Description
New Englander Leonard Bailey was one of the inventive geniuses of the American Industrial Revolution. His designs and patented inventions solved problems with woodworking planes that had plagued craftsmen for centuries. His planes allowed woodworkers to transition from the age of wooden carpenter’s planes to modern, metallic, fully adjustable planes suitable for any kind of woodworking. His plane designs are still in use throughout the world and are essentially unchanged from the planes he first made in the 1860s. He deserves more credit than he has received among America’s great inventors.
This book covers the 32-year period in Bailey’s life between 1852 when he began inventing, making and selling woodworking tools in Winchester, Massachusetts, through his years at the Stanley Rule & Level Company from 1869 to 1874, and ends in 1884 when he worked in Hartford, Connecticut and sold his Victor Tool business to the Stanley Rule & Level Company.
Hardcover, 248 pages, 2019.