PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
402
threads. His paper ‘On a uniform system of Screw Threads’, read to the
Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841, was the beginning of rationalization in
the manufacture of screwed fastenings. A compromise system was eventually
worked out based on the average pitch and depth of thread in use by leading
engineers, and a table was produced giving the pitches of screws of different
Figure 7.8: A model of James Nasmyth’s original steam hammer of 1839.

ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION
403
diameters and a constant proportion between depth and pitch by adopting an
angle of 55° for the ‘V’ profile. By 1858, Whitworth could claim that his
standardization of screw threads had been implemented, although his
advocated decimal scale was not accepted except where it coincided with
fractional sizes and in Europe, where it competed with the metric thread. (A
similar fate greeted his decimal Standard Wire Gauge which was never
adopted as a national standard.)
In 1853, Whitworth joined a Royal Commission visiting the New York
Exhibition and reported that American machine tools were generally inferior
to English, although their eagerness to use machinery whenever possible to
replace manual labour appealed to him. A request by the Board of Ordnance
to make machinery for manufacturing the Enfield rifle in 1854 turned his
interest towards the manufacture of firearms. He produced his own rifle and
later cannon which were superior to their competitors in performance but they
were rejected by the official committees, although he obtained large orders
from abroad. His visit to America also confirmed his belief in the value of
technical education, first shown in his support for the Mechanics Institutes and
Manchester School of Design in the late 1830s, and led to the launch of
Whitworth Scholarships in 1868–9. Unfortunately he was a supreme egotist,
which led to conflict with authority, and his rigorous, authoritarian control of

the details of his manufactures stultified later development.
The greatest users of machine tools of the day were the engine builders.
Concurrently with Henry Maudslay’s, the works of Boulton and Watt at Soho,
Birmingham, and Matthew Murray’s Round Foundry at Leeds expanded
rapidly at the end of the eighteenth century. Such growth was only possible by
the injection of capital and it was at this stage that the business men, Matthew
Boulton at Soho and James Fenton at Leeds, began to make their impact on
machine-tool building by financing the inventiveness of the engineers to take
advantage of the great demand for engines and selling the tools developed for
this purpose to other manufacturers. The Soho Foundry was completed in
1796 and William Murdock was put in charge in 1798. He constructed a
massive horizontal boring mill of Wilkinson pattern, but with his own worm
and wheel drive and an attachment to machine the end face of cylinders. A
64in (162.5cm) diameter cylinder was completely machined on this mill in 27
1/2 working days in 1800. A vertical boring mill was also built at Soho in 1854
to bore four cylinders for Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship to 7ft (2.13m) in
diameter. This engine produced 2000hp and was the most powerful in the
world at that time. Many tools were purchased from smaller makers for
general purposes and William Buckle, who became manager at Soho in 1825,
introduced the first large screw cutting lathe to the works: previously large
screws had been cut by hand methods. Matthew Murray at Leeds was more
inventive and a better production engineer, making work of higher quality
than that of Soho, and was one of the first manufacturers of high quality
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
404
machine tools for sale in addition to engines. He devised the ‘D’ slide valve for
steam engines and designed and built a planing machine to make it which was
so ahead of its time that it was kept secret. Many designs of boring mill were
produced by Murray and sold in Britain and abroad in which screw drive to
the cutter head was incorporated by 1802. Murray’s steam locomotives were

the first commercially successful in the world (see p. 559).
Other machine tool designers had different primary objectives. One of the
most outstanding was James Fox who gave up his post as butler to a country
parson to make improved textile machinery. In order to do this he had first to
design and construct his own machine tools and he was highly successful in
this. His detailed improvements in carriage traverse became standard practice
on the lathe. His first planing machine was built in 1814 and by 1817 it
included power drive to the table with automatic reverse and automatic feed to
horizontal and vertical tool travel. The machine tools built by Fox were ahead
of other manufacturers in the detailed design of traverse mechanisms and
precision guideways and he was a successful exporter to France, Germany,
Russia and Poland. Several of his machines can be seen in the museum at
Sielpia Wielka in Southern Poland.
MASS PRODUCTION
Special purpose machine tools are designed to perform a particular operation
repetitively in the manufacture of numbers of specific products. Clockmaking
was the first important application of these techniques and some of the
machines developed had features used later in general purpose machines.
Joseph Bramah’s lock, which he invented in 1784, required many small parts in
the construction which would have been difficult and uneconomic to produce
accurately by hand methods, so he engaged Maudslay, following his training at
Woolwich Arsenal, to help in devising and constructing suitable machines. A
sawing machine, (c. 1788), quick grip vice, milling cutters, drilling templates
and a spring winding machine (1790), were made and still survive in the
Science Museum, London. The last of these exhibits, a screw method of
traversing the spring wire winding head, appeared later in the screw cutting
lathe. Bramah’s other inventions included: hydraulic press, fire engine, beer
pump, extruded lead pipe, water closet, fountain pen, banknote numbering
machine, and a wood planing machine with hydraulic bearings and feed
system (c. 1809).

