The high standard of living in the developed countries owes much to mechanical engineering. The mechanical engineer invents machines to produce goods and develops machine tools of increasing accuracy and complexity to build the machines.
The principal lines of development of machinery have been an increase in the speed of operation to obtain high rates of production, improvement in accuracy to obtain quality and economy in the product, and minimization of operating costs. These three requirements have led to the evolution of complex control systems.
The most successful production machinery is that in which the mechanical design of the machine is closely integrated with the control system. A modern transfer (conveyor) line for the manufacture of automobile engines is a good example of the mechanization of a complex series of manufacturing processes. Developments are in hand to automate production machinery further, using computers to store and process the vast amount of data required for manufacturing a variety of components with a small number of versatile machine tools.