Ciceri Smith was a quality-driven manufacturer. He made wire mesh at his plant in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he wanted to improve quality by providing his workers with a micrometer that they could easily read. What he wanted was a micrometer on which his workers could read the numbers and not have to count numbers and lines, but there wasn't such a micrometer on the market. So he invented one.
Smith designed what is believed to be the world's first "digital" micrometer, and received a patent sometime between 1890 and 1893, according Dr. Victoria Beauchamp, a Mitutoyo-funded researcher for The Hawley Collection, University of Sheffield (Sheffield, England). The device, which was not electric as today's digital tools are, used a mechanical display that showed inch measurements three ways: 10ths, 100ths and 1,000ths. It allowed his workers to quickly and accurately take measurements.