John T. Parsons, who was born in Detroit, was a pioneer in the development of numerical control systems, which led to today’s highly productive CNC machines, which are used in factories around the world.
One of John T. Parsons’ earliest memories was using a file on a piece of iron when he was 3 years old. It was a fitting precursor to a long career in engineering that earned him recognition as the father of the second Industrial Revolution.
Growing up in Detroit in the early 19th century, young Parsons developed a unique talent with metals. While others could identify flowers by scent, he learned how to distinguish different metals by their smell.
By the 1940s he was pursuing technological inventions that led him to develop the concept of “numerical control.” His concept was the earliest application of what would become the computer technology needed to control machines used in manufacturing processes.
Numerical control, later called computer numerical control, or CNC, allows the precise operation of tools including drills, lathes, mills, grinders, routers, and 3-D printers.
This approach changed the use of machine tools for manufacturing from an imprecise craft to an exact science, and is credited with touching off worldwide industrial developments in disparate fields ranging from machine tools to medicine; aerospace; computer chips; transportation on land, water, and in the air; oil and gas; clothing; electronics; and national defense.
“Every day, hundreds of thousands of CNC machines churn out millions of products,” Modern Manufacturing India magazine wrote in a column paying tribute to Parsons. The magazine is a publication of the Indian Machine Tool Manufacturing Association.
“Virtually, almost every product we use in our daily lives has been touched by CNC technology somewhere in the process. Parsons’ invention of numerical control has created employment for millions of people around the world and has changed the way we approach manufacturing forever,” the article stated.
Parsons’ 60-year career of creative problem-solving involving metals and machines began humbly, when he took a job as a piece worker in a Detroit stamping plant. Later, he was a tool room apprentice. He didn’t have a college degree.
“He very much came up through the shops, his father’s shops,” says Steven Walton, an associate professor of history who specializes in technology and science at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. Walton is researching Parsons’ career.
The outbreak of World War II presented multiple manufacturing opportunities for the young inventor. At that time, the armaments industry required companies with military contracts to shrink their footprints by moving manufacturing plants out of cities to less densely populated areas, reducing their chances of becoming enemy targets.
Parsons moved a branch of his father’s Detroit-based automotive parts company to an unlikely location, Traverse City — then, as now, a major vacation haven and the state’s top cherry- and wine-growing region.
Walton says Parsons bought a factory building in Detroit, disassembled it, and reassembled it in Traverse City. In that bucolic setting, he established the Parsons Corp. and obtained military contracts to build bombs, rockets, and land mines.
Following the war, in 1946, Parsons hired Frank L. Stulen, an aeronautical engineer in the Material Command of the U.S. Army Air Force, the service branch responsible at the time for developing aircraft, electronic systems, munitions, and missiles. Stulen would become his invaluable collaborator and sounding board.
Stulen had a background in military manufacturing and was head of the Military Command’s helicopter lab at Wright Air Force Base, now Wright-Patterson, near Dayton, Ohio.
At the time of his hire, Stulen was working on problems with perfecting curves of helicopter rotor blades. Parsons had undertaken a similar challenge in Traverse City (Parsons Corp. had produced a single helicopter propeller prototype).
“They got a subcontract to build helicopter rotor blades, and that was completely different technology mechanically because rotor blades were built up out of handcrafted wood and then a plywood skin, which as far as I can tell was material and a process they never before had anything to do with, but John T. said, ‘Yes, we can do that,’ ” Walton says.
To bring precision to their work, Parsons and Stulen figured out how to use punch card technology and IBM tabulation machines to control a cutter to make templates for manufacturing the curved helicopter propellers. “That was the basis of all numerical control, now CNC machining, that’s all over the planet,” Walton says.
Soon after, Parsons Corp. became the country’s largest independent manufacturer of helicopter blades. It held that position through the Korean War until major helicopter builders like Sikorsky Aircraft brought that work in-house, Walton says.
