At least two of the superintendents of the Colt Armory should be mentioned—Prof. Charles B. Richards and William Mason.

Mr. Richards was not primarily a tool builder, but his contributions to mechanical engineering are too great to pass without notice. About 1860 he helped Charles T. Porter develop the design of the first high-speed steam engine, and in order to study the action of this engine he invented the Richards steam engine indicator. Indicators, more or less crude, had been in use from the time of Watt, but the Richards indicator was the first one accurate enough and delicate enough to meet the demands of modern engine practice; and its influence has been far-reaching. After a few years in New York as a consulting engineer, he was for many years in the Colt Armory as engineering superintendent under Mr. Root, and later was superintendent of the Southwark Foundry & Machine Company in Philadelphia. In 1884 he became Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, where he remained for twenty-five years as the head of the mechanical engineering department.

William Mason was another of those who helped make the Colt Armory what it was. He was a modest, kindly man, little known outside of his immediate associates, but of singular fertility in invention and almost unerring mechanical judgment. He learned his trade with the Remington Arms Company at Ilion, N. Y., and after a long association with them he was for sixteen years superintendent of the Colt Armory. In 1885 he became master mechanic of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven, and held that position until his death in 1913. He had granted to him more than 125 patents, most of them in connection with arms and ammunition and tools for their manufacture, but they included many appliances for looms and weaving, steam pumps, and bridge work, and he assisted with the development of the Knowles steam pump and Knowles looms.

Asa Cook, a brother-in-law of F. A. Pratt, was for years a foreman and contractor at Colt’s. He was afterwards a designer and manufacturer of machinery for making wood screws, bolt machinery and many other types of tools. George A. Fairfield, another Colt foreman, became superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine factory and later president of the Hartford Machine Screw Company; another workman, A. F. Cushman, of the Cushman Chuck Company, for many years manufactured lathe chucks. In fact, there is hardly a shop in Hartford which dates from the seventies and eighties which does not trace back in some way to the Colt Armory. Its influence is by no means confined to Hartford, for such men as Bullard and Gleason carried its standards and methods to other cities.

Four of the Colt workmen formed two partnerships of wide influence: Charles E. Billings and Christopher M. Spencer, who organized the Billings & Spencer Company, and Francis A. Pratt and Amos Whitney, of the Pratt & Whitney Company.

Charles E. Billings was a Vermonter, who served his apprenticeship in the old Robbins & Lawrence shop at Windsor, Vt. When twenty-one, he came to Colt’s, in 1856, as a die sinker and tool maker and became their expert on the drop forging process. In 1862 he went to E. Remington & Sons, where he built up their forging plant, increasing its efficiency many times, saving $50,000, it is said, by one improvement in frame forging alone. At the end of the war he returned to Hartford as the superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, which had taken over the old Sharps Rifle Works, built by Robbins & Lawrence. For a short time in 1868 Mr. Billings was at Amherst, Mass., associated with Spencer in the Roper Repeating Arms Company. The venture was not a success, and the next year, 1869, they came back to Hartford and formed the Billings & Spencer Company. This company has probably done more than any other for the art of drop forging, not only in developing the modern board drop hammer itself, but in extending the accuracy and application of the process. Mr. Billings was president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1895.

Christopher M. Spencer was born at Manchester, Conn. He served his apprenticeship in the machine shops of the silk mills there from 1847 to 1849, and remained for several years as a journeyman machinist with Cheney Brothers. In 1853 he went to Rochester, N. Y., to learn something of the other kinds of machinery, working in a tool building shop and a locomotive shop. After some years at the Colt Armory he went back to Cheney Brothers and soon obtained his first patent for an automatic silk-winding machine. This was adopted by the Willimantic Linen Company, with some modifications made by Hezekiah Conant, and was the machine which Pratt & Whitney began manufacturing in their first rented room in Hartford.

