Power & Precision

Opened in Cleveland's huge Public Auditorium last week was the 1935 Machine Tool Show, first that the industry has felt prosperous enough to hold since 1929. The volume of machine tool orders --one of the best indicators of industrial activity--has been mounting sharply of late, and the industry now talks of a better year than 1929. Though the Show has been planned for about a year, tool makers grew happier as the months passed, and by last week had assembled the greatest display of power & precision in history.

Every hotel in Cleveland was jammed and before the Show closes this week more than 40,000 are expected to attend. The general public was not admitted. For tool makers the Show is a great fair, with sales the primary objective. About 5,000 people were connected with the exhibition, 1,500 alone running machines. The visitors were largely engineers and executives from industrial plants throughout the world who went to gape if not to buy. Even General Motors' Knudsen thought it worth his while to attend, and no less than 49 Russians turned up to purchase equipment for Soviet factories.

Set up in the Auditorium were more than five acres of cold, gleaming machines priced from about $1,000 up. Nearly 250 companies installed exhibits, most of them presided over by the president in person. All day from 9 a. m. to 6 p. m., when a fire siren--the only thing that could be heard above the din--signaled closing time, 900 machines performed incredible feats of grinding, cutting, boring, planing, broaching, lapping, honing.

Technically, a machine tool is a power-driven, non-portable instrument that removes metal in the form of chips. One of the indices of machine tool efficiency is the amount of metal chipped per minute. Up to 1900, with old-fashioned carbon steel tools, about one-quarter of a pound of metal could be cut in 60 seconds. Today, using tools tipped with cemented carbides, the chips fall at the rate of 17 lb. per minute. Carbides are crystalline substances so hard that they will machine glass.

A sturdy stronghold of the little fellow is the machine tool business. There are a few big units like Pratt & Whitney, Brown & Sharpe, Cincinnati Milling, but most of the industry consists of family-owned concerns, many of them passed down from father to son for generations. New England cities are filled with machine tool plants but the centre of the industry has of late shifted westward to Cincinnati and Cleveland to be near the automobile industry, biggest user of machine tools.

In the total output of U. S. machinery the machine tools bulk small--about 2%. But it is a vital 2%, for all other machinery is made with machine tools. And machine tools are the only machines that can reproduce themselves.

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