Machine tools

The Industrial Revolution created a demand for metal parts used in machinery. This led to the development of several machine tools for cutting metal parts. They have their origins in the tools developed in the 18th century by makers of clocks and watches and scientific instrument makers to enable them to batch-produce small mechanisms.
Before the advent of machine tools, metal was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and chisels. Consequently, the use of metal was kept to a minimum. Wooden components had the disadvantage of changing dimensions with temperature and humidity, and the various joints tended to rack (work loose) over time. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, machines with metal parts and frames became more common. Hand methods of production were very laborious and costly and precision was difficult to achieve. Pre-industrial machinery was built by various craftsmen—millwrights built water and wind mills, carpenters made wooden framing, and smiths and turners made metal parts.
The first large machine tool was the cylinder boring machine used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. The planing machine, the milling machine and the shaping machine were developed in the early decades of the 19th century. Although the milling machine was invented at this time, it was not developed as a serious workshop tool until somewhat later in the 19th century.
Watch video: Demonstration of industrial lathe on YouTube
Watch video: Demonstration of milling machine on YouTube
Watch video: Demonstration of metal planer on YouTube
Military production, as well, had a hand in the development of machine tools. Henry Maudslay, who trained a school of machine tool makers early in the 19th century, was employed at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, as a young man where he would have seen the large horse-driven wooden machines for cannon boring made and worked by the Verbruggans. He later worked for Joseph Bramah on the production of metal locks. Bramah patented a lathe that had similarities to the slide rest lathe. Maudslay perfected the slide rest lathe, which could cut machine screws of variable pitches using changeable gears between the spindle and the lead screw. Before its invention screws could not be cut to any precision using various earlier lathe designs, some of which copied from a template.[42] Maudslay's lathe was called one history's most important inventions.
Maudslay left Bramah's employment and set up his own shop. He was engaged to build the machinery for making ships' pulley blocks for the Royal Navy in the Portsmouth Block Mills. These machines were all metal and were the first machines for mass production and making components with a degree of interchangeability. The lessons Maudslay learned about the need for stability and precision he adapted to the development of machine tools, and in his workshops he trained a generation of men to build on his work, such as Richard Roberts, Joseph Clement and Joseph Whitworth.
James Fox of Derby had a healthy export trade in machine tools for the first third of the century, as did Matthew Murray of Leeds. Roberts was a maker of high-quality machine tools and a pioneer of the use of jigs and gauges for precision workshop measurement.
In half century following the invention of the fundamental machine tools the machinery industry would become the largest segment of the economy, by value added, in the U.S.