How a Small Factory in Bridgeport Quietly Armed Three Wars

In 1924, a Bridgeport toolmaker named Richard Moore opened a shop on the second floor of a building above a diner, equipped with one lathe, a few machines, a single toolmaker, and a boy to run errands. He was consumed by a problem that sounds almost trivial today: putting a hole in exactly the right place in a piece of steel. The methods of his era leaned on the toolmaker's button method, a slow and secretive craft that lived inside the heads of individual masters and died with them. Moore believed the feel in a master's hands could be built into a machine and repeated forever, and that belief turned an ordinary little job shop into a name the entire precision trade would measure itself against. This documentary traces how that single obsession grew into the Moore Special Tool Company, the firm that gave American industry, in the words of a 1974 trade award, an additional decimal place of accuracy. It covers the 1932 Number One jig borer and its hardened, hand-lapped lead screws, the 1940 jig grinder that finally solved the problem of grinding holes into hardened steel after heat treatment, and the brutal hand craft of scraping cast iron flat against granite that the company's accuracy secretly depended on. It follows Moore through the Second World War, when its machines became part of the Arsenal of Democracy, and into the Cold War, when its grinders shaped tough aerospace alloys and its measuring machines ended up in national standards laboratories around the world. One of those machines, built by hand in the 1980s, still serves as the primary reference standard at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, measuring to within ten billionths of a meter in a room held to a hundredth of a degree. The film examines the family's so-called heresy of openness, the decision to publish the trade's guarded secrets in three landmark books, including Wayne Moore's Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy, still treated as the bible of precision engineering. And it confronts the technology that nearly ended the company. Wire electrical discharge machining could burn complex shapes through fully hardened steel automatically, with no master at the controls, undercutting the very craft Moore had spent fifty years perfecting. As Bridgeport's industry declined, the company adapted with computer-controlled continuous-path grinders, leaned on overseas sales to survive a collapse in the American machine tool market, and finally, in 1994, after seventy years of family ownership, was sold to the Producto Machine Company and folded into the PMT Group. Three years later it spun off a new venture carrying its obsession into the age of nanometers and advanced optics. This is a story about precision, obsession, and the strange fate of a company that built machines so accurate the world could not measure them, only to watch a thin brass wire and a few lines of code make its life's work look obsolete. It is also about the principle Moore was mocked for, the rule that still governs every laboratory pushing against the edge of the possible. To make something precise, you must first build something even more precise to make it with. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more documentaries on the people and companies that built the physical world. Sources: Connecticut Mills. "Moore Special Tool Co." Making Places. https://connecticutmills.org/find/det.... Hale, Layton Carter. "Principles and Techniques for Designing Precision Machines." PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/8431. Industry Today. "Moore Tool: A Connecticut Company." Industry Today. https://industrytoday.com/machine-tools/. Moore, J. Robert. Precision Hole Location for Interchangeability in Toolmaking and Production. Bridgeport, CT: Moore Special Tool Company, 1946. Moore Tool Company. "Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy." Moore Tool Company. https://mooretool.com/product/foundat.... Moore Tool Company. "Timeline." Moore Tool Company. https://mooretool.com/about-us/timeline/. Moore, Wayne R. Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Murphy, Chris. "Murphy Highlights Bridgeport Manufacturer, Moore Tool Company, as 'Murphy's Monday Manufacturer.'" Office of U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. https://www.murphy.senate.gov/. National Institute of Standards and Technology. "Meet 'Bob,' One of the Most Accurate Measuring Machines on the Planet." NIST, 2016. https://www.nist.gov/. Optometrics. "Maximising the Accuracy of Ruling Engines." Laser Components. https://www.lasercomponents.com/uk/ph.... Trumbull Times. "Obituary: Wayne Richard Moore, 83, CEO, Accomplished Swimmer, Author, Korean War Veteran." Trumbull Times. https://www.trumbulltimes.com/.