43
The years 1830 to 1880 marked the maturing of the
Machine Age born during the Industrial Revolution.
One by one, older technologies gave way to new ones,
based on power-driven machinery. Machinery was
enlisted to help the housewife, the office worker,
and the factory worker. Entirely new devices, such
as the sewing machine and the typewriter, were
invented, developed, mass-produced with specialized
machine tools, and then marketed. They soon became
indispensable.(24)
The introduction of the turret lathe and the
metal planer before the Civil War and subsequent improve
ments of them and of drilling, milling, and grinding
machines, coupled with improvements in accuracy and in
knowledge of metallurgy advanced the machine-tools
industry; and advance in the machine-tools industry
was related intimately to advances in production for
the economy as a whole.
. . machine-tool manufacture, in particular, . .
emerged into prominence as the very foundation of
mechanization. It provided the machinery and tools
for the expanding technology of mass production,
and, indeed, the "master tools" of all industry.(25)
24
Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., "Machines and Machine
Tools, 1830-1880," in Technology in Western Civilization,
ed. by Kranzberg and Pursell, ojd. cit. p. 407. See
also, H. J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The University Press,
1967); Nathan Rosenberg, "Technical Change in the Machine
Tool Industry, 1840-1910," Journal of Economic History,
XXIII (December, 1963), pp. UlU-Uj.
25
Samuel Rezneck, "Mass Production Since the War
Between the States," in The Growth of the American
Economy, ed. by Harold f7 Williamson (New York: Prentice
Hall, Inc., 1951), p. 502.