Why was Britain slow to adopt the milling machine?

The milling machine came to Britain as a production machine only when 74 machines arrived from the US at the Enfield small arms factory in 1855. Even after that it spread slowly, because cutters were expensive and hard to sharpen, the few imported machines were put to heavy work they were not designed for, and skilled use of the planer was well established. At the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1890 it was said that fewer than 60 percent of works had a milling machine. It spread in earnest only from about 1890–1910.

Was Nasmyth's nut-milling machine the world's first milling machine?

No. The machines in the gun factories of Whitney and of Middletown in the US are thought to be earlier. But Nasmyth's own records make it clear that his machine was built in 1829–31, and it is regarded as the first example of a milling machine with an indexing device and the first record of a cutter cooled with water.

Who built Bridgeport milling machines in Britain?

Adcock and Shipley of Leicester. It began manufacturing in 1959 under an agreement with Bridgeport Machines of the US, later expanded to a factory in Bridlington, and shipped its 10,000th machine in 1970. It was bought by Textron of the US in 1971 and changed its name to Bridgeport Machines, Ltd. in 1986.

What was Molins' System 24?

A production system announced in 1967 by the cigarette machinery maker Molins, which aimed to run around the clock by moving workpieces on pallets among several NC machines under computer command. Its development was led by D. T. N. Williamson, formerly of Ferranti, and it is regarded as an early example of what was later called an FMS (flexible manufacturing system).

UK 06The Lineage of British Milling Machines and Machining Centers

Britain gave birth to the lathe, the boring machine and the planer, but with the milling machine it took a slightly different path. Around 1829, in Maudslay's works, the young Nasmyth built a machine that cut the faces of nuts with a "revolving file," and in the 1840s Leeds produced the heavy crank-cutting machine. But what brought the milling machine to Britain as a production machine was the arrival in 1855, at the Enfield small arms factory, of 74 American-built machines. Even after that it spread slowly, and at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1890 it was said that "fewer than 60 percent of works have a milling machine." In the 20th century Herbert, Parkinson, Archdale and Kendall and Gent built vertical, universal and bridge-type machines; the American firm Cincinnati opened a factory in Birmingham, and after the war Adcock and Shipley built the Bridgeport. In NC there were Ferranti control, Marwin ball screws and Molins' System 24, all ahead of the rest of the world, and today Japan's Mazak builds machining centers in Worcester. This chapter traces how cutters, indexing, feed, drive, guideways and control changed, and what changed in shop-floor machining, checking each point against technical journals and records of the time.

From the revolving file
to factories that run
unattended!

This is a “machine-type chapter.” In time it overlaps with Chapter 1 (The Birth of the Machine Tool), Chapter 2 (The Workshop of the World), Chapter 3 (The Two World Wars), but here we follow only the inner workings of the milling machine itself. Ferranti's NC and the decline of the British machine tool industry itself are covered in Chapter 4, "NC, FMS, Industrial Decline and Revival". How the milling machine took its form in the US is covered in American Chapter 7, "The Lineage of American Milling Machines and Machining Centers", and the years in this chapter are aligned with it. Today's types of MC and how to choose one are covered in our machining center guide.

The revolving file: Nasmyth and early milling (1829–1854)

In British engineering works of the early 19th century, the tools for making a flat surface were the file and the chisel, and the planer, which was only just beginning to be built. "Milling," cutting with a rotating round cutter with many teeth, had long existed as a tool for cutting clock wheels, but the cutters were hard to make and to sharpen, and it had not become ordinary shop work. Gilbert (1966) of the Science Museum writes that the difficulty of making cutters and keeping them sharp delayed the spread of milling, despite its many advantages^[3].

Nasmyth's nut-milling machine

In May 1829 the Scottish-born James Nasmyth joined Henry Maudslay's works in London and began working as Maudslay's assistant. One of the jobs he was given was some 300 small bolts and nuts for a model steam engine. Finishing steel nuts to an accurate hexagon, and with a collar at that, took a great deal of work with a file. So Nasmyth devised a tool that rotated a cutter made of a hard steel disk, held the nut on the spindle of a small index plate mounted on a carriage, and cut the six faces in turn, rotating the nut 60 degrees after each face^[1]. He called this cutter a "circular file." The results were accurate and quick, Maudslay was delighted, and a larger version was soon installed in the works^[1].

Woodbury (1959) treats this machine, though it came later than the American machines of Whitney and Middletown, as the early milling machine whose date and details are the clearest, and places it between Nasmyth's arrival in May 1829 and Maudslay's death in 1831^[2]. Mechanically, the feed was automatic by screw and nut, but intermittent, and there was no means of changing the cutter's height or lateral position, because it was a special machine for cutting many identical nuts. On the other hand, it was the first example of a milling machine combined with an indexing device, and cooling the cutter with water from a small tank is the first record of cutting fluid used in milling, Woodbury writes^[2]. Indexing and cooling, two things taken for granted on today's MCs, were combined here for the first time.

After setting up on his own, Nasmyth made this nut-milling machine one of his works' products, and writes that he supplied it to many engineers^[1]. Robertson Buchanan's book on machine tools, published in 1841, carried Nasmyth's own description and drawings, and of the 54 machine tools covered in the book, 21 were Nasmyth's^[2][3]. The Science Museum has a model of a mid-19th-century engineering works, in which two plain milling machines close to Nasmyth's design stand side by side^[3][2].

