Joshua Bigwood & Son Ltd. was founded in 1874 in the industrial Black Country. In their earlier years, like many competing firms, their range of products was vast and included water and steam pipes, mitre, bevil, and spur gear wheels, castings and stamping machines to make hollow ware (such as buckets and funnels) and a range of wood-turning lathes. During the 1930s, having expanded considerably and become a large and important industrial enterprise, the company moved to a factory in Wednesfield Road, Wolverhampton, and grew big enough to become The Bigwood Group, consisting of five divisions: Metal Forming (a long-time specialty of the company) that made forging machines, rotary corrugating machines, friction screw presses, pipe benders, straighteners for tube, bar and section, oil, sheet and plate processing machines, roll formers, plate levellers, slitting lines, three or four roll bending machines, cut-to-length lines, press brakes, guillotines, shearing machines and stretch-levellers. The Radiator Division manufactured not radiators, but the machinery to make them, equipment that was exported worldwide; the Heating Division, trading as Unicalor, was once Britain's leading manufacturer of automatic coal stokers, these being used in the heating of public buildings, schools, hospitals and factories, both at home and abroad. Equipment for heating associated with the burners was also manufactured and included coal elevators, ash crushers, ash extraction units, and burners for anthracite, turf and other fuels. Being based in the Black Country - known as such for the dirt and filth associated with coal burning - it was no surprise that Bigwood also has a Dust Control Division that specialised in equipment for the control, collection and suppression of dust and treatment of trade effluent; in the 1960s it was known as the Traughber Filter Company Ltd and later Bigwood Dust Control Ltd. Products included wet-type dust collectors, grit arresters for chimneys, pneumatic dust conveying equipment, fabric dust collectors and - a very important item - highly efficient cyclone type dust collectors. A Fabrication Division supplied fabrications to the parent company and to the trade in general. In the 1960s this section of the company traded as the Butro Jig & Engineering Company Ltd. To become, in the 1970s Bigwood Metal Fabrications Limited. As well as metal fabrications the company produced jigs, assembly fixtures, press tools and carried out all kinds of precision engineering work.
In their final years of operation Bigwood made not only this unusual flow-turning and spinning lathe they also a range of specialised machinery that harked back to their origins including slitting machines and lines, 'cut-to-length lines', recoilers and uncoilers, roller type shape and section straightening machines, metal shearers and roll forming lines.
The once great size and importance of Joshua Bigwood & Son Ltd. and its success at exporting is hinted at by the large collection of the company's trade literature to be found in American Museums.