John T. Parsons

John Thoren Parsons (born October 11, 1913 in Detroit , Michigan , † April 19, 2007 in Traverse City , Michigan) was an American inventor of numerically controlled machine tools ( numerical control ).

Parsons had Swedish immigrants as ancestors. He was in the Propeller Lab of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (responsible for helicopter rotor blades) in the 1940s when he and his employee Frank L. Stulen developed techniques for manufacturing helicopter rotor blades and other machine parts with numerically controlled machines. At that time, however, the settings of the machine tools were still made by humans, only the interpolation of the rotor outlines and the resulting manufacturing steps were calculated on the computer. In 1948 he founded his own company Parsons Corporation in Traverse City. In cooperation with IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (laboratory for servomechanisms by Gordon S. Brown), a fully automatic control of the machines was then developed, which was later followed by its own programming language (Automatic Programming Tool, APT). The prototype was presented in 1952. A patent filed in 1952 was granted to Parsons in 1958. The licenses saved his company from running out of development costs, and eventually he sold the rights to Bendix Corporation in 1955 . His company became the world's largest manufacturer of helicopter blades and had factories in Detroit and Stockton . His factory also made the fuel tanks for the Saturn booster rockets .

In 1993 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame . In 1985 he received the National Medal of Technology with Stulen . In 1989 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan and in 1997 from Lake Superior State University . In 1982 he received the Founders Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and in 1968 the first Joseph Marie Jacquard Award from the Numerical Control Society.

Web links

• Biography at Computer Pioneers
• obituary
• Invention of CNC machines