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Established as a die manufacturer, the Keller Corporation was a family business established in Brooklyn in 1896, where it remained until 1930 when it was sold to Pratt & Whitney. In addition to selling dies for the silverware industry, the company soon began selling machines to create dies themselves using their proprietary technique. The Keller machine typically is a tracer-controlled, horizontal milling machine, some models of which have up to three spindles, permitting up to three molds/dies to be copied from the original model. It is the tracer that distinguishes the Keller from other milling machines, for it is this element that permits a model of the part to be machined to be made from wood, plaster of paris or other such easily-worked material, with the pattern then used to make casting molds or stamping/forging dies of great precision. These machines were sold to other companies, including Boeing and Ford Motor Company, to help them rapidly change their product lines. The ubiquity of their technique is documented by the fact that “Kellering” entered the engineering vernacular as a term for creating dies using their method.

Early Years
In 1896, Sidney A. Keller and Joseph F. Keller formed a partnership in New York and went into the business of designing and manufacturing dies for the silverware industry. At that time, there were no machines produced by machine builders in this country that were sufficiently accurate to make such dies, and consequently the small Keller shop used engraving and reducing machines that had been made in Europe.

Because Joseph Keller was a mechanical engineer, he eventually developed machines made in their small shop for their own use. Then, as business broadened and prospered, they saw a market for small forging dies as well as silverware dies. Joseph designed and built a one-to-one duplicating machine and also a weight-controlled machine for the duplication of forging dies. This machine was designated the E-1 Automatic Die Cutter Machine, that was produced in various models until about 1930, and was still in use for several decades after that in some small machine shops around the country.



Early-model Keller machines used direct connection between the tracer and cutting tool in the manner of a pantograph, with contact pressure maintained by means of weights and pulleys. Inconsistent requirements of light tracer pressure on delicate models and considerable pressure for the cutter head dictated that the weighted system was limited to small dies, such as those required for silverware. Construction of the larger Keller machines had to await the inventive genius of John C. Shaw. Through the use of micro-switches on the tracer head and electric relays and magnetic clutches on cutter head feed motors, he succeeded in maintaining light pressure on the tracer while providing the cutter head pressures required to produce the large dies used for such purposes as stamping automobile fenders. Machining by this process became known as Kellering, and the larger machines became a key production factor in both the automobile and the aerospace industries. Keller machines were originally manufactured by the Keller Mechanical Engraving Co., whose name was subsequently changed to the Keller Mechanical Engineering Co. – KME.

The basic principle of the Keller Machine is that a steel die can be made using a fragile model by using a tracer on the model to control the cutter that mills the die. The earliest machines used a direct, pantograph linkage between the two that had to deal with an inherent inconsistency: to avoid damage to the model, pressure on the tracer had to be light, while to cut a steel die, pressure on the cutting head had to be reasonably positive. For the earliest machines, a level of pressure had to be selected that accomplished both goals. For the Keller Machine to become a factor of industrial production, some way had to be found to separate the pressure applied to the model from that applied to the cutting tool.

The Mechanical Tracer
The solution to this problem was the tracer control invented by John C. Shaw (assigned to KME in the patent of 1924). Both tracer and cutter scan back and forth over both model and die. The tracer is motor-driven and uses magnetic clutches to turn the screw drive in and out, and the tracer head is spring loaded and has micro-switches that sense whether or not it is in contact with the model. Impulses from the micro-switches go to a panel where they trip relays that send current to magnetic clutches in the cutting head to make it advance or retreat by exactly the same amount as the tracer with an accuracy on the order of 1/10,000 of an inch. The magnetic relay – an essential component – was invented by Samuel Morse as part of his telegraph a half a century earlier.

In the course of normal business, some of the customers for silverware and forging dies visited the Keller plant in Brooklyn and became interested in the process used in producing the dies. It then followed that some of these customers asked if they could purchase these machines, and, almost without making a conscious effort to do so, the Keller Mechanical Engraving Company became machine tool builders, and along the way changed its name to the Keller Mechanical Engineering Company (KME). The first machine was sold to Crescent Tool Company in 1915, and this order was immediately followed by one for six machines, this time the customer being Remington Arms in Ilion, New York. Shortly thereafter orders for reducing machines (Type D) were received from International Silver Company and other silverware manufacturing companies. It is interesting to note that some machines of this type were still in operation in the late 1950s, and at that time there were customers who were still asking where new machines of this variety could be purchased.

