Andy Ashburn was born in Winston-Salem, NC and spent his entire career writing for and about America’s durable goods, manufacturing industries merged technology with citizenship. One infamous writing in the American Machinist magazine’s 100th Anniversary edition traced manufacturing technique from the birth of the “American System” of interchangeable parts through mass production to modern robotics, becoming a basic text for several college courses on the history of technology.

Ambitious projects were the Ashburn style, devoting a special issue of the already-influential American Machinist Magazine to the role for industry in dealing with the hard core unemployed. This issue won the 1969 National Magazine Award. The first of four awards for the magazine. After retiring from McGraw-Hill Publications in 1987, Ashburn remained active in the manufacturing industry, writing monthly columns for a German newspaper and guest editorials in American Machinist.