The 100-Year-Old Lathes Still Running in U.S. Shipyards

For nearly a century, the Lodge & Shipley Machine Tool Company of Cincinnati built the lathes that built America. This documentary traces its full arc, from an English immigrant's empty-pocketed arrival to the boardroom deal that erased it. William Lodge landed in Cincinnati in 1872 with almost nothing, apprenticeship-trained in Leeds and hardened on the floor of John Steptoe's shop, the training ground for the men who made the city the machine-tool capital of the world. By 1892 he had walked away from a successful firm over a single conviction his own partner called a fantasy, that it was better to build one machine perfectly than many adequately. With Murray Shipley and a hundred thousand dollars in capital, he founded a company on a three-word rule. Good Lathes Only. The video follows the breakthrough that turned the firm into a national power, the Patent Head lathe of 1905, engineered with Nicholas Chard to survive the high-speed steel revolution that was wrecking every other builder's machines. It covers the climb to becoming the largest lathe maker in the United States, the affectionate nickname machinists gave the heavy, beautifully proportioned machines, Large & Shapely, the company's round-the-clock production through two world wars, and its postwar reinvention, including the Floturn shear-forming process still shaping aerospace and rocket components in Cincinnati today. It also tells the harder story. How the firm that survived everything was dismantled in the 1980s by Japanese competitors whose own origins ran from noodle machines to pots and pans, by Federal Reserve interest rates above twenty percent that killed its customers overnight, and by the 1987 sale of its assets to the Cincinnati engineering company Belcan, which reduced a century-old institution to a line on a balance sheet. In December 1976, Lodge & Shipley had shipped its fifty-thousandth machine to the W.M. Powell Company, the same Cincinnati firm that gave William Lodge one of his first orders back in 1880. Less than a decade later, the company was gone, its lathe drawings and patents eventually sold to Monarch for roughly a million dollars. And yet the machines refuse to die. Century-old Lodge & Shipley lathes still cut metal in working shops and aboard the carrier USS Midway. The Floturn process, owned now by the workers who bought it, still forms metal for flight. The original 1899 plant on Colerain Avenue still makes aerospace parts under a different name. This is the story of a company that built things to outlast itself, and the financial logic that decided outlasting itself was not enough. For more stories of the companies that built the physical world and then got erased from it, subscribe to Trade Archive. SOURCES Dolle, W. L., Jr. William Lodge: A 19th Century Entrepreneur. Cincinnati: Dolle Communications, 2003. https://www.dollecommunications.com/P.... Floturn, Inc. "About" and "Flow Forming / Shear Forming." Accessed 2026. https://www.floturn.com/about/. Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. "Lodge and Shipley Machine Tool Co." and "William Lodge." Accessed 2026. https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Lodge_a.... Griffiths, Tony. "Lodge & Shipley Lathes." Lathes.co.uk. Accessed 2026. http://www.lathes.co.uk/lodgeshipley/. "Lodge & Shipley Machine Tool Co. History and Assigned Patents." VintageMachinery.org. Accessed 2026. http://vintagemachinery.org/mfgindex/.... "William Lodge Memorial." Find a Grave. Accessed 2026. https://www.findagrave.com. "Four Metalworking Pioneers Join Machine Tool Hall of Fame." American Machinist. Accessed 2026. https://www.americanmachinist.com. "Lodge & Shipley 106 Year Old Metal Cutting Lathe." Machine Tools South. Accessed 2026. https://machinetoolssouth.com/blog/21.... "L&S Plant in Cincinnati." Practical Machinist Forum. Accessed 2026. https://www.practicalmachinist.com/fo.... "'E' for Excellence During WWII." New-York Historical. Accessed 2026. https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/e-for.... "Ralph G. Anderson," "DMG Mori Seiki Co.," and "Yamazaki Mazak Corporation." Wikipedia. Accessed 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_G.... "Okuma Corporation Celebrates 125-Year Anniversary." PR Newswire, March 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea.... "Climax Packaging's Driving Mission." Vox Verba. Accessed 2026. https://voxverba.com/blogs/resources.