Maudslay’s experience in special machine construction was useful, and laid
the foundation of his fortune, when he was selected to manufacture the
Portsmouth block-making machines designed by Marc Isambard Brunel.
Working models of these machines constructed by Maudslay (now in the
Maritime Museum, Greenwich) were useful in persuading the Admiralty to set
ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION
405
up its own block-making factory. Maudslay constructed all the full-size
machinery between 1802 and 1809. The plant consisted of 45 machines of 22
different kinds. When it came into full operation making three sizes of block in
1810, it was producing 100,000 blocks per annum and was the first large-scale
plant employing machine tools for mass production. With these machines ten
unskilled men could do the work of no skilled blockmakers. Apart from two
large sawing machines, all the others were of metal and precise in operation to
allow the assembly of component parts. They were used up to the mid-
twentieth century and several are now exhibited in the Science Museum in
London: Mortising, 1803; Block Shaping, 1804; Scoring, 1804; Coaking,
1804; Circular Saw, 1803.
The manufacture of firearms, particularly small arms, was another area
requiring a high rate of production with the special problem of producing
many small precision parts which could be made to fit together easily.
Traditional methods of hand production were slow; and weapons were made
of individual, non-standard parts, so that if a component was lost or broken a
replacement had to be specially made by a skilled gunsmith. Large numbers of
infantry could be made ineffective in this way and governments became
concerned about this weakness should long campaigns have to be waged. In
1811 the British army had 200,000 useless muskets awaiting lock repairs.
A French gunsmith, Le Blanc, was the first to propose in 1785, a system of
manufacturing in which the components of firearms should be made so
accurately that all parts would be interchangeable and thus allow simple

replacement when parts failed in action. The French government appointed
several committees to examine this proposal and approved its development,
but the political difficulties and revolution in France prevented its realization.
Thomas Jefferson, the American Minister to France in 1785, saw the products
of Le Blanc’s workshop and tested the parts of the musket lock for
interchangeability, reporting its value to his government, but it was not until
1798 that a contract to manufacture arms for the Federal Government on these
principles was given. Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin (see Chapter
17), was the first to be awarded a contract from the $800,000 voted by
Congress for the purchase of cannon and small arms. He was to provide 1000
stands of arms for which a payment of $15,000 would be made, with
continuing payment up to 10,000 stands of arms. Whitney was unable to
achieve the targets set in the contract and it is doubtful if he employed new
methods of machining the parts rather relying on the use of filing jigs and the
‘division of labour’ to produce the 4500 muskets delivered in September 1801.
The US government armoury at Springfield was also producing firearms
and employing new machinery and methods of assembly and work
organization which enabled production to increase from 80 to 442 muskets per
month in 1799. John Hall designed his rifle in 1811 to be made by
interchangeable parts at Harpers Ferry Armoury by 1817 and he introduced
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
406
many new machines, a system of dimensioning from a single datum, and
gauges at each stage of manufacture to ensure accuracy. He also used
secondary and tertiary gauges to check the bench gauges. Other American
manufacturers began using these methods, including pistols by Simeon North
and Elisha K.Root’s arrangements for making Colt’s revolver. By 1815 all
firearms made to United States government contract were required to be
interchangeable with weapons made at the National Armouries and the system
was proved in 1824 when 100 rifles from different armouries were brought