Crank-cutting machines in Leeds, and a knee type ahead of its time

What is distinctively British is that milling was used early on for heavy work. Around 1845 Robert Willis, foreman at E. B. Wilson & Co., a locomotive works in Leeds, built a machine to cut the webs of locomotive crankshafts. Until then it took three operations: drilling a row of holes on a drilling machine, removing the material bit by bit on a slotting machine as if cutting a mortise, and rounding the remaining square pin on a lathe. Willis' machine rotated a disk carrying steel cutters shaped to the finished curve, fed the table by worm and gear at about 9 cm per hour, and finally turned the whole shaft through one revolution to cut the round of the pin as well. It weighed 7 tons and took nine and a half hours per crank^[4][2]. The magazine described it as a machine combining the lathe, the planer and the boring machine in one^[4].

According to Woodbury, the "knee-type" idea of raising and lowering the table in front of the column had already been drawn by J. G. Bodmer of Manchester in an 1839 British patent. But it had almost no influence on later machines, and the knee type spread around the world only with Brown & Sharpe's universal milling machine of 1862^[2]. Britain had all the parts, but it was America that put them together into a "milling machine that could be used for anything": that is the picture of this period.

American machines at Enfield, and slow adoption (1855–1899)

74 American milling machines

Through the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the inspection tours of the United States in 1853–54, Britain learned that American gun factories were making interchangeable parts by machine. When it was decided to rebuild the small arms factory at Enfield, a committee (with Nasmyth among its members) toured the American armories. At Springfield, guns from ten years' production were taken apart, the parts mixed, and the guns reassembled before them^[6]. As a result, 157 machines were sent from the United States to Britain in 1855, and 74 of them were milling machines (along with 23 drilling machines, 5 tapping machines and others)^[6]. Most were built by Robbins & Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont, and by Ames of Massachusetts^[6]. Gilbert of the Science Museum sums it up: it was the import of these Enfield machines that brought the milling machine to Britain, he writes^[3]. The story of interchangeable manufacture is covered in Chapter 2, and the machines of the American armories in American Chapter 1.

Brown & Sharpe's universal milling machine, born in the US in 1862, also came to Britain. According to Gilbert, five of the No. 1 machines were sold to Britain, and one of them (built in 1865) survives at the Science Museum^[3]. This machine can still be seen today in the Making the Modern World gallery^[7]. With its combination of a knee, a swiveling table and an index head geared to the feed screw, it could cut twist drill flutes and helical gears^[3].

Why didn't it spread in Britain?

British works, however, were slow to use milling machines. Woodbury says British makers took up milling in earnest only in 1890–1910, and points to the use of the few imported machines for heavy work that neither the cutters nor the machines were designed for as one of the reasons^[2]. Copies of American machines also circulated, and it was reported that by 1883 there were copies in Britain that even reproduced the original maker's name^[2].

In October 1890 George Addy of Sheffield read a paper, "On Milling Cutters," at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE)^[10]. In the discussion, fewer than 60 percent of British engineering works had a milling machine, one speaker stated^[10], and the view was also expressed that British engineers had been blamed for being slow to adopt the milling machine, but that it would be used more once standard parts were made repeatedly^[10]. Meanwhile an engineer from the railway's Nine Elms works reported that milling coupling rods and similar parts had made them 30–40 percent cheaper^[10], and Addy replied that milling machines could be run by ordinary workers rather than skilled men^[10]. The calculation was beginning to emerge that even if cutters were expensive, the cost could be recovered in setup and labor.

Cutter innovations also came from Britain. In 1881 Alfred Muir of Manchester patented helical grooves in the teeth of milling cutters to break up the chips^[2]. Since a long cutting edge does not engage all at once even in a heavy cut, the machine vibrates less. And British works, as in Willis' day, went on using milling in place of the planer. In 1889 Kendall and Gent of Manchester built a large milling machine for an Italian shipyard to mill the edges of steel plates, and The Engineer presented it as "an example of milling spreading to the work of the planer and the slotter"^[9]. In 1890 George Richards of Broadheath patented a vertical milling machine with a spindle head mounted on a planer-like bed^[2].

Why the move from the planer to the milling machine? On a planer a single tool reciprocates, and it does not cut on the return stroke. With a milling cutter many teeth engage one after another, and each tooth cuts only briefly and then cools, so the feed can be faster. With a formed cutter, slots and curved surfaces can be cut in a single pass. On the other hand cutters are expensive, and if they are sharpened wrongly the machine's power cannot be fully used. In the 1890 discussion, the case of a works running 8-inch and 14-inch cutters at the same speed was described with the remark that "the small cutters were not run fast enough," showing that the idea of cutting speed had not yet taken root on the shop floor^[10].

British makers: vertical, universal and plano-millers (1900–1933)

Woodbury writes that after 1900 British and Continental designers made important original contributions, especially to the vertical milling machine^[2]. Alfred Herbert of Coventry, known for turret lathes, patented with P. V. Vernon in 1906 gearing that fed the spindle of a vertical milling machine up and down under power at several rates. Brown & Sharpe in the US was also working on power spindle feed in the same year, and Woodbury reproduces a drawing of Herbert's 1906 vertical milling machine^[2]. If the spindle can be fed up and down, a vertical milling machine can also drill holes and cut slots to a set depth. In 1907 Herbert also patented a device for clamping the knee from the front^[2]. In feed control that automatically repeats rapid approach, cutting feed and rapid return of the table, Coxon and Gartside in Britain also filed patents in 1913–14^[2].

Gearboxes and independent feed: Olympia, 1920

After the First World War, British milling machines were on show at the machine tool exhibition held at Olympia, London, in September 1920. James Archdale of Birmingham showed two vertical milling machines; the larger was driven by a constant-speed pulley and clutch and could cut mild steel 7 inches (about 18 cm) wide and 0.06 inch (about 1.5 mm) deep at 12.4 inches (about 31 cm) per minute^[11]. Rather than shifting belts from an overhead shaft over cone pulleys, the design was to change a constant-speed input with gears inside the machine. J. Parkinson and Son of Shipley, Yorkshire, showed a universal milling machine that drove the spindle and the feed separately. Its 18 spindle speeds and 16 feeds (up to 14.8 inches, about 375 mm, per minute) could be combined freely, and the table swiveled up to 50 degrees either way^[11]. Engineering noted that independent feed carried the danger that the feed would not stop even if the main belt broke, but that the advantage of free combination outweighed it^[11]. Setting the speed to suit the size of the cutter and setting the feed by feed per tooth, today's way of thinking about cutting conditions, could now be selected on the machine itself.

A British specialty: the plano-miller

The other pillar of British milling machines was the plano-miller (a bridge-type milling machine with rotating cutter heads on a planer-type bed), built for shipbuilding, railways and generators. Kendall and Gent of Manchester (founded in Salford in 1849^[5]) built in 1932 a heavy-duty plano-miller billed as the largest yet built in Britain. The aim was to eliminate the work of resetting large workpieces again and again^[12]. It continued the British specialty, going back to the plate-edge milling of 1889, of machining heavy surfaces quickly. American machines of the same period are covered in American Chapter 7.

Cincinnati's British factory and the Second World War (1934–1958)

Cincinnati in Birmingham

In 1934 the American milling machine maker Cincinnati set up a factory in Britain, and the first British-built Cincinnati milling machines and tool and cutter grinders appeared^[13]. An American museum also notes that Cincinnati began building machine tools in Western Europe in that year^[14]. The factory was at Tyburn, Birmingham, and in 1946 production began of the No. 2MI, a medium-sized knee-type milling machine with a 5 hp motor housed in the base. Spindle speeds could be varied over a 60:1 range and feeds over a 120:1 range, and the overarm (the arm supporting the outer end of the cutter arbor) had a built-in vibration damper^[16]. The form settled in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, with the motor inside the base and wide ranges of spindle speed and feed through gearboxes, was now being built just as it was in Britain. In the ten years after the war the factory was greatly enlarged and reorganized for flow production^[13].

War and imports

In the Second World War Britain imported large numbers of machine tools from the US (see Chapter 3). Even so, the milling machine was a type with large domestic production: according to the official government war history, British production of milling machines in 1942 was 10,196, while imports from the US peaked at 6,807 a year, and domestic production always exceeded imports. The history also says, however, that some special milling machines could be obtained only by import^[15]. Compared with automatics (imports 2.5 times domestic production) and turret lathes (2.8 times), the milling machine was a type in which British makers were relatively strong^[15].

The universal milling head

Postwar British makers refined the usability of general-purpose machines. At the 1952 machine tool exhibition Parkinson showed a universal milling machine whose overarm carried a head driven by its own motor. The universal milling head swiveled 360 degrees about two axes at right angles, so it could cut from any angle without moving the work. Its spindle had 16 speeds (44–1,800 rpm) and could be fed about 3 inches (about 76 mm), so angled holes could also be drilled^[17]. The idea of cutting by changing the direction of the cutter, without resetting the work again and again, leads to the later five-axis MC (for five-axis machining today, see the 5-axis machining guide). By 1961 Herbert of Coventry was also selling the No. 47V vertical milling machine, which cut angled slots with a rotary table fitted^[42]. The Science Museum Group also holds a Parkinson 1A plain milling machine^[38].

①NC, Bridgeport, ball screws and System 24 (1955–1972)

Aircraft spars and Ferranti's NC

In Britain, as in the US, the first to need numerically controlled (NC) milling machines was the aircraft industry. In October 1955 Fairey Aviation, backed by the Ministry of Supply, signed a contract for a large milling machine with numerical control of all three axes. The control was designed by Ferranti of Edinburgh, with commands on magnetic tape. A March 1958 report described the machine as under test: a working range of 24 × 7 feet (about 7.3 × 2.1 m), a weight of about 50 tons, and the capacity to remove 50 pounds (about 23 kg) of aluminum per minute^[18]. The same report also describes Ferranti's three-dimensional continuous-path control fitted to a Kearney & Trecker milling machine. Two diffraction gratings ruled with 2,500 lines per inch were laid over each other at a slight angle, and the light and dark fringes produced by movement were counted to read the table position to 0.0002 inch (about 5 μm)^[18]. This is the ancestor of today's linear scale. In June 1957 there was also a demonstration of a Ferranti computer-controlled milling machine fitted with a measuring head in place of the cutter to measure shapes automatically^[18]. In Britain, besides Ferranti, EMI, Ekco and BTH offered NC equipment, which was beginning to be fitted to ordinary milling machines^[18]. Ferranti's NC and measuring machines are covered in Chapter 4.

Copying machines also advanced in aircraft factories. Fairey built "Green Linnet," a copy milling machine that traced a template hydraulically, and Cramic cut wing skins with routers running at 6,000–18,000 rpm. Cramic's machine all but eliminated sliding friction with linear ball bearings, in which balls recirculate between hardened round bars^[18]. The move from sliding guides to rolling guides began with these high-speed aircraft machines.

Adcock and Shipley's Bridgeport

Among general-purpose milling machines for small shops, the turret milling machine of America's Bridgeport came to be built in Britain too. In 1959 Adcock and Shipley of Leicester began building it in Britain under an agreement with Bridgeport Machines of the US. A swiveling turret sat on top of the knee-type column, a ram moved back and forth on it, and the milling head was on the end of the ram; the table was 42 × 9 inches (about 1,070 × 230 mm) and normally fed by hand^[19]. It was a popular machine whose output in the US rose from 28 to 125 a week in 1951–58^[20], and in Britain production spread to Bridlington in Yorkshire; in April 1970 the 10,000th machine was shipped to Germany^[27]. Adcock and Shipley held the license to build Bridgeports outside the US, and in 1971 it was bought by Textron, Bridgeport's parent company^[28][29]. The Bridgeport type, which changes the position and angle of the cutter without moving the work and can also drill with its quill, became the standard in British mold, jig and prototype shops (for its birth in the US, see American Chapter 7).

Ball screws and PTFE: Marwin's Max-e-Mill

With NC machines, the construction of the machine itself also changed. In 1965 Marwin brought out an NC vertical milling machine developed with Ferranti, the Max-e-Mill. Its sliding surfaces were lined with low-friction PTFE (fluoropolymer), and its feeds used recirculating ball screws, combining accuracy with rigidity. With two spindles it could machine two parts at once up to 17 inches (about 430 mm) wide, and there were two types of control: magnetic-tape contouring and eight-hole paper-tape straight-line and positioning control^[23]. Acme screws, made for turning by handwheel, cannot follow fine commands because of backlash and friction. Ball screws and low-friction guideways were the answer to NC's demand to "move as commanded, at once and accurately." In 1960 Kearns, the horizontal boring machine maker, also brought out a boring and milling machine with AEI automatic positioning, with tools drawn into the spindle by a drawbolt and springs^[22].

Molins' System 24

In 1967 the cigarette machinery maker Molins announced "System 24"^[24]. Its development was led by D. T. N. Williamson, formerly of Ferranti. Molins made 70 percent of the world's cigarette-making machines and needed to make a very wide variety of small parts a few centimeters in size. System 24 was a plan to run around the clock among NC machines of different kinds (the first installation was six machines and an automatic inspection machine), moving workpieces fixed to pallets by racks and conveyors as the computer commanded. Workers fixed workpieces to pallets the day before according to a computer-generated schedule, and 72 sets of pallets per machine were stored on racks^[25]. Its economics were also studied, finding that combining three-axis machines was cheaper than having one five-axis machine do everything^[25]. A 1974 report by the US RAND Corporation also cites System 24 as an advanced example of NC machines linked by conveyors^[26]. It was an early example of the idea later called FMS (flexible manufacturing system).

★The machining center era: KTM and Mazak's Worcester plant (1973–)

KTM and the plight of British makers

In the 1970s, as machining centers with automatic tool changers (ATC) spread, British makers also built MCs. Marwin Machine Tools of Leicester won a Design Council award in 1973 for Modula, an NC machine tool built from standard units combined to suit each customer's order, and sold it at a modest price in the US as well^[31]. In the same year, 1973, the British subsidiary of Kearney & Trecker of the US merged with Marwin to form Kearney and Trecker Marwin (KTM), where 1,200 people in Brighton built NC milling machines, machining centers and transfer machines^[30]. But it struggled, and in June 1974 Vickers took over its management and the Department of Industry agreed to provide up to £3.5 million through a new holding company. The government journal explained this as a measure to keep a British maker in the field^[30]. The decline of the British machine tool industry as a whole is covered in Chapter 4.

Bridgeport's British company changed its name to Bridgeport Machines, Ltd. in 1986^[29] and was still operating in Leicester in the early 1990s^[32]. The Science Museum Group holds a Bridgeport milling machine that came from Bridgeport Machines Ltd. and Adcock-Shipley^[37].

Mazak's Worcester plant

In June 1987 the British plant of Japan's Yamazaki Mazak opened in Worcester^[33][34]. As a European production base it now builds more than 50 models and more than 1,000 machine tools a year, and the VCN-600 vertical machining center is labeled as made in Britain^[35][36]. Just as Cincinnati of the US once built American-style milling machines in Birmingham, a Japanese maker now builds machining centers in Britain.

What it means on the shop floor. When you look at an old British milling machine, ask: "Is the feed taken from the cone pulley, or from a gearbox separate from the spindle (independent feed, as on the Parkinson)?" "Is the head fixed, or a universal head that swivels on two axes?" "Is it a knee type, a bridge-type plano-miller, or a Bridgeport type with ram and turret?" "If it is NC, are the feeds Acme screws or ball screws, and are the guideways sliding or rolling?" The answers tell you the machine's generation and the work it is good at. The heavy cutting of the plano-miller, angled cutting with the universal head, ball screws and position reading, and setup with workpieces circulating on pallets all survive as basic elements of today's MC. The basics of machining today are covered on the Machining basics page; for NC programs, see NC programming.

