The Machine Tool Company That Invented CNC, Industrial Robots, and Then Lost Everything

In 1887, a twenty-one-year-old bank clerk named Frederick A. Geier walked into a struggling Cincinnati machine shop to collect a debt. What he found instead was a milling machine designed by a German immigrant named Fred Holz that was better than anything else on the market. Geier bought into the company for seven thousand dollars, reorganized it around machine tools, and spent the next four decades building the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company into the largest machine tool manufacturer in the world. The company's Oakley Factory Colony in Cincinnati became a hundred-acre industrial campus with its own foundry, power plant, and workforce that peaked at over 8,500 employees during World War II. In 1942 alone, the Mill produced 17,511 machine tools, one out of every twelve made in the United States that year. Its machines cut the aluminum cooling fins on aircraft engines, ground B-29 fuel injection plungers to tolerances of seven millionths of an inch, and machined every major naval gun barrel in the U.S. fleet. After the war, Cincinnati Milling partnered with MIT on the development of numerical control, the direct ancestor of modern CNC machining. In 1973, the company, now renamed Cincinnati Milacron, introduced the T3 robot, the first commercially available minicomputer-controlled industrial robot. Ford and Volvo bought fleets of them. For a brief period, Cincinnati Milacron led the world in both CNC and industrial robotics. Then Japanese competitors entered the American market with cheaper, more reliable machines aimed at the small job shops Milacron had ignored. The company sold its robotics division to ABB in 1990 and its machine tool division to Unova in 1998. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, was acquired by private equity, returned to public markets in 2015, and was bought by Hillenbrand for $1.9 billion in 2019. The Oakley factory site is now a retail and residential complex built on remediated soil. This documentary traces the full arc of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company from its 1874 origins through its wartime peak, its technological breakthroughs, the Japanese competitive onslaught, and the corporate decisions that dismantled one of the most important industrial companies in American history. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more stories about the companies that built the machines that built the modern world. Sources: Cincinnati Milacron Inc. Company History. International Directory of Company Histories. Reference for Business. https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/.... "Machining for Freedom." American Machinist. https://www.americanmachinist.com/arc.... Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Holland, Max. When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1989. Hohn, Richard E., Merton D. Corwin Jr., and Ronald L. Tarvin. "Method and Apparatus for Programming a Computer Operated Robot Arm." US Patent 3,920,972, filed July 16, 1974, granted November 18, 1975. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3.... Cincinnati Milacron T3 Type Robotic Arm. Computer History Museum, Accession 102640478. https://www.computerhistory.org/colle.... "Unova Completes Acquisition of Milacron's Machine Tool Group." Press release. October 5, 1998. https://www.theautochannel.com/news/p.... Milacron Inc. Form 8-K. Filed March 10, 2009. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da.... Milacron Holdings Corp. Form 424B4. Filed June 2015. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da.... "Hillenbrand Completes Acquisition of Milacron." Hillenbrand press release. November 21, 2019. https://hillenbrand.com/corporate-new.... "Hillenbrand Announces Definitive Agreement to Sell Cimcool Business to DuBois Chemicals, Inc." PR Newswire. March 20, 2020. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea.... Site Information. City of Cincinnati Office of Environment and Sustainability. Brownfield Revitalization. https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/oes/res.... Herman Schneider. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_.... "UC Inducts First Honorees to New Co-op Hall of Honor." University of Cincinnati. https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/lega.... Frederick A. Geier Award. Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/fr....