during this period, although, with the exception of the centerless
grinder, no significant new types of tools appeared. The machines that
were made with machine tools increased in complexity and, with the
introduction of ideas that made mass production of complex mechanical
products economically feasible, there was an accelerating increase in
quantity. The adoption of standards for all sorts of component parts
also had an important bearing upon the ability of a designer
economically to produce mechanisms that operated very nearly as he hoped
they would.

The study of kinematics has been considered for nearly 80 years as a
necessary part of the mechanical engineer's training, as the dozens of
textbooks that have been published over the years make amply clear.
Until recently, however, one would look in vain for original work in
America in the analysis or rational synthesis of mechanisms.

One of the very earliest American textbooks of kinematics was the 1883
work of Charles W. MacCord (1836-1915), who had been appointed professor
of mechanical drawing at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken
after serving John Ericsson, designer of the _Monitor_, as chief
draftsman during the Civil War.[110] Based upon the findings of Willis
and Rankine, MacCord's _Kinematics_ came too early to be influenced by
Kennedy's improvements upon Reuleaux's work.

[Footnote 110: A biographical notice and a bibliography of MacCord
appears in _Morton Memorial: A History of the Stevens Institute of
Technology_, Hoboken, 1905, pp. 219-222.]

When the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis introduced in
1885 a curriculum in "dynamic engineering," reflecting a
dissatisfaction with the traditional branches of engineering, kinematics
was a senior subject and was taught from Rankine's _Machinery and
Millwork_.[111]

[Footnote 111: _Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers_, 1885-1886, vol. 7, p. 757.]

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Peter Schwamb, professor of
machine design, put together in 1885 a set of printed notes on the
kinematics of mechanisms, based on Reuleaux's and Rankine's works. Out
of these notes grew one of the most durable of American textbooks, first
published in 1904.[112] In the first edition of this work, acceleration
was mentioned only once in passing (on p. 4). Velocities in linkages
were determined by orthogonal components transferred from link to link.
Instant centers were used on