British scientists and machine-tools

Henry Maudslay was born at Woolwich on August 22^nd 1771. Henry worked as a powder monkey in the dockyards aged 12, making and filling cartridges. At 14 he had moved into the carpenters shop, although he took every opportunity to slip into the blacksmiths shop where he became familiar with working with iron. In 1780’s the famous locksmith Joseph Bramah was looking for someone to produce the tools required to make his new precisionlocks. Within a few years, Maudslay had been appointed as head foreman of Bramah’s works. By 1797, Maudslay asked for a raise of thirty shillings a week (to support his wife and 3 children) and Bramah refused, so Maudslay walked out and started his own workshop on Oxford Street in London, producing machine tools made to order. One of his most successful tools was the slide rest lathe. This allowed people to turn large pieces of metal, very quickly and with exact precision. In 1810 he moved his works to Westminster Road (Lambeth) London. He went on to improve the original slide lathe and invented new machine tools and manufactured flour and saw mills, mint machinery and steam engines. One of his most successful new tools was a machine that could automatically punch holes in boiler plates, which resulted in him gaining a contract to supply the Royal Navy with iron plates for ships tanks.

Joseph Clement was born in 1779 at Great Ashby in Westmoreland, England. Joseph, like other poor men’s sons at the time, received but scant education and was set to work at an early age. At first he helped his father with weaving, but when hand-loom weaving began to be replaced by the quicker and cheaper machine-loom weaving, Joseph became, at the age of 18, a thatcher. Like his father, he was very interested in mechanics. He became friendly with the village blacksmith and in the smithy learned how to use the hammer and anvil and the file. By way of training himself he decided to build a lathe. He left the village and succeeded in finding employment in different places. He took lessons in drawing and became an expert draughtsman. In 1817, he took a small workshop in Newington Butts and began business as a mechanical draughtsman and machine manufacturer. In 1818 he made a slide rest, 22 inches long, for cutting screws, embodying in it the means of self-correction, and in 1827 the Society of Arts awarded him another gold medal for his improved turning lathe. In 1828 Clement was awarded the Society of Arts Silver Medal for yet another lathe improvement, his self-adjusting double driving centre-chuck, known as “Clement’s Driver”. In the same year he began the making of fluted taps and dies. He performed the fluting operation by means of a revolving cutter running on an arbour between the lathe centres. This cutter he called a mill-wheel owing to its resemblance to the wheel of a water-mill and thus was born the milling cutter. Next came his invention of the planing machine.