 In 1910 , he moved to Springfield , Vermont to work as a mechanical engineer for the Fellows Gear Shaper Company . He was already friendly with James Hartness , the president of the Jones & Lamson Machine Company ( J & L ) , another company in town . In 1911 , Flanders married Hartness ' daughter , Helen . Shortly afterwards , Hartness hired Flanders as a manager of the department at J & L that built the Fay automatic lathe . Flanders redesigned that lathe to achieve higher productivity and accuracy . He became a director in 1912 and president of the company in 1933 after Hartness retired . As president of J & L , Flanders implemented a continuous production line to manufacture the Hartness Turret Lathe instead of building each machine individually , attempting to bring some of the efficiencies of mass production to machine tool building . By 1923 , he had acquired and assigned more than twenty patents to J & L. 
