author

Franklin Day Jones

1879–1967

Best known as a founding co-author of Machinery’s Handbook, he helped turn dense mechanical know-how into practical guidance that generations of machinists and engineers could actually use.

1 Audiobook

Turning and Boring A specialized treatise for machinists, students in the industrial and engineering schools, and apprentices, on turning and boring methods, including modern practice with engine lathes, turret lathes, vertical and horizontal boring machines

Turning and Boring A specialized treatise for machinists, students in the industrial and engineering schools, and apprentices, on turning and boring methods, including modern practice with engine lathes, turret lathes, vertical and horizontal boring machines

by Franklin Day Jones

About the author

Franklin Day Jones was an American technical writer and engineering author whose work focused on mechanical engineering and toolmaking. He is most closely associated with the first edition of Machinery’s Handbook, published in 1914 with engineer Erik Oberg, a reference that became a long-running standard for machinists, draftsmen, and engineers.

His books and manuals centered on practical shop problems, including mechanisms, jigs and fixtures, thread cutting, and other everyday manufacturing topics. That practical bent is a big part of why his writing endured: it was aimed less at abstract theory than at helping working engineers and machinists solve real problems.

Although readily available biographical detail about his personal life appears limited in the sources reviewed, his professional legacy is clear. Jones remains remembered as one of the early authors who helped organize industrial knowledge into clear, usable form for the machine age.