In 1916 John C. Shaw came on the scene. He was trained as a mechanical engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and went into the gas business in 1904 in the days when a gas works was subject to accidental explosions. In order to prevent an operator from opening the wrong valve at the wrong time, Shaw came up with a mechanical-electrical valve control and interlock that took the guesswork out of the business. It was this device that gave him the idea for an electrical machine tool control. To develop this idea, he quit the gas business to work with KME because it had been known for twenty years as a manufacturer of mechanically-controlled automatic die sinkers.

As the size of forging dies increased, it was realized that the Type E machine was no longer sufficient. By 1920 he had completed designs for the first Electric Tracer Control Keller Machine – Type BG 1. The first machine, serial #550, was shipped to the Budd Company in Philadelphia in March 1921, and the second machine was shipped in July of the same year. The BG 1 was quickly made in a number of sizes as orders began to come into the small plant in Brooklyn. Machines larger than 6’ x 4’ were designated BG 2s, and presumably a similar criterion was used for designation of the BG 3. The BG machines were followed by the BL machine, which looked a good deal like the more modern versions, including the latest numeric model. An electric tracer was also developed for the E Type machine, and similar electric controls were developed for use on lathes, planers and other machines.

By the time it was purchased by Pratt & Whitney Company, Inc. of West Hartford, CT (P&W) in 1930, KME had sold and shipped over 4,000 machines. It was soon discovered that after the forging dies had been produced on the Keller Machine, it was necessary to “barber” or “bench” the dies so that they could be used in the presses. Accordingly, a small flexible shaft grinding and finishing machine was developed and named the Kellerflex. It was produced in considerable numbers by P&W.

Along with the Keller machines, KME, and later P&W, produced a wide variety of burrs made of high-speed steel for their use. In a similar manner, it was recognized that nearly all the operations performed on Keller Automatic Milling Machines required the use of either ball nose or radius end mills. It obviously followed that customers using such a machine had to have a quick and convenient way to resharpen and grind their cutters. Recognizing this need, KME brought out the Keller Cutter and Radius Grinder, and modifications of this machine were later sold by P&W as welcome companion pieces for the Keller BL and BG type machines.

Move to Hartford
After Sidney A. Keller sold KME to P&W in 1930, the whole facility was moved from the home plant in Brooklyn, NY to P&W’s facilities in Hartford, CT pending removal to the brand-new plant in West Hartford, CT that was inaugurated on December 5, 1939. Before the P&W purchase of KME, John C. Shaw had been joined by his brother, Robert E. Shaw, and both moved to Hartford with the company together with the top sales and manufacturing personnel. There the Shaw brothers continued to refine and enlarge upon the controls for Keller Machines. It has been pointed out that, had it not been for their contribution to the development of the BG Type Keller machines, it would not have been possible for the automobile industry to make model changes on an annual basis. Without automated machining, it would have simply taken to long to make the necessary large-scale dies.

After the Shaw brothers left the scene, design responsibility for the Keller line passed to J. J. Jaeger, then Chief Engineer and later President of P&W. Two of Sidney A. Keller’s sons joined P&W, Alexander S. Keller as Vice President and Richard D. Keller as head of Sales for the Keller Division. Other members of the original Keller sales force at P&W were Paul Renno and Harry Reichert.

Legacy
An undated KME publication contains “A Representative List of Users of Keller Automatic Tool Room Machines with full Electrical Control (i.e., BL or BG 1 or larger),” that shows the location of some 160 machines. Of these, 88 are in the hands of automobile industry entities, of which Ford alone has 16. It is also interesting to note that 25 had been sold to companies outside the U.S., mainly Germany.

Once it entered into commercial use, the Keller Machine transformed other industries. One clear example is the automobile industry, where it used to take an entire year to make new stamping dies for auto body parts such as fenders. Car models could therefore only be changed very slowly. Using Keller Machines, model designs could be changed every year. It is no surprise that Ford Motors was one of the two biggest purchasers of Keller Machines. The other was Boeing.