What Happened to the U.S. Machine Tool Industry?
January 18th, 2024Via: Construction Physics:
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization. Sometimes called “mother machines” (because they’re machines that make other machines), machine tools are required to make almost everything. Nearly every manufactured good is made using machine tools, or by machines which were made using machine tools:
“Thus an automobile is an assembly of metal parts made by machine tools, plastic parts produced by machines made by machine tools, fabric processed on textile machines made by machine tools, rubber processed and molded by equipment made on machine tools, and glass processed by equipment produced by machine tools.” – Anderson Ashburn, Is New Technology Enough?
Being able to manufacture machine tools is often considered an important capability for an industrialized country. Not only does this provide ready access to the latest manufacturing technology, but it ensures production of munitions and other military equipment won’t be bottlenecked by a lack of machine tools. This isn’t a hypothetical concern: American production of artillery shells for Ukraine has been held back by a lack of machine tools. The military has thus historically paid close attention to the machine tool industry and the availability of machinists.
For most of the 20th century, the US was unrivaled in its machine tool technology, and as late as the early 1980s it was the largest machine tool producer in the world.. But almost overnight, the industry collapsed: annual machine tool shipments declined by more than 50% in 2 years, hundreds of machine tool companies went out of business, and the US slipped from the largest producer in the world to the 4th or 5th (depending on the year), roughly where it remains today.
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Today, the US competes in a machine tool market that continues to be dominated by Japan, Germany, and now China. It has some bright spots, such as Haas Automation (founded in 1983, in the ashes of the industry’s collapse), but the major producers are all foreign companies. As of 2014, not a single one of the 10 largest machine tool companies in the world was a US company (Haas clocked in at number 13), a fact which as far as I know remains true today. The US is still a major purchaser of machine tools (2nd in the world behind China), but unlike for most of the 20th century, today its factories are full of machines made elsewhere.