Links with Japan

Japanese milling machines grew up first on the model of the American Cincinnati design (see Japanese Archive, Chapter 2). No technical tie-ups between British milling machine makers and Japanese makers could be confirmed in the research for this chapter. Within that, there are two clear points where Britain and Japan meet.

One is FMS. In 1972, five years after Molins' System 24 was announced in 1967, Makino Milling Machine built a transfer line of adaptive-control MCs, and in 1983 Yamazaki Iron Works (today's Yamazaki Mazak) completed "MAZATROL FMS," aimed at long periods of unmanned operation (see Japanese Archive, Chapter 2). The System 24 idea of keeping machines running by moving workpieces on pallets and conveyors spread in Japan in the practical form of MCs and FMS. A direct influence between the two has not been confirmed in this chapter.

The other was Mazak's Worcester plant. In the 1980s, when Japanese MCs were being exported around the world (see the same chapter), Mazak built a plant in Britain, and since 1987 it has been building machine tools for Europe in Britain. The VCN-600 vertical machining center carries the words "MADE IN THE UK"^[33][35][36]. American milling machines reached Enfield in the 19th century, Cincinnati built them in Birmingham in the 20th, and now a Japanese maker builds them in Worcester: this flow shows that the history of British milling machines was also a history of "building in Britain machines that came from outside." Read it together with the chapters on the same machines in the US and Germany (America, Germany), and the differences become clear.

⑂Family tree of makers

Name changes and mergers of the main British makers of milling machines and machining centers. The left and right ends of each bar are the years of the first and last events checked in this chapter, not the years the companies were founded or ended (a dotted line means "not confirmed beyond this point"). Red arrows show where a business went, and a › at the right end marks a company that continues today. The parent companies of Cincinnati's British factory are traced in the family tree in American Chapter 7.

Sources: company history pages and published company histories [5][9][12][21][2][42][8][11][17][13][16][19][28][29][32][23][31][30][33][35]

Places to visit

Old milling machines were usually used up in factories, so there are few places to see them. Check each site's information on opening days, whether visits are possible and changes to exhibits before you go. Also see the places to visit in the

Science MuseumLondon (England)A Brown & Sharpe No. 1 universal milling machine (built 1865), said to be one of five sold to Britain, is on display in the Making the Modern World gallery. The museum also holds a model of a mid-19th-century machine shop that includes a milling machine close to Nasmyth's design (check the displays before you go)^[7][3][2]

Science Museum Group collection (online catalog)London and elsewhere (England)The catalog lists a Bridgeport turret milling machine built in Britain by Adcock and Shipley, a Parkinson 1A plain milling machine, a universal boring and milling machine by George Richards of Broadheath, a model of a Cramic NC milling machine, and more. The catalog does not give display locations, so ask the museum if you want to see them^{[37][38][39][40]}

American Precision MuseumWindsor (Vermont, USA)A machine tool museum in the very armory building (a National Historic Landmark) of Robbins & Lawrence, which built many of the gun-making machines sent to Britain's Enfield factory in 1855. You can see the beginnings of the British milling machine from the American side^[41][6]

⌛Timeline

All the events checked for this chapter. The numbers are sources; click one to open that source (at the page, where known). "p." is a page of a book, and "frame" is the sequential number of an Internet Archive scan (for Gilbert's catalog, the page number shown in the viewer).

The revolving file: Nasmyth and early milling1829–1854

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
1829–31	★The young Nasmyth, newly at Maudslay's works, builds a machine to cut the small hexagon nuts used in model steam engines, combining a hard steel disk cutter (he called it a "revolving file") with a dividing plate on which the nut was mounted. The six faces were cut in turn by indexing, more accurately and quickly than with a hand file, which delighted MaudslayNasmyth's list of inventions (p.409) gives 1829. Woodbury places it after he joined in May 1829 and before Maudslay's death in 1831	James Nasmyth (Maudslay's works)collar-nut cutting machine	[1, p.145][1, p.146][2, frame 12][3, frame 7]
c. 1830	Woodbury regards Nasmyth's machine as the first example of a milling machine with an indexing device and the first record of a cutter cooled with water. The feed was automatic by screw and nut, but intermittent, with no vertical or lateral adjustment	James Nasmyth	[2, frame 13]
1839	Woodbury writes that the "knee-type" idea of raising and lowering the table in front of the column was already drawn in Bodmer's British Patent No. 8070, though he says it had almost no influence on later machinesThe original patent has not been checked (recorded in the retry notes). The knee type spread from Brown & Sharpe's universal milling machine of 1862	John George Bodmer (Manchester)	[2, frame 24]
1841	Robertson Buchanan's Practical Essays on Mill Work (1841 edition) carries Nasmyth's own description and drawings. Of the 54 machine tools covered in the book, 21 were Nasmyth's. The nut-milling machine became a product of Nasmyth's works, and he writes that he supplied engineers with "plenty" of them	Nasmyth, Gaskell & Co.	[2, frame 12][3, frame 7][1, p.146]
1845 (described in print in 1848)	★Robert Willis, foreman at a Leeds locomotive works, builds a heavy machine to cut the webs of locomotive crankshafts. It rotated a disk carrying steel cutters shaped to the finished curve and fed the table by worm at about 9 cm per hour, combining the three operations of drilling machine, slotting machine and lathe in one machine. 7 tons; nine and a half hours per crankThe feed is 3.5 inches per hour in the original. The design year of 1845 is from Woodbury	E. B. Wilson & Co. (Railway Foundry, Leeds)Robert Willis' crank-cutting machine	[4, p.104][4, p.105][2, frame 12]
1849	Kendall and Gent build the first shop of Victoria Works near Springfield Bridge in Salford and begin making machine tools (according to the 1894 works guide of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers). The firm later moved to Gorton (Manchester) and became known for plano-millers and large milling machinesGrace's Guide gives 1847 but cites no source. In 1855 the two took out a British patent for a machine for cutting metal	Kendall and Gent (Salford)	[5]