together, disassembled and reassembled at random successfully.
The ideas of Hall were developed by Root at the Colt Armoury at Hartford
which contained 1400 machines and proved a tremendous success, its
influence being spread by the outstanding engineers who worked there in
similar fashion to those from Maudslay’s workshop in England. Two of these
men, Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney, were to form the great engine
company and became great exporters of machine tools for gunmaking as well
as principal manufacturers of engine lathes. The company also supported the
research and development by William Roper and George Bond of a line
standard comparator employing a microscope with micrometer adjustment to
calibrate their gauges. Another armoury of importance was the Robbins &
Lawrence shop in Windsor, Vermont, run by Richard S.Lawrence, Frederick
W.Howe and Henry D. Stone. In 1851 they sent a set of rifles to the Great
Exhibition in London and demonstrated the ease with which parts could be
interchanged, creating the official interest which led to the Commission to
America which was chaired by Nasmyth and had Whitworth as one of its
members (see p. 403). Their successful visit and recommendations led to the
order for Robbins & Lawrence and the Ames Manufacturing Company to
supply similar machinery for the Enfield factory to manufacture the 1853
pattern rifle musket, thus bringing the American System to England.
In addition to the machinery several skilled men from the American
armouries were imported, notably James Henry Burton who became chief
engineer at Enfield. After serving his five year contract there, Burton returned
to America to be brought into the Civil War as a Confederate lieutenant-
colonel to superintend all their armouries. To set up a new armoury in
Georgia, Burton returned to England to obtain the machinery and tools
necessary from Greenwood & Batley of Leeds but, although designed and
built, the equipment was not delivered. After the Confederate defeat Burton
returned to Greenwood & Batley, which became a principal manufacturer of
complete sets of machinery and gauges for arms production, supplying

Birmingham Small Arms Company, the Austrian armoury at Steyr, the Belgian
Government factory at Liège, the Imperial Russian armouries at Tula,
Sestrovelsk and Izhersk, the French armouries at St Etienne, Tulle and
Chatellerault, and arms factories in Sweden, Italy, Japan, Hungary and Brazil.
Their basic marketing device was to advocate setting up a factory to produce a
ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION
407
minimum of 1000 rifles and bayonets per week, for which they would provide
all machinery, gauges and power plant, and erect and start up the factory for
about £135,000 f.o.b. in 1891. This English company learned the value of the
‘American System’, but despite its example the ideas were slow to spread to
other manufacturers. In the now United States, by contrast, these production
methods were adopted quickly in the making of clocks, watches, sewing
machines, bicycles, typewriters and agricultural machinery. The principal
reason for this difference, and for the consequent change of fortune between
the American and English machine tool industries, was the shortage of skilled
labour in the USA. Immigrants with skills could rapidly become masters, and
for those with imagination and courage the opportunities of a good life
farming in the West competed with the prospect of factory work in the East.
This created the high level of wages offered and the need to build skill into the
machine tools so that they could be operated by whatever unskilled labour was
available. Output being so directly related to the efficiency of the operation of
machinery, wages were paid under contract and direct ‘piecework’ systems,
marking the beginning of ‘payment by results’ and the material success of all
classes, well outstripping that in Europe.
The ‘American System’, or mass production, in different industries called
for many machines designed to operate at higher speeds and perform multiple
operations, and for new processes to meet the needs of the product. Grinding
had remained a simple process of creating an edge on a cutting tool or external
finishing of cylindrical objects, using wheels of similar form to that in the

oldest illustration from the Utrecht Psalter of 850 AD and work guidance by
hand. New products such as the sewing machine could only be made
commercially by mass production methods, and the success of these products
called for greater refinement in the accuracy of their components; grinding
therefore had to become a precision operation for both cylindrical and surface
finishing. The first attempts to do this involved mounting a grinding wheel on
the cross slide of a lathe and driving it from the same overhead shaft which
powered the spindle. Several refinements in the design provided covered
guideways, specially weighted carriages to avoid chatter, and a reversible,
variable speed drive to the carriage.
Brown & Sharpe, the great machine tool and gauge making firm of the USA
produced such a grinding lathe in about 1865 for the needles, bars and
spindles of the Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine they were manufacturing.
This machine required such careful control that in 1868 Joseph Brown
designed his Universal Grinding Machine, the forerunner of all precision
grinding machines which in turn made possible the production of accurate
gauges, measuring instruments and cutting tools of all types. The success of
this machine depended very largely on the use of grinding wheels which were
made with emery or corundum bonded by a material to give it strength while
allowing the abrasive particles to cut. In England in 1842, Henry Barclay had
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
408
experimented in producing a vitrified wheel, followed by Ransome in 1857
with a soda bond which was much more successful and Hart produced a
similar wheel in the USA in 1872. Sven Pulson, also in the USA, managed to
make an effective clay wheel in 1873 on the lines of Barclay’s attempt 30 years
earlier. Feldspar was used in the formula when F.B.Norton patented the
process in 1877, marking the beginning of progressive development of artificial
grinding wheels. Small arms manufacturing also created the milling machine
and, although its actual inventor is unclear, it appeared in 1818 in the arms

