A few years later, about 1818, he invented the lathe for turning irregular forms which is associated with his name. It was first built for turning gun-stocks at the Springfield Armory, and the original machine (Fig. 29) is still preserved there in the museum. Blanchard worked at the Armory for several years as an expert designer and invented or improved about a dozen machines for the manufacture of firearms, chiefly mortising and turning machines. He was a fertile inventor and worked in many lines besides tool building. His principal income came from royalties on his “copying” lathe. Many stories are told of his ingenuity and homely wit. In his later life he was a patent expert. His keen mechanical intuitions, his wide and varied experience and unswerving honesty, gave weight to his opinions, and his old age was spent in comfortable circumstances. He died in 1864. In 1823 William A. Wheeler came to Worcester, and two years later he was operating a foundry. He did some machine work, and had the first steam engine and the first boring machine in Worcester, and also an iron planer “weighing 150 lb., 4 ft. long and 20 in. wide,” the first one, it is said, in the state. Beginning with three or four hands, this foundry employed at times two hundred men. Its long career closed in the summer of 1914. Samuel Flagg moved to Worcester from West Boylston in 1839, to be near the Wheeler foundry from which he got his castings. “Uncle Sammy Flagg” was the first man in Worcester to devote himself entirely to tool building, and is considered the father of the industry there. He made hand and engine lathes in rented quarters in the old Court Mills, which has been called the cradle of the Worcester tool building industry. His first lathes were light and crude, with a wooden bed, wrought-iron strips for ways, chain-operated carriage, and cast gears, as cut gears were unheard of in the city at that time. His first competitor, Pierson Cowie, began making chain planers about 1845. After a few years he sold his business to Woodburn, Light & Company, which in a few years became Wood, Light & Company, one of the best known of the older firms. About the same time S. C. Coombs began making lathes and planers. Flagg meantime had organized the firm of Samuel Flagg & Company, which included two of his former apprentices, L. W. Pond (whose portrait appears in Fig. 46) and E. H. Bellows. Pond later bought out Flagg and Bellows and developed the business greatly. It was incorporated as the Pond Machine Tool Company, in 1875, specialized in heavy engine lathes, and is now part of the Niles-Bement-Pond Company. Bellows went into the engine business, and Flagg started another enterprise, the Machinist Tool Company, which did not last long. It lasted long enough, however, to build one of the largest lathes made up to that time, 35 feet long with ways 8 feet wide.