Joseph Wickham Roe’s English and American Tool Builders (1916) is the founding history of the machine-tool trade: Maudslay’s slide rest, Whitworth’s standards, the armory practice of Whitney and Colt — the men who built the machines that build all other machines.
Historians of technology still start here; the interchangeable-parts story is told at the source. Download the free EPUB for industry’s hidden aristocracy.