Leonard Bailey and his Woodworking Planes

Book excerpt: New Englander Leonard Baileywas one of the inventive geniuses of the American Industrial Revolution. His designs and patented inventions solved problems with woodworking planes that had plagued craftsmen for centuries. His planes allowed woodworkers to transition from the age of wooden carpenter’s planes to modern, metallic, fully adjustable planes suitable for any kind of woodworking. His plane designs are still in use throughout the world and are essentially unchanged from the planes he first made in the 1860’s. He deserves more credit than he has received among America’s great inventors. This book covers the thirty-two-year period in Leonard Bailey’s life between 1852 when he began inventing, making and selling woodworking tools in Winchester, Massachusetts, through his years at the Stanley Rule & Level Company from 1869–1874, and ends in 1884 when he worked in Hartford, Connecticut, and sold his Victor Tool business to the Stanley Rule & Level Company.