Abstract
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, because of the difficulty of cutting metal with any degree of precision, each piece of machinery, each nut and each bolt was unique. In the 1770s, the British industrialist John Wilkinson perfected machine tools for boring truly circular and parallel iron cylinders. Between 1790 and 1820, British machinists Henry Maudslay and his former employee Richard Roberts developed machine tools for the precise turning, cutting and planing of metal. With the invention of these and other machine tools, Britain by the 1820s had become the world’s primary producer and exporter of machinery.
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Dudley, L. (2017). Machines to Make Machines. In: The Singularity of Western Innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39822-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39822-2_8
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