UK 02The Workshop of the World and Britain Overtaken

The Great Exhibition, the American shock and Enfield (1851–1857)

1851: Britain at its peak

At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 (the Crystal Palace), the star among machine tools was Joseph Whitworth of Manchester. He showed 23 items, from lathes, planers, shapers, slotting machines and drilling machines to machines for cutting threads and gears, a measuring machine and gauges, while the other 20 firms showed one to three each^[1]. Roe writes that his machine tools were “in a class by themselves,” less for novelty than for accuracy and quality of workmanship^[2].

In the same hall were rifles from Robbins & Lawrence of Vermont in the U.S. Made on the interchangeable system, they drew attention because their parts could be mixed and still assembled, and they won a medal^[2]. British machine tools were the best of their kind as “universal tools” with which a skilled craftsman could make anything. What America showed was a method of lining up special-purpose machines, each built for one operation on one part, to make the same article in quantity without relying on skill.

1853: Whitworth's American tour

In 1853 Whitworth, sent by the government as a commissioner to the New York exhibition, and George Wallis of the Birmingham School of Art toured American factories. At the national armory in Springfield, they timed with a watch, operation by operation, how gunstocks were shaped almost completely by machine^[3]. In his 1854 report Whitworth wrote that in America the scarcity of labor actually encouraged the eager use of machinery, and that this was a major reason for American prosperity^[2] (the same visit also appears in American Chapter 1). In the same year Nasmyth became a member of the committee for rebuilding the Enfield rifle factory^[4].

1854: the parliamentary select committee on small arms

Until then, British military rifles had been made by craftsmen under contract in Birmingham and elsewhere. Each part was ordered from a different contractor, inspectors checked the parts with gauges, and either the small state factory at Enfield or contractors assembled them^[7]. But 28,000 new rifles ordered in 1851 were not delivered until November 1853, and other orders kept running late. The Board of Ordnance estimated that more than 900,000 rifles would be needed, and a state factory making 500 rifles a day was planned^[7].

The report of the House of Commons select committee dated May 12, 1854 is the record of that debate^[7]. John Anderson, engineer at the Woolwich arsenal, testified that Britain still had few machines made specially for rifles but had ample capacity to make them, and that it should first buy American machines; he himself wanted to go to America to learn^[7]. Whitworth testified that at Springfield a gunstock was finished in 23 minutes, but doubted whether the parts of American guns were really interchangeable and said fine finishing required handwork^[7]. Nasmyth, drawing on his experience of supplying the Russian government with machines for making gun parts some four years earlier, argued that mechanization was what would free manufacturers from dependence on craftsmen^[7]. While keeping the contract system, the committee recommended a state factory at Enfield on a small scale as a trial^[7].

A commission to America, machines to Enfield

The Board of Ordnance sent a commission of Lieutenant-Colonel Burn, Lieutenant Warlow and Anderson to the United States^[8]. Its report, laid before Parliament in 1855, said that Britain was ahead in ordinary machine tools, but that in special-purpose machines for a single operation it would have to learn from American ingenuity if it was to hold its position in world markets^[9]. The commission was also surprised that machines for copying gunstocks from a pattern were not yet in use in Britain. These machines were bought from the Ames company in the U.S.^[9].

In 1855, 157 machines for making arms were shipped from the U.S. to Enfield. Most were milling machines and special-purpose machines; Roe gives a breakdown including 74 milling machines and 23 drilling machines^[2] (the U.S. census report gives a different breakdown; see American Chapter 1). The Science Museum catalogue says that milling machines spread in Britain from the Enfield machines^[1]. The land of the lathe and the planer received the milling machine, which cuts with a rotating cutter, from America. According to BSA's company history, Enfield began machine production in the summer of 1855 and was turning out more than 2,000 rifles a week by about the time of the peace in April 1856. The Science Museum catalogue gives 1,200 a week, through 719 operations^[12][1]. One of the machines that went to Enfield, a special machine for engraving lock parts (1857), is still in the museum's collection^[1].

General-purpose and special-purpose machines. British machine tools had been perfected as general-purpose machines on which a skilled craftsman could machine anything by devising the setup. The machines of the American armories were special-purpose machines that did only a set operation on a set part; combined with jigs and gauges, they let people without skill make identical articles. In today's small shops the judgment is still the same: for high-variety, low-volume work, general-purpose machines and skill; for many identical parts, dedicated jigs, special machines and automation. The difference between Britain and America was less a matter of technical superiority than of the size of orders and the labor situation.

