Our Workshop of the World gallery
celebrates Scotland’s reputation as a pioneering industrial nation.
At the far end of the gallery, you’ll find an impressive piece of
machinery that symbolises the innovation and energy of Scottish
industry: a lathe made around 1916 by John Lang and Sons, an
engineering company based in Renfrewshire.
John Lang was one of the leading manufacturers of machine tools,
especially lathes, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
with customers across the world, from Europe to Hong Kong to
Russia.
What does a lathe do?
A lathe is a machine tool used in metal working, woodwork,
pottery and glass making. Lathes are used to make symmetrical
objects. The material to be worked is turned on a spindle driven
manually, by water or steam or by an electric motor, and is shaped
by a cutting tool mounted on the lathe. A potter’s wheel is a
simple example of a lathe: the clay spins round on the wheel, while
the potter shapes it with their hands.
By the early 20th century, when our machine was made, lathes had
become complex tools, masterpieces of engineering developed and
adapted to complete a huge range of industrial tasks. Lathes like
the one in the museum were used for a wide range of metal working
and could operate at various speeds to create a variety of
products. They could be found on local farms, Glasgow shipyards or
railway works in Australia.
How can we learn more about historic machine
tools?
There are lots of ways we can discover more about how old
machine tools such as the John Lang lathe were used in practice.
During the 19th and early 20th century, many
books and journals were published about machine tools, using
photographs and diagrams to explain how they worked. These books
were not just aimed at factory workers, but at beginners who wished
to buy and use these machines at home for a spot of
turn-of-the-century DIY!
Operating manuals and company photographs are another useful
resource. The archives of the John Lang Works contain hundreds of
photos showing how machine tools were manufactured and how the
finished products worked. Often these photos reveal details that
could be missed from a manual. For example, some show workers
keeping their feet warmer in winter by standing on wooden pallets
when operating machinery.
Above: Machines on the floor of a munitions factory,
Renfrewshire, c. 1915.
However, there is only so much we can learn from words and
diagrams. Some skills, such as the ability to hear when machinery
is malfunctioning, or feel the temperature rise, can only be
learned through experience. So to really understand how machinery
worked in the past, we need to experience working historic machine
tools firsthand.
Nowadays, our curators and conservators still work with some of
our historic machine tools for restoration purposes and to provide
public demonstrations. By using the machines, we can learn things
that would have been obvious to the original operators, but which
might now be forgotten, such as what kind of clothing to wear or
how best to stand when operating the machine.
Machine tools were shaped through the knowledge and skills of
the engineers who made them and the workers who operated them. By
looking at historic machine tools today, we can learn more about
these skills, and come to appreciate the ingenuity and expertise
with which they were made and used.