Parsons’ partnership with Stulen spanned decades, with Stulen serving as the company’s chief engineer and vice president of engineering. Apart from rotor blades, the company successfully applied similar concepts to the design and production of fiberglass tail fins for aircraft for the U.S. Air Force.
Despite his early success, Parsons was nearly sidelined from the company he founded.
“By the 1950s, the bureaucrats who were in this now larger company thought he was putting too much money into research for the numerical control stuff and they couldn’t see where this was going to be a money-maker, so his CFO at the time engineered his ouster,” Walton says. “The whole company largely turned against the CFO, and Parsons came back in about two years and became the sole owner.”
Parsons led the way in creating the process of tube extrusion, which produced the massive fuel lines for NASA’s Saturn V booster rockets.
Parsons’ inventions weren’t limited to military uses, but extended to a wide swath of industries. The company produced built-in kitchen units, fiberglass boats, and archery equipment.
Over his career, Parsons and his company filed more than 50 patents for his inventions with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He pioneered adhesive bonding for titanium, aluminum, and alloy steel in metal aircraft structures, and used that technique to build the first all-composite airplane for the Office of Naval Research.
Parsons also applied his numerical control advancements to revolutionize the production of dies used for building automobile bodies.
In addition, Parsons Corp. became a key player in America’s space program. Parsons invented the process of tube extrusion, which produced the massive fuel lines for NASA’s mighty Saturn V booster rockets that took U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to the moon in 1969. The blades on the helicopter that plucked the trio from the ocean after splashdown also were made by Parsons Corp.
“I used to say we took them to the moon and we brought them back home afterward,” Parsons told the Traverse City Record-Eagle upon the recovery of the astronauts.
Not everything Parsons invented made money. He had a brief foray into fiberglass boat-building in the 1980s, Walton says, describing a videotaped interview in which Parsons said, “We spent $3 million to make $1 million in sales.”
“This was another case of him pivoting into another industry using fiberglass construction, which they were doing with rotor blades, but the boat one didn’t work so well,” Walton says. “It was the marketing and consumer contact that the company didn’t have, and didn’t want to do. Going to boat shows was something Parsons had never done. They tried it, and it didn’t work.”
In the late 1960s, Parsons looked at expanding to Texas and Florida, but nothing came of it.
“He opened a small branch in Stockton, Calif., to be near the aerospace industry, and that’s what resulted in their demise,” Walton says. “They came to the attention of Hitco Carbon Composites, a California-based company that wanted Parsons’ patents for tube extrusions. Hitco bought out Parsons, promising to keep the Traverse City operation open, but closed it within two years. The deal went through in 1968, and Traverse City was closed in 1970 or 1971.”
Parsons went into private R&D until he retired, while Stulen became a prominent member of the Traverse City community. He served on several boards, was elected a city commissioner, and was mayor for one year. He received the Traverse City Distinguished Citizen Award in 1972.
In 1975, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers awarded Parsons a plaque naming him The Father of the Second Industrial Revolution. A decade later, former President Ronald Reagan awarded Parsons and Stulen the nation’s most prestigious scientific citation, the National Medal of Technology.
In 1988, the University of Michigan presented him with an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree, and Parsons was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1993, joining legendary predecessors like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
John T. Parsons died on April 18, 2007, at age 93. Stulen was 89 years old when he passed away on June 25, 2010.
Burt Raynes, a competitor of Parsons and CEO of Rohr Corp., once said of the inventor: “There aren’t 25 people in the United States capable of understanding the magnitude of John Parsons’ accomplishments.”
Because of his move to Traverse City in the early days of World War II, Parsons catalyzed industrial activity in Traverse City, a legacy that continues today, Walton says.
“Though his fundamentally important invention of numerical control machining — which revolutionized modern manufacturing the world over — didn’t spawn a local industry, the company’s coordination of engineers, craftsmen, programmers, material specialists, and then all the subsidiary companies that fed their production, including machine shops and lumberyards and aluminum and fiberglass suppliers, shifted Traverse City from being only an agricultural and vacation city to a region with an important aerospace and industrial base,” Walton says.
