New book on the Brown & Sharpe Mfg. company

Hello all, Happy New Year.

This past year a new book came out on Brown & Sharpe, "Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry: Making the Precision Machine Tools That Enabled Manufacturing, 1833-2001"
by Gerald M Carbone. It is on Amazon at

Amazon.com: Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry: Making the Precision Machine Tools That Enabled Manufacturing, 1833-21 (9781476669212): Gerald M Carbone, Rhode Island Historical Society, Foreword by Steven Lubar: Books

I am a little over half way through it am and enjoying it immensely, at first I was a little worried because the author was commissioned by the Sharpe family to write it. It is very personal in talking about the key players and I have read things I never knew about them, about J.R. Brown, Darling, Beale and of course the Sharpe's. One thing this book is not is a re-hash of the old B & S story as told by Luther Burlingame.

So if you like B & S I recommend you get and read this book.

Just ordered it.
I met Henry Sharpe Jr. at one of the IMTS shows in Chicago a long time ago.
We talked for some time about old machine tools.
He told me he had all of the old company records and was planning to write a history of B&S with the records.

Rob

I found a better price ($35.98 including shipping) for the physical book on eBay: Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry Making the Precision Machine 9781476669212 | eBay

Amazon charges $42.73 with free shipping and Indiana tax for the book, so the eBay seller has a good deal.

But I can buy the Kindle version from Amazon for only $3.99 and read it on my tablet or desktop. I like the electronic books for things I read from start to finish on my tablet, like novels. I do not like the tablet for reference books or books with illustrations. I got the free sample from Amazon just now and put it on my desktop with 24" monitor. It is very easy to read and the pictures are excellent. I don't know if there is an index or a means of searching for words or phrases. There is a table of contents that looks like one can skip to any of the chapters, but the table of contents does not list an index.

I bought the Kindle version and will see how it works out.

Larry

Just got the kindle version, excellent so far. Thanks for the tip rivett.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Interesting price difference between physical copy and electronic. Looks like the author doesnt keep much. Most goes into printing and distribution costs.

I bought a copy last year but its still in the yet to read pile. Glad to hear you are enjoying it.

rivett608 said:

Hello all, Happy New Year.

This past year a new book came out on Brown & Sharpe, "Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry: Making the Precision Machine Tools That Enabled Manufacturing, 1833-2001"
by Gerald M Carbone. .....
I am a little over half way through it am and enjoying it immensely, .....

Click to expand...

Is there much interesting about the Victor micrometer story?

Not much about the Victor. One thing I did not realize is just how big B & S was. The machinists measuring tools were just one small part of a bigger enterprise. Some of the areas that made them a lot of money in the early days were the Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine, their hair clippers and their foundry products.

I’m glad some of you are getting this. In this day and age I don’t see how anyone could put the time it takes to write such a book considering this would never be a big seller and I can’t imagine a movie deal.

I think we can be pretty certain that the costs, including payment to the author, were underwritten by the Sharpe family although, as it is none of my business, I have not asked them. The author seems entirely sincere, but his qualifications are that he's a retired reporter for the Providence Journal. In speaking to him, I got the impression that he has no strong personal interest in industrial history and I think it would be fair to say, no specific knowledge of machine or precision measuring tools.

There is a prevailing misconception (to my mind) that "journalists" can write about anything... or at least they seem to think they can. I'm certain some are better than others but I've encountered so many instances were a journalist writes definitivly about a subject he doesn't begin to understand and makes a through mess of it. I'm hoping this isn't one of those situations. At least Mr. Carbone had the enthusiastic cooperation of the Sharpes so he should be on firm ground there. I know he also consulted another member of this forum on the measuring tools so he probably got some good guidance there as well. I'm not so sure about the machine tools... and maybe that isn't important.

I just finished this book and really liked it. Of course some of the more technical stuff could be better and more detailed. We would all like that. But the personalities, especially those of the Sharpe family really come out along with the difference in management styles of each generation. What I found most interesting was how the changes in both US laws and the world economy effected the company. For me this was a really good book, a very nice telling of a 150 year history of a company that was a lot bigger and more important that even I realized.

rivett608 said:

I just finished this book and really liked it. Of course some of the more technical stuff could be better and more detailed. We would all like that. But the personalities, especially those of the Sharpe family really come out along with the difference in management styles of each generation. What I found most interesting was how the changes in both US laws and the world economy effected the company. For me this was a really good book, a very nice telling of a 150 year history of a company that was a lot bigger and more important that even I realized.

Click to expand...

I know that I am late to the party, but I just read this book and loved it, too. Most history books bore me, but Mr. Carbone's way of telling of the Brown & Sharpe story read almost like a novel.
His vivid descriptions and use of actual quotations from the players in this story brought the story alive for me.
I am not a machinist, so his simplistic approach to describing the machines they invented was very understandable and a appreciated by me. (Since reading thid book, I bought a reprint collection of old B&S catalogs which show and describe these machine tools in more detail.)
What particularly fascinated me in reading this history was how dependent these companies were upon the politics of the day, the ups and down in the economy, and the eventual battles that took place between management and labor. Some of the strikes and labor riots described later in the Carbone book reminded me of what we are seeing in some of our cities today, where people are trying to destroy an old system and create a new one, which might be even worse, rather than trying to improve the old one.



Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk