After some time as an independent organisation, Pratt and Whitney became part of the Niles-Bement-Pond group of companies. One of the most famous names in machine tools, the Niles part of the Niles-Bement-Pond equation came from two brothers, James and Jonathan Niles, who left their native Connecticut in 1845 to establish a company in Cincinnati to repair boats on the Ohio river. Their business grew rapidly and they were soon able to afford the luxury of designing their own power plants - which led them to building steam-powered sugar mills delivered to the booming plantations in Louisiana - by the very same river boats that had created their original wealth. By 1853 the firm was a major employer, providing jobs for between four and five-hundred workers.
The firm's foray into machine tool building came about almost by accident for, during the Civil War, the firm, needing another lathe, found that non was available quickly enough, and so instructed two young mechanics, George A. Gray Jr. and Alexander Gordon to built one. So successful was their design that before long they found themselves in charge of a new department manufacturing nothing but machine tools.
In 1866 the Niles brother were bought out by a partnership of Gaff (a wealthy distiller in Aurora, Ill.), Gray & Gordon . The Niles name was retained as the "Niles Tool Works" - since their main interest was in the manufacture of machine tools. The Niles factory in Cincinnati stood on a site needed for the new Pennsylvania Railroad station, and the Company moved to Hamilton, Ohio, where water power was available from a canal along the Miami River.
Expanded enormously, the Niles Tool Works was soon rivalling the Sellers firm in Philadelphia as a builder and exporter of large machine tools. In 1898 Niles purchased control of the Pond Machine Tool Works and, during the next year, a great consolidation took place with the Niles-Bement-Pond Co. being formed from several major builders of large machine tools including the Niles Tool Works, Bement, Miles & Co., the Pond Machine Tool Company and the Philadelphia Engineering Works. Pratt & Whitney were bought out two years later; the company was being torn apart by internal bickering and was unable to resist a take-over bid.
Among the companies acquired later were John Bertram in Canada, the Ridgeway Machine Company (which built boring mills in Pennsylvania) and the Milwaukee Machine Tool Company, a lathe builder as well as numerous other small companies. As a result of expanding markets, improved exports, a strong home trade and their take-over activities, Niles-Bement-Pond became, for a time, the largest machine-tool company in the world.
In 1920, the Company's catalog, issued from their headquarters in New York, was a huge 635-page hard-backed book, with full-page halftones of the company's main products. Some were series production items, but many were highly specialised machines designed for munitions and similar military work. The range of products was so great, from toolmaker's flats and slip gages to armour plate bending presses, from precision bench to vertical lathes with 42-foot diameter tables, that the company could offer to undertake the construction and complete equipping of new industrial plants with NBP machine tools, cranes, railway engines, track and associated services.
Long synonymous with the finest-quality American engineering, Pratt & Whitney produced a range of machine tools amongst which were a series of beautifully made and elegantly proportioned precision bench lathes. The machine illustrated below, and its immediate forebears (which lacked the large cast-in Pratt & Whitney letters on the bed and may have been sold under the model designation 880) were available from before WW1 until shortly before WW2. Later P & W plain-turning precision lathes, of the 3C Type and not dissimilar to the early models, had enclosed headstocks and were mounted on self-contained, underdrive cabinet stands.
P & W were not the only American makers of such machines and firms such as Levin, Bottum, American Watch Tool Company, B.C.Ames, Bottum, Hjorth, Potter, Pratt & Whitney, Rivett, Wade, Waltham Machine Works, Wade, Pratt & Whitney, Rivett, Cataract, Hardinge, Elgin, Remington, Sloan & Chace, and (though now very rare) Frederick Pearce, W.H.Nichols, Ballou & Whitcombe, Sawyer Watch Tool Co., Engineering Appliances, Fenn-Sadler the "Cosa Corporation of New York" and UND..
|
Pratt & Whitney 7" and 10" Precision Lathe (3.5" and 5" centre height) |
|
|
||
|
Last version of the P & W precision bench lathe from a 1949 catalogue cover |
||
|
Listed as the Bench Machine Tool Set the unit above consisted of the No. 3 precision lathe, No. 0 Sigourney High-Speed Sensitive Drill and the No. 3 Horizontal Miller. The pine and cast-iron unit was factory built, with a complete "fast and loose" countershaft unit with foot treadle control - and could be ordered with any combination of accessories and extras from the maker's lists. |
|
|
|
up for grinding and the one on the right for chase screwcutting. |
||
|
Built circa 1940 to 1945 this is a Pratt & Whitney Model M-1689. Constructed, like all P & W bench precision lathes to a very high standard, this model was unusual in having a miniature CamLock spindle nose in a size a D1-2 - a fitting for which it almost impossible to find chucks, faceplates or any other kind of fitting. The collet fitting was a Type 5PN. |
||
|
|
|
|
|
The seldom-found D1-2 spindle nose. Drawn to a known standard, the only other bench precision lathe so far known to have used this fitting was that by W.H.Nichols |
|
|
|
A Master Speed-Ranger variable-speed drive unit mounted inside a Model C stand. The unit had an integral 3/4 h.p. motor and worked by pinching a steel ring between two cones that could be moved relative to each other on a longitudinal axis |