CHAPTER XIV.
METALLURGY.
“Nigh on the plain, in many cells prepared,
That underneath had veins of liquid fire
Sluiced from the lake, a second multitude
With wondrous art founded the massy ore;
Severing each kind, and scumm’d the bullion dross;
A third as soon had formed within the ground
A various mould, and from the boiling cells
By strange conveyance fill’d each hollow nook;
As in an organ, from one blast of wind,
To many a row of pipes the sound board breathes.”
—Paradise Lost.
Ever since those perished races of men who left no other record but that engraven in rude emblems on the rocks, or no other signs of their existence but in the broken tools found buried deep among the solid leaves of the crusted earth, ever since Tubal Cain became “an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron,” the art of smelting has been known. The stone age flourished with implements furnished ready-made by nature, or needing little shaping for their use, but the ages of metal which followed required the aid of fire directed by the hand of man to provide the tool of iron or bronze.
The Greeks claimed that the discovery of iron was theirs, and was made at the burning of a forest on the mountains of Ida in Crete, about 1500 B. C., when the ore contained in the rocks or soil on which the forest stood was melted, cleansed of its impurities, and then collected and hammered. Archeologists have deprived the Greeks of this gift, and carried back its origin to remoter ages and localities.
Man first discovered by observation or accident that certain stones were melted or softened by fire, and that the product could be hammered and shaped. They learned by experience that the melting could be done more effectually when the fuel and the ore were mixed and enclosed by a wall of stone; that the fire and heat could be alone started and maintained by blowing air into the fuel—and they constructed a rude bellows for this purpose. Finding that the melted metal sank through the mass of consumed fuel, they constructed a stone hearth on which to receive it. Thus were the first crude furnace and hearth invented.
As to gold, silver and lead, they doubtless were found first in their native state and mixed with other ores and were hammered into the desired shapes with the hardest stone implements.
That copper and tin combined would make bronze was a more complex proceeding and probably followed instead of preceding, as has sometimes been alleged, the making of iron tools. That bronze relics were found apparently of anterior manufacture to any made of iron, was doubtless due to the destruction of the iron by that great consumer—oxygen.
What was very anciently called “brass” was no doubt gold-coloured copper; for what is modernly known as brass was not made until after the discovery of zinc in the 16th century and its combination with copper.
Among the “lost arts” re-discovered in later ages are those which supplied the earliest cities with ornamented vessels of gold and copper, swords of steel that bent and sprung like whalebones, castings that had known no tool to shape their contour and embellishments, and monuments and tablets of steel and brass which excite the wonder and admiration of the best “artificers in brass and iron” of the present day.
To understand and appreciate the advancements that have been made in metallurgy in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to know, in outline at least, what before had been developed.
The earliest form of a smelting furnace of historic days, such as used by the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and probably by the Hindoos and other ancient peoples, and still used in Asia, is thus described by Dr. Ure:
“The furnace or bloomary in which the ore is smelted is from 4 to 5 feet high; it is somewhat pear-shaped, being about 5 feet wide at bottom and 1 at top. It is built entirely of clay. There is an opening in front about a foot or more in height which is filled with clay at the commencement, and broken down at the end of each smelting operation. The bellows are usually made of two goatskins with bamboo nozzles, which are inserted into tubes of clay that pass into the furnace. The furnace is filled with charcoal, and a lighted coal being introduced before the nozzle, the mass in the interior is soon kindled. As soon as this is accomplished, a small portion of the ore previously moistened with water to prevent it from running through the charcoal, but without any flux whatever, is laid on top of the coals, and covered with charcoal to fill up the furnace. In this manner ore and fuel are supplied and the bellows urged for three or four hours. When the process is stopped and the temporary wall in front broken down the bloom is removed with a pair of tongs from the bottom of the furnace.”
This smelting was then followed by hammering to further separate the slag, and probably after a reheating to increase the malleability.
