From Pocket Watches to Sherman Tanks: The Van Norman Story

In the mid-1980s, a century of engineering drawings from one of America's greatest machine tool builders was thrown into a dumpster behind a shuttered factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. This documentary traces how the Van Norman Machine Tool Company rose from a watchmaker's bench to the seventh-largest machine tool builder in wartime America, and how a Wall Street raider, a parade of conglomerates, and the collapse of New England manufacturing destroyed it in a single generation. The story begins in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1874, where Canadian immigrant Caleb Hopkins Van Norman founded the Hopkins Watch Tool Company to build lathes for the American watch industry, machines that held tolerances measured in ten-thousandths of an inch. His sons carried the firm to Springfield in 1890, into the Connecticut River corridor known as Precision Valley, and built their first milling machine the same year. Out of that shop came the invention the Van Norman name still stands for, the ram-type milling machine, a single machine that converted between horizontal and vertical work in minutes. The film covers the full machine line, from the compact No. 6 to the nine-thousand-pound No. 38, the legendary No. 12 that sold more than five thousand units, the company's stubborn proprietary 5V and 50V collet tapers, and how the castings, hand-scraped ways, and fitted gibs were actually made. The documentary then follows Van Norman's two most consequential sidelines. In 1914 the company pioneered oscillating grinders for ball bearing races, seeding a precision grinding niche that would later collide with Cold War nuclear strategy through the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont, the 1960 Soviet order for Centalign-B grinders, the Senate's "Export of Ball Bearing Machines to Russia" hearings, and the controversial 1972 sale of forty-five precision grinders that critics tied to Soviet MIRV capability, the same year Van Norman's own centerless grinder line was sold to Bryant. In 1920 the company entered automotive engine repair equipment and produced the Per-Fect-O portable boring bar, whose patented cat's paw supports eliminated chatter and made it the machine that rebuilt the engines of the American automobile age. The human story runs through all of it. Van Norman's Springfield workforce was organized by the United Electrical Workers, one of the most militant left-wing unions in American labor history, locked in a decades-long war with management's stopwatch men and piece-rate systems. During the Second World War that same distrusted workforce grew to 2,779 workers and earned the Army-Navy "E" Award given to roughly five percent of American war contractors. Then came 1956, when New York industrialist Herbert Segal seized a controlling interest, moved headquarters to Manhattan, renamed the firm Van Norman Industries, and vowed to build the General Motors of the machine tool industry. Within two years a recession brought halted construction, one hundred layoffs, a boardroom coup, and the cancellation of the design program that might have saved the company. The film follows the ownership carousel through Universal American, Gulf & Western, and Winona Tool, the closure of the Springfield plant, and the fate of the machinists left behind, drawing on the work of historian and former machinist Robert Forrant. The story ends in the present, where the Van Norman name survives on new flywheel grinders from Winona Van Norman and Irontite Products, and where home machinists rescue, restore, and run the original mills and boring bars, machines that have outlived every corporation that owned them. Subscribe to Trade Archive for documentaries on the companies, machines, and people that built the physical world. Sources: Forrant, Robert. Metal Fatigue: American Bosch and the Demise of Metalworking in the Connecticut River Valley. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 2009. Forrant, Robert. "Too Many Bends in the River." Journal of Industrial History 5, no. 2 (2002). Forrant, Robert, and Frank Wilkinson. "Globalisation and Degenerative Productive Systems: The Case of the Connecticut River Valley." Cambridge: ESRC Centre for Business Research working paper. Griffiths, Tony. "Waltham Machine Works and Van Norman Lathes." Lathes.co.uk. Sutton, Antony C. National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973. U.S. Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act. Export of Ball Bearing Machines to Russia. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961. Van Norman Industries, Inc. v. United States, 361 F.2d 992 (Ct. Cl. 1966). Wagoner, Harless D. The U.S. Machine Tool Industry from 1900 to 1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. "Van Norman Machine Tool Company." Wikipedia. "Bryant Grinder." Wikipedia. "Van Norman Machine Tool Co. - History." VintageMachinery.org. "Van Norman Flywheel Grinders." Irontite Products Inc.