Background
Adolph Lodewyk De Leeuw was born on May 6, 1861 in Zwolle, the capital of Overijssel province in the Netherlands. He was the son of Andries De Leeuw, an accountant, and his second wife, Henriette de Jonghe.
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book
Rambling Through Science
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Metal Cutting Tools, Their Principles, Action And Construction
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultura...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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Adolph Lodewyk De Leeuw
Edit ProfileEducation
Because of poor health, De Leeuw did not attend school until he was eleven years old, but at thirteen he passed the examination for a scholarship awarded by the government to the top twenty students in the country.
Educated at private schools in Haarlem, at the Polytechnic in Delft, and at the University of Leyden, he received degrees in science and in mechanical and electrical engineering.
Career
De Leeuw taught mathematics and applied mechanics at the Lauer Institute in Arnhem and, while still in his mid-twenties, wrote two widely used books on algebra and geometry.
In 1890 De Leeuw emigrated to America. After working briefly in the Pennsylvania Railroad shops at Altoona, Pennsylvania, he was employed by a number of companies in New York and Ohio before being engaged by the Pond Machine Tool Company in Plainfield, New Jersey. He was transferred in 1897 to the Niles Tool Works in Hamilton, Ohio.
After a few years as chief engineer at Niles, where he was one of the pioneers in applying the electric motor to the operation of machine tools, De Leeuw opened his own office in Hamilton as a consulting engineer. One of his clients was the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company. De Leeuw became chief engineer of the company in 1908 and two years later moved his family to Cincinnati.
He laid out a new plant at Oakley and designed the efficient production line for which the company was long noted, but his main energies were devoted to a prolonged series of systematic experiments with the milling machine, a highly versatile machine tool which shapes metal to precise specifications by use of a rotary multiple-tooth cutter. De Leeuw focused particularly upon the relationship between the milling cutter and the machine itself, and the complex of stresses to which the cutting edges are subjected while in contact with the metal being acted upon. After establishing that the cutters then in use were not as strong as the machines which drove them, he undertook to correct this imbalance by redesigning them.
The most distinctive feature of his new cutters was teeth much more widely spaced than before. Further investigation also established optimal design for rake angles of the teeth as well as their optimal steepness and staggering. De Leeuw's research, closely analogous to that of Frederick W. Taylor on single-point cutting tools, resulted in increasing both the speed with which milling machines could remove metal and the durability of the cutters.
The new cutters, in turn, led to other innovations, including new cooling techniques to compensate for increased speed, and improvements in feed mechanisms, in speed control, in the transmission of power, and in unit construction.
In 1914 De Leeuw accepted an appointment as chief engineer of the Singer Manufacturing Company and was placed in charge of its plants both in America and in Europe. During World War I he played a major part in converting them to wartime production. When the French awarded Singer the contract for manufacturing the recoil mechanism for their 75-millimeter artillery pieces, a mechanism never before produced in the United States, De Leeuw not only set up the necessary factories with remarkable speed but also designed a series of machines that performed the work automatically.
After the war, in 1919, he opened an independent consulting office in New York City. Numerous large firms retained him, primarily to solve problems of production control and management. In 1923, at the request of Stanley P. Goss, he designed a new line of automatic chucking machines; the two men joined in the formation of the Goss and De Leeuw Machine Company in New Britain, Connecticut, and De Leeuw served as vice-president and chief engineer of this firm until his death.
Achievements
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Adolph Lodewyk De Leeuw is remembered as a prolific inventor who took out more than fifty patents, the most important of which concerned the milling machine. His designs were widely adopted throughout the machine tool industry and remain the major achievement of his career. De Leeuw also contributed many articles to technical and professional journals, and for a time was consulting editor to the American Machinist.
Works
book
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Rambling Through Science
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
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Metal Cutting Tools, Their Principles, Action And Construction
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultura...)
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Rambling Through Science
Connections
De Leeuw met Katherine Caroline Bender, whom he married on June 15, 1898; they had two daughters, Adele Louise and Cateau Wilhelmina.
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Born
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Died
February 5, 1942 (aged 80) -
Nationality
American