It will be noticed that in this earliest process pure carbon was used as a fuel, and a blast of air to keep the fire at a great heat was employed. To what extent this carbon and air blast, and the mixing and remixing with other ingredients, and reheating and rehammering, may have been employed in various instances to modify the conditions and render the metal malleable and more or less like modern steel, is not known, but that an excellent quality of iron resembling modern steel was often produced by this simple mode of manufacture by different peoples, is undoubtedly the fact. Steel after all is iron with a little more carbon in it than in the usual iron in the smelting furnace, to render it harder, and a little less carbon than in cast or moulded iron to render it malleable, and in both conditions was produced from time immemorial, either by accident or design.
It was with such a furnace probably that India produced her keen-edged weapons that would cut a web of gossamer, and Damascus its flashing blades—the synonym of elastic strength.
Africa, when its most barbarous tribes were first discovered, was making various useful articles of iron. Its earliest modes of manufacture were doubtless still followed when Dr. Livingstone explored the interior, as they now also are. He thus describes their furnaces and iron: “At every third or fourth village (in the regions near Lake Nyassa) we saw a kiln-looking structure, about 6 feet high and 2½ feet in diameter. It is a clay fire-hardened furnace for smelting iron. No flux is used, whether with specular iron, the yellow hematite, or magnetic ore, and yet capital metal is produced. Native manufactured iron is so good that the natives declare English iron “rotten” in comparison, and specimens of African hoes were pronounced at Birmingham nearly equal to the best Swedish iron.” The natives of India, the Hottentots, the early Britons, the Chinese, the savages of North and South America, as discovery or research brought their labours to light, or uncovered the monuments of their earliest life, were shown to be acquainted with similar simple forms of smelting furnaces.
Early Spain produced a furnace which was adopted by the whole of Europe as fast as it became known. It was the Catalan furnace, so named from the province of Catalonia, where it probably first originated, and it is still so known and extensively used. “It consists of a four-sided cavity or hearth, which is always placed within a building and separated from the main wall thereof by a thinner interior wall, which in part constitutes one side of the furnace. The blast pipe comes through the wall, and enters the fire through a flue which slants downward. The bottom is formed of a refractory stone, which is renewable. The furnace has no chimneys. The blast is produced by means of a fall of water usually from 22 to 27 feet high, through a rectangular tube, into a rectangular cistern below, to whose upper part the blast pipe is connected, the water escaping through a pipe below. This apparatus is exterior to the building, and is said to afford a continuous blast of great regularity; the air, when it passes into the furnace, is, however, saturated with moisture.”—Knight.
No doubt in such a heat was formed the metal from which was shaped the armour of Don Quixote and his prototypes.
Bell in his history of Metallurgy tells us that the manufacture of malleable iron must have fallen into decadence in England, especially before the reign of Elizabeth and Charles I., as no furnaces equal even to the Catalan had for a long time been in use; and the architectural iron column found in ancient Delhi, 16 inches in diameter, about 48 feet long and calculated to weigh about 17 tons, could not have been formed by any means known in England in the sixteenth century. This decadence was in part due to the severe laws enacted against the destruction of forests, and most of the iron was then brought to England from Germany and other countries.
From time immemorial the manufacture of iron and steel has been followed in Germany, and that country yet retains pre-eminence in this art both as to mechanical and chemical processes. It was in the eighteenth century that the celebrated Freiberg Mining Academy was founded, the oldest of all existing mining schools; and based on developing mining and metallurgy on scientific lines, it has stood always on the battle line in the fight of progress.
The early smelting furnaces of Germany resembled the Catalan, and were called the “Stückofen,” and in Sweden were known as the “Osmund.” In these very pure iron was made.
The art of making cast iron, which differs from the ordinary smelted iron in the fact that it is melted and then run into moulds, although known among the ancients more than forty centuries ago, as shown by the castings of bronze and brass described by their writers and recovered from their ruins, appears to have been forgotten long before the darkness of the middle ages gathered. There is no record of its practice from the time the elder Pliny described its former use (40-79 A. D.), to the sixteenth century. It is stated that then the lost art was re-invented by Ralph Page and Peter Baude of England in 1543—who in that year made cast-iron in Sussex.
