English mechanics were making machines for cutting metal at least
a generation before Whitney. One of the earliest of these English
pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and maker of the boring
machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to bring their
steam engine to the point of practicability. Without this machine
Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the necessary
degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of the
steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may
judge of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of
whom thousands are unnamed and unknown, have played in the
industrial world.
* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 1 et seq.
So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine
tools were first made of such variety and adaptability that they
could be applied generally to other branches of manufacturing;
and so it was that the system of interchangeable manufacture
arose as a distinctively American development. We have already
seen how England's policy of keeping at home the secrets of her
machinery led to the independent development of the spindles and
looms of New England. The same policy affected the tool industry
in America in the same way and bred in the new country a race of
original and resourceful mechanics.
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