A Good Book

by John H. Verrill

8/24/2025

Recently Alan Sadler, an EAIA member, shared a book with me that he thought would be of interest to me and to members of our organization. I began reading it and could not put it down it was so interesting. The book is entitled “Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry” written by Gerald M. Carbone with the Rhode Island Historical Society. Brown & Sharpe was a manufacturing company that started in Providence, Rhode Island, as a small company devoted to making clocks, watches and repairing mechanical things in a small shop owned and run by its inventor/ owner Joseph Brown.  Lucian Sharpe, started as an apprentice to Brown in 1848, and within five years a partnership was born. Joseph Brown developed a machine that would accurately mark the divisions on a ruler and this and other measuring devices helped to seed the growth of Brown & Sharpe as a leading manufacturer of tools, measuring devices and precision calipers used in manufacturing.

For nearly 150 years Brown & Sharpe grew and manufactured machine tools for industry worldwide. Mr. Carbone outlines the ups and downs of the company and the reasons surrounding its cycles of growth and decline. As much as it is a story of one company manufacturing machine tools, it is also an excellent history of the nations’ economy and the growth and decline of industry based on the various economic crises, wars and other events that influenced industries.

I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in the development of machine tools and the history of manufacturing in the United States. The book was published by the McFarland & Company, Inc. of Jefferson, NC. The book is available on Amazon, Abebooks and as an eBook from Barnes & Noble.

 I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. Happy summer reading.