History and Technology Vol. 25, No. 3, September 2009, 257–304 ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/07341510903083245 http://www.informaworld.com The shows and the flows: materials, markets, and innovation in the US machine tool industry, 1945–1965 Philip Scranton* Taylor and Francis GHAT_A_408497.sgm 10.1080/07341510903083245 History and Technology 0734-1512 (print)/1477-2620 (online) Original Article 2009 Taylor & Francis 25 3 000000September 2009 PhilipScranton scranton@camden.rutgers.edu Machine tools may be fundamental to metalworking industrial economies, but their Cold War era history in the US has rarely been assessed over the last generation. A quarter century after David Noble’s crucial and critical Forces of Production, perhaps a broad- gauged assessment may be timely. This essay aims to offer two theses for discussion. First, it seems that a sector whose enterprises once specialized in one or more tool types reconfigured itself into clusters of firms servicing automotive-based automation demands, aeronautical/aerospace precision and flexibility needs, or providing specialized auxiliary components, especially instrumentation and controls. Second, cascades of new industrial materials and processes generated both opportunities for and constraints on tool firms, as innovations facilitated users’ substituting, for example, plastics for metals or material-forming for metal-cutting, quietly shifting the technical and market foundations. Such dynamics set the stage for US machine tool enterprises’ decline as the Cold War ebbed, but they did not chiefly derive from technological deflections deriving from military contracting. Keywords: machine tools; automobiles; aeronautics; military contracts; automation; precision; numerical control Six Epigraphs Never have there been so many technical advances made in so short a time as during the past four years of war, and it is safe to say that the design of machine tools has advanced at least fifty years in that time. (H.E. Linsley, Machine Tools Editor, Iron Age, January 1946) 1 Out of the research on alloy steels, necessitated by the many and rapid advances in aircraft design during the war, has come the superalloys. These were developed to furnish necessary high strength at high temperatures. To a considerable extent, the veil of secrecy surrounding these important developments has been lifted during the past year. (J.M. Hodge and M.A. Grossman, R&D Division, Carnegie–Illinois Steel, October 1946) 2 A recent trend has been to subordinate the clear-cut distinction between general-purpose and single-purpose machine tools … first in order to obtain the savings of high production tech- niques on smaller lots and secondly to install equipment adaptable to change in design of the product. (American Machinist, March 1946) 3 Where Taylor had hard, medium, and soft steel, and hard, medium and soft cast iron to machine, the present-day field covers literally thousands of types of steels and nonferrous metals …. There are many carbon and alloy steels, plain and alloyed cast irons, malleable and pearlitic irons, and many high- and low-strength nonferrous metals of copper, aluminum, zinc, and magnesium, and a great variety of types and forms of nonmetallic plastics. Dozens of these metals are now being machined at hardnesses not even thought of by Taylor. (Orlan Boston, College of Engineering, University of Michigan, April 1946) 4 *Email: scranton@camden.rutgers.edu