Machine Tooling - The Industrial Revolution, Part II
Most of these companies were just small shops, driven mainly by orders for certain specified products. They would specialize generally in very specific subsets of tooling. And most of the time they were working with large scale manufacturers who were then attaching machine shops to their primary manufacturing centers so they could have it all in house. Those early advancements really, by this point, results in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century being comfortable with machining.
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The modern world is an integrated system of almost unfathomable complexity, built upon sub systems, technologies, people and practices that if partially removed or neglected sufficiently, result in disastrous supply chain break downs as witnessed in wartime or as the world seized up in response to an over-hyped flu virus in 2020. One of the industries at the heart of the manufacturing economy is the machine tool industry, responsible for “building the machines that build the machines” – mills, lathes, planers, presses, etc. that produce the metal products such as cars, airplanes and household appliances. Without these industrial tools, production would be relegated to hand tools or worse, and for national security reasons is arguably a strategic industry to be protected. As with most things in modern America, however, what is sensible and what is reality is at odds, with the machine tool industry witnessing a global market share decline of number one in the world at around 20% in 1981 to less than 5% today.
