The Landis Tool Company, of Waynesboro, Pa., builders of grinding machinery, springs from the firm of Landis Brothers, established in 1890 by F. F. and A. B. Landis. One was superintendent and the other a tool maker in a small plant building portable engines and agricultural machinery. A small Brown & Sharpe grinding machine was purchased for use in these works. Mr. A. B. Landis became interested in the design of a machine more suited to their particular work, and from this has developed the Landis grinder. CHAPTER XX THE WESTERN TOOL BUILDERS Prior to 1880 practically all of the tool building in the United States was done east of the Alleghenies. The few tools built here and there in Ohio and Indiana were mostly copies of eastern ones and their quality was not high. In fact, there were few shops in the West equipped to do accurate work. “Chordal’s Letters,” published first in the _American Machinist_ and later in book form,[215] give an excellent picture of the western machine shop in the transition stage from pioneer conditions to those of the present day. [215] Henry W. See: “Extracts from Chordal’s Letters”; McGraw-Hill Book Co., N. Y. 12th Edition. 1909. Good tool building appeared in Ohio in the early eighties, and within ten years its competition was felt by the eastern tool builders. The first western centers were Cleveland, Cincinnati and Hamilton. Of these, Cleveland seems to have been the first to build tools of the highest grade. We have already noted that the Pratt & Whitney shop in Hartford furnished Cleveland with a number of its foremost tool builders. The oldest of these and perhaps the best known is the Warner & Swasey Company. This company has the distinction, shared with only one other, of having furnished two presidents of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Oddly enough the other company is also a Cleveland firm, the Wellman, Seaver, Morgan Company, builders of coal- and ore-handling machinery, and of steel mill equipment.