Originally Posted by
grumpus
I've seen it suggested that after WWII Italy received American machine tools to help with economic recovery, and they were not capable of cutting metric threads.
That's hilarious, I actually had a picture in my brain of an old South Bend, no metric, but hadn't put together the connection. That's not out of the realm of possibility. And if not from the USA, British machine tools. But USA machine tool production was going gangbusters.
I can't count the number of USA machine tool builders that no longer exist. Most named after the city where they started.