Machine tool makers of the workshop of the world (1856–1879)

Whitworth's measuring machine and “end measures”

In 1856 Whitworth, now president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, brought to his address in Glasgow a measuring machine that could detect a difference in length of 1/1,000,000 inch. An object was held between two accurate planes, and the point of light contact was found not by eye but by feel alone^[13]. Whitworth argued that in the workshop it was easier to work to 1/10,000 inch with end-measure standards than to 1/100 inch with the lines on a 2-foot rule, and that all fits should be measured by end measures^[2]. The following year, 1857, he also proposed dividing the inch decimally to standardize workshop dimensions^[13]. These ideas lead to today's gauge blocks and limit gauges (for today's methods of measuring, see Gauges; for fits, see Fits).

Makers in Manchester and Leeds

From the 1850s to the 1870s, the centers of British machine tool building were Manchester and Leeds. Works building locomotives, textile machinery and marine engines clustered there, and makers grew up to supply them with machine tools. In Leeds, Thomas Greenwood and John Batley, who had worked at Peter Fairbairn's works, started Greenwood & Batley in 1856. The firm built ordnance and textile machinery and special-purpose machine tools, and its surviving ledgers later became the central source for Floud's study of the British machine tool industry^[14]. The catalogue of the British section at the 1878 Paris Exposition lists Sir Joseph Whitworth & Co. (Manchester), Smith & Coventry of the Gresley Iron Works in Manchester, and Greenwood & Batley advertising “special machine tools,” among others^[15]. At London's second international exhibition in 1862, the number of firms showing machine tools had risen to 60, and Whitworth still took up a quarter of the space^[1].

Birmingham gunmakers buy machines: BSA

The mechanization of Enfield cornered Birmingham's gunmakers. According to BSA's company history, Birmingham made as many as 156,000 rifles for the British army during the Crimean War, but after the war it lost the work to Enfield and was forced to “buy machines or go out of business”^[12]. In June 1861 a meeting of Birmingham gun trade firms decided to form the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) as a company to make guns by machine, and bought 25 acres at Small Heath to build a factory^[12][16]. Its first large order was 20,000 Enfield rifles for the Turkish government, and in 1866 it won a British government contract to convert 100,000 muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, turning out more than 3,000 a week with a night shift^[12]. Gunmaking in the town of craftsmen was turning into machine work in factories.

Warnings from America, and Sheffield steel

In this era British engineers saw American factories at every exhibition and repeated the same warning. Rosenberg cites British reports on the 1867 Paris Exposition and the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. In the 1876 report Anderson wrote that the nature of the coming competition could not be understood without seeing the special tools in American factories: furniture, hardware, clocks and even ammunition were made cheaply and well with special tools, and workers' wages were high besides^[9].

In tool steel, Britain was ahead. In 1868 Robert Mushet found a steel that hardened without quenching; the active ingredient was tungsten. In 1871 Samuel Osborn of Sheffield took over the process and spread it to machine shops around the world as “R. Mushet's Special Steel”^[17]. Osborn of that company wrote that Mushet steel could double or triple the work of a single lathe^[17]. The American Taylor also wrote that until the early 1890s, Mushet steel was a special tool, a few of which were kept in the shop for cutting hard materials^[17]. This steel was the starting point for high-speed steel 30 years later.

Bicycles and American machines (1880–1899)

From guns to bicycles

In 1878, with government orders gone, BSA's factory stood idle for a year from August. The company looked for work outside arms, and in 1880 it built 200 Otto bicycles and entered the bicycle business^[12]. A large order for Lee-Metford rifles made it give up bicycles in 1888, but it came back with bicycle parts in November 1893; orders quadrupled in 18 months, reaching £4,620 a week by May 1895^[12]. The precision mass-production factory set up for rifles became, just as it was, a factory for bicycle parts.

Alfred Herbert and Coventry

In Coventry, the man who rode this bicycle wave to become a machine tool maker was Alfred Herbert. Born in 1866 into a farming family in Leicester, he served an apprenticeship with a local crane company from 1881 to the end of 1886, then became manager of a small works in Coventry, which he bought with his friend William Hubbard to start Herbert & Hubbard^[22][21]. At first they built machines for making pills and ribbons, but with the bicycle craze they moved into machines for making bicycles. Their first bicycle machine was a polishing lathe, the next a simple drilling machine, followed by a lathe with back gear and compound slide rest^[21]. The Science Museum has one of the company's lathes from 1889^[1]. In 1894 Hubbard left and the company became Alfred Herbert Ltd.; it grew with its capstan lathe (No.4) and also began buying and selling American machine tools^[22][21]. Handling American machines alongside its own says a great deal about British machine tool building in this period.

