Something I feel was sort of left out here was precision grinding which began to come in to play right around the same time period this article focuses on. Grinding is what really allowed the industrial revolution to explode. Tight tolerances and good surface finishes allowed things to run faster and more efficiently. Automation and repeatability lead to high production of tooling and products that eventually lead to mass production.
Thank you for making this. My dad(now retired) owned a machine tool manufacturing space in the 70s and 80s in a small town in north india. After foreign CNC machines left no demand for manual/semi automatic ones in the country, he switched over to a foundry to manufacture cast iron parts in a blast cupola furnace and later a rotary furnace(better for smaller on demand work). But he kept the lathe around along with an employee to finish the parts. And your animation brings back a lot of memories for me. I learned to operate the lathe and had all manners of fun. It is kind of like yak shaving. Your clothes turn black but you just love the mechanical back and forth of it. He made pulleys, Truck engine parts, housing for water motors(fun fact municipal water is scarce and not of adequate pressurized in homes, farms, factories etc so these are ubiquitous) etc.
I sent this to my dad. I am sure he will enjoy reading this.
I started digging into Watt's challenges getting an accurate cylinder bore for his pistons, and it spiraled out from there :).
The article covers some of the key techniques developed during the industrial revolution to measure and make incredibly precise parts. There are a lot of animations and interactive figures to explore how it works.
Very cool! Though my ChemEng degree obligates me to say that the animation in the "steam" section should really show boiling all the time if the pressure gauge is indeed showing the pressure in the container. Though in reality you'd never heat water at below atmospheric pressure in a real engine, if you did it would be boiling at any temperature at or above the triple point, and below the critical point, so long as there is no air in there.
Interesting that many of the early steam mills used a steam engine to pump water into a water tower, which then drove a conventional water wheel to power the millworks.
Early electric mills replaced their big centralised steam engine with a big centralised electric motor. And the first web browser was a program running within a non-web-based operating system.
Yeah, saw one house that was this kind of "electric mill" originally - electric motors were expensive so it made perfect sense to just have one big motor and transfer the power using leather transmission belts. Not to mention all the machines needing power at that point expecting it to come from a belt drive.
The big motor and most of the machinery was long gone but you could still see where the belts went through duento various holes and cutouts, now usually closed by wooden blanks.
Yes, until they were able to get smooth rotation out of the engines, the water wheel was a much smoother source of power. Especially for looms and weaving machines, stable, smooth power was critical. "Power in the Industrial Revolution" by Richard L Hills is a deep exploration of the history there :).
The rivers and streams actually turned into a battleground! This is an excerpt from my beam engine article:
The fight for water
Richard Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and the factory system that followed created fierce demand for the best river sites. Water-powered mills were also dependent on the weather: a dry season could shut down the factory.
Steam pumping engines offered a solution. An engine lifted the water that had passed beneath the wheel back up the hill, allowing the same water to fall through the wheel again. This kept the smooth turn of the water wheel, but wasted coal moving the water. Watt sold sixteen to twenty horsepower pumping engines to deliver ten horsepower to the machines.
Watt's double-acting engine, beam, crank and flywheel let the engine directly turn the line shaft. This met a huge demand from mill owners who wanted to build near workers and materials rather than around a particular stretch of river.11 One problem remained, though: every time a machine was turned on or off, the load on the engine changed.
Early iron rails wore out and had to be replaced after a given usage (measured in years on a heavily traveled section) --- this was a big part of the need for the Bessemer process to be developed.
Armchair metrologist here. Did metalworkers back then use 16ths, or 12ths and 24ths? I'm familiar with the use of 1/12th lines ''' and multiples of 1/144th points ''''.
Good question! From my reading, English engineering shops like these used 1/8ths and 1/16ths. Whitworth did push for "decimal inches" (1/10, 1/100, etc). It seems like the 1/12th and 1/144th were more common in watchmaking and optics.
The text was hand written, but reviewed by AI and light edits were made. The CAD models that drive a lot of the animations were either sourced or built based on pictures of historical machines. As called out in the credits, the interactive figures were built by myself and Claude Fable 5 (mostly - a bit of Opus 5.5 in there now).
It's a code-first CAD kernel/toolkit specifically to help LLMs with CAD stuff, it's currently AI usable but not very human usable yet since I'm working on the editor UI. Get your Claude to clone it and give it a try and see if it's easier than your current workflow.
