Charles E. Billings was a Vermonter, who served his apprenticeship in the old Robbins & Lawrence shop at Windsor, Vt. When twenty-one, he came to Colt’s, in 1856, as a die sinker and tool maker and became their expert on the drop forging process. In 1862 he went to E. Remington & Sons, where he built up their forging plant, increasing its efficiency many times, saving $50,000, it is said, by one improvement in frame forging alone. At the end of the war he returned to Hartford as the superintendent of the Weed Sewing Machine Company, which had taken over the old Sharps Rifle Works, built by Robbins & Lawrence. For a short time in 1868 Mr. Billings was at Amherst, Mass., associated with Spencer in the Roper Repeating Arms Company. The venture was not a success, and the next year, 1869, they came back to Hartford and formed the Billings & Spencer Company. This company has probably done more than any other for the art of drop forging, not only in developing the modern board drop hammer itself, but in extending the accuracy and application of the process. Mr. Billings was president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1895. Christopher M. Spencer was born at Manchester, Conn. He served his apprenticeship in the machine shops of the silk mills there from 1847 to 1849, and remained for several years as a journeyman machinist with Cheney Brothers. In 1853 he went to Rochester, N. Y., to learn something of the other kinds of machinery, working in a tool building shop and a locomotive shop. After some years at the Colt Armory he went back to Cheney Brothers and soon obtained his first patent for an automatic silk-winding machine. This was adopted by the Willimantic Linen Company, with some modifications made by Hezekiah Conant, and was the machine which Pratt & Whitney began manufacturing in their first rented room in Hartford. Mr. Spencer has had a passion for firearms from boyhood. In 1860 he obtained a patent for the Spencer repeating rifle. The Civil War created a tremendous demand for it, and the Government ordered first 1000, then 10,000, and before the war was over it had purchased about 200,000. In 1862, while the first contracts were pending, Spencer saw President Lincoln at Washington. He and Lincoln went down on the White House grounds with the new rifle, set up a board and shot at it. Lincoln enjoyed it like a schoolboy, and shot well, too. He tore his coat pocket in the process, but told Spencer not to worry over it, as he “never had anything of value in it to lose.” At the close of the war Spencer went to Amherst and was there first associated with C. E. Billings in the Roper Company, as we noted. A year later he joined in starting the Billings & Spencer Company and coöperated with him in the development of the drop hammer.