Machine Tools
Arms
manufacturing is intimately linked with the machine-tool industry,
in which Connecticut inventors and industrialists have been the
pioneers and leading figures for a century and a half. Gene Silvero
Cesari’s “American Arms-Making Machine Tool Development, 1798-1855”
(doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1970) focuses
on Eli Whitney who, the author says, “clearly illustrates the
combination of profit-seeking and process-perfecting drives in
a single individual.” (from the abstract) Cesari insists that
social and political considerations were significant motivation
for figures like Whitney and others he studied to pursue the developments
described. A more mechanically directed study of the same phenomena
is Guy Hubbard’s “Development of Machine Tools in New England,”
in American Machinist 59-61(1923-24).
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