How It All Started

My family company, Cadillac Machinery, was a used machinery dealer specializing gear machinery, especially bevel gear equipment, so we knew first-hand how unique and sometimes insular the gear industry was. As a member of AGMA, I often attended AGMA events, including the Fall Technical Meeting, where tremendous knowledge was presented, year after year, about the latest research, technology and manufacturing approaches for gears.

And there were other technical conferences. Companies would send their top gear engineers to these conferences to learn as much as possible from technical experts around the world. They would hear the presentations and come home with a binder full of technical papers. The engineer would take that binder back to the office, put it up on a shelf, and catch up on all the work that accumulated while he was gone. He knew what was in those binders, but no one else did.

Back in the early 1980s it occurred to me that the information in those binders could benefit far more people if it were more widely disseminated. There were other trade publications at the time, of course—but nothing so highly focused or technically oriented as what the gear industry needed.

The original purpose of the magazine was nothing more than a mission to educate the community. If all we ever did was republish some of those technical papers and share them to a wider audience, we’d be doing a great service to the gear industry.

The idea was met with extreme enthusiasm. My good friend David Goodfellow, then president of American Pfauter, pledged his support on the spot and became our very first advertiser. Other suppliers were equally enthusiastic and eager to join the project, including Klingelnberg, Starcut Sales, Liebherr and Gleason, all of whom advertised in that very first issue, May/June 1984.

Clearly, there was a hunger for this type of information. From the beginning, response from our readers has been enthusiastic and supportive.

Over the years, our content grew beyond technical papers. We added news, back-to-basics, in-depth feature articles and analysis of trends. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, or when we took on the moniker, but we became “The Gear Industry’s Information Source.” All the while, though, our mission of being the industry’s educational resource never changed.

I remember Marty Woodhouse, then sales manager at Star Cutter, telling me he was sitting in the lobby of a gear company in the middle of China, where no one spooke English. He happened to be there when the mail was delivered, and sure enough, there was a copy of Gear Technology. He told me then, for sure, that he knew Gear Technology could be found wherever gears were manufactured or engineered.

I can’t tell you how many engineers have told me they have kept every single issue. In my time at Cadillac Machinery, and later Goldstein Gear Machinery, I had the opportunity to visit many gear plants, and they were often proud to open up a closet or point to the shelf where they kept their personal Gear Technology library.

In the old days, nothing was digitized. We printed the magazines using plates and film. So we hired a firm to scan everything. We employed the teenage children of some of our staff members to help us break up those scans into articles and import everything into a database. I remember spending my vacations—not just basking in the sun, but sitting on the beach with my laptop adding keywords to all those articles. Creating that digital library is one of the projects I’m most proud of from my career.

Of course, today that library is available online to anyone who needs it. Every issue and every article from 1984 until today is part of the Michael Goldstein Gear Technology Library. My vision of taking that information out of those binders on the shelf and spreading it out to the world has come true, and now the world’s greatest collection of gear knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection.

Gear Technology is unique: started by a gear industry insider, read by gear industry professionals around the world, now published by AGMA, the gear industry’s association. Anything else is a poor example of a “wannabe.”

Although I retired at the end of 2019, I am very happy to see that the legacy safely continues under the auspices of the AGMA. From what I can see, it looks like Gear Technology is in good hands for at least the next 40 years.