English and American Tool Builders
9781465684004
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Well informed persons are aware of the part which machinery in general has had on modern industrial life. But the profound influence which machine tools have had in that development is scarcely realized, even by tool builders themselves. Three elements came into industrial life during the latter part of the eighteenth century. First, the development of modern banking and the stock company brought out the small private hoards from their hiding places, united them, and made them available for industrial undertakings operating on the scale called for by modern requirements. Second, Watt’s development of the steam engine and its application to the production of continuous rotative motion gave the requisite source of power. But neither the steam engine itself nor the machinery of production was possible until the third element, modern machine tools, supplied the means of working metals accurately and economically. It is well to glance for a moment at the problems which were involved in building the first steam engine. Watt had been working for several years on the steam engine when the idea of the separate condenser came to him on that famous Sunday afternoon walk on the Glasgow Green, in the spring of 1765, and, to use his own words, “in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far (that is, as a pumping engine) complete in my mind.” He was a skilled instrument maker and his first small model was fairly successful, but when he undertook “the practice of mechanics in great,” his skill and all the skill of those about him was incapable of boring satisfactorily a cylinder 6 inches in diameter and 2 feet long; and he had finally to resort to one which was hammered. For ten weary years he struggled to realize his plans in a full sized engine, unable to find either the workmen or the tools which could make it a commercial success. His chief difficulty lay in keeping the piston tight. He “wrapped it around with cork, oiled rags, tow, old hats, paper, and other things, but still there were open spaces left, sufficient to let the air in and the steam out.” Small wonder! for we find him complaining that in an 18 inch diameter cylinder, “at the worst place the long diameter exceeded the short by three eighths of an inch.” When Smeaton first saw the engine he reported to the Society of Engineers that “neither the tools nor the workmen existed that could manufacture so complex a machine with sufficient precision.”
