Before the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, hand tools were used to cut and shape materials for the production of goods such as cooking utensils, wagons, ships, furniture, and other products.

After the advent of the steam engine, material goods were produced by power-driven machines that could only be manufactured by machine tools. Machine tools (capable of producing dimensionally accurate parts in large quantities) and jigs and fixtures (for holding the work and guiding the tool) were the indispensable innovations that made mass production and interchangeable parts realities in the 19th century.

The earliest steam engines suffered from the imprecision of early machine tools, and the large cast cylinders of the engines often were bored inaccurately by machines powered by waterwheels and originally designed to bore cannon. Within 50 years of the first steam engines, the basic machine tools, with all the fundamental features required for machining heavy metal parts, were designed and developed. Some of them were adaptations of earlier woodworking machines; the metal lathe derived from woodcutting lathes used in France as early as the 16th century. In 1775 John Wilkinson of England built a precision machine for boring engine cylinders.

In 1797 Henry Maudslay, also of England and one of the great inventive geniuses of his day, designed and built a screw-cutting engine lathe. The outstanding feature of Maudslay’s lathe was a lead screw for driving the carriage. Geared to the spindle of the lathe, the lead screw advanced the tool at a constant rate of speed and guaranteed accurate screw threads. By 1800 Maudslay had equipped his lathe with 28 change gears that cut threads of various pitches by controlling the ratio of the lead-screw speed to the spindle speed.

The shaper was invented by James Nasmyth, who had worked in Henry Maudslay’s shop in London. In Nasmyth’s machine, a workpiece could be clamped horizontally to a table and worked by a cutter using a reciprocating motion to plane small surfaces, cut keyways, or machine other straight-line surfaces. A few years later, in 1839, Nasmyth invented the steam hammer for forging heavy pieces. Another disciple of Maudslay, Joseph Whitworth, invented or improved a great number of machine tools and came to dominate the field; at the International Exhibition of 1862, his firm’s exhibits took up a quarter of all the space