The Development History Of Machine Tools

The embryonic machine tool of the 15th century, due to the need to make clocks and weapons, was the thread lathe and gear machine for watchmakers, as well as the hydraulically driven barrel boring machine. Around 1501, the Italian Leonardo Da Vinci sketched the idea of a lathe, boring machine, threading machine, and internal grinder with new mechanisms such as a crank, flywheel, center, and bearing. Tiangong Kaiwu, published during the Ming Dynasty of China, also contains the structure of a grinding machine, which used a foot method to spiral iron and sand and water to cut jade.
The Industrial Revolution led to the creation and improvement of all kinds of machine tools. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century gave impetus to the development of machine tools. In 1774, the Englishman Wilkinson (full name John Wilkinson) invented the more sophisticated barrel boring machine. The next year, he used this barrel boring machine to bore cylinders to meet the requirements of a watt steam engine. In order to bore larger cylinders, he also built a water-wheel-driven cylinder boring machine in 1775, which promoted the development of the steam engine. From then on, machine tools were driven by steam engines through crankshafts.
In 1797, the British Maudsley made the lathe with a lead screw drive tool holder that could realize the motor feed and turning thread, which was a major change in the structure of machine tools. Maudsley is known as the father of the British machine tool industry.
In the 19th century, various types of machine tools emerged, driven by the production of textiles, power, transportation machinery, and munitions. In 1817, British Roberts created a planer; in 1818, American Whitney (full name Eli Whitney) made a horizontal milling machine; in 1876, the United States made a universal cylindrical grinding machine; and in 1835 and 1897, he successively invented a gear hobbing machine and a gear shaping machine.
The center of industrial technology development has been quietly moving from Britain to the United States since the 19th century. Whitney was among those who stole Britain's technological cachet. Whitney was brilliant and visionary, and he was the first to develop the system as a mass-produced replaceable part. The Whitney Engineering Company, still active today, developed a turret lathe as early as the 1840s. This kind of lathe came into being with the complexity and refinement of workpiece making. In this kind of lathe, a winch was installed on which the various tools needed were mounted, so that the tool could be turned into the desired position by turning the turret that held the tool in place.
With the invention of the motor, machine tools began to use motor drives and then widely used separate motor drives, also known as the working mother machine or tool machine, commonly referred to as machine tools. Generally divided into metal cutting machine tools, forging machine tools, and woodworking machine tools. There are many ways to process mechanical parts in modern machinery manufacturing: in addition to machining, there are casting, forging, welding, stamping, extrusion, etc., but where the precision requirements are higher and the surface roughness requirements are finer, you generally need to use the cutting method on the machine tool for final processing.
In the early 20th century, in order to process the workpiece, fixture, and thread machining tools with higher accuracy, the jig boring machine and thread grinding machine were developed successively. At the same time, in order to meet the needs of mass production in the automobile and bearing industries, we developed a variety of automatic machine tools, copying machine tools, combination machine tools, and automatic production lines.
In 1900, it entered a period of refinement. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the single lathe has gradually evolved into a milling machine, planer, grinder, drilling machine, and so on. These main machine tools have been basically set up so as to create conditions for the early 20th century's precision machine tools and production mechanization and semi-automation.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, people were built around milling machines, grinding machines, and assembly lines. Due to the requirements of automobile, aircraft, and engine production, it is urgent to have precision and automatic milling and grinding machines for a large number of processing parts with complex shapes, high precision, and high finish. As a result of the advent of the multi-helix edge milling cutter, basically solved the single-edge milling cutter's generated vibration and finish, and the difficulty of the milling machine's development, so that the milling machine becomes an important piece of equipment for processing complex parts.