Made during the 1950s and 1960s by a Newall subsidiary, Optical Measuring Tools Ltd., the Newall 'Measuring Machine' was intended for use in toolrooms and precision machine shops and made in four sizes able to take work from 0 to 24" (0 to 600 mm), 0 to 48" (0 to 1200 mm), 0 to 72" (0 to 1800 mm), and 0 to 144" (0 to 3600 mm). Similar in design and function to the American Pratt & Whitney measuring machine and those by the Swiss SIP Company, the Newall was, in effect, a giant micrometer. Needless to say, to produce accurate results, the machine was best housed in a temperature-controlled and preferably vibration-resistant room and handled only by trained personnel. Like the "Lord Chancellor" microscope designed and built by the famous English engineer Henry Maudsley in the early 19th century - and the subsequent types manufactured by Joseph Whitworth in the 1840s - the Newall was intended as the final arbiter of length standards in a large toolroom or precision workshop. It helped to ensure that jigs and fixtures were made "to standard", could then be duplicated and also checked from time to time to ensure that no deviation had occurred from their original specification. The catalogue below explains the features of the machine and how it was operated..

Once a well-known and highly respected British maker of high-precision machine tools and accessories, the Newall Group consisted of the main Newall Engineering Co. Ltd. (Peterborough), Optical Measuring Tools Ltd (OMT), Keighley Grinders Ltd. (Keighley), James C. Kay & Co. Ltd. (Ironfounders, Bury), and Machine Tool Electrics Ltd. (Leigh-on-Sea). Items manufactured included jig borers, electrical switch and control gear and electronic equipment, a range of high-precision optical measuring and inspection instruments, tank telescope gun sights for the army, ordinary and inclinable circular tables with and without optical scales, a 30-inch automatic indexing rotary table, standard and major horizontal omtimeters, vertical omtimeter, bench-mounted microscopes for use in the toolroom, lathe-tool setting and thread-form inspecting microscopes, optical flats, large and small form of projector to magnify and check manufactured parts, camera lenses, prisms and a range of precision boring heads. Items added in later years included a 35 mm motion picture projector, some 200 film cameras costing up to £8000 each for the rank organisation, a roundness measuring machine (in competition with the well-known and still-manufactured Taylor Hobson Talyrond),  a projection pantometer for the inspection of parts with three-dimensional contours such as turbine blades, specialised, universal and very large projectors (some of the latter weighing over 4 tons), equipment to inspect thread forms, surface-coated mirrors, anti-reflecting coatings, multi-layer films, neutral filters, metallic electrical conducting coatings, 35 mm film printers, cinéradiography cameras, Newall-branded 35 mm cameras for Technicolor Ltd. and even polyhedral prisms designed for experimental colour television in the United States. There was also a department devoted to producing items to meet customers' special requirements.