James Nasmyth and the Early Growth of Mechanical Engineering

Credit is nowadays usually given to the Americans for the pioneering of standardised mass-production and assembly-line manufacture, and there is no doubt that from the mid-nineteenth century onwards they did take the lead in many aspects of mechanical engineering. ¹ There is evidence, however, that in some fields they were preceded in the application of such methods by certain early British engineering firms. This is not surprising in view of the fact that these methods were made possible by the invention of automatic machine-tools, most of which were brought out in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.