Of the Massachusetts towns, Worcester and Fitchburg seem to have been the first to develop successful shops producing machine tools only. In Worcester also the machinery trade had its beginning in the manufacture of textile machinery; in fact, Worcester antedates even Pawtucket in its attempts at cotton spinning, but these at first were unsuccessful. Practically all the early water privileges in and about the town, not used for sawmills, were used for textile mills. Prior to 1810 there was a small clock shop, some paper mills, and a few other enterprises, but they could hardly be dignified as factories. One of these was the old shop where Thomas Blanchard invented his copying lathe for turning irregular forms. An Abraham Lincoln operated a mill and a forge with a trip hammer as early as 1795. Here, in quarters rented from Lincoln, Earle & Williams started, about 1810, the first machine shop in the city. The town grew slowly and its interests were largely local. It was not until 1820 that Worcester took first rank even among the towns in the county. There was quite an excitement over the discovery of coal in 1823. It was found, however, to be so poor, that, as someone put it at the time, “there was a ---- sight more coal after burning it than there was before.” The Providence & Worcester canal was opened in 1828, but its usefulness for navigation was greatly limited by the many power privileges along its route. Its traffic was never large and it went out of business in 1848. It served, however, to hasten the building of the Boston & Worcester Railroad, which was built by Boston capital to deflect the trade of the central Massachusetts towns from Providence to that city. It opened in 1835; and in 1836 there were listed in Worcester “seven machinery works,” one wire mill and one iron foundry. Most of the earlier tool builders were trained in the small textile-machinery shops which had sprung up after 1810, such as Washburn & Goddard’s, Goulding’s, Phelps & Bickford’s, White & Boyden’s. The rapid development of railroads created a demand for machine tools which the Worcester mechanics were quick to recognize, as had Nasmyth and Roberts in England. Thomas Blanchard, who was born near Worcester, is one of the picturesque and attractive figures in our mechanical history. He was a shy, timid boy, who stammered badly, and was considered “backward.” The ingenious tinkerer, laughed at by all, first secured his standing by devising an apple-parer which made a hit, social and mechanical. At eighteen he began building a tack machine and worked six years on it before he considered it finished. The essentials of its design have been little changed since. It made over two hundred tacks a minute and its product was more uniform and better than the hand-made tacks. Blanchard sold the patent for it for $5000, a large price for those days, but only a fraction of its real value.