Blanchard, Thomas
NAME: Blanchard, Thomas.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Blanchard lathe
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 24th June 1788, in Sutton, MA.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 16th April 1864, in Boston, MA. Aged 77.
DISCIPLINE: Machine tool worker.
FIELD: Manufacturing.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Samuel Blanchard and Susanna Tenney.
SIBLINGS:
SPOUSE: Sarah Segress, died 1834. Marcia Pierce, deceased. Laura A. Shaw, married 1863.
CHILDREN: Six, five of whom died young.
EDUCATION: Irregular.
MAJOR WORK: The irregular turning lathe.
LIFE AND TIMES: Thomas Blanchard worked in his brother’s shop, where he invented a machine for counting nails. Over the next few years, he invented a machine for shearing woollen cloth, and one for cutting and heading tacks.
After selling the patents for $5,000 he set up his own water-powered machine shop in West Millbury with the proceeds.
Asa Waters Jr., of the Waters Gun Manufactory asked Blanchard to perfect a gun barrel lathe and, by adding a simple cam motion to the lathe, Blanchard eliminated the need for hand grinding. Following this success, Roswell Lee, the Superintendent of the United States Armory, employed him to install the device on the armoury lathes in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Blanchard then turned his attention to gunstocks, which were of a more irregular shape than gun barrels. The result was the irregular turning lathe, which was able to copy odd-shaped three-dimensional designs, and which Blanchard patented in 1819.
In 1823, he became an internal contractor for the Springfield Armoury, manufacturing gunstocks at the plant. While working there, he developed a sequence of thirteen additional special-purpose machines for use with the irregular turning lathe which could produce the gunstocks ready for assembly with the other gun parts.
This production-line system was adopted at Harpers Ferry Armoury in Virginia and, after the end of his contract, Blanchard collected royalties on the gunstocks made over a further fourteen years.
During the course of the 1820’s, he set up a factory with water-powered machines near Hudson, New York, to produce pulley blocks and built a steam carriage that probably incorporated his invention for regulating the speed of carriages. He also operated shallow-draft steamboats over the rapids between Hartford and Springfield and, in 1831, patented his own ninety-six feet long steamship, a stern-paddler, for the navigation of rapids.
In the 1830s, Blanchard continued woodworking for nautical purposes, and built manufacturing machines that he patented in 1836 and which were later produced by the Winooski Patent Block Manufacturing Company. In 1843, he was able to adapt his original irregular turning lathe to make wheel spokes and axe handles.
While living in Newark, NJ, in 1849, he invented a wood-bending machine which became widely used to make plough handles, carriage wheels, chair parts and even heavy ships’ timbers. By now he held a number of patents and ran businesses in New York City, Newark, and Boston.
Having succeeded in extending his patent on his irregular lathe in 1834, he tried to extend it further in 1847. This time he used the misleading claim that sculpted busts of leading congressmen had been produced using the lathe and that he needed a patent extension for this new use. He was granted the extension, allowing him a forty-two year patent period, the longest ever.
With twenty-four patents to his name, Blanchard was a wealthy man and involved in extensive litigation, especially against the manufacturers of shoe lathes. He continued to invent throughout his sixties and seventies before dying ten months after his third marriage.
ASSESSMENT: His irregular turning lathe was one of his most important innovations, together with his sequence of machines for producing gunstocks, which were models for modern manufacturing techniques.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work related to that of Whitney*.
ONELINER: Thomas Blanchard, early American machine tool inventor
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
ANB