Milling Cutter - History

History

The history of milling cutters is intimately bound up with that of milling machines. Milling evolved from rotary filing, so there is a continuum of development between the earliest milling cutters known, such as that of Jacques de Vaucanson from about the 1760s or 1770s, through the cutters of the milling pioneers of the 1810s through 1850s (Whitney, North, Johnson, Nasmyth, and others), to the cutters developed by Joseph R. Brown of Brown & Sharpe in the 1860s, which were regarded as a break from the past for their large step forward in tooth coarseness and for the geometry that could take successive sharpenings without losing the form of the cut. De Vries (1910) reported, "This revolution in the science of milling cutters took place in the States about the year 1870, and became generally known in Europe during the Exhibition in Vienna in 1873. However strange it may seem now that this type of cutter has been universally adopted and its undeniable superiority to the old European type is no longer doubted, it was regarded very distrustfully and European experts were very reserved in expressing their judgment. Even we ourselves can remember that after the coarse pitched cutter had been introduced, certain very clever and otherwise shrewd experts and engineers regarded the new cutting tool with many a shake of the head. When however, the Worlds Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, exhibited to European experts a universal and many-sided application of the coarse pitched milling cutter which exceeded even the most sanguine expectations, the most far-seeing engineers were then convinced of the immense advantages which the application of the new type opened up for the metalworking industry, and from that time onwards the American type advanced, slowly at first, but later on with rapid strides".

Woodbury provides citations of patents for various advances in milling cutter design, including irregular spacing of teeth (1867), forms of inserted teeth (1872), spiral groove for breaking up the cut (1881), and others. He also provides a citation on how the introduction of vertical mills brought about wider use of the endmill and fly cutter types.

Scientific study by Holz and De Leeuw of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company made the teeth even coarser and did for milling cutters what F.W. Taylor had done for single-point cutters with his famous scientific cutting studies.