Masters of Manufacturing: M. Eugene Merchant

Manufacturing Engineering, Jul 2004 by Destefani, Jim

This is the third annual installment in an article series we call Masters of Manufacturing. In these articles, we honor a distinguished figure in manufacturing technology, and by doing so, we hope to remind readers that a career of great achievement in manufacturing is still possible.

M. Eugene Merchant began his career in 1936 at the Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. (later Cincinnati Milacron), where he went to work analyzing the nature of friction between the cutting tool and the chip. The young engineer eventually developed a mathematical model of the metalcutting process that is still taught and used today.

From there, Merchant moved on to help bring the full power of computers to bear on manufacturing. He visualized computer-integrated manufacturing systems more than 40 years ago, and delivered papers outlining his vision that influenced the development of CAD, CAM, and other software used today throughout manufacturing organizations. Merchant also highlighted the need to eliminate waste in batch production, and helped introduce concepts that are key to lean manufacturing.

One of only 25 people inducted into the Automation Hall of Fame at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Merchant retired from Milacron at age 70 in 1983. He has received multiple honors over the course of a career that has spanned more than six decades. He is a past president of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) and an honorary member of both SME and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The organizations present the jointly sponsored M. Eugene Merchant Award each year to an individual responsible for improving productivity and efficiency in manufacturing.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Merchant has served as president of the International Institution for Production Engineering Research (CIRP). He has received awards from multiple engineering societies and academic institutions. Now 91, he still works as a senior consultant at TechSolve, a Cincinnati-based manufacturing consulting firm. The organization's technology development center is named for him, and TechSolve recently published Merchant's book, An Interpretive Review of 20th Century US Machining and Grinding Research (see the TechSolve website at www.tech-solve.org). He also remains active in SME, serving as chairman of the Proposal Review Committee of the Society's Education Foundation and as an emeritus member of its board of directors.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with Manufacturing Engineering, Merchant recently discussed his life, his work, and his vision for the future of manufacturing and engineering education.

Manufacturing Engineering: How did you get involved in engineering? Were you interested in mechanical things as a young man?

M. Eugene Merchant: Even though my father was a minister, he was very interested in machinery, particularly automobiles. He had one of the first autos in our small town of Blandford, MA-first a Metz, and then a Model T Ford. he worked on the cars himself, and he would let me help even though I was only a few years old. I became fascinated with mechanical things.

When I got to high school and was able to drive, I got my own Model T. By this time my father was an Army chaplain at Ft. Ethan Allien, VT, where I went to high school in Essex Junction and then to the University of Vermont. I had a good friend in Essex Junction, and our hobby was taking old cars that weren't in running condition and tearing them apart and rebuilding them. We had a wonderful time. When I first went to university I signed up for electrical engineering because I was fascinated by that as well. But I quickly decided otherwise, and switched to mechanical engineering in my first year.

ME: How did you become interested in metalcutting?

Merchant: Well, in those days mechanical engineering included a hands-on shop course. You went out in the shop and ran machine tools. I enjoyed running a lathe, machining metal. It was just a fascinating process.

Then, I had the good fortune to get a graduate fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, sponsored by Cincinnati Milacron [at the time The Cincinnati Milling Machine Co.]. It was a four-year co-op program. You'd work six months in the company's research lab, six months at school continuing your research but also taking coursework. With that, I received an Sc.D. degree from the university.

The program was the idea of Herman Schneider, who was then dean of engineering at UC. The idea was to take graduates of engineering programs and expose them to education in the advanced sciences-advanced thermodynamics and mechanics, quantum mechanics, and things like that.

That experience opened up a whole new world. You really saw engineering as the focal point of application for the whole realm of science. It gave me a much broader perspective of engineering and science in industry as well as in academia.

ME: Can you tell our readers about the events leading to the development of your theoretical model of metalcutting?