Charles Hotchkiss Norton (November 23, 1851, Plainville, Connecticut – October 27, 1942, Plainville, Connecticut) was an American mechanical engineer and designer of machine tools.
[1] After working for the Seth Thomas Clock company in Thomaston, in 1886 Norton became Assistant Engineer with the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company at Providence, Rhode Island, redesigning their universal grinding machine.
In 1890 he became a partner in the newly established Leland, Faulconer & Norton Company at Detroit, Michigan, designing and constructing machine tools.
Returning to Brown & Sharpe in 1896, he designed a grinding machine with larger and heavier grinding wheels, capable of supplying machine parts for the emerging automobile industry.
On April 8, 1925, he was a recipient of The John Scott Medal and Premium for his invention of "accurate grinding devices of high power".