[SEE COVER] The history of the United States is fundamentally a history of invention.
—Roger Burlingame
Businessmen, scientists and engineers from 27 nations gathered in Chicago last week to see a new breed of U.S.-produced machines, so wondrously gifted and versatile that they hold the promise of a new industrial revolution. In Chicago's huge, hot International Amphitheatre and Navy Pier, the visitors excitedly inspected 11,000 gleaming new engineering marvels in twin shows: the Machine Tool Exposition and the Production Engineering Show. The new breed—and the stars of the shows—were nearly 100 machine tools of a wholly new kind, the brilliant offspring of the marriage of the automated machine and the computer's electronic brain. They represented a giant stride toward the ultimate goal of man's industrial progress: machines able to run themselves.
The key to the new revolution is "numerical control." The new machine needs an operator to show it only once how to do an intricate job. In the process its computer brain jots down symbolic numerical notes, thereafter can work automatically from "memory"—or learn a new task just as quickly. In the machine and tool industry, where techniques change so slowly that an exposition is held only twice a decade, the numerical-control machines brought forth a babble of superlatives, such as "the sunburst of a new era," "a stupendous breakthrough." Where it now takes a day to "set up" a lathe or other machine before it can begin turning out parts, the new machines can be ready to work in minutes, switch easily from one job to another.
The Great Quest. The machines are but a small example of the flood of new products that are transforming industry and the American way of life, and hold the promise of a new industrial era in the 1960s. No facet of living—or of manufacturing—has escaped the restless minds of inventors trying to devise newer, cheaper, faster or better ways of doing things. Some are as simple and gadgety as the self-shaking mop; some are as complicated as the sealed-window, almost dust-free house. Some are as frivolous as a musical toothbrush that sounds a sour note when the teeth are not brushed correctly; some are as awe-inspiring as the purposeful arc of Echo threading its way through the stars. For the housewife, the worker on the production line, and the executive in his office, the outpouring of new inventions has provided more time to pursue dozens of new interests at leisure—and a choice of hundreds more new products to make leisure time more fun.