Museum of Science and Industry

Machine tools are vital to the mass production process because they make components for other machines. They do this by cutting or grinding away excess material. In Manchester, the thriving cotton industry stimulated machine tool manufacture.

Trained in London at Henry Maudslay's workshop, Joseph Whitworth came to Manchester to set up his own buiness in 1833. He became the greatest precision engineer of the nineteenth century. Whitworth improved the planing machine, devised the most accurate end-measuring machine and introduced standard gauges and screw threads. His advances produced machine parts that were truly interchangeable, the foundation for modern consumerism.

Other Manchester machine tool makers continued this innovative tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, the way forward was universal machine tools and the numerical control process. The latter involved programming a machine tool to carry out a sequence of precise operations automatically. In 1955, Kearns & Co. Ltd of Broadheath produced the world's first punchcard-controlled machine tool, a boring machine.