“The American invasion”

At the end of the 1890s, American machine tools came into Britain. McKenzie's 1901 book The American Invaders said that American machine tools were in use all over Britain, and that even Sheffield, the city of cutlery, used American machines and dies^[24]. According to McKenzie, the trigger was the bicycle boom: British firms brought in automatic American machines to raise output, and other firms that saw them followed. He also wrote that the great engineering dispute of 1897–98 was the start of the influx of American goods. Turret lathes and engine lathes were especially strong^[24]. McKenzie was a journalist, however, and gives no figures for the volume of imports. How large it really was is examined by the research in the next section.

Whitworth died in 1887. About £600,000 from his estate went to the Whitworth Institute, Owens College, technical schools and others in Manchester^[2]. He was the last of the generation that gave birth to the machine tool.

High-speed steel and standards (1898–1915)

From Mushet steel to high-speed steel

In 1898 F. W. Taylor, who had come to reorganize the machine shop of Bethlehem Steel in the U.S., resumed comparative tests of tool steels, comparing Mushet steel with the American Midvale steel. From the following year he carried out heat-treatment experiments with M. White, and in 1898–1900 found that chromium-tungsten steel heated to near its melting point could do 2–4 times the work of other tools^[17]. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, tools given this “Taylor-White process” were shown cutting at high speed on the same lathe used in the Bethlehem tests^[17]. Taylor divided the history into the age of carbon steel up to 1894, the age of self-hardening steels such as Mushet's up to 1900, and the age of high-speed steel after that^[17]. According to the Science Museum catalogue, cutting speed rose from 40 feet a minute (about 12 m) with carbon steel in 1850 to 120 feet a minute (about 37 m) with high-speed steel in 1900^[1].

In the discussion of Taylor's 1906 paper, Osborn of Sheffield countered that high-speed steel was a natural extension of Mushet steel and that his company had recommended hardening at high temperatures even before the Taylor-White process^[17]. In 1903 comparative tests of lathe tools were held at the Manchester Association of Engineers, comparing new steels against Mushet steel as the standard. There Osborn argued that heat treatment mattered as much as composition^[17].

When the tool changes, the machine changes. When high-speed steel tripled cutting speeds, lathes driven by belt cone pulleys lacked power, and their spindles and ways were too weak. The answer was geared headstocks, individual electric motors, and heavier spindles and beds. The form of the machine tool changed, pushed by advances in tool materials. The same thing happened 30 years later with carbide tools (for how lathes changed, see Chapter 5). For today's thinking on cutting conditions, see the Machining page.

The Engineering Standards Committee and British Standard Whitworth

In 1901 five institutions (civil, mechanical, naval architecture, iron and steel, and electrical) came together to form the Engineering Standards Committee. It was the beginning of today's British Standards Institution (BSI), and was incorporated in 1918 as the British Engineering Standards Association^[25][26]. According to a U.S. Bureau of Standards document, the committee standardized Whitworth's thread as British Standard Whitworth (BSW) in 1905^[27]. Its 1919 interim report states that the pitch table fixed by Whitworth would be kept as it was, and specifies that gauges are to be checked with “go” and “not go” limit gauges and that reference gauges are to be verified at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL)^[26]. A thread proposed by a single machine tool maker in 1841 had taken 60 years to become a national standard (for today's thread standards, see Threads; for how to look up standards, see Standards).

On the eve of the war

In 1910–11 the Machine Tool Trades Association, an organization of British machine tool makers, was formed, and Alfred Herbert became one of its leading figures (president 1919–34). One of its aims was to curb the problem of too many exhibitions that makers felt forced to take part in, by concentrating on its own exhibition held once every four years^[29][30][22]. In April 1915 Herbert was invited by the War Office to head the department in charge of machine tool production, and later served as Controller of Machine Tools at the Ministry of Munitions^[22][21]. The story of the war and the control of machine tools continues in Chapter 3.

Did British machine tools fall behind?

“Britain, which gave birth to the machine tool, was overtaken by America and Germany in the late 19th century.” This view existed even at the time. The warnings Anderson repeated in his reports of 1855 and 1876 are one example^[9]. The American Roe wrote in 1916 that the very dominance of Whitworth's methods over British machine tools for generations may have been one reason Britain lost the lead, and that most of the new developments of the following 50 years took place in America^[2]. McKenzie's 1901 book on the “invasion” conveys the same mood^[24].

Economic historians tried to test this with figures. In 1968 Saul published a paper surveying the British machine tool industry up to 1914^[35]. Roderick Floud's 1976 book The British Machine Tool Industry, 1850–1914 examined the structure of the industry and its performance in international trade, and analyzed the extensive ledgers of Greenwood & Batley of Leeds to measure the efficiency and productivity of a single firm. According to the publisher's summary, it concludes that its findings do not support a pessimistic view of Britain's industrial performance in this period^[14]. One can also take the view that British makers built machines suited to their own market (customers making a wide variety of locomotives, ships and textile machinery), and that not building many American-style special-purpose machines was less a sign of backwardness than a decision to fit the market.

