The shows and the flows: materials, markets, and innovation in the US machine tool industry, 1945–1965

Abstract

Machine tools may be fundamental to metalworking industrial economies, but their Cold War era history in the US has rarely been assessed over the last generation. A quarter century after David Noble's crucial and critical Forces of Production, perhaps a broad‐gauged assessment may be timely. This essay aims to offer two theses for discussion. First, it seems that a sector whose enterprises once specialized in one or more tool types reconfigured itself into clusters of firms servicing automotive‐based automation demands, aeronautical/aerospace precision and flexibility needs, or providing specialized auxiliary components, especially instrumentation and controls. Second, cascades of new industrial materials and processes generated both opportunities for and constraints on tool firms, as innovations facilitated users' substituting, for example, plastics for metals or material‐forming for metal‐cutting, quietly shifting the technical and market foundations. Such dynamics set the stage for US machine tool enterprises' decline as the Cold War ebbed, but they did not chiefly derive from technological deflections deriving from military contracting.

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