Worcester E. Warner, of the Warner & Swasey Company, was born at Cummington, Mass., in 1846. Although a farmer’s son and denied a college education, he had access in his own home to an admirable library, which he used to great advantage. When nineteen years old he went to Boston and learned mechanical drawing in the office of George B. Brayton. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the shop at Exeter, N. H., where he first met Ambrose Swasey. Mr. Swasey was born at Exeter, also in 1846, went to the traditional “little red schoolhouse,” and learned his trade as a machinist in the shop to which Warner came. In 1870 they went together to Hartford, entered the Pratt & Whitney shop as journeymen mechanics, and in a short time had become foremen and contractors. Mr. Swasey soon gained a reputation for accurate workmanship and rare ability in the solution of complex mechanical problems. He had charge of the gear department, and invented and developed a new process of generating spur gear teeth, which was given in a paper before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.[216] Mr. Warner, also, became one of the company’s most trusted mechanics, was head of the planing department, and had charge of the Pratt & Whitney exhibit at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. [216] Trans. A. S. M. E., Vol. XII, p. 265. In 1881 they left Hartford and went first to Chicago, intending to build engine lathes, each putting $5000 into the venture; but finding difficulty in obtaining good workmen there, they moved in about a year to Cleveland, where they have remained. Their first order was for twelve turret lathes, and they have built this type of machine ever since. At various times they have built speed lathes, die-sinking machines, horizontal boring mills, and hand gear-cutters, but they now confine their tool building to hand-operated turret lathes. They have never built automatics. [Illustration: FIGURE 54. WORCESTER R. WARNER] [Illustration: FIGURE 55. AMBROSE SWASEY] The building of astronomical instruments was not in their original scheme, but Mr. Warner’s taste for astronomy and Mr. Swasey’s skill in intricate and delicate mechanical problems, led them to take up this work. These instruments, usually designed by astronomers and instrument makers, were in general much too light; at least the large ones were. From their long experience as tool builders, Warner and Swasey realized that strength and rigidity are quite as essential as accuracy of workmanship where great precision is required. The design of a large telescope carrying a lens weighing over 500 pounds at the end of a steel tube forty or sixty feet long, and weighing five or six tons, which must be practically free from flexure and vibration and under intricate and accurate control, becomes distinctly an engineering problem. To this problem both Mr. Warner and Mr. Swasey brought engineering skill and experience of the highest order.