Mr. Spencer has had a passion for firearms from boyhood. In 1860 he obtained a patent for the Spencer repeating rifle. The Civil War created a tremendous demand for it, and the Government ordered first 1000, then 10,000, and before the war was over it had purchased about 200,000. In 1862, while the first contracts were pending, Spencer saw President Lincoln at Washington. He and Lincoln went down on the White House grounds with the new rifle, set up a board and shot at it. Lincoln enjoyed it like a schoolboy, and shot well, too. He tore his coat pocket in the process, but told Spencer not to worry over it, as he “never had anything of value in it to lose.”

At the close of the war Spencer went to Amherst and was there first associated with C. E. Billings in the Roper Company, as we noted. A year later he joined in starting the Billings & Spencer Company and coöperated with him in the development of the drop hammer.

A successful machine which Spencer invented for turning sewing machine spools suggested to Spencer the possibility of making metal screws automatically. The result was his invention of the automatic turret lathe. The importance of the blank cam cylinder, with its flat strips adjustable for various jobs, was wholly over-looked by his patent attorney, with the result that Spencer obtained no patent right on the most valuable feature in the whole machine.

The importance of this invention can hardly be overestimated. It ranks with Maudslay’s slide-rest and the turret tool-holder, as it is an essential feature in all modern automatic lathes, both for bar-stock and chucking work.

Assured of the success of the machine, Spencer withdrew from active connection with the Billings & Spencer Company in 1874, and in 1876, with George A. Fairfield, then superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, and others, formed the Hartford Machine Screw Company, one of the most successful enterprises in the city. Unfortunately, Mr. Spencer withdrew in 1882 to manufacture a new repeating shotgun and rifle which he had invented. The gun was a success mechanically, but the Spencer Arms Company, which had been formed in 1883 at Windsor, Conn., was a failure, and Mr. Spencer lost heavily. In his later years Mr. Spencer has returned to the field where he did his most brilliant work, automatic lathes. He represents the New England mechanic at his best, and his tireless and productive ingenuity has made a permanent impress on modern manufacturing methods.

Francis A. Pratt was born at Woodstock, Vt. When he was eight years old his family moved to Lowell. He was a mechanic from boyhood but he had the good fortune to be apprenticed as a machinist with Warren Aldrich, a good mechanic and a wise teacher. At twenty, Mr. Pratt went to Gloucester, N. J., where he was employed first as a journeyman, later as a contractor. In 1852 he came to the Colt shop, where he worked for two years. He then accepted the foremanship of the Phœnix Iron Works, which was run by Levi Lincoln and his two sons.

Amos Whitney was born in Maine and moved to Lawrence, Mass., where he served his apprenticeship with the Essex Machine Company which built cotton machinery, locomotives and machine tools. He came from a family of mechanics. His father was a locksmith and machinist, his grandfather was an expert blacksmith, his great-grandfather was a small manufacturer of agricultural tools, and he is of the same family as Eli Whitney of New Haven, and Baxter D. Whitney, the veteran tool builder of Winchendon. In 1850 both he and his father were working at Colt’s factory at Hartford. In 1854 Amos Whitney joined Pratt in the Phœnix Iron Works, where they worked together for ten years, the former as a contractor, the latter as superintendent. Whitney was earning over eight dollars a day when he left Colt’s and took up the new contract work which offered at the beginning only two dollars a day.

Many of the shops of that generation were “contract shops.” The Colt Armory was run on that basis, at least in its manufacturing departments. Under this system the firm or company furnished all the materials, machinery, tools, shop room and supplies, while the workmen were employed by the contractor, their wages being paid by the firm but charged against the contractor’s account. A better training for future manufacturers could hardly be devised, and a surprising number of these old-time contractors have succeeded later in business for themselves.

