May 30, 2001

HISTORY OF THE CMM

I recently had the pleasure of reading a piece of promotional material from another machine CMM manufacture, we will just call them ‘Brand Z’, which was masquerading as news. They claim to have invented the first CMM. As someone who has been in this industry for over twenty years, and who had the pleasure of knowing the people who did, this comes across a little presumptuous.

EMD, Inc. was co-founded in 1986 by Russell Shelton. The first CMM was actually made by Scottish Company Ferrantti. This precursor used mechanical hard bearings and a fancy X-Y digital display. They were primarily an electronics and defense contractor that developed this technology for its own production and found a waiting market.

What we recognize as a CMM today made from Air Bearings and granite was a technology that was pioneered by Russell. Working in conjunction with the U.S. department of energy, Companies like GM, Boeing and IBM, his company Shelton Metrology, built CMM’s in the 1960’s, which extensively developed these components and technology.

This picture, which can be dated to the 1960’s by the young lady in the psychedelic mini-skirt and beehive hairdo, was a CMM delivered in 1970. This CMM used porous copper air bearings, granite, analog and digital contact probes, two-axis probe articulation and a Honeywell computer with 2KB of “CORE” memory and a punch tape reader.

Through Russell, the lineage of EMD, Inc. is far more directly tied to the first CMM than this other far more prominent CMM builder. It took them another 10 years, into the late 70’s, to copy the technology he pioneered.

Klaus Ulbrich