In the 1950s a new era and manufacturing was born for the first time in the history of manufacturing. A number of large production machines electronically controlled were functioning simultaneously as an integrated production line virtually unattended. These machines were drilling, boring, milling, and passing unrelated parts from machine to machine. End products were processed from rough castings through three complete and different cycles of machining operations entirely independent of human intervention taped instructions guided the precision movements of the machine tools and the electronic system maintained complete and unerring control of all operations during the three separate manufacturing cycles.
The story behind this revolutionary electronic control system began in 1950s when a group of Hughes products engineers highly trained and experienced in commercial applications of electronics investigated the possibility of producing a computer numerically controlled machine tool line which would offer complete versatility rather than the single product limitation of the so-called Detroit type machine as the research progressed desirable features of a system equally adaptable to limited production runs in small machine shops as well as large scale operations were carefully charted and investigated.
CNC machines are different from numerical control machines by that they use digital codes instead of manual punch tape plus CNC machines and produced parts much more quickly and accurately than previous machining methods with digital CNC codes programmers can more easily fix their mistake instead of trying to fill in a wrongly punished bolt thus making CNC more practical solution. CNC has a great effect on the world we live in, it allows for the mass production of products making them cheaper and more readily available such as electronics are made possible by the precise movements of CNC machines thus is almost solely responsible for the way of life we know today.
John T. Parsons is the first man who invented numerical control, eventually, he developed CNC technology. Parsons worked for his father’s company. He also hired Frank Stulen as an engineer, together they built a procedure using an IBM punch card reader to calculate accurately the curvature of helicopter rotary blades. Parsons and Stullen worked with MIT’s Servomechanisms laboratory in pursuit of the improvement of a machine that can reproduce the creation of exact machine parts. Their work at MIT led to the revealing of a machine that could perform such work in September, the same year.
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