How Wall Street Destroyed American Tool Works: The Pacemaker Story.

In 1892, a master machinist named William Lodge was coerced out of the company he had helped build in Cincinnati, Ohio. He walked down the road and started a rival firm. The company that pushed him out was eventually reorganized and renamed the American Tool Works Company. Both would compete for nearly a century, making the same product, the lathe, in the same city. Both are now gone. This documentary traces the full history of the American Tool Works Company: from its origins in a bitter corporate divorce, through the violent labor wars of the early 20th century, to the engineering triumph of the Pacemaker lathe — a machine so precisely designed and so durably constructed that working examples are still cutting metal in active shops today, eight decades after they were built. The Pacemaker was designed by ATW's chief engineer William G. Hoelscher, a man who holds eleven of the twelve patents declared on the machine and who has been almost entirely absorbed by history. The machine was built to handle the carbide tooling that the late 1930s had made available to the trade, and it was built to outlast everything around it. It did. During the Second World War, ATW went to twenty-four-hour production under direct Navy oversight. A rail spur was installed into the Pearl Street plant for loading completed machinery. Pacemaker lathes went to sea aboard U.S. Navy vessels, where machinists held tolerances on monel pump shafts that would be impressive on equipment built today. The company received the Army-Navy E Award for production excellence. The workers who earned it, including women and African American workers brought onto the heavy manufacturing floor for the first time, did not all receive equal credit for it. The postwar era brought hydraulic automation and then Numerical Control, and with each technological transition the financial pressure on ATW increased. In 1966, Curtis Manufacturing acquired the company. White Consolidated Industries absorbed it two years later. The R&D budgets were cut. The materials were substituted. The engineers who had spent careers building to a standard watched that standard being dismantled by executives whose primary frame of reference was the quarterly report. When Japanese CNC manufacturers entered the American market in volume in the late 1970s, ATW had no competitive response left. The Pearl Street plant was shuttered. The intellectual property was sold. The name eventually came to rest at Bourn & Koch in Rockford, Illinois, which operates today as the custodian of ATW's parts inventory and engineering drawings. The factory is now offices and apartments. The company is a parts desk. The machines are still running. Subscribe to Trade Archive for the history of the companies, machines, and men who built the physical world. Sources: Aldrich, Mark. Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Bourn & Koch, Inc. American Tool Works OEM Support. Official corporate publication, 2020. bourn-koch.com/oem-machine-tool-repair-parts-service-2/mill-turn-bore/american/ Dolle, W.L. Jr. William Lodge: A 19th Century Entrepreneur. Family-authored biography. Cited in Griffiths, Tony. Machine Tool Archive. lathes.co.uk. Griffiths, Tony. "American Pacemaker Lathes." Machine Tool Archive. lathes.co.uk/pacemaker/ Griffiths, Tony. "Lodge & Shipley." Machine Tool Archive. lathes.co.uk/lodgeshipley/ Holland, Max. When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1989. Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Iron Age Magazine. "Cincinnati Industries Dig Out From the Mud." Vol. 139, February 1937. Lingeman, Richard R. Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front 1941–1945. New York: Putnam, 1970. Menke, Greg. American Tool Works Documentation Archive. pounceatron.dreamhosters.com/pacemaker/lathe.html Noble, David F. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York: Knopf, 1984. Practical Machinist Forum. "American Tool Works." practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/american-tool-works.93014/ Rosner, David, and Gerald Markowitz. Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Taylor, Frederick W. On the Art of Cutting Metals. New York: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1907. The Cincinnati Enquirer. "Cincinnati Machinists Walk Out." October 5, 1915. U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor (The La Follette Committee). Washington: Government Printing Office, 1939.