Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

It is stated that there is on exhibition in the Abbott museum of the Historical Society, New York, a bronze drinking vessel, five inches in diameter, that was exhumed from an ancient tomb in Thebes, and which bears evidence of having been turned on a lathe. It is thought by those skilled in the art that it was not possible to have constructed the works of metal in Solomon’s Temple without a turning lathe. One of the earliest published descriptions of a metal turning lathe in its leading features is that found in a book published in London, in 1677-83, by Joseph Moxon, “hydographer” to King Charles II., entitled, Mechanical Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy Works. He therein also described a machine for planing metal. Although there is some evidence that these inventions of the learned gentleman were made and put to some use, yet they were soon forgotten and were not revived until a century later, when, as before intimated, the steam engine had been invented and furnished the power for working them.

Wood-working implements in which the cutting tool was carried by a sliding block were described in the English patents of General Sir Samuel Bentham and Joseph Bramah, in 1793-94. But until this century, and fairly within its borders, man was content generally to use the metal lathe simply as a holding and turning support, while he with such skill and strength as he could command, and with an expenditure of time, labour and patience truly marvellous, held and guided with his hands the cutting tool with which the required form was made upon or from the slowly turning object before him. The contrivance which was to take the place of the hand and eye of man in holding, applying, directing and impelling a cutting tool to the surface of the metal work was the slide-rest. In its modern successful automatic form Henry Maudsley, an engineer in London, is claimed to be the first inventor, in the early part of the century. The leading feature of his form of this device consists of an iron block which constitutes the rest, cut with grooves so as to adapt it to slide upon its iron supports, means to secure the cutting tool solidly to this block, and two screw handles, one to adjust the tool towards and against the object to be cut in the lathe, and the other to slide the rest and tool lengthwise as the work progresses, which latter motion may be given by the hand, or effected automatically by a connection of the screw handle of the slide and the rotating object on the lathe.

A vast variety of inventions and operations have been effected by changes in these main features. Of the value of this invention, Nasmyth, a devoted pupil of Maudsley and himself an eminent engineer and inventor, thus writes:—“It was this holding of a tool by means of an iron hand, and constraining it to move along the surface of the work in so certain a manner, and with such definite and precise motion, which formed the great era in the history of mechanics, inasmuch as we thenceforward became possessed, by its means, of the power of operating alike on the most ponderous or delicate pieces of machinery with a degree of minute precision, of which language cannot convey an adequate idea; and in many cases we have, through its agency, equal facility in carrying on the most perfect workmanship in the interior parts of certain machines where neither the hand nor the eye can reach, and nevertheless we can give to these parts their required form with a degree of accuracy as if we had the power of transforming our-selves into pigmy workmen, and so apply our labour to the innermost holes and corners of our machinery.”

The scope of the lathe, slide-rest and operating tool, by its adaptation to cut out from a vast roll of steel a ponderous gun, or by a change in the size of parts to operate in cutting or drilling the most delicate portions of that most delicate of all mechanisms, a watch, reminds one of that other marvel of mechanical adaptation, the steam hammer, which makes the earth tremble with its mighty blows upon a heated mass of iron, or lightly taps and cracks the soft-shelled nut without the slightest touch of violence upon its enclosed and fragile fruit.

The adaptation of the lathe and slide to wood-working tools will be referred to in the chapter relating to wood-working.

Following the invention of the lathe and the slide-rest, came the metal-planing machines. It is stated in Buchanan’s Practical Essays, published in 1841, that a French engineer in 1751, in constructing the Marly Water Works on the Seine in France, employed a machine for planing out the wrought iron pump-barrels used in that work, and this is thought to be the first instance in which iron was reduced to a plane surface without chipping or filing. But it needed the invention of the slide-rest and its application to metal-turning lathes to suggest and render successful metal-planing machines. These were supplied in England from 1811 to 1840 by the genius of Bramah, Clement, Fox, Roberts, Rennie, Whitworth, Fletcher, and a few others. When it is considered how many different forms are essential to the completion of metal machines of every description, the usefulness of machinery that will produce them with the greatest accuracy and despatch can be imagined. The many modifications of the planing machine have names that indicate to the workman the purpose for which they are adapted—as the jack, a small portable machine, quick and handy; the jim crow, a machine for planing both ways by reversal of the movement of the bed, and it gets its name because it can “wheel about and turn about and do just so”; the key groove machine, the milling machine with a serrated-faced cutter bar, shaping machine and shaping bar, slotting machine, crank planer, screw cutting, car-wheel turning, bolt and nut screwing, etc.

As to the mutual evolution and important results of these combined inventions, the slide-rest and the planer, we again quote Nasmyth:—

“The first planing machine enabled us to produce the second still better, and that a better still, and then slide rests of the most perfect kind came streaming forth from them, and they again assisted in making better still, so that in a very short time a most important branch of engineering business, namely, tool-making, arose, which had its existence not merely owing to the pre-existing demand for such tools, but in fact raised a demand of its own creating. One has only to go into any of these vast establishments which have sprung up in the last thirty years to find that nine-tenths of all the fine mechanisms in use and in process of production are through the agency, more or less direct, of the slide rest and planing machine.”

Springing out of these inventions, as from a fruitful soil, came the metal-boring machines, one class for turning the outside of cylinders to make them true, and another class for boring and drilling holes through solid metal plates. The principle of the lathe was applied to those machines in which the shaft carrying the cutting or boring tool was held either in a vertical or in a horizontal position.

Now flowed forth, as from some Vulcan’s titanic workshop, machines for making bolts, nuts, rivets, screws, chains, staples, car wheels, shafts, etc., and other machines for applying them to the objects with which they were to be used.