What CAD do you use for the models, and does it have a CAM simulator (for example, you might actually be able to simulate the tread cutting in Fusion 360 CAM's simulator.
Anyone interested in this might also enjoy the book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, by Simon Winchester. I read it a few years ago, and thought it was a really interesting journey through bootstrapping precision and how that fundamentally changed our relationship to certain types of things, particularly related to mass production of "good enough".
I was rather disappointed by this book. Felt that it spent a lot of time waffling about irrelevant detail[1] and failed to really present a coherent narrative about how precision engineering was developed.
Conversely I rather enjoyed The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, which tackles the topic of how manufacturing became scaled and efficient. I would love to read a similar book on precision.
[1] particularly the endless guff about Rolls Royce, which I felt really detracted from the book
> After repeated copying and correction, Maudslay made a master screw five feet long and two inches across, with fifty threads to the inch and a foot-long nut that engaged six hundred of them at once.
That's the stuff I like to read about the historical endeavors. A fifty-threads nut doesn't average the distance between the grooves quite accurately enough? Then let's make a nut with six-hundred threads on it, and so what if it's foot long.
I actually didn't understand that paragraph. Is it saying that instead of averaging between two screws it instead averaged across 600? Edit: Or that the nut had 600 threads?
> Maudslay also devised an ingenious method that used two imperfect screws to guide the tool cutting a third. Equal gears turned both guide screws at the same speed. A bar joined their two nuts, with the tool fixed at its midpoint, so the tool's position was the average of the two nut positions. Where one guide ran ahead and the other lagged, their errors partly cancelled. Each guide contributed only half its error to the new screw.
Actually, this invention is Leonardo Da Vinci's! Here's what his screw-copying machine looked like.
I own the leatherbound hardcover which I purchased when nostalgia for the original Vol. 2 _The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap_ got to me.
The thing is, it was written for a different time, and I believe that it should be possible to do a more capable design which is more readily sourced/fabricated given the changes in what is available at a hardware store these days.
Or, maybe I'll just buy a casting kit and make a Shaper....
This is very neat. My engineering nerd friend was immediately turned off by the seeming conflation of "precision" and "accuracy" in the title/subtitle though. As this article seems aimed at laypeople, clearing up the difference upfront by defining them might be helpful, as they are not interchangeable.
Ah, heh. That's a very fair point. To be honest, I struggled with the title and subtitle, because most of my ideas had "Precision" in them, and it sounded like I was repeating myself.
I had thought about talking more deeply about the difference between them, but the article was already getting too long! It's certainly worth a footnote though. Revision upcoming :).
I've sometimes thought of making a YouTube series where the foundations of precision are created as increasingly precise artifacts, building on each other and following the history. Something like the "Primitive Technology" channel but for machine tools.
It follows a somewhat similar premise, though it's obviously a work of fiction, and animated. Still, the progression of rebuilding all of the world's technology from scratch is very detailed and impressive.
Oh my, I forgot to add him into the credits for this one! The Beam Engine article has this: "Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one."
Industrial history and the history of precision manufacturing is extremely exciting to me. This is an excellent overview and the animations — while not quite as smooth as https://ciechanow.ski/ — add to the experience.
If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy the book “English and American Tool Builders" by Joseph Wickham Roe.
The pace of technological progress is incredible these days. It's amazing and also scary and unpredictable. Like, will we understand ME/CFS within my lifetime? The rate of achievement is so insane that it very well may be possible, but we just won't know unless it happens (or I die first).
The dystopian surveillance panopticon is progressing nicely, though, and new generations are growing up without any notion that privacy was ever possible in the first place. I had a harsh reality check when I met someone online who didn't even know old Reddit existed and then even disliked it. It made me so sad.
Also, there's a meme floating around that technological progress came to a screeching halt during the "Christian dark ages", so maybe it's just that we're finally getting back up to how we were before then! (Lmao)
It's a mixture of techniques. Using fully rigged CAD models is a huge help, it ensure physically realistic motions. Then, I built a custom exporter / renderer to render them realistically in CAD style.