In the summer of 1860 Pratt and Whitney rented a small room and, in addition to their regular employment, began doing work on their own account, i.e., manufacturing the small winder for the Willimantic Linen Company. Mr. Whitney’s father-in-law acted as pattern maker, millwright, bookkeeper and general utility man. The following February they were burned out, but were running again a month later in other quarters. Here they continued to spread from room to room until all available space was outgrown. They succeeded from the very start, and at once became leaders and teachers of other mechanics, suggesters of new methods of work and of new means for its accomplishment. Both Pratt and Whitney were thoroughly familiar with gun manufacture, and the business was hardly started when the outbreak of the Civil War gave them more than they could do. In 1862 they took into partnership Monroe Stannard of New Britain, each of the three contributing $1200. Mr. Stannard took charge of the shop, as Pratt and Whitney were still with the Phœnix Iron Works. Within two years the business had increased to such an extent that they gave up their positions at the Phœnix works and in 1865 erected the first building on their present site. From $3600 in 1862 their net assets grew in four years to $75,000, and during the three years following that they earned and put back into the business more than $100,000. In 1869 the Pratt & Whitney Company was formed with a capital of $350,000, later increased to $500,000. In 1893 it was reorganized with a capitalization of $3,000,000. Since that time it has become a part of the Niles-Bement-Pond Company.

Beginning with the manufacture of machine tools and tools for making guns and sewing machines, they have extended their lines until their catalog fills hundreds of pages. From their wide experience in interchangeable manufacture, it was natural that they should take a prominent part in developing the machinery for the manufacture of bicycles and typewriters, when, later, these were introduced.

Soon after the Franco-Prussian War, an agent of the company visited Prussia and found the royal and private gun factories equipped with old and inferior machinery and the armories bare. Mr. Pratt was sent for, and returned to Hartford with orders from the German Government for $350,000 worth of gun machinery. During the next few years Mr. Pratt made no less than ten trips to Europe, taking orders aggregating over $2,000,000 worth of machinery. When the panic of 1873 prostrated the industries of the United States, Pratt & Whitney had orders, mostly foreign, which kept them busy until 1875. Their equipment of the three royal armories of Spandau, Erfurt and Danzig resulted in an improvement in quality of output and a saving of 50 per cent in wages. Pratt & Whitney’s production of gun-making machinery alone has run into many millions of dollars, and there are few governments which have not at one time or another purchased from them.

Pratt & Whitney from the start were leaders in establishing standards, particularly in screw threads. Their gauges for pipe threads have for years been the standard for the country. The troubles which arose from the lack of agreement of standard gauges and the growing demand for interchangeable bolts and nuts led to a demand on the company for a set of gauges upon which all could agree.

In undertaking this work Pratt & Whitney examined their own standards of length with reference to government and other standards in this country and abroad. The results were conflicting and very unsatisfactory. By different measurements the same bar would be reported as above and as below the standard length, and the investigation produced no results which could be used for a working basis. At length Prof. William A. Rogers of Harvard University, and George M. Bond, backed by the Pratt & Whitney Company, developed the Rogers-Bond comparator with which they determined the length of the standard foot. When they began, the length of the yard and its subdivisions varied with the number of yardsticks. Professor Rogers’ work was based on line measurement rather than the end measurement which had held sway from the time of Whitworth and which is now generally recognized to be inferior for final reference work. Professor Rogers went back of all the secondary standards to the Imperial Yard in London and the standard meter in the Archives at Paris. He obtained reliable transfers of these, and with the coöperation of the United States Coast Survey, the most delicate and exhaustive comparisons were made of the standard bars prepared by him for the use of the company with the government standard yard designated “Bronze No. 11.” Many thousands of dollars and three years of time went into this work.

The methods used and the results obtained were examined and reported upon by a committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the conclusion given in their report is as follows:

The standards so obtained became the basis of the gauges which Pratt & Whitney have produced.

In 1888 the company received its first order for Hotchkiss revolving cannon, and for three- and six-pounders rapid-fire guns. They have made hundreds of these guns for the secondary batteries of war vessels. In 1895 they brought out a one-pounder invented by E. G. Parkhurst, an expert mechanic, who had entered their employment as assistant superintendent in 1869 and later took charge of their gun department.

