ROLT | Batsford LIT.C.ROLT42s. ner Machine tools and their makers have played a crucially important part in the history of technology. We should never have heard of such men as Watt, Stephenson, Daimler, Diesel and the Wright brothers but for the tools which alone could give a practical shape wo theic ideas. Yet although the hames of these great inventors and pioneers have become household words, the great toolmakers on whom the sures of tir offs depended wwe remained anonymous. This book—the fire single work on the history of tools and their makers to be pub- lished in England—therefore remedics a sad deficiency at a time when increasing im- portance is being attacked to the study of the history of technology. L. T. C. Rolt, well- known biographer of Telford, Stephenson, Brunel and Wate, here presents a step-by-step account of the evolutionary process which has led from earliest times right down to the fully automatic power-controlled machine tool of today. Plentiful ‘lusteations, specially col- lected from many souress, enhance a lucid and fascinating story. ‘The book’s scope can fairly be stated to be exeremely comprehensive in its survey of the development of machine tools. Certainly, mach painstaking research has been necessary to bring together in this one volume the facts about how the gathering momentum of scientific and engineering thinking required. the parallel development of machine tools which could produce the requirements accurately and speedily. From the machines evolved by the individual craftsman for his workshop there is traced the 18th century development of the embryo machine tools of the frure and their use in the frst machine shops. The work of Henry Maudslay—who raised metal custing to an art—and of the pioneers, Clement, Fox, Roberts, Nasmyth and Whitworth, is put into perspective. A chapter deals with how the rise of America ickened the pulse of design as a resile of the New World's ideas on interchangeable ‘manufacture and the consequent birth of mass production, Metal cutting progresses to an exact and exacting scionce until we now have the sophisticated machine tools of the 2oth century. A BATSFORD BOOK ‘The jacket illustration is a drawing by Peter Verbruggen of his fazher’s mortar boring mill at Woolwich Arsenal 1770 a — ee ‘A century ago, a young American fom Connecticut started a business on his own as ‘an importer of machinery and tools. He was Charles Churchill and the enterprise he began bears his name to-day although it is doubsfal if he could have visualised the extent and growth of the: present Group's interests in the manufacture and marketing of machines and tools. ‘To mark the Centenary of Charles Churchill and Company Limited, a mumber of ideas were examined, among them that Snes ing a history of the Company, but this was abandoned as being of too limited an interest. While the ide of a book sill persed, the suggestion came of telling the story of ‘machine tools and of the men who conccived and made them. It has proved to be an in story, appealing not only to the engineer but also to the interested layman. ‘This book, however, does not only place on record the achievements of the pioneers—the ‘backroom boys'—it fulfils an outstanding need for a shore definitive history of machine tools. Tt brings home the incontrovertible fact that ‘modem civilisation just could not have been . developed without machine tools. The brilliant manifestations of technology so much taken for granted in industrial and domestic life to-day would have remained stillborn had it not been for the genius and ace of men who have created, and their Fei voday who sill create, tools for the jobTools for the Job A SHORT HISTORY OF MACHINE TOOLS L. T. C. Rolt QZ] B. T. BATSFORD LTD LONDON