workshop of Simeon North. According to a drawing by Edward G.Parkhurst,
it consisted of a spindle carrying a cone pulley mounted between two heavy
bearings with a toothed cutter on the spindle extension and a carriage, on
which the work was mounted, traversed by hand underneath the cutter at 90°
to its axis.
Between 1819 and 1826, according to the report of an official
investigating commission into the work being done by John Hall in the rifle
section of Harpers Ferry Armoury, there existed plain and profile milling
machines designed by Hall to cut the straight and curved surfaces of his rifle
components and eliminate the handwork of filing to templates. Another
machine of doubtful origin is thought to have been built c. 1827; the next,
made in the Gay, Silver & Co. workshops c. 1835, incorporated an improved
cutter spindle support and vertical adjustment to the headstock. Frederick
Howe was trained in the Gay Silver shop and when he joined Robbins &
Lawrence in 1847 he built a production milling machine based on patterns
from the Springfield Armoury which resembled the basic structure of the
lathe in bed, headstock and tailstock, with the cutter supported and driven
between the head and tail centres. The work was traversed across the bed by
hand-operated cross slide and cut applied by raising the cross slide. A
development of this design with greater rigidity, made in 1852, was sold to
the Enfield small arms factory in England. This design was also the one
modified by Pratt & Whitney at Phoenix Iron Works into the famous Lincoln
Miller supplied all over the world by 1872. The next stage in the
development of the milling machine occurred in 1861, when the problem of
the slow and expensive method of filing the helical grooves from rod to make
twist drills was brought to the attention of Joseph R.Brown by Frederick
Howe. Brown’s solution was the Universal Milling Machine which, with its
knee and column construction and geared dividing head on the swivelling
table, was to become the most flexible and widely used machine tool, second
only to the lathe, and the basis of the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing

Company’s machine tool business (see Figure 7.9). An inclined arbor in the
dividing head allowed the production of tapering spirals or straight grooves
for cutting such requirements as reamer teeth and was based on Brown’s
work in gear cutting. For heavier work the Brown & Sharpe Universal
Milling Machine was made in 1876, with an over arm to give increased
ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION
409
support to the cutter. The pioneer milling machines of the early clockmakers
used a rotary file type of cutter and, as larger gears were required, similar
machines were made to match the profile of the teeth to be cut by hand
chiselling and filing, following the idea of Vaucanson in 1760. These
methods were inadequate for the new milling machines because the small
teeth allowed only a small depth of cut and presented difficulties of
sharpening. Brown solved this problem by patenting in 1864 a formed cutter
which could be face ground without changing its profile. With these cutters
the milling operation was fully established, other cutter development
following closely: notched in 1869, inserted teeth in 1872, face milling with
inserted teeth in 1884.
Safety bicycles, increasingly popular in Britain and on the continent of
Europe during the 1880s (see Chapter 8), were imported into the USA and
were immediately recognized as candidates for mass production. Special
machines were devised for hub forming, boring and threading by the Garvin
Figure 7.9: Joseph R.Brown’s universal milling machine of 1861.
PART TWO: POWER AND ENGINEERING
410
Machine Co. of New York. A rim drilling machine was built by Rudolph &
Kremmel in 1892 which could drill 600 wheel rims in a ten-hour day. Spokes
were made of wire and threaded by rolling or cutting. The cutting machine
allowed a boy to thread 4000–4500 spokes a day. Thread rolling was carried
out by machines made on the pattern of the Blake & Johnson, c. 1849. By 1897