American machines at Enfield, and slow adoption1855–1899

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
1854	To rebuild the Enfield small arms factory, a British committee inspects American armories and gun factories. At Springfield, guns from ten years' production were taken apart and reassembled before them, and Britain decided to adopt the "American System" of making interchangeable parts by machine. Nasmyth was a member of this committeeFor details of the visit, see Chapter 2, “The Workshop of the World and Britain Overtaken”	British government (Small Arms Committee)	[6, p.138][6, p.140][3, frame 9]
1855	★157 machines were shipped from the U.S. to Britain for Enfield, 74 of them milling machines. Gilbert of the Science Museum sums up that the milling machine came into Britain with this import of machines for EnfieldRoe's figures are 74 milling machines, 23 drilling machines, 5 tapping machines and 7 edging machines, the rest being special machines for screw cutting, rifling and other work	Robbins & Lawrence, Ames and others (US)	[6, p.138][3, frame 9]
1865	★Five of Brown & Sharpe's No. 1 universal milling machines were sold to Britain, and one of them (built in 1865) is still at the Science Museum. With its knee, swiveling table and index head connected to the feed screw, it set the pattern for later milling machinesScience Museum catalog number 1961-56. Donated by the Singer Sewing Machine Co. Ltd.	Brown & Sharpe (US)No. 1 universal milling machine	[3, frame 74][7]
1867	Joseph Parkinson starts in business (Floud 1976 gives this year from the company's old records). It became J. Parkinson and Son of Shipley (Yorkshire), which in the 20th century built milling machines and Sunderland gear planers	J. Parkinson and Son	[8]
August 1881	Alfred Muir of Manchester takes out a British patent (No. 498) for helical grooves in the teeth of milling cutters to break up the chips. It was a way of reducing the force on the teeth in heavy cuts	Alfred Muir (Manchester)	[2, frame 27]
1883	Pickering of the US reported that among the copies of American-style milling machines shown at European exhibitions were some that copied even the original maker's name, and that British makers did the sameFrom Woodbury's note (Trans. ASME Vol. V, 1883)	British machine tool makers	[2, frame 6]
1889	Kendall and Gent complete a large milling machine to mill the edges of steel plates for an Italian shipyard. The Engineer presented it as "an example of milling spreading to work formerly done on the planer and the slotter"	Kendall and Gent (Manchester)	[9, frame 70]
August 1890	George Richards takes out a British patent (No. 12,076) for a vertical milling machine with a spindle head on a planer-like bed, a swiveling table, longitudinal and cross power feed, friction-wheel reversing and a worm drive to the spindle	George Richards (Broadheath)	[2, frame 42]
October 1890	★Addy reads a paper, "On Milling Cutters," at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). In the discussion it was said that "less than 60% of British engineering works have milling machines," and some complained that British engineers had long been blamed for being slow to adopt the milling machine. On the other hand, the railway's Nine Elms works reported that milling had cut costs by 30–40%The paper begins on printed p.528, and the discussion is on pp.538–552	George Addy (Sheffield)	[10, frame 977][10, frame 982][10, frame 979]

British makers: vertical, universal and plano-millers1900–1933

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
December 1906	★A. Herbert and P. V. Vernon take out a British patent (No. 6491) for gearing that feeds the spindle of a vertical milling machine up and down under power at several rates. Woodbury reproduces a drawing of Herbert's vertical milling machine of the same year as an example of the major contribution British and Continental designers made to the vertical milling machine after 1900	Alfred Herbert (Coventry)	[2, frame 43][2, frame 44][2, frame 42]
July 1907	Alfred Herbert and others take out a British patent (No. 15,645) for a device that clamps the knee from the front. Woodbury writes that Brown & Sharpe had built this feature into its machines in 1900, and that in Britain it was later patented	Alfred Herbert (Coventry)	[2, frame 30]
1913–14	Patents on automatic feed control (bringing the table up in rapid traverse, cutting at feed rate and returning in rapid traverse) are also taken out in Britain, by Coxon (1913, No. 15,639) and Gartside (1914, No. 17,749)	Fred Coxon, Vincent Gartside	[2, frame 46]
September 1920	Archdale shows vertical milling machines at the Olympia machine tool exhibition. Driven by a constant-speed pulley and clutch, the larger machine could take a cut 7 inches (about 18 cm) wide and 0.06 inch (about 1.5 mm) deep in mild steel	James Archdale and Co. (Birmingham)	[11, frame 5]
September 1920	At the same exhibition Parkinson shows a universal milling machine with separate drives for the spindle and the feed. Its 18 spindle speeds and 16 feeds could be combined freely, and the table swiveled up to 50 degrees either way	J. Parkinson and Son (Shipley)	[11, frame 7]
October 1932	Kendall and Gent build a heavy-duty plano-miller (bridge-type milling machine) billed as the largest yet built in Britain. It was a machine for eliminating the work of resetting large workpieces again and again	Kendall and Gent (1920), Ltd. (Manchester)Large heavy-duty plano-miller	[12, frame 19]