No single word can settle which view is right. But lining up the events seen in this chapter, it becomes clear that Britain's weakness lay less in the skill of building machines than in the market for making the same thing in quantity, and the way machines were used for it. The Portsmouth block mills (1808) achieved interchangeable mass production early by world standards, yet the method did not spread to the rest of British industry (Chapter 1). That same Britain bought the Enfield machines from America in 1855 and brought in American turret lathes for bicycles in the 1890s. When the need arose, Britain was quick to adopt American methods too.

From the small shop's point of view. “We do everything with general-purpose machines and skill,” or “for this one part, we run it through dedicated jigs and machines”: the difference between Britain and America was exactly the difference in this judgment. When the quantity and variety of orders change, the right answer changes too. The historians' debate teaches us that a technology cannot be judged by itself, without looking at the market that uses it.

⛩Links with Japan

A Whitworth Scholar goes to Japan

Meiji Japan looked first to Britain as its model for industry. In 1873 Henry Dyer was invited from Glasgow and served until 1882 as principal of the Kogakuryo (later the Imperial College of Engineering, one of the forerunners of today's Faculty of Engineering of the University of Tokyo) and as teacher of civil and mechanical engineering. The six-year course was divided into two years each of preparatory, technical and practical study, combining theory with practical training in the works^[18]. In 1870, while a student at the University of Glasgow, Dyer had been chosen for the scholarship founded by Whitworth^[18]. So a British engineer educated with Whitworth's money laid the foundations of engineering education in Japan.

The Akabane works and its planer

According to a book Dyer published in London in 1880, mechanical engineering students worked at the Akabane works, which Dyer managed, under the same rules as ordinary apprentices. Dyer wrote that this was not a school “toy workshop” but a real factory, employing about 300 people and handling many kinds of work despite shortages of skilled workers, materials and machines. For graduation he also required drawings and a thesis on at least three kinds of machine tools^[19]. A 6-foot double-housing planer built in 1879 by that Akabane works (the Akabane Engineering Works of the Ministry of Public Works) survives at the Museum Meiji-mura as one of the earliest surviving Japanese-built machine tools (Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 67)^[20].

From British style to American style

The Ikegai works, started in Tokyo in 1889, had a British-style lathe, and Shotaro Ikegai used it as a model to build a British-style 9-foot lathe. It is built in the British way, with six speeds through back gearing and a gap in the bed for turning large work (Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 53, National Museum of Nature and Science)^[23]. In 1905, however, Ikegai switched to mass-producing American-style lathes to specifications by the American engineer Francis^[28]. The trend seen in the second half of this chapter, “British machine tools overtaken by America,” was taking place even inside a factory far away in Japan (Japanese Archive, Chapter 1, "The Lineage of Japanese Lathes"). Then, in the middle of the First World War, Ikegai exported lathes to Britain too, sending five in 1915^[28]. Japanese machine tools, modeled on British machines at the start of the Meiji era, were crossing to Britain little more than 40 years later.

FAQ

Why did Britain buy machines for making rifles from America?

Around the time of the Crimean War, British army rifles were made by craftsmen under contract, and orders ran years late. Before the 1854 parliamentary committee, Anderson, engineer at Woolwich, testified that American machines should be bought and learned from, and a commission was sent to America to order machines. In 1855, 157 machines were shipped from America to the state factory at Enfield, and Britain adopted what it called the “American system.”

When did milling machines spread in Britain?

The Science Museum's 1966 catalogue says that milling machines spread in Britain after American milling machines were installed at the Enfield state rifle factory in 1855–57. Until then British machine tools were mainly machines that cut with a single-point tool, such as lathes, planers and shapers.

What kind of company was Alfred Herbert?

It began as Herbert & Hubbard, which Alfred Herbert started with a friend in Coventry at the end of the 1880s; it moved into machines for making bicycles during the bicycle boom and became Alfred Herbert Ltd. in 1894. It grew with capstan lathes and also handled American machine tools, and by 1957, when Herbert died, it had four plants in Britain and more than 5,000 employees. The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry is a museum Herbert helped found with a donation.

Is it true that “British machine tools fell behind”?

British engineers who saw American special-purpose machines issued warnings at the time, and Roe (1916) also wrote that Britain lost the lead. On the other hand, Floud (1976), analyzing the ledgers of Greenwood & Batley and other evidence, reached a conclusion that does not support a pessimistic view of British industrial performance. In that view British makers were building general-purpose machines suited to their home market, and the verdict is still not settled.