Joseph Brown, founder of Brown & Sharpe, was a skilled clockmaker turned mechanical designer who invented new machines, and new ways to make things, as needed. Samuel Darling, an eccentric inventor from Maine and a one-time competitor of Brown's, joined the firm and brought with him his prized dividing engine for marking precise graduations on measuring instruments. Lucian Sharpe, with his son Henry and grandson Henry, Jr., guided the company for more than a century--and along with it the global machine tools industry. The skilled men and women who worked for Brown & Sharpe, who produced and...