Early in the Civil War the Providence Tool Company took up the manufacture of Springfield muskets for the Government. Frederick W. Howe, who had become superintendent of that company after leaving Robbins & Lawrence, had been designing turret machines for a number of years, as we have seen. In order to equip the Tool Company for this work, and especially for making the nipples, he went to J. R. Brown & Sharpe and arranged with them to build a turret screw machine for this purpose. The general design of this machine was similar to those of Howe & Stone, and Mr. E. E. Lamson tells the writer that the castings for it were made at the Jones & Lamson shop in Windsor. J. R. Brown added the self-revolving turret, utilizing a ratchet and pawl action on the return motion of the slide, the device for releasing, feeding and gripping the bar-stock while in motion, and the reversing die holder. While Brown was the first to adapt these features to the Howe machine, the revolving feeding mechanism had been used before and Pratt & Whitney had begun the manufacture of turret screw machines with self-revolving heads that same year, 1861.[192] [192] “Origin of the Turret,” _American Machinist_, May 24, 1900, p. 489. This screw machine seems to have been the first machine tool built for sale by the Brown & Sharpe Company. Various sizes of screw machines, of both hand and automatic types, were built by them during and since the Civil War. In the early eighties, S. L. Worsley developed for them the complete automatic screw machine, many features of which are still in use in the machines now being built. At the opening of the war plain milling machines had been in use for many years. The Lincoln miller had taken its present form and Howe had designed a miller with a vertically adjustable cutter-slide and a swiveling chuck which could be revolved, indexed and swiveled in two planes and fed longitudinally under the cutter.[193] The statement by Fitch in the “Report on the Manufacture of Interchangeable Mechanism” in the United States Census, 1880, that the “universal miller” was designed by Howe in 1852, is doubtless based on this machine or a forerunner of it. The drawings of it, however, show a machine of radically different design from what is now known as the “universal miller,” which was invented by Joseph R. Brown in 1861-1862, at Howe’s suggestion. [193] Illustrated in the _American Machinist_, Aug. 13, 1914, pp. 296-297. The Brown & Sharpe universal miller is indirectly connected with the percussion nipple which brought about their first screw machine. The hole in this piece was drilled by twist drills which the Providence Tool Company were making for themselves. One day Howe came into the shop and watched the workman filing the spiral grooves in tool-steel wire with a rat-tail file. He decided that the method was too expensive and consulted with Joseph R. Brown to find a better and more economical way of making them.