The “Stückofen” furnace above referred to was succeeded in Germany by higher ones called the “Flossofen,” and these were followed by still higher and larger ones called “Blauofen,” so that by the middle of the eighteenth century the furnaces were very capacious, the blast was good, and it had been learned how to supply the furnaces with ore, coal and lime-stone broken into small fragments. The lime was added as a flux, and acted to unite with itself the sand, clay and other impurities to form a slag or scoria. The melted purified iron falling to the bottom was drawn off through a hole tapped in the furnace, and the molten metal ran into channels in a bed of sand called the “Sow and pigs.” Hence the name, “pig iron.”
The smelting of ore by charcoal in those places where carried on extensively required the use of a vast amount of wood, and denuded the surrounding lands of forests. So great was this loss felt that it gave rise to the prohibitory laws and the decadence in England of the manufacture of iron, already alluded to. This turned the attention of iron smelters to coal as a substitute. Patents were granted in England for its use to several unsuccessful inventors. Finally in 1619 Dud Dudley, a graduate of Oxford University, and to whom succeeded his father’s iron furnaces in Worcestershire, obtained a patent and succeeded in producing several tons of iron per week by the use of the pitcoal in a small blast furnace.
This success inflamed the wood owners and the charcoal burners and they destroyed Dudley’s works. He met with other disasters common to worthy inventors and discontinued his efforts to improve the art.
It is said that in 1664 Sir John Winter of England made coke by burning sea coal in closed pots. But this was not followed up, and the use of charcoal and the destruction of the forests went on until 1735, when Abraham Darby of the Coalbrookdale Iron Works at Shropshire, England, commenced to treat the soft pit coal in the same way as wood is treated in producing charcoal. He proposed to burn the coal in a smouldering fire, to expel the sulphur and other impurities existing in the form of phosphorus, hydrogen and oxygen, etc. while saving the carbon. The attempt was successful, and thus coke was made. It was found cheaper and superior to either coal or charcoal, and produced a quicker fire and a greater heat. This was a wonderful discovery, and was preserved as a trade secret for a long time. It was referred to as a curiosity in the Philosophical Transactions in 1747. In fact it was not introduced in America until a century later, when in 1841 the soft coal abounding around Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and in the neighbouring regions of Ohio was thus treated. Even its use then was experimental, and did not become a practical art in the United States until about 1860.
With the invention of coke came also the revival of cast iron.
The process of making cast steel was reinvented in England by Benjamin Huntsman of Attercliff, near Sheffield, about 1740. Between that time and 1770 he practised melting small pieces of “blistered” steel (iron bars which had been carbonised by smelting in charcoal) in closed clay crucibles.
In 1784 Henry Cort of England introduced the puddling process and grooved rolls. Puddling had been invented, but not successfully used before. The term “puddling” originated in the covering of the hearth of stones at the bottom of the furnace with clay, which was made plastic by mixing the clay in a puddle of water; and on which hearth the ore when melted is received. When in this melted condition Cort and others found that the metal was greatly improved by stirring it with a long iron bar called a “rabble,” and which was introduced through an opening in the furnace. This stirring admitted air to the mass and the oxygen consumed and expelled the carbon, silicon, and other impurities. The process was subsequently aided by the introduction of pig iron broken into pieces and mixed with hammer-slag, cinder, and ore. The mass is stirred from side to side of the furnace until it comes to a boiling point, when the stirring is increased in quickness and violence until a pasty round mass is collected by the puddler. As showing the value of Cort’s discovery and the hard experience inventors sometimes have, Fairbairn states that Cort “expended a fortune of upward of £20,000 in perfecting his invention for puddling iron and rolling it into bars and plates; that he was robbed of the fruits of his discoveries by the villainy of officials in a high department of the government; and that he was ultimately left to starve by the apathy and selfishness of an ungrateful country. His inventions conferred an amount of wealth on the country equivalent to £600,000,000, and have given employment to 600,000 of the working population of our land for the last three or four generations.” This process of puddling lasted for about an hour and a half and entailed extremely severe labour on the workman.
