Bridgeport is a brand of milling machines and machining centers, which are machine tools used in the machining industries. The brand was produced by Bridgeport Machines, Inc. from 1938 until 2004, when it was acquired by Hardinge, Inc., its current owner. Hardinge is a multinational corporation whose machine tool brands include Hardinge, Bridgeport, Kellenberger, Hauser, Tripet, and Tschudin. It has currently subsidiaries in England, Germany, Switzerland, China, and Taiwan, ROC.
The original corporation was founded in Bridgeport, Connecticut and started selling its machines in 1938. It became famous in the following decades for these small- and medium-sized vertical milling machines, with their iconic form of a quill-equipped multiple-speed vertical milling head with a ram-on-turret mounting over a knee-and-column base. The American Precision Museum's biography of Rudolph Bannow[1] reports that he conceived the iconic design in 1936 as the logical machine on which to mount the milling head already being built by the Bridgeport Pattern and Model Works (which he owned with partner Magnus Wahlstrom). The first Bridgeport milling machine (serial number 1) is on display at the Museum.[2]
Bridgeport's manual milling machines have been so successful and ubiquitous that, within the machining industries and among hobbyists, the Bridgeport is an archetypical example of that class of machine, and the term "Bridgeport" is often used to refer to any vertical milling machine of the same configuration, regardless of make. Many other companies have cloned the form. Today the Bridgeport brand still produces this configuration in both manual and CNC versions, although tool-changer-equipped machining centers are now equally prominent members of the product line.