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Since many decades ago, the term "machine tool builder" implies a company that builds machine tools for sale to other companies, who then use them to manufacture subsequent products. Macroeconomically, machine tools are only means to ends (with the ends being the manufactured products); they are not the ends themselves. Thus it is in the nature of machine tools that there is a spectrum of relationships between their builders, their users, and the end users of the products that they make. There is always natural potential for the machine tool users to be the same people as the builders, or to be different people who occupy an intermediate position in the value stream. Markets often have some proclivity for circumventing such a position, although the proclivity is often not absolute. Every variant on the spectrum of relationships has found some instances of empirical embodiment; and over the centuries, trends can be seen for which variants predominated in each era, as described below.
Machine tool building is a specialty within the [[tool and die maker|tool and die making]] field, in a way analogous to [[specialty (medicine)|specialties within medicine or surgery]]. The machine tool industry began gradually in the early nineteenth century with individual toolmakers who innovated in machine tool design and building. The ones that history remembers best include [[Henry Maudslay]], [[Joseph Whitworth]], [[Joseph Clement]], [[James Nasmyth]], [[Matthew Murray]], [[Elisha K. Root]], Frederick W. Howe, Stephen Fitch, J.D. Alvord, Frederick W. Howe, Richard S. Lawrence, Henry D. Stone, [[Christopher Miner Spencer|Christopher M. Spencer]], [[Amos Whitney]], and [[Francis A. Pratt]]. The industry then grew into the earliest corporate builders such as [[Brown & Sharpe]], the [[Warner & Swasey Company]], and the [[Pratt & Whitney Measurement Systems|original Pratt & Whitney company]]. In all of these cases, there were product manufacturers who started building machine tools to suit their own inhouse needs, and eventually found that machine tools had become product lines in their own right. (In cases such as B&S and P&W, they became the main or sole product lines.) In contrast, [[Colt's Manufacturing Company|Colt]] and [[Ford Motor Company|Ford]] are good examples of product manufacturers that made significant advances in machine tool building while serving their own inhouse needs, but never became "machine tool builders" in the sense of having machine tools become the products that they sold. National-Acme was an example of a manufacturer and a machine tool builder merging into one company and selling both the machines and the products that they made ([[automatic lathe|screw machines]] and fasteners).<ref name="Rose1990pp564-565">{{Harvnb|Rose|1990}}, [http://books.google.com/books?id=IT1NVT1vEwUC&lpg=PA564&ots=ZjyLeSiwXo&dq=Reinhold%20Hakewessel&pg=PA564#v=onepage&q&f=false pp. 564–565].</ref><ref name="Ro|lt1965pp169-170">{{Harvnb|Rolt|1965|pp=169–170}}.</ref> [[Hyundai]] and [[Mitsubishi]] are [[chaebol]] and [[keiretsu]] conglomerates (respectively), and their interests cover from ore mine to end user (in actuality if not always nominally).
Today, machine tool builders tend not to be in the business of using the machine tools to manufacture the subsequent products (although exceptions, including chaebol and keiretsu, do exist); and product manufacturers tend not to be in the business of building machine tools. In fact, many machine tool builders are not even in the business of building the control system (typically [[numerical control|CNC]]) that animates the machine; and makers of controls tend not to be in the machine building business (or to inhabit only specialized niches within it). For example, [[FANUC]] and [[Siemens]] make controls that are sold to many machine tool builders. Each segment tends to find that crossing into other segments involves becoming a conglomerate of dissimilar businesses, which is an execution headache that they don't need as long as focusing on a narrower field is often more profitable in net effect anyway. This trend can be compared to the trend in which companies choose not to compete against their own distributors. Thus a software company may have an online store, but that store does not undercut the distributors' stores on price.
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