How Two Broke Mechanics Solved The Biggest Bottleneck In Manufacturing: The National Acme Story

In 1895, two broke mechanics in Hartford, Connecticut patented a machine nobody wanted to buy. Edwin Henn and Reinhold Hakewessell had solved the single biggest bottleneck in manufacturing, the fact that an automatic lathe could only cut one bar of metal at a time, by mounting multiple spindles in a rotating carrier, like the cylinder of a revolver. Every time the carrier indexed, a finished part dropped off. It was the architecture of modern mass production, and within two years the company built around it was nearly bankrupt. This documentary follows the full 130-year arc of National Acme and the Acme-Gridley multi-spindle automatic screw machine. It covers the desperate 1897 deal that saved the firm, when A.W. Henn traded 25 machines for cash and half of a Cleveland company, and the 1901 merger that moved the whole operation to Ohio. It traces George O. Gridley, the Connecticut farm boy who learned the machine tool business as a stenographer taking dictation for James Hartness, built his own four-spindle automatic in 1907 inside the historic Robbins & Lawrence armory in Windsor, Vermont, and whose name was fused onto Acme's machines after the 1915 acquisition. The film goes inside the 570,000-square-foot plant at East 131st Street and Coit Road in Cleveland, ten acres under one roof, where skilled machinists cut the cams, ground the spindle carriers, and printed the legendary Brown Book manuals in-house. It explains how the cam-driven Acme-Gridley actually works, why setup men were the aristocracy of the shop floor, and why these deafening, oil-soaked machines could drop a finished part every few seconds without a single microprocessor. It covers the WWI boom that doubled the town of Windsor and produced the NAMCO Block, the largest apartment building in Vermont, and the WWII years when, by the company's own count, more than 90 percent of American and Canadian .30 and .50 caliber armor-piercing bullet cores were turned on Acme-Gridley machines, an effort honored in a May 1942 ceremony attended by Navy Undersecretary James Forrestal. Then comes the fall. The 1968 merger with Cleveland Twist Drill that created Acme-Cleveland Corporation, the 1980 peak of $405 million in sales and 6,300 employees, and the collapse that followed: Japanese CNC competition, a $31.9 million loss, fifteen plant closures, the strikes of 1986 and 1989, the Vickers lawsuit paid partly in unsold machine tools, and the 1990 death of operator Gordon Hurley that reached the federal courts. The story ends with the 1996 Danaher hostile takeover that erased a 101-year-old company at $30 a share, the illegal dumping and asbestos demolition that turned the abandoned Cleveland plant into a federal crime scene with two men sent to prison, and the $11 million cleanup now transforming the site into Cleveland's largest industrial parcel, while thousands of Acme-Gridleys keep running on shop floors worldwide under Bourn & Koch's OEM support. Subscribe to Trade Archive for documentaries about the companies, machines, and machinists that built the physical world. SOURCES American Precision Museum. "George O. Gridley." Machine Tool Hall of Fame. Windsor, VT. Axios Cleveland. "Cleveland Leaders Tout National Acme Site Glow-Up." April 7, 2025. Bourn & Koch, Inc. "OEM Repair Parts & Service: Acme-Gridley & National Acme." Rockford, IL. Case Western Reserve University. "Acme-Cleveland Corp." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Connecticut Humanities. "Christopher Miner Spencer, 19th-Century Arms Manufacturer." ConnecticutHistory.org. FundingUniverse. "History of Acme-Cleveland Corp." International Directory of Company Histories. Hubbard, Guy. "Genealogy of the Machine Industries of Windsor, Vermont." 1922. Maldonado v. National Acme Co., 73 F.3d 642 (6th Cir. 1996). National Park Service. "NAMCO Block." National Register of Historic Places nomination, 1991. U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office, N.D. Ohio. "Cleveland Man Sentenced to Nearly Three Years in Prison for Illegal Demolition of Former Factory." September 21, 2017. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Acme-Cleveland Corp. Schedule 14D-9/A filings. June 1996. VintageMachinery.org. "National Acme Co. (NAMCO) - History." The Washington Post. "D.C.-Based Danaher to Buy Acme-Cleveland." June 4, 1996. #NationalAcme #AcmeGridley #IndustrialHistory #Manufacturing #Documentary