imperfections, and of working plates in sets of three to guarantee flatness by avoiding matching concave and convex pairs. Joseph Whitworth, born in 1803, had been an apprentice with Maudslay from 1825 but had left by the time he started his own business in 1833. He described this process to the British Association in 1840 in his paper "On producing True Planes or Surfaces on Metals"—as he related during his chairman's address in 1856 at the inaugural meeting of the British Institute of Mechanical Engineers in Glasgow. His 1840 paper, and his past work for Maudslay, has led to some writers claiming Whitworth as the originator of the surface plate scraping technique, not Maudslay. Plate material Granite Before the Second World War, metal was the standard material used for surface plates, however, the war efforts of various countries put a strain on the availability of metal. A monument and metal shop owner (Wallace Herman) in Dayton, Ohio, along with his inventive employee Donald V. Porter, started using granite in place of metal for his surface plates. Today most surface plates continue to be made of black granite, more accurately referred to as black diabase, with the more wear-resistant surface plates being made of quartz-bearing granite. The quartz content of these granite surface plates increases the wear resistance of the plate as quartz is a harder stone. Black granite is dominantly used in machine bases, granite accessories, and custom applications for its superior stiffness, excellent vibration damping, and improved machinability. Quartz-bearing granite (usually pink, white, or grey) is often made thicker than black granite to provide equal load-bearing capabilities of the types of material used for surface plates, as it is not as stiff as black granite. Damage to a granite surface plate will usually result in a chip but does not affect the accuracy of the overall plane. Even though it is chipped, another flat surface can still make contact with the undamaged portion of a chipped surface plate, whereas damage to a cast-iron plate often raises the surrounding material above the working plane causing inspected objects to no longer sit parallel to the surface plate. Granite is also inherently stable, is non-magnetic, has excellent vibration damping characteristics, and will not rust. On 3 August 1961, Federal Specification GGG-P-463B was issued to provide requirements in United States customary units for igneous rock (granite) surface plates for use in precision locating