Mark Fields wrote:
I don't read this as a lie at all. It's all in how you read things. I
believe they are telling the history of G&L, not the history of machine
tools.

Therefore they are stating they built "THEIR" first NC machine tool in 1955.

It would be different had they put "invented the first NC machine tool".


Yeah, it's a lie. The beginnings of NC/CNC were done by a couple
guys in a tool shop in Traverse City, Michigan. They made charts of X/Y
coordinates for movements on a Bridgeport mill. Then one guy stood in
front of the machine with the saddle handle (Y axis), while another
stood at the side of the machine with the table handle (X axis), and
they made simultaneous moves in a step by step fashion.'

This wasn't NC machining, of course; but it was a beginning. The
two guys in the tool shop (Parsons might have been one of them; but the
names escape me at the moment), showed their idea to the defense
department as a way to improve and streamline the manufacture of
military stuff. That led to the idea being taken up by MIT, with DOD
funding, where the two guys with charts and handles were replaced by
punched cards, crude calculating machines with relays and vacuum tubes,
and electric motors. THAT was the first NC machine.

If the iron that this idea was first applied to happened to be a G&L,
or a Bridgeport, or whatever, it seems to me that that was totally
incidendtal. G&L not only didn't invent it; but they were actually
pretty slow to do anything that ended up being sold as a useful machine.

Based on what I've read, heard, looked at in museums, and seen with
my own eyes (I'm old, you know), G&L didn't invent NC or CNC machining
any more than Al Gore invented the internet.

KG
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