In glancing back at these early tool builders, it will be seen that few of them were men of education. All were men of powerful minds, many of them with broad intellectual interests. It is suggestive to note one thing, whatever may be its bearing. Only three of all these men, Matthew Murray and the two Fairbairns, served a regular apprenticeship. Bentham and Brunel were naval officers; Bramah, a farmer’s boy and cabinetmaker; Maudslay, a blacksmith; Clement, a slater; Roberts, a quarry laborer; Nasmyth, a clever school boy; and Whitworth, an office clerk. Whatever may have been the reason, the rapid advance of the English machine-tool builders ceased about the middle of the last century, and they have made but few radical changes or improvements since that time. At about the same time the American engineers introduced a number of improvements of very great importance. The great distance of America from England forced it into a situation of more or less commercial and mechanical independence. While France and Germany were importing machine tools from England, America began making them and soon developed independence of design. The interchangeable system of manufactures and the general use of accurate working gauges, which were hardly known in England, developed rapidly in America. These, with the introduction of the turret, the protean cam, and precision grinding machinery, and the great extension of the process of milling, served in the next fifty years to transfer the leadership in machine-tool design from England to America. A visit to any one of the great machine shops in England, Germany or France will convince one that the leadership now rests with the American tool builders. The remaining chapters will take up the lives and work of those who have contributed to this great change. CHAPTER X EARLY AMERICAN MECHANICS The phrase “Yankee ingenuity” has become a part of the English language. If New England no longer holds all the good mechanics in the United States, there was a time when she came so near it that the term “New England mechanic” had a very definite meaning over the whole country. The industrial development of New England was long delayed, but once started it was rapid. Up to 1800 New England artisans supplied merely small local needs and there was little or no manufacturing in any modern sense; but from then on the development was so rapid that by 1850 New England was not only supplying the United States with most of its manufactured products, but was beginning to export machinery and tools to England, where machine tools originated. For five generations, American mechanics had little or no industrial influence on Europe, and then within fifty years they began to compete on even terms.