一九世紀末ドイツにおける大量生産の開始と工作機械工業

Abstract

This study intends to analyze the initiation of mass production technology and its influence on the machine tool industry in Germany at the end of the 19th century.It is still believed, that at the end of the 19th century, mechanical engineering industry in Germany was technologically far behind as compared with the standard of the USA. The “American system of manufacturing” was often used to emphasize the above notion to prejudge the German machine tool industry. However, it is a question to assess whether the development of the German machine tool industry was far behind than that of America.Even in the USA, the sewing machine, one of the typical product of the “American system, ” was made as a hand-made one at the beginning. Sewing machine builders in the USA introduced its mass production upon interchangeable parts in 1870s, after few years of this change, German also began to intoroduce this system. This pattern was also true for industries like bicycle, fire arm and typewriter.In order to make parts for the above machines, it was inevitable to use new kind of machine tools like milling machine or turret lathe. Although these machines were developed by American engineers in the middle of the 19th century, their commercial production commenced even in the USA in the middle of 1860s. After few years later German machine tool builders also started to copy and improve them.In the stage of developing process of the mass production, the machine tool industry played a “convergent” roll not only in the USA but also in Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, the German machine tool technologies had been developed significantly in order to compete with the American builders in the world market.