The invention of mechanical puddlers, hereinafter referred to, consisting chiefly of rotating furnaces, were among the beneficent developments of the nineteenth century.
Prior to Cort’s time the plastic lump or ball of metal taken from the furnace was generally beaten by hammers, but Cort’s grooved rollers pressed out the mass into sheets.
The improvements of the steam engine by Watt greatly extended the manufacture of iron toward the close of the 18th century, as powerful air blasts were obtained by the use of such engines in place of the blowers worked by man, the horse, or the ox.
So far as the art of refining the precious metals is concerned, as well as copper, tin and iron, it had not, previous to this century, proceeded much beyond the methods described in the most ancient writings; and these included the refining in furnaces, pots, and covered crucibles, and alloying, or the mixture and fusion with other metals. Furnaces to hold the crucibles, and made of iron cylinders lined with fire brick, whereby the crucibles were subjected to greater heat, were also known.
The amalgamating process was also known to the ancients, and Vitruvius (B. C. 27) and Pliny (A. D. 79), describe how mercury was used for separating gold from its impurities. Its use at gold and silver mines was renewed extensively in the sixteenth century.
Thus we find that the eighteenth century closed with the knowledge of the smelting furnaces of various kinds, of coke as a fuel in place of charcoal, of furious air blasts driven by steam and other power, of cast iron and cast steel, and of refining, amalgamating, and compounding processes.
Looking back, now, from the threshold of the nineteenth century over the path we have thus traced, it will be seen that what had been accomplished in metallurgy was the result of the use of ready means tested by prolonged trials, of experiments more or less lucky in fields in which men were groping, of inventions without the knowledge of the real properties of the materials with which inventors were working or of the unvarying laws which govern their operations. They had accomplished much, but it was the work mainly of empirics. The art preceding the nineteenth century compared with what followed is the difference between experience simply, and experience when combined with hard thinking, which is thus stated by Herschel: “Art is the application of knowledge to a practical end. If the knowledge be merely accumulated experience the art is empirical; but if it is experience reasoned upon and brought under general principles it assumes a higher character and becomes a scientific art.”
With the developments, discoveries and inventions in the lines of steam, chemistry and electricity, as elsewhere told, the impetus they gave to the exercise of brain force in every field of nature at the outset of the century, and with their practical aid, the art of metallurgy soon began to expand to greater usefulness, and finally to its present wonderful domain.
The subject of metallurgy in this century soon became scientifically treated and its operations classified.
Thus the physical character and metallic constituents of ores received the first consideration; then the proper treatment to which the ores were to be subjected for the purpose of extracting the metal—which are either mechanical or chemical. The mechanical processes designed to separate the ore from its enclosing rock or other superfluous earthy matter called gangue became known as ore dressing and ore concentrating. These included mills with rollers, and stamps operated by gravity, or steam, for breaking up the ore rocks; abrasion apparatus for comminuting the ore by rubbing the pieces of ore under pressure; and smelting, or an equivalent process, for melting the ore and driving off the impurities by heat, etc. The chemical processes are those by which the metal, whatever it may be, is either dissolved or separated from other constituents by either the application to the ore of certain metallic solutions of certain acids, or by the fusion of different ores or metals in substantially the old styles of furnaces; or its precipitation by amalgamating, or by electrolysis—the art of decomposing metals by electricity.
In the early decades of the century, by the help of chemistry and physics, the nature of heat, carbon, and oxygen, and the great affinity iron has for oxygen, became better known; and particularly how in the making of iron its behaviour is influenced by the presence of carbon and other foreign constituents; also how necessary to its perfect separation was the proper elimination of the oxygen and carbon. The use of manganese and other highly oxidisable metals for this purpose was discovered.
Among the earliest most notable inventions in the century, in the manufacture of iron, was that of Samuel B. Rogers of Glamorganshire, Wales, who invented the iron floor for furnaces with a refractory lining—a great improvement on Cort’s sand floor, which gave too much silicon to the iron; and the hot air blast by Neilson of Glasgow, Scotland, patