The Secret Cartel Hiding Inside America's Toughest Machines

In 1916, a thirty-seven-year-old machinist named Jack C. Carlton bought a struggling Cincinnati drill builder for fifty thousand dollars and turned it into one of the most respected names in American heavy industry. This documentary traces the complete history of the Carlton Machine Tool Company, from the foundry district of Camp Washington to the federal courtroom where its most closely guarded secret came apart. The film follows Carlton's climb through Cincinnati's legendary machine tool ecosystem: an apprenticeship at Fay & Egan, seven formative years at the Bickford Tool Company, and a rise through Lodge & Shipley that took him from the shop floor to a three-year posting selling American machines across fifteen European countries on the eve of the First World War. It covers the founding of the company on Spring Grove Avenue, the hand craftsmanship behind its machines (gray iron castings, hobbed gears, ground and heat-treated spindles, and ways scraped flat by hand), and the wartime decision that broke one of heavy industry's oldest customs, when Carlton opened a training school for women machinists in 1918 and projected that up to seventy-five percent of the company's work would soon run through their hands. The documentary then examines the engineering that made Carlton radial drills the standard of their field, including the low hung spindle drive, the industry's first all-ball-bearing radial construction, push-button electro-hydraulic power clamping, and pre-selector speed and feed controls, along with the full product line from the compact Model 0A to the 64,250-pound Model 5A, a machine capable of drilling to the center of a twenty-four-foot circle. It also documents the company's darkest chapters. In 1933, Carlton joined four other machine tool builders in Associated Patents, Inc., a secret patent pool that divided the American machine tool market into exclusive territories for two decades, until the Department of Justice sued and a federal judge declared the arrangement an illegal conspiracy under the Sherman Act in 1955. The film follows Carlton through its World War II service under the War Production Board, the Korean War boom, the transition to numerical control, and the collapse of the early 1980s, when import competition gutted the American machine tool industry, chairman J. Moran warned Congress about the erosion of the defense industrial base, and preferred shareholders later pursued him into bankruptcy court over money they alleged was taken as the company failed. The story ends with the 1991 NATCO merger, the survival of the Carlton parts business under Lucas Precision of Cleveland (ironically, a descendant of Carlton's own cartel partner, now owned by the Czech Fermat Group), and the thousands of Carlton drills still cutting steel today, a century after they were built. Subscribe to Trade Archive for documentaries on the companies, machines, and industrialists that built the modern world. Sources: Biographical sketch of Jack C. Carlton. Cincinnati and Hamilton County biographical collection. Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Digital Collections. United States v. Associated Patents, Inc., 134 F. Supp. 74 (E.D. Mich. 1955). Spinnenweber v. Moran (In re Moran), 152 B.R. 493 (Bankr. S.D. Ohio 1993). U.S. Congress. Joint Economic Committee. Restoring America's Defense Industrial Base: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Monetary and Fiscal Policy. 97th Cong., September 30, 1981. Carlton, Jack C. Transmission for Radial Drill Arms, Elevating Mechanism, and Drill Spindles. US Patent 1,684,344, granted September 11, 1928. Carlton, Jack C. Clamping Mechanism for Radial Drills. US Patent 2,002,446, granted May 21, 1935. The Carlton Machine Tool Company. Automatic Tool Changer. US Patent 3,451,125, granted 1969. "How the Shortage of Skilled Mechanics Is Being Overcome by Training the Unskilled." 1918. Project Gutenberg. Library of Congress. Interior View with Carlton Radial Arm Drill Press, Machine Operator Eddie Burttram. O'Neal Steel, Birmingham, Alabama. HABS/HAER/HALS Collection. American Machinist, November 13, 1950. Dinopoulos, Elias, and Mordechai E. Kreinin. "The U.S. VER on Machine Tools." In Empirical Studies of Commercial Policy, edited by Robert E. Baldwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. "Case Note: United States v. Associated Patents." Michigan Law Review 54, no. 5 (1956). Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. "Carlton Machine Tool Co." VintageMachinery.org. "Carlton Machine Tool Co." and "National Automatic Tool Co." Justia Trademarks. National Automatic Tool Company, Inc., CARLTON filing, June 29, 1988. Lucas Precision LLC. Spare Parts and Service documentation. Cleveland, Ohio. Manufacturing News. "Fermat Group Acquires Lucas Precision." March 2015. Department of Everyday Visualingual. "Carlton Machine Tool Co. Ghost Sign in Cincinnati." July 9, 2013.