bicycles were being produced at the rate of two million a year in the USA
before the market collapsed when the era of the automobile arrived.
The need for many small parts in these mass-produced goods encouraged
the use of sub-contractors who produced specialized components on machines
designed for the purpose in small workshops. Ball bearings were gradually
introduced into bicycle manufacture and cycle bearing companies were formed
producing balls either by rolling hot metal or turning from bar on special
machines similar to the Hoffman used in England. All balls were finished by
grinding, and the cups and cones were turned, casehardened and ground on a
Brown & Sharpe machine or similar. The vast number of screws required for
the percussion locks of 30,000 pistols had caused Stephen Fitch to design and
build the first turret lathe in 1845. This had a horizontal axis and carried eight
tools which could be fed into the work in turn to perform eight successive
operations without stopping to change tools. This idea was so time-saving that
it was rapidly taken up by other manufacturers after 1850, although the
vertical axis turret became most favoured by Robbins & Lawrence, who also
produced the box tool and hollow mill used in operations on the turret lathe.
Automatic screwing machines followed with the invention by Christopher
Miner Spencer of the brain wheel control of tool slides by adjustable cams and
roller followers. His machine used the collet chuck and closing mechanism
patented by Edward G.Parkhurst in 1871, which was similar to Whitworth’s
collet chuck, and the production machine patented in 1873 had two ‘brain
wheels’, one to control collet opening and closing, allowing the bar stock to be
moved and locked into working position, and the other to control tool slides.
Spencer set up the Hartford Machine Screw Company to take advantage of the
great market in screws but failed to protect the ‘brain wheel’ in his patent,
which allowed many copies to be made. Spencer subsequently designed a
three-spindle version to make screws from wire using a radial arrangement of
tools on the Fitch pattern. From this was developed a four-spindle model by
Hakewessel, used initally by the National Acme Screw Co. of America to

manufacture screws but from about 1906, in association with George
O.Gridley, manufactured as the Acme-Gridley automatic lathe. Other
automatic lathes followed; New Britain Gridley, Conematic, and Fay from
different companies.
Many of the mass-produced goods also required gears and, more
importantly, the new manufacturing machinery also depended on the ability to
transfer motion and change speeds between shafts accurately and without
vibration through gears made in large quantity. The cast gears used extensively
ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION
411
in early machines and continuing in the textile industry were no longer
satisfactory for high-speed accurate machining by the new machine tools. The
transition between clockmaking and engineering gear production occurs in
James Fox’s machine of c. 1833, which used formed tooth cutters and a screw
micrometer division of the index cylinder to machine a large gear blank on a
vertical spindle. John George Bodmer also patented a gear cutting machine in
1839 capable of cutting internal gears, spur and bevel in addition to external
spur, worm wheels and racks, but his formed metal cutting tools were very
difficult to sharpen. Whitworth’s gear cutters of 1834 were the first machines
with involute cutters, geared indexing and cutters driven by a flat belt through
a worm and wheel. By 1851 this type of machine was made with a self-acting
in-feed and had the appearance of a heavy lathe with the headstock carrying a
vertical spindle on which the involute cutter was mounted, the saddle carrying
the wheel to be cut on a horizontal axis shaft with an indexing wheel. Joseph
R.Brown’s precision gear cutting machine of 1855 made use of the involute
form backed off gear cutter invented in 1854 and used with the Universal
Milling Machine (see p. 408). A Troughton & Simms dividing engine was used
to make the index plate divisions. Other large gear cutting machines were
developed for engine and power transmissions such as the Gleason template
system machines for cutting large spur and bevel gears. The describing

generating method of producing the gear tooth profile was first applied
practically by Herrman in 1877 and used a single point reciprocating tool
similar to the shaper action, all the motions to generate the gear tooth being
given to the blank by various attachments to make spur or bevel gears with
epicycloidal or involute teeth. A similar type was produced by C.Dengg & Co.
of Vienna, in a patent of 1879 for epicycloidal teeth on bevel gears. Pratt &
Whitney developed an epicycloidal machine in 1880 employing a circular
cutter controlled by a disc rolling on the outside of a ring representing the pitch
circle of the gear. Smith & Coventry of England exhibited a describing
generating machine at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, and an example of the
original Robey-Smith machine designed by J.Buck in 1895, which has two
cutters to work on opposite sides of the same tooth, can be seen in the Science
Museum, London. The chainless bicycle stimulated the development by Hugo
Bilgram of Philadelphia in 1884, of a machine to produce the bevel gears
required. It used a single point cutter and obtained the rolling action by
swinging the carrier of the blank around the axis in line with the apex of the
pitch cone by means of two flexible steel bands passing round the control cone
on the blank spindle. The gear shaper invented by E.R.Fellows in 1897 is the
most significant and widely used. It employs the moulding generating
principle, with a fully formed gear as the generator, hardened and with the
cutting edges backed off. The machine works as a vertical slotter, with the
cutting tool and gear blank rotating in mesh. The application of a worm
sectioned to provide cutting edges was first used by Ramsden in 1768 for his