Cincinnati's British factory and the Second World War1934–1958

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
1934	★Cincinnati of the U.S. builds a plant in Britain, and the first British-built Cincinnati milling machines and tool grinders appear in 1934. An American museum also presents this as the year an American company began making machine tools in Western Europe	Cincinnati Milling Machines, Ltd. (Birmingham)	[13, frame 47][14]
1942	★In 1942, during the Second World War, British production of milling machines was 10,196, exceeding the peak of imports from the US (6,807 a year). Some special milling machines, however, could be obtained only by importFrom the official government war history. The comparison is by number of machines, with a note that imports included many expensive special-purpose machines	British machine tool industry	[15, p.331][15, p.332]
Nov 1946	Production of the No. 2MI (plain and universal), a medium-sized knee-type milling machine with a 5 hp motor, begins at the Birmingham factory. Spindle speeds could be varied over a 60:1 range and feeds over a 120:1 range, and the overarm had a built-in vibration damper	Cincinnati Milling Machines, Ltd. (Tyburn, Birmingham)No. 2MI	[16, frame 16]
September 1952	Parkinson shows at the machine tool exhibition a universal milling machine with a motor-driven universal milling head on the overarm. The head swiveled 360 degrees about two axes at right angles to cut from any angle, and the 16-speed spindle (44–1,800 rpm) could be fed about 3 inches to drill angled holes	J. Parkinson and Son (Shipley), Ltd.	[17, frame 4]
1958	In the ten years after the war, the Birmingham factory's floor area is greatly enlarged and it is reorganized for flow production	Cincinnati Milling Machines, Ltd.	[13, frame 47]

NC, Bridgeport, ball screws and System 241955–1972

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
October 1955	★The aircraft maker Fairey Aviation, backed by the Ministry of Supply, signs a contract for a large milling machine with numerical control of all three axes. The control was designed by Ferranti and ran on magnetic tapeAs of the March 1958 report the machine was under test. Working range 24 × 7 feet (about 7.3 × 2.1 m), weight about 50 tons	Fairey Aviation, Ferranti (Edinburgh)	[18, frame 94][18, frame 63]
June 1957	A demonstration is given of a Ferranti computer-controlled milling machine fitted with a measuring head in place of the cutter to measure shapes automatically. In Britain, besides Ferranti, EMI, Ekco and BTH offered NC equipment, which was beginning to be fitted to ordinary milling machines	Ferranti, Ministry of Supply inspection department	[18, frame 99][18, frame 71]
March 1958	A case is reported of Ferranti's three-dimensional continuous-path control fitted to a Kearney & Trecker milling machine. It read the table position to 0.0002 inch (about 5 μm) by counting the light and dark fringes produced by overlapping diffraction gratings ruled with 2,500 lines per inch	Ferranti	[18, frame 74]
March 1958	To machine aircraft skins and spars, Fairey builds "Green Linnet," a copy milling machine that traces a template hydraulically, and Cramic builds routers running at 6,000–18,000 rpm. Cramic's machine moved lightly on linear ball bearings in which balls recirculate between hardened round bars	Fairey Aviation, Cramic EngineeringGreen Linnet and others	[18, frame 63][18, frame 64]
May 1959	★Adcock and Shipley of Leicester, under an agreement with Bridgeport Machines of the U.S., begins building Bridgeport turret milling machines in Britain. A rotating head (turret) and ram sat on top of a knee-type column, and the table was 42 × 9 in (about 1,070 × 230 mm)	Adcock and Shipley (Leicester)Bridgeport turret mill	[19, frame 96][20, frame 105]
August 1959	W. E. Sykes, the gear cutting machine maker of Staines, acquires most of the shares of Kendall and Gent, the plano-miller maker of GortonAn April 1960 railway journal article (Sykes's interim report) puts the acquisition eight weeks before the end of Kendall and Gent's financial year (September 30, 1959)	W. E. Sykes, Kendall and Gent	[21]
July 1960	Kearns, the horizontal boring machine maker, shows at the machine tool exhibition a universal boring, milling and drilling machine with AEI two-axis automatic positioning. Tools were drawn into the spindle by a drawbolt and springs	H. W. Kearns & Co. (Broadheath)	[22, frame 64]
April 1965	★Marwin brings out the Max-e-Mill, an NC vertical milling machine developed with Ferranti. Its sliding surfaces were lined with low-friction PTFE (fluoropolymer), its feeds used recirculating ball screws, and its two spindles could machine two parts at once. There were two control types: magnetic-tape contouring and paper-tape positioning	Marwin (Holdings) Ltd.Max-e-Mill	[23, frame 52]
1967	★Molins, the cigarette machinery maker, announces "System 24," which moves workpieces among several NC machines under computer command. Its development was led by D. T. N. Williamson, who had come from Ferranti. Parts on pallets were carried by racks and conveyors, aiming at 24-hour operationElectronics Australia says it was presented at the 8th MTDR Conference in Manchester. The first installation was for the company's own Deptford works	Molins Machine Co. (London)System 24	[24][25][26, frame 18]
April 1970	The 10,000th Bridgeport is completed at the Bridlington factory and shipped to Germany. Machines were being sent to Germany by container every month	Adcock and Shipley (Bridgeport) Ltd.	[27, frame 55]
1971	Textron, the American parent company of Bridgeport, buys Adcock and Shipley. Adcock and Shipley held the license to build Bridgeport machines outside the US	Textron, Adcock and Shipley	[28][29]

