Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and appendices
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The engineering industries
- 2 The technical history of machine tools, 1850–1914
- 3 The machine tool industry: structure and explanation
- 4 International trade in machine tools
- 5 Greenwood and Batley: history, records and methods
- 6 Greenwood and Batley: markets and prices
- 7 Greenwood and Batley: production
- Conclusion
- List of works cited
- Notes
- Index
1 - The engineering industries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and appendices
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The engineering industries
- 2 The technical history of machine tools, 1850–1914
- 3 The machine tool industry: structure and explanation
- 4 International trade in machine tools
- 5 Greenwood and Batley: history, records and methods
- 6 Greenwood and Batley: markets and prices
- 7 Greenwood and Batley: production
- Conclusion
- List of works cited
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The mechanical engineering industry is at once one of the most important of modern industries, and one of the most difficult to define. The first British Census of Production, taken in 1907, classified the output of the engineering industry (including electrical engineering) under forty separate headings; even these headings are often merely broad descriptions – for example ‘agricultural machinery’, ‘textile machinery’, ‘railway and tramway equipment and parts’ – which conceal the operations of hundreds of firms producing thousands of separately named pieces of equipment (P.P. 1912–13b). Perhaps the most important single unifying factor, linking these thousands of disparate products, however, is that the mechanical engineering industry is concerned with the processing of metals, and in particular with the transformation of metals into machinery, for further use in the operations of a myriad other industries. This transformation of raw or semi-finished metals into machinery is carried out by machine tools, defined ‘as briefly as possible’ by one writer as
contrivances in which a cutting tool is used to bring a piece of metal to the shape, size and degree of finish required by the operator and which to some degree reduce the manipulative skill and physical strength he needs to achieve his object.
(Steeds, 1969, p. xix)The machine tool industry thus occupies a central place within the mechanical engineering industry.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The British Machine Tool Industry, 1850–1914 , pp. 4 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1976