The Global History of Machine Tools.
Knowledge, Narratives and Fiction
Machine Tools and the International Transfer
of Industrial Technology
30-31 March 2009, King's College, Cambridge
Between the 1860s and the 1960s there was an extraordinary quantum leap in humanity's capacity to transform raw metal into highly complex machines. Tracing the development of these productive forces and the discourses that surrounded and impelled their development was the subject of this conference, which sought to explore and map the development of machine-tool technology from the late 19th century up to the 1960s. The concentration was on machine tools because they are the ubiquitous instruments of modern manufacturing and because right up to the 1980s they occupied an iconic position in debates about industrial modernization. The Centre supported conference was organised by David Edgerton, Ralf Richter, Cristiano Ristuccia, Adam Tooze and Tomas Welskopp. For further information, visit the conference web site. A report by one of the participants at the conference is available at hsozkult and H-net.
Ralf Richter, Centre for History and Economics Prize Student 2000-01, Centre Research Associate since 2001; Research Assistant, Hans Böckler Foundation (Ralf-Richter@boeckler.de)
Cristiano A. Ristuccia, convenor of the Quantitative Economic History Seminar at the Centre for History and Economics; Senior Research Associate, Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge (car37@cam.ac.uk)
J. Adam Tooze, Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics (1995-96), Centre Research Associate since 1996; Senior Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge (jat27@cam.ac.uk)
Milling Machine of the J.E. Reinecker AG (Chemnitz) [click for larger picture] |
Viewed across space and time the development of this technology is remarkable in two senses. Viewed across time what clearly dominates is the incredible dynamism of a process of change, taking in all the major centres of industrial production. In the late nineteenth century it was still a considerable technological challenge to mass-produce pedal-operated sewing machines and bicycles. By the 1940s, factories in Japan, Australia, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Canada and the United States were all turning out high-performance aero engines and combat aircraft, by the thousand. Across the industrial world, workshops had emerged that were capable of machining multi-ton turbines so finely balanced that they would revolve perfectly smoothly at barely credible speeds and turbines so light and strong that they could drive aircraft at speeds faster than the speed of sound. Heavy engineering shops learned how to construct structures of enormous proportions and pressure vessels, gun barrels and nuclear reactor components capable of withstanding unimaginable pressures and withering heat. In cellars buried deep in the ground, Swiss mechanics in the 1940s, assembled ultra high precision jig-boring machines from components manufactured in temperature controlled rooms by automatic machines programmed to operate independently of any human intervention to avoid the distorting impact of human body heat. Seismographs monitored the effect of the slightest earth tremors on the accuracy of the machines (Woytinsky & Woytinsky p. 1148).
Milling Machine of the J.E. Reinecker AG (Chemnitz) [click for larger picture] |
To date, the historical literature has focused very heavily on the second aspect of the changes just described, i.e. the divide between the US and the rest. It has sought to understand this divide in terms of a distinction between “special purpose” and “general purpose” machine tools. A fundamental premise of our project is that this has been over-hasty. We simply do not know enough about the development of this key technology and its geography for it to be useful to adopt such stark dichotomies. What we do know is not encouraging to the dichotomous view. Philip Scranton’s work on the United States suggests that special purpose machinery was far from dominant in American industry even in the 1950s and 1960s. A variety of work on German metalworking technologies suggests that they were far from simply “general purpose”. The closely matched inventories compiled by Cristiano Ristuccia and Adam Tooze for the United States and Germany, show that the dichotomy fails to capture the most important trans-Atlantic differences in the 1930s and 1940s.
Heald Internal Centerless Grinder, 1933 [click for larger picture] |
Our projects therefore are double-edged. They address themselves both to discourses about technology and to the objects to which this talk was directed. They are also symmetrical in the sense that they keep in mind both the complex pattern of similarity and difference between “the United States and the rest” and the more general process of manufacturing development across the industrialized world. In this sense we hope to mark a departure from recent debates in comparative industrial history, which have been overshadowed by the European-American productivity gap and by questions of catch-up. If it is true that the productivity gap in manufacturing between the United States and Europe was constant for most of the twentieth century this is remarkable. But the fact that the gap neither narrowed, nor widened significantly implies that manufacturing capacity broadly speaking developed in parallel and what is more, it did so at an utterly unprecedented rate. This enormous general development in industrial capacity is in danger of being obscured by the narrow focus on the productivity gap.
The key questions for our projects are as follows:
What enabled this parallel and absolutely unprecedented growth in manufacturing capacity? How did industrial producers across the world achieve the spectacular increases in metalworking capacity? How did contemporaries interpret these products and processes? How did ideas about industrial modernity and the iconic status of machine tools, in particular, impact on the process itself? What were the channels of communication, imitation and appropriation that kept the development of the major industrial economies on such a fundamentally similar path?