For a lot of the animations, I first develop storyboards to cover the main beats, and decide on what would be interactive or not. Then a lot of iteration with Fable (and Opus 5.5 now!) on how to show things clearly. A lot of time is spent trying to show the key ideas visually. Eg. in the bench micrometer adding an overlay with the size of the micrometer closing over the part, as well as showing the screw spinning was a big improvement in "readability".
Something I feel was sort of left out here was precision grinding which began to come in to play right around the same time period this article focuses on. Grinding is what really allowed the industrial revolution to explode. Tight tolerances and good surface finishes allowed things to run faster and more efficiently. Automation and repeatability lead to high production of tooling and products that eventually lead to mass production.
Thank you for making this. My dad(now retired) owned a machine tool manufacturing space in the 70s and 80s in a small town in north india. After foreign CNC machines left no demand for manual/semi automatic ones in the country, he switched over to a foundry to manufacture cast iron parts in a blast cupola furnace and later a rotary furnace(better for smaller on demand work). But he kept the lathe around along with an employee to finish the parts. And your animation brings back a lot of memories for me. I learned to operate the lathe and had all manners of fun. It is kind of like yak shaving. Your clothes turn black but you just love the mechanical back and forth of it. He made pulleys, Truck engine parts, housing for water motors(fun fact municipal water is scarce and not of adequate pressurized in homes, farms, factories etc so these are ubiquitous) etc.
I sent this to my dad. I am sure he will enjoy reading this.
You are welcome! Thank you for the background, I'm glad it brought back some pleasant memories.
Author here. This is a sequel to my beam engine article: https://glinscott.github.io/beam-engine/.
I started digging into Watt's challenges getting an accurate cylinder bore for his pistons, and it spiraled out from there :).
The article covers some of the key techniques developed during the industrial revolution to measure and make incredibly precise parts. There are a lot of animations and interactive figures to explore how it works.
Very cool! Though my ChemEng degree obligates me to say that the animation in the "steam" section should really show boiling all the time if the pressure gauge is indeed showing the pressure in the container. Though in reality you'd never heat water at below atmospheric pressure in a real engine, if you did it would be boiling at any temperature at or above the triple point, and below the critical point, so long as there is no air in there.
Interesting that many of the early steam mills used a steam engine to pump water into a water tower, which then drove a conventional water wheel to power the millworks.
Early electric mills replaced their big centralised steam engine with a big centralised electric motor. And the first web browser was a program running within a non-web-based operating system.
Yeah, saw one house that was this kind of "electric mill" originally - electric motors were expensive so it made perfect sense to just have one big motor and transfer the power using leather transmission belts. Not to mention all the machines needing power at that point expecting it to come from a belt drive.
The big motor and most of the machinery was long gone but you could still see where the belts went through duento various holes and cutouts, now usually closed by wooden blanks.
Yes, until they were able to get smooth rotation out of the engines, the water wheel was a much smoother source of power. Especially for looms and weaving machines, stable, smooth power was critical. "Power in the Industrial Revolution" by Richard L Hills is a deep exploration of the history there :).
Reliable too, I suppose.
The rivers and streams actually turned into a battleground! This is an excerpt from my beam engine article:
The fight for water Richard Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and the factory system that followed created fierce demand for the best river sites. Water-powered mills were also dependent on the weather: a dry season could shut down the factory.
Steam pumping engines offered a solution. An engine lifted the water that had passed beneath the wheel back up the hill, allowing the same water to fall through the wheel again. This kept the smooth turn of the water wheel, but wasted coal moving the water. Watt sold sixteen to twenty horsepower pumping engines to deliver ten horsepower to the machines.
Watt's double-acting engine, beam, crank and flywheel let the engine directly turn the line shaft. This met a huge demand from mill owners who wanted to build near workers and materials rather than around a particular stretch of river.11 One problem remained, though: every time a machine was turned on or off, the load on the engine changed.
Is there any chance you'd add an RSS feed to your blog? Unless I missed one?
Piston rings were really bad in the early days.
Remember, this was all iron, not steel. The mass production of steel didn't get going until the 1880s. It's amazing that railroads predate steel.
Early iron rails wore out and had to be replaced after a given usage (measured in years on a heavily traveled section) --- this was a big part of the need for the Bessemer process to be developed.
Armchair metrologist here. Did metalworkers back then use 16ths, or 12ths and 24ths? I'm familiar with the use of 1/12th lines ''' and multiples of 1/144th points ''''.
