The Self-Taught Machinist Who Built America's FIRST Precision Machine Empire

In 1851, mechanics from Windsor, Vermont walked into London's Crystal Palace, disassembled six rifles in front of the British Empire, mixed the parts, and rebuilt six working guns. Five years later, a cancelled British contract and the end of the Crimean War drove that company, Robbins and Lawrence, into bankruptcy. Out of the wreckage grew Jones and Lamson, one of the most consequential machine tool builders in American history. This documentary follows the full 140-year arc. The 1845 federal contract for 10,000 Mississippi rifles at 11.90 dollars each, and the armory practice of milling machines, fixtures, and hardened gauges that made true interchangeable parts possible. The Civil War years, when as many as a third of the Union's Model 1861 rifle muskets were built on Windsor-made machinery. The 1888 move to Springfield, and the second-choice hire of a 27-year-old machinist named James Hartness, whose Flat Turret Lathe of 1891 made competing designs obsolete, sold in the thousands, and financed one of the strangest lives in industrial history, complete with a lawn-mounted turret telescope, a 240-foot tunnel under his mansion, one of America's earliest pilot licenses, and a term as Governor of Vermont. The film covers the spin-offs Hartness funded rather than suppressed, Fellows Gear Shaper and Bryant Chucking Grinder, which filled one Vermont river valley with more than fifty machine tool firms. It traces the Fay Automatic Lathe that fed Detroit's assembly lines, and the 1919 optical comparator that Hartness created with Arctic expedition survivor Russell Porter, a device still manufactured in Springfield today. It follows Ralph Flanders from farm-boy machinist to company president to U.S. Senator, where his July 1954 resolution led to the 67 to 22 vote censuring Joseph McCarthy. And it documents the other side of the ledger, the wartime plant running 23 hours a day, the hundreds of women who entered Springfield's machine shops during the war, the 1943 crash that emptied the town as fast as war had filled it, the union battles of UE Local 218, the 3.68 dollar hourly wage, and the 61 dollar monthly pension. The final act is the fall. Textron's 1964 acquisition, the CNC revolution, Japanese builders delivering standardized machines in weeks while Springfield's backlog stretched past a year, a workforce collapsing from 1,200 to under 250, the 1986 Chapter 11 filing, and a 270,000 square foot factory stripped by scavengers and sold for 165,000 dollars. What survives: Bourn and Koch as OEM, J&L Metrology as the last American comparator maker, the American Precision Museum in the original 1846 armory, and the Stellafane telescope club still meeting on Breezy Hill. Along the way, the video digs into how the machines themselves were made. Gray iron beds poured as sand castings and seasoned to relieve stress, sliding ways finished by hand scraping against master plates coated in marking blue, turrets scraped to their seats and locked with annular gibs, and a culture of gauging inherited directly from the gun contracts of the 1840s. It also covers the National Screw-Thread Commission that Hartness chaired during World War One, the thread interchangeability crisis that inspired the comparator, the August 1920 telescope-making class of fourteen machinists and one schoolteacher that became the Springfield Telescope Makers, Russell Porter's later work on the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar, and Charles Lindbergh's 1927 landing at the airport Hartness donated to the state. Subscribe to Trade Archive for a new documentary on the forgotten empires of industry every week. Sources: American Precision Museum. "Machine of the Month: First Model Jones & Lamson Flat Turret Lathe." Windsor, VT. Broehl, Wayne G., Jr. Precision Valley: The Machine Tool Companies of Springfield, Vermont. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959. Bushnell, Mark. "Then Again: The Vermonter Who Brought Down Joseph McCarthy." VTDigger. Christian Science Monitor. "Saving a Sinking Factory." August 2, 1984. Hartness, James, and Russell W. Porter. Optical Comparator. US Patent 1,703,933, filed May 21, 1925, granted March 5, 1929. Library of Congress. "Robbins & Lawrence Armory, Windsor, Vermont." Historic American Engineering Record. RAND Corporation. The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery. Rutland Herald. "Springfield: County's Center of Industry." United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. UE News features on Springfield organizing and Local 218. United States Senate Historical Office. "The Censure Case of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (1954)." UPI Archives. Jones & Lamson-Textron relocation report, September 9, 1983.