In 1886, brothers Thomas Smithies Taylor and Herbert William Taylor established T. S. & W. Taylor to manufacture camera lenses and other optical equipment. The following year they hired W. S. H. Hobson as salesman, and at some point soon afterward the business name changed to Taylor, Taylor & Hobson (TTH). Their product line quickly expanded to include engineering and scientific instruments as well as providing contract machining work and machine design. Regular products included various kinds of microscopes and telescopes that were adapted for specific applications. Eventually they introduced the product which qualifies them for listing on this site dedicated to woodworking and metalworking machinery: the world's first modern pantograph engraving machine.
In 1901 TTH reorganized as an LLC, Taylor, Taylor & Hobson Ltd. During the early decades of the motion picture industry, this company's lenses were widely used on movie cameras. The company also developed a good reputation for their metrology (measuring) instruments such as toolmaker's microscopes and surface-texture measurement instruments. And the pantograph engraving machines continued their success. The early pantograph engravers were originally designed for engraving lens mounts and other small items, and were popular with cutlery manufacturers and jewelry makers. Larger models soon followed. An electric etching head, with rapidly vibrating tungsten tip, was introduced for engraving very hard materials, This "Javelin" line of engravers would prove to be very successful and it replaced the slower and messier acid etching on many production lines.
Another innovation added to the pantograph engravers was a down-feed on the cutterhead, which allowed it to vary the depth of the work. On a larger and heavier machine, this third dimension allowed the machine to be used for "die sinking", i.e., forming the three-dimensional surface of a stamping or molding die. TTH's die sinker was a world first.
In 1947 TTH was acquired by a Rank Organisation division, British Optical and Precision Engineers, which by the 1970s would be the Rank Optics Machine Tool Group. In 1980 a group of Rank managers bought out the engraving-machine portion of the business and organized it as Newing Hall Ltd., its name created by combining the names of the three company directors: Trevor Newton, Derek Ingham, and Wilf Hall.
In the late 1970s Newing Hall developed a computer-controlled version of their Pantocut engraver, which was beefed up to to allow its use for profiling and milling as well.
Meanwhile, the TTH/Rank metrology division ended up with Metek Ultra Precision Technologies, an international company based in the United States.
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