Modern industrial society could not exist without machine tools. The transformation of metals from their origin as ore to their finished state is completed by metal-working machine tools, and the invention and innovation of efficient and effective machine tools, largely during the nineteenth century, made possible the production of the multifarious machines on which nineteenth- and twentieth-century economy and society has been based. The machine tool industry in any country, and particularly in such an advanced industrial country as Britain, has therefore always been at the forefront of technical progress; in spite of this, it has normally been small, the employer of a few highly skilled men rather than of a vast labour force, and the monetary value of its products has always seemed low compared to the output of the many other engineering and metal processing industries who use its products. Perhaps for this reason, there have been few studies of the machine tool industry; yet study of it is important not only because of its intrinsic significance but also for the light which study of it can throw on the wider context of manufacturing industry, and on the process of invention and innovation which is a constant feature of industrial change.

This study is intended to do three things: to throw light on the history of a neglected but important industry, to discuss the relevance of the experience of the machine tool industry to a controversial period of British economic history, and, most generally, to discuss how it is possible to describe and explain invention, innovation, technical and technological change and its causes and consequences.