I've got the same set of Brown & Sharpe micrometers. Perhaps mine is older as the "Brown and Sharpe" name is done in gold lettering. I paid 100 bucks for the set, buying it from an old friend. Interestingly, the mikes in my set are marked "I & SE". This was a division of General Electric known as "Installation and Service Engineering".
I & SE sent out erecting engineers mainly on steam turbine and generator installation and service work, and sometimes took on contracts for entire jobs on their equipment.
What is furnished with each mike in my set is a "standard bar" to calibrate the micrometers to. The exception is the 0-1" mike, which has a hardened and ground disc 1.0000" diameter.
One or two mikes in my set were replaced with Starrett, no complaints from me about that. I find the set to be quite handy in my shop. Amongst machinists and toolmakers and millwrights there was often some little controversy as to which firm: Starrett or Brown & Sharpe, made the better tools. While the bulk of my machinist tools are Starrett, what I do have from Brown & Sharpe seems to have at least as good, if not a better finish and feel to it.
The demise of Brown & Sharpe is a sad thing. They produced a full line of machinist's tools, maybe not quite so diversified as Starrett, but very well designed and made. Towards the end, I bought a 6" machinist rule made by B & S, and it came out of England. Looking in my chests, I found a pair of Brown and Sharpe firm joint outside calipers and an automatic center punch- all made in England. I've got a couple of small dial indicators reading in tenths, Brown and Sharpe's name is on them, but they are Swiss made. I do not know when Brown & Sharpe finally got out of manufacturing high quality machinist tools in Rhode Island. Years ago, we were having a planer mill rebuilt, and the ways were being hand scraped. The machinist doing the scraping was an oldtimer, and he told me he was a veteran of Brown and Sharpe. As he told it to me, he worked in the machine tool division, and all scraping was done by hand. No talking on the shop floor between machinists was permitted, even into the 1970s. When they were rough-scraping to break up a machined surface or remove a lot of metal, this fellow said it was not uncommon to have the chips coming off smoking hot. What he told me was there was a strike by the workforce at Brown and Sharpe, probably in the late 1970's or early 1980's (I forget when he said it was). It was a long strike, neither side giving any ground, and things were stalemated for months. When the strike ended, Brown and Sharpe management decided to close up shop as far as making precision grinders and other machine tools. It would seem likely that they started sending the machinists' measuring instrument and hand tool work overseas at that point, keeping only a corporate headquarters and distribution operation in Rhode Island.
