April 2010- At one time, the United States was a premier manufacturer of machine tools. In 1965, manufacturers produced 28 percent of the total worldwide production.

Today, the United States manufactures just 5 percent.

Facts like these are found in Albert Albrecht's new book, "The American Machine Tool Industry: Its History, Growth and Decline," which chronicles the rise and fall of this business.

For instance, what happened to the well-known machine tool manufacturing companies, such as Jones & Lamson Machine Co., Kearny & Trecker, R. K. LeBlond Machine Tool Co., Cincinnati Milacron and many others.

Albrecht has reviewed the history of the machine tool industry as an insider. He is an engineer, former vice president of Textron's machine tool division and retired co-owner of NATCO Inc., Richmond, Ind., a builder of transfer- and rotary-dial metal-cutting machines.

His first chapters start off with the development of the first machine tools. Then he writes about how the manufacturing of rifles changed the industry, causing accelerated growth.

Albrecht mentions the American Precision Museum in Vermont, which offers an extensive history and collection of machine tool equipment.

He also reviews the early trade journals that reported on the industry, and he covers the golden years of machine tool production in the 20th century.

Additionally, Albrecht examines mass-production equipment, such as transfer machines, automatics and screw machines.

He reports on how carbide cutting tools increased the productivity of this equipment, along with the history of the second industrial revolution: the development of the numerical-control system for machine tools.

Numerical control changed the world for both machine tools and anything that relied on automatic-axis control, such as plastic injection-molding equipment.

Albrecht also writes about the beginnings of the Machine Tool Builders Association and the International Machine Tool Show, which is now called the International Manufacturing Technology Show. The name was changed to bring in new exhibitors of manufacturing equipment, such as metalforming machines, as machine tool manufacturers declined.

Next, Albrecht reviews where the industry is today, and finally how it all but died in the United States because of a massive amount of imports taking over the market.

Even though this book is not about metalforming, it does have some information on the history of metal-forming companies. But because the majority of metalforming companies have at least a manual lathe and mill--and often CNC metal-cutting equipment--they have people who might find this book interesting. FFJ