The development history of machine tools.

The prototype of machine tools in the fifteenth century, due to the needs of manufacturing clocks and weapons, appeared thread lathes and gear processing machines used by watchmakers, as well as water-driven barrel boring machines.Around 1501, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out ideas for lathes, boring machines, threading machines and internal grinders, which included new mechanisms such as cranks, flywheels and bearings."Tiangong Kaiwu" published in the Ming Dynasty also contains the structure of a grinder, which uses a foot pedal to rotate an iron plate and add sand and water to cut jade.

The Industrial Revolution led to the creation and improvement of various machine tools.The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century promoted the development of machine tools.In 1774, Wilkinson (full name John Wilkinson) invented a more sophisticated barrel boring machine.The following year, he used this barrel boring machine to boring out cylinders that met the requirements of the Watt steam engine.In order to boring larger cylinders, he built a water wheel-driven cylinder boring machine in 1775, which was the development of the steam engine.From then on, machine tools began to be driven by steam engines through crankshafts.

In 1797, Maudsley created a lathe with a screw-driven tool holder that could realize motorized feeding and thread turning. This was a major change in the structure of machine tools.Maudsley is also known as the "Father of the Machine Tool Industry".

In the 19th century, various types of machine tools appeared one after another due to the promotion of textile, power, transportation machinery and arms production.In 1817, Roberts created a gantry planer; in 1818, Whitney (full name Eli Whitney) made a horizontal milling machine; in 1876, he made a cylindrical grinder; in 1835 and 1897, he invented the gear hobbing machine and the gear shaping machine.

The center of industrial technology development has quietly moved abroad since the 19th century.Among those who have taken away technical prestige, Whitney is the leader.Whitney was a brilliant and farsighted man who developed a system of mass-produced replaceable parts.The Whitney Engineering Company, which is still active today, successfully developed a turret-type hexagonal lathe as early as the 1840s.This kind of lathe came out with the complexity and refinement of workpiece manufacturing. In this kind of lathe, a winch is installed, and all kinds of required knives are installed on the winch. In this way, by rotating the turret that fixes the tool, the tool can be turned to the required position.

With the invention of the electric motor, machine tools began to be driven by centralized electric motors, and then were widely driven by individual electric motors. They were also called machine tools or machine tools, and were customarily referred to as machine tools.Generally divided into metal cutting machine tools, forging machine tools and woodworking machine tools.There are many methods for processing mechanical parts in modern machinery manufacturing: in addition to cutting, there are also casting, forging, welding, stamping, extrusion, etc. Parts that require higher precision and finer surface roughness generally need to be finished by cutting on a machine tool.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in order to process workpieces, fixtures and thread processing tools with higher precision, jig boring machines and thread grinders were successively created.At the same time, in order to meet the needs of mass production in industries such as automobiles and bearings, various automatic machine tools, profiling machine tools, combination machine tools and automatic production lines have been developed.