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Machine Tools
New Advance

Machine Tools

Prerequisites

Requires:

  • Flintlock
  • Military Engineering

Statistics

Gives:

  • Cannon

Gameplay

Powered Machine Tools actually came before the Steam Engines that became the power source of 19th century industry. Among the first applications of the new tools was in the manufacture of smoothbore Cannons for both Bombardment and Ranged Attack.

Historical

Machine tools are the tools that make the tools. One of the earliest examples was Robert Hooke’s wheel cutting machine, a water-powered device for manufacturing gears that he built in 1670 AD. In the century that followed, water power an large-scale machinery were adapted to serve an increasing number of industrial manufacturing needs: screw-manufacturing machinery by Job and William Wyatt in 1760 and boring machines by John Smeaton in 1765, for example. John Wilinson improved Smeaton’s machine in 1775, resulting in a machine so exact that it could bore iron canon gun tubes and cylinders for the primitive steam engines being produced for pumping and powering machinery. Precision large-scale machinery like this made it possible to produce large numbers of goods for both civilian consumption and, ominously, for war. Hand equipment never could have produced the millions of muskets or the thousands of cannon used in the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century, and the experience of building such machinery was applied directly to the factories and production lines resulting from the Industrial Revolution.