For many years the Pratt & Whitney tool-room lathes were the standard for the country. Later their leadership was materially affected by the Hendey Machine Company of Torrington, Conn., who built a high grade tool-room lathe having the change-gear box which has since been applied to nearly all types of machine tools. The change-gear box is one of the important contributions to tool building made in recent years. Among the later developments introduced by Pratt & Whitney is the process of thread milling, and they have designed a full line of machines for this work.

The Pratt & Whitney works, like the Colt Armory, has been a training school for successful tool builders. Worcester R. Warner and Ambrose Swasey were both foremen at Pratt & Whitney’s and left there to go west, first to Chicago and then to Cleveland. Some account of these two men will be given in a later chapter. Pratt & Whitney have had a marked influence on tool building in Cleveland, for, in addition to Warner and Swasey, E. C. Henn and Hakewessel of the National Acme Manufacturing Company who developed the multi-spindle automatic lathe, A. F. Foote of Foote, Burt & Company, and George C. Bardons of Bardons & Oliver, come from their shop. Johnston of Potter & Johnston, Pawtucket, was chief draftsman at Pratt & Whitney’s; and J. N. Lapointe who later developed the broaching machine, Dudley Seymour of Chicago, Gleason of the Gleason Works in Rochester, E. P. Bullard of Bridgeport, and F. N. Gardner of Beloit, Wis., inventor of the Gardner grinder, were all workmen there.

Mr. Gleason was also a workman in the Colt Armory. He went to Rochester in 1865 and the works which he developed form the most important tool building interest in western New York. There have been “a good many starts there in tool building and almost as many finishes.” Mr. Gleason always said that but for the training and methods he had gained at Hartford he would have shared their fate. Like many others, his company began with a general line of machine tools but has come to specialize on one type of machine, bevel-gear cutters, of which they build a most refined type.

E. P. Bullard, like Gleason, worked at both Colt’s and Pratt & Whitney’s. Later he formed a partnership with J. H. Prest and William Parsons, manufacturing millwork and “all kinds of tools” in Hartford. In 1866 he organized the Norwalk Iron Works Company of Norwalk, but afterwards withdrew and continued the business in Hartford. For a number of years Mr. Bullard was in the South and Middle West, at Athens, Ga., at Cincinnati, where he organized the machine tool department of Post & Company, and at Columbus, where he was superintendent of the Gill Car Works. In 1875 he established a machinery business in Beekman Street, New York, under the firm name of Allis, Bullard & Company. Mr. Allis withdrew in 1877 and the Bullard Machine Company was organized. Recognizing a demand for a high grade lathe he went to Bridgeport, Conn., and engaged A. D. Laws to manufacture lathes of his design, agreeing to take his entire output. In the latter part of the same year Mr. Bullard took over the business and it became the Bridgeport Machine Tool Works. In 1883 he designed his first vertical boring and turning mill, a single head, belt feed machine of 37 inches capacity. This is believed to be the first small boring machine designed to do the accurate work previously performed on the face plate of a lathe. Up to that time boring machines were relied on only for large and rough work. In 1889 he transferred his New York connections to J. J. McCabe and gave his entire attention to manufacturing, the business being incorporated as the Bullard Machine Tool Company in 1894.

The building of boring mills gradually crowded out the lathes, and for twenty years the company has concentrated on the boring machine as a specialty. In their hands it has received a remarkable development. They introduced a range of small-sized mills capable of much more accurate work than had been done on this type of machine. They applied the turret principle to the head carried on the cross rail and a few years later introduced a mill having a head carried on the side of the frame which permitted of the close working of the tools. These improvements transformed the boring mill into a manufacturing machine, and it became practically a vertical turret lathe with the advantages inherent in that type of machine. This trend toward the lathe type has finally resulted in a multiple station-type of machine which is in effect a vertical multi-spindle automatic chucking lathe with five independent tool heads, as shown in Fig. 56. Comparison of this with Fig. 15, shows how the lathe has developed in the 115 years since Maudslay introduced the slide-rest principle and the lead screw.