Charles Hotchkiss Norton was an American mechanical engineer and machine tool designer. He designed a grinding machine with larger and heavier grinding wheels, capable of supplying machine parts for the emerging automobile industry.
Background
Charles Hotchkiss Norton was born on November 23, 1851 in Plainville, Connecticut, United States. He was the first of three children, all sons, of John Calvin and Harriet (Hotchkiss) Norton. He was a descendant of John Norton, a Puritan clergyman who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635, and of Samuel Hotchkiss, who settled in New Haven, Connecticut, about 1641. Norton's father, born in Boston, was a cabinetmaker who worked in the Whiting and Royce clock dial factory in Plainville; his mother was employed by the same firm as a painter of dials.
Education
Norton attended the public schools of Plainville and Thomaston, Connecticut.
Career
Norton went to work in 1866 as a chore boy for the Seth Thomas Clock Company in Thomaston. His aptitude and resourcefulness in machine building soon led to his promotion to machinist and then to foreman, superintendent of machinery, and manager of the department making tower clocks. During his years with Seth Thomas he designed many public clocks, and through practical experience became familiar with the mass production methods of interchangeable manufacture which Connecticut clockmakers working in the tradition of Chauncey Jerome were refining and extending in the years after the Civil War.
In 1886 Norton took a position as assistant engineer with the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company at Providence, Rhode Island, later becoming its designer and engineer for cylindrical grinding machinery. When he came to Providence the grinding machine, as pioneered by Jacob R. Brown and others between 1864 and 1876, was in a state of rapid transition; no longer employed merely for sharpening tools and finishing surfaces, it was being used in the manufacture of small metal parts and was potentially a metal-cutting device capable of both high precision and volume production. The universal grinding machine exhibited by Brown & Sharpe at the Paris Exposition of 1876 had been one of the peak achievements of this early period. In 1887 Norton redesigned this machine to give it greater rigidity, and within the next two years perfected a spindle that made internal grinding commercially feasible. By 1890 the major elements and standard types of precision grinding machines were familiar in progressive factories and shops, and had been greatly improved by automatic power and a variety of controls. Nevertheless, precision grinding was for the most part still confined to light manufacturing. Norton left Brown & Sharpe in 1890 to become a partner in the newly established Detroit firm of Leland, Faulconer & Norton Company. Henry Martyn Leland, a former machinist and department head at Brown & Sharpe who later became one of the pioneers of the automotive industry, was vice-president and general manager; Robert C. Faulconer, who had put up $40, 000 for the venture, was president; and Norton was brought in as a designer of new machinery and given a small stock interest. The firm quickly prospered, and its diversified business gave Norton broader experience in the design and building of production machine tools. He withdrew from the firm in 1895 (it later merged with the Cadillac Automobile Company) and, after working briefly as a mechanical engineer in Bridgeport, Connecticut, returned the next year to Brown & Sharpe. During his second sojourn with the Providence firm Norton formulated the principles of precision grinding that marked his most creative contribution to the American machine tool industry, then entering upon a highly innovative era with the emergence of the newer mass production industries, notably automobile manufacture. His use of a larger and wider grinding wheel made it unnecessary to traverse the workpiece, thereby making possible the construction of a machine operating on the feed principle. This fast, flexible, and economical technique, later known as plunge grinding, involved greater power, higher speed, heavier cuts, and more rigid construction. Additional improvements made it possible to turn out highly accurate contoured work on a commercial volume basis. With these ideas Norton developed the precision grinding machine from a light production tool of limited capability to a heavy special-purpose machine integral to modern industrial technology.
Norton's revolutionary approach encountered considerable opposition at Brown & Sharpe, and in 1900 he left to found the Norton Grinding Company in Worcester, Massachussets. Individual members of the Norton Emery Wheel Company in Worcester (known after 1900 as the Norton Company), to whose founders he was not related, gave him financial backing, and he became chief engineer of his new firm. The two companies were completely independent until 1919, when the Norton Company acquired the grinding firm by merger; thereafter Charles H. Norton served as chief engineer of the machinery division until 1934, when, now in his eighties, he became consulting engineer. After forming his own company Norton promptly built his first heavy-production cylindrical grinding machine, patenting it in 1904. It weighed more than 15, 000 pounds, had a metal-cutting capacity of one cubic inch of steel per minute, and from rough stock turned out work of extremely fine dimensional accuracy and high surface finish. By 1903 Norton had also produced a special crankshaft-grinding machine which performed in fifteen minutes a series of operations that had formerly required five hours. It was adopted by automobile manufacturers, among them Henry Ford, who ordered thirty-five for making the Model T at his new Highland Park plant. A camshaft-grinding machine invented by Norton also proved of great value to the automotive industry.
Shortly after selling his company in 1919 he made Plainville his permanent residence.
Achievements
During the First World War the Norton firm made important contributions to the output of aircraft engines, field artillery, and munitions. Well after his sixty-fifth year, Norton continued to introduce new types of cylindrical grinding machines that progressively reduced the cost of precision-ground work. He held more than a hundred patents and was the author of Principles of Cylindrical Grinding (1917).
He received the John Scott Medal from the City of Philadelphia for his invention of accurate high-gear grinding machinery.
Connections
Norton was married three times. His first wife, whom he married on January 7, 1873, was Julia Eliza Bishop of Thomaston, Connecticut, by whom he had two daughters, Ida and Fannie. On June 16, 1896, following a divorce, he married Mary E. Tomlinson of Plainville. After her death in 1915 he married Mrs. Grace (Drake) Harding of Spencer, Massachussets, on January 7, 1917.
