Some of the machines are so versatile that specially designed sets of cutting edges will adapt them to almost any work.
Standardization, due to the machine tool, is one of the chief glories of American manufacturing.

Accurate watches and clocks, bicycles and motor cars, innumerable devices to save labor in the home, the office, the shop, or on the farm, are within the reach of all, because the machine tool, tended by labor comparatively unskilled, does the greater part of the work of production.

In the crisis of the World War, American manufacturers, turning from the arts of peace, promptly adapted their plants to the manufacture of the most complicated engines of destruction, which were produced in Europe only by skilled machinists of the highest class..