Edwin R. Fellows - Early Life

Early Life

Fellows' father, Charles L. Fellows, was a principal of Torrington High School and was interested in mathematics. When his father died, Fellows was in his first year of high school. As a result of his father's death, Fellows had to go to work as a department store clerk while his mother had to take on lodgers. One such lodger was James Hartness, who was to become a machine-tool entrepreneur in Springfield, Vermont and who befriended Fellows and ultimately convinced him to follow career opportunities in the Springfield machine-tool industry with his firm, the Jones & Lamson Machine Company (J&L). Roe reports that Fellows completed high school.

Fellows moved to Springfield in 1889, working first at a screw-making machine before being transferred to the drafting department at J&L. In this capacity he became interested in the problem of manufacturing gears, which requires accurate shaping according to mathematical principles in many different forms, including spur gears, worm gears, helical gears and spiral bevel gears. The problem employs the "study of involute cycloidal, epicycloidal and hypocycloidal curves."

By 1896 Fellows had fully developed a new approach to gear cutting. Previously, gears had been milled, using cutters that were formed to the shape of the individual teeth. Upon the completion of each gear tooth, the gear blank was indexed to a new position to mill the next tooth, which could lead to problems in accurate spacing of gear teeth and the shaping of the individual teeth. Fellows conceived a method whereby the gear cutter, which was itself a gear with hardened cutting edges, and gear blank revolved together as if they were a pair of gears. This process required no intermediate template or other type of mechanical guide for shaping the gear. Hobbing has become the preferred approach to manufacturing spur gears and helical gears.