Interesting website on old machine tools. Alloy Artifacts
I ran into it while trying to track down history of the Vlchek Tools and found quite the trove. One of the more interesting facts about Frank Vlchek and his company:
Vlchek was also a pioneer in cost analysis, and established a special Cost Department to keep up-to-date estimates of the costs of production. This move was prompted by Vlchek's observation that many of his competitors didn't know whether they were operating at a profit or loss until the books were closed at year's end; obviously, this would be a major problem in a period of fluctuating prices. The combination of efficient production and good business management allowed Vlchek Tool to expand its factory several times between 1909 and 1920.A good blacksmith and a great businessman. The idea that a company would not know it's profit and loss statement until the end of the fiscal year is amazing. Things have come a long way from then until the copy of QuickBooks that sits on our office computer. My Mom's side of the family ran a paper warehouse in Erie, PA and I remember the room full of old ledgers handwritten by my Grandmother in her fine Copperplate hand. Whenever we went up from Pittsburgh, PA to visit, they would let me travel along with one of the salesmen so I got infected with the printing bug at an early age. The old presses were magic and the Linotype machine was pure magic... Fast forward to the last fifteen years, I was an early adopter of Xerox's Ventura Desktop Publisher which had one of the coolest diskette box packages ever. I got very familiar with that program and could out-edit anyone using Pagemaker on one of these fussy little Mac things. Ventura ran on the GEM graphical interface that ran on top of MS-DOS -- this was very much pre-Windows. An interesting span of time...