The machining center era: KTM and Mazak's Worcester plant1973–

Year	Event	Maker / model	Sources
1973	★The British subsidiary of Kearney & Trecker of the US and Marwin Machine Tools merge to form KTM, a leading British maker of NC milling machines, machining centers and transfer machines, with 1,200 employeesDated 1973 because the government journal (June 1974) refers to "last year's merger"	Kearney and Trecker Marwin Ltd. (Brighton)	[30, frame 3]
May 1973	Marwin's NC machine tool Modula receives a Design Council award. Built by combining standard units (modules) to suit each customer's order, it was priced low and also sold in the US	Marwin Machine Tools Ltd. (Leicester)Modula, Modulamatic	[31, frame 27]
June 1974	Vickers takes over the management of the struggling KTM, and the Department of Industry is to provide up to £3.5 million through a new holding company. It was a measure to keep a British maker in this field	Kearney and Trecker Marwin, Vickers	[30, frame 3]
1986	Adcock & Shipley's name changes to Bridgeport Machines, Ltd. It was still operating on Forest Road, Leicester, in the early 1990sYear of the name change from IDCH (not confirmed in a second source)	Bridgeport Machines, Ltd. (Leicester)	[29][32]
June 1987	★Japan's Yamazaki Mazak opens its British plant in Worcester. Its European production base, it now builds more than 1,000 machine tools a year, and the VCN-600 vertical machining center is labeled as made in BritainYear and month of the opening from Mazak's company history (1989); the year from The Times (1992) and Mazak's official information	Yamazaki Machinery UK (Worcester)	[33][34][35][36]

FAQ

Why was Britain slow to adopt the milling machine?: The milling machine came to Britain as a production machine only when 74 machines arrived from the US at the Enfield small arms factory in 1855. Even after that it spread slowly, because cutters were expensive and hard to sharpen, the few imported machines were put to heavy work they were not designed for, and skilled use of the planer was well established. At the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1890 it was said that fewer than 60 percent of works had a milling machine. It spread in earnest only from about 1890–1910.
Was Nasmyth's nut-milling machine the world's first milling machine?: No. The machines in the gun factories of Whitney and of Middletown in the US are thought to be earlier. But Nasmyth's own records make it clear that his machine was built in 1829–31, and it is regarded as the first example of a milling machine with an indexing device and the first record of a cutter cooled with water.
Who built Bridgeport milling machines in Britain?: Adcock and Shipley of Leicester. It began manufacturing in 1959 under an agreement with Bridgeport Machines of the US, later expanded to a factory in Bridlington, and shipped its 10,000th machine in 1970. It was bought by Textron of the US in 1971 and changed its name to Bridgeport Machines, Ltd. in 1986.
What was Molins' System 24?: A production system announced in 1967 by the cigarette machinery maker Molins, which aimed to run around the clock by moving workpieces on pallets among several NC machines under computer command. Its development was led by D. T. N. Williamson, formerly of Ferranti, and it is regarded as an early example of what was later called an FMS (flexible manufacturing system).

What's next and related pages

British Machine Tool ArchiveChapters and mini timeline Chapter 5: The Lineage of British LathesPrevious chapter. From Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe to NC lathes Chapter 7: The Lineage of British Grinding MachinesNext chapter. Grinding machines from Churchill, Jones & Shipman and Newall Chapter 4: NC, FMS, Industrial Decline and RevivalFerranti's NC, Molins, Renishaw Chapter 2: The Workshop of the World and Britain OvertakenGreat Exhibition, Enfield, overtaken by the US and Germany Chapter 3: The Two World Wars and Machine Tool ControlMachine tool control and machines from the U.S.The Lineage of American Milling Machines and MCs Lincoln miller, universal milling machine, Bridgeport, Milwaukee-Matic The Lineage of German Milling Machines and MCsFrom Deckel, Maho and Heller to DMG MORI Japanese Archive Chapter 2: The Lineage of Milling Machines and Machining CentersFrom building Cincinnati-type machines in Japan to MCs and FMS Japanese Archive: The Lineage of Multitasking Machines and 5-AxisThe history of simultaneous 5-axis and multitasking machining Machining centerTypes of MCs today and how to choose one 5-axis machining5-axis machine configurations and programming Machining basicsMilling, drilling and cutting conditions

Sources

Books and trade journals were checked in Internet Archive scans, museum objects in the Science Museum Group catalog, and makers' histories on their web pages, all in October 2026. "Frame" is the scan's sequence number (one or two pages per frame); for Gilbert's catalog it is the page number shown in the viewer (one more than the printed number). Newspapers with a whole year in one file and lending-only books were checked through excerpts from Internet Archive full-text search, so no pages are given. Numbers and dates of British patents are from the notes in Woodbury's book. Where something is called the "first," the text says what kind of first it is (record, patent or product).