Message #253924

[Robert Pence]

Jeffrey,

Metal-turning lathes would have to go back to the early nineteenth century, and possibly before. I've never looked into that. In order to build any sort of sophisticated machines from castings and forgings, like steam engines and the machines that worked in large grist and flour mills and textile mills, lathes would have been essential.

In the 1960s I worked in a small machine shop in Bluffton, Indiana, that did mostly sub-contract work for local manufacturers. Our machinery was whatever the cheapskate boss could scrounge up, and some of it was worn out or in poor condition. Next door was an ancient shop dating to the 1800s that had once included a foundry. It was a half-block-long timber-framed building with a lantern roof, no heat, and a dirt floor in it. The steam engine that once drove all the machinery via overhead line shafts still sat in a room off to one side, unused for many years, but many of the machines, dating to the 1800s, were still driven from the shaft that had been divided into sections driven by old-old electric motors. I think the man who owned the place was almost as old as the building and equipment.

Sometimes we'd get a piece of work too big to handle on our machines, and we'd take it next door and use Abe's facilities. I recall one very large casting that I took over there to work it down to where we could handle it in our shop. There was this beast of a lathe that still ran from the overhead shaft. On modern machines the lead screw that's used for thread-cutting is driven by gears that can be changed to cut screw threads of varying pitches, most often with a lever or two and a change-gear box. This relic had pulleys and flat leather belts to drive the lead screw, and instead of change gears there was a stack of different-sized pulleys that could be swapped out.

I scraped around in the hundred-year accumulation of grease and dirt on the frame and uncovered a brass plate that said, "Pond Machinery Co. Pat'd 1860." Even as a twenty-something, I was a technology history geek who wished for time travel. That day was about as good as it gets.

I doubt if undershot wheels provided very much power unless the flow velocity was pretty high. Another possibility would be breast wheels, where the water strikes the wheel partway up the face; breast wheels are configured with a bucket-like periphery much like overshot wheels, except that they face the opposite direction.

Turbines came into use around the Civil War, or possibly as early as the 1850s. They were popular in areas that didn't have the cascading water needed for overshot wheels, and could work with as little as three feet of head. They produced several times more power from a given flow of water than a wheel could.