Good question! From my reading, English engineering shops like these used 1/8ths and 1/16ths. Whitworth did push for "decimal inches" (1/10, 1/100, etc). It seems like the 1/12th and 1/144th were more common in watchmaking and optics.
These could really use a way to really pause everything so one can read the text without distracting animations.
How was AI used when writing the article? Not implying anything, I haven't started reading it (yet).
Certainly a fair question!
The text was hand written, but reviewed by AI and light edits were made. The CAD models that drive a lot of the animations were either sourced or built based on pictures of historical machines. As called out in the credits, the interactive figures were built by myself and Claude Fable 5 (mostly - a bit of Opus 5.5 in there now).
The article itself was built over about 4 months.
Hey, so a bit of self-promotion for some free software I built that you may be interested in.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Aetheris/
It's a code-first CAD kernel/toolkit specifically to help LLMs with CAD stuff, it's currently AI usable but not very human usable yet since I'm working on the editor UI. Get your Claude to clone it and give it a try and see if it's easier than your current workflow.
I built two 3D mechanical demos with it a couple of weeks ago that you can check out as well. https://aetheris-difference-engine-showcase.yuechenli.worker... https://aetheris-editable-v8.yuechenli.workers.dev/
What CAD do you use for the models, and does it have a CAM simulator (for example, you might actually be able to simulate the tread cutting in Fusion 360 CAM's simulator.
I used onshape, but just the basics :). The thread cutting was done just as an animation.
Have you read "The Perfectionists" by Simon Winchester? Great book if you're into this stuff!
Yes, a wonderful book :).
Anyone interested in this might also enjoy the book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, by Simon Winchester. I read it a few years ago, and thought it was a really interesting journey through bootstrapping precision and how that fundamentally changed our relationship to certain types of things, particularly related to mass production of "good enough".
There is also this one: https://archive.org/details/Foundations_of_Mechanical_Accura...
Oh yes, this is the PhD version :).
I was rather disappointed by this book. Felt that it spent a lot of time waffling about irrelevant detail[1] and failed to really present a coherent narrative about how precision engineering was developed.
Conversely I rather enjoyed The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, which tackles the topic of how manufacturing became scaled and efficient. I would love to read a similar book on precision.
[1] particularly the endless guff about Rolls Royce, which I felt really detracted from the book
Great Work! I want to share some great resources related to Precision Engineering:
[1] Origins of Precision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
[2] The books that taught me precision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM9X_gjnleY
[3] 2.75 FUNdaMENTALs of Design - Alexander H.Slocum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgMq7yha9wU&list=PLksE8LDXGX...
[4] Building the most accurate DIY CNC lathe in the world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEr2CJruwEM
[5] Design Principles for Precision Mechatronics
https://www.dspe.nl/knowledge/dppm-cases/
[6] Tutorials in Optomechanics
https://wp.optics.arizona.edu/optomech/tutorials-in-optomech...
[7] American Society of Precision Engineering - Recommended Readings
https://aspe.net/resources/recommended-readings/
[8] What books should a precision engineer read?
https://precisionmindsetllc.com/recommended-readings.html
Precision engineering is the biggest rabbit hole,an endless supply of interesting stories and artifacts.
> After repeated copying and correction, Maudslay made a master screw five feet long and two inches across, with fifty threads to the inch and a foot-long nut that engaged six hundred of them at once.
That's the stuff I like to read about the historical endeavors. A fifty-threads nut doesn't average the distance between the grooves quite accurately enough? Then let's make a nut with six-hundred threads on it, and so what if it's foot long.
I actually didn't understand that paragraph. Is it saying that instead of averaging between two screws it instead averaged across 600? Edit: Or that the nut had 600 threads?
Sorry it wasn't clear - the nut had 600 threads.
Ah amazing thankyou! I'm really enjoying it and it has cleared up a lot of things I'd vaguely heard about but never fully understood
> Maudslay also devised an ingenious method that used two imperfect screws to guide the tool cutting a third. Equal gears turned both guide screws at the same speed. A bar joined their two nuts, with the tool fixed at its midpoint, so the tool's position was the average of the two nut positions. Where one guide ran ahead and the other lagged, their errors partly cancelled. Each guide contributed only half its error to the new screw.
Actually, this invention is Leonardo Da Vinci's! Here's what his screw-copying machine looked like.
https://cdn.britannica.com/39/60539-050-BCB3019D/machine-Leo...
https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0661830/800wm/C0661830...
The screws can also be taken out and flipped end-over-end, averaging out the errors even further.
Oh wow, that's awesome! Thank you, I will correct the article.
This sort of thing makes me wonder what the successor is to the Gingery Books now that they're going away:
https://gingerybookstore.com/
Chris Borges has done some pretty cool little machines using 3D printed forms filled with concrete:
https://www.printables.com/@ChrisBorge
and of course there are more CNC router designs than one can shake a stick at (ob. discl., I work for a company which makes one)
You could download the books.
I own the leatherbound hardcover which I purchased when nostalgia for the original Vol. 2 _The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap_ got to me.
The thing is, it was written for a different time, and I believe that it should be possible to do a more capable design which is more readily sourced/fabricated given the changes in what is available at a hardware store these days.
Or, maybe I'll just buy a casting kit and make a Shaper....
This is very neat. My engineering nerd friend was immediately turned off by the seeming conflation of "precision" and "accuracy" in the title/subtitle though. As this article seems aimed at laypeople, clearing up the difference upfront by defining them might be helpful, as they are not interchangeable.
Ah, heh. That's a very fair point. To be honest, I struggled with the title and subtitle, because most of my ideas had "Precision" in them, and it sounded like I was repeating myself.
I had thought about talking more deeply about the difference between them, but the article was already getting too long! It's certainly worth a footnote though. Revision upcoming :).
I've sometimes thought of making a YouTube series where the foundations of precision are created as increasingly precise artifacts, building on each other and following the history. Something like the "Primitive Technology" channel but for machine tools.
Some of your ideas have been covered before, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 , https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking/videos . But I would love to see your take on the topic and see a more complete story.
You might enjoy the anime Dr. Stone.
It follows a somewhat similar premise, though it's obviously a work of fiction, and animated. Still, the progression of rebuilding all of the world's technology from scratch is very detailed and impressive.
Good work! Your style of animated articles reminds me of the work of Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski
Oh my, I forgot to add him into the credits for this one! The Beam Engine article has this: "Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one."
Industrial history and the history of precision manufacturing is extremely exciting to me. This is an excellent overview and the animations — while not quite as smooth as https://ciechanow.ski/ — add to the experience.
If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy the book “English and American Tool Builders" by Joseph Wickham Roe.
What really surprises me about these precision machines is how recent all of these inventions are, only a couple hundred years
The pace of technological progress is incredible these days. It's amazing and also scary and unpredictable. Like, will we understand ME/CFS within my lifetime? The rate of achievement is so insane that it very well may be possible, but we just won't know unless it happens (or I die first).
The dystopian surveillance panopticon is progressing nicely, though, and new generations are growing up without any notion that privacy was ever possible in the first place. I had a harsh reality check when I met someone online who didn't even know old Reddit existed and then even disliked it. It made me so sad.
Also, there's a meme floating around that technological progress came to a screeching halt during the "Christian dark ages", so maybe it's just that we're finally getting back up to how we were before then! (Lmao)
I love these kinds of articles, of how we bootstrapped technology.
I would welcome suggestions for books that describe the advance of technology from early times.
Im a distractible reader so I prefer books that are a bit more personal and story telling rather than dry.
Thanks!
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Maybe this one? Haven't read it but I think a machinist youtuber recommended it.
That is an awesome suggestion, thank you! I found it on ebay and am looking forward to reading it.
how did you make these videos? ive struggled to understand mechanical systems from static figures and these are super helpful
Awesome, glad they helped :).
It's a mixture of techniques. Using fully rigged CAD models is a huge help, it ensure physically realistic motions. Then, I built a custom exporter / renderer to render them realistically in CAD style.
For a lot of the animations, I first develop storyboards to cover the main beats, and decide on what would be interactive or not. Then a lot of iteration with Fable (and Opus 5.5 now!) on how to show things clearly. A lot of time is spent trying to show the key ideas visually. Eg. in the bench micrometer adding an overlay with the size of the micrometer closing over the part, as well as showing the screw spinning was a big improvement in "readability".
This page deserves some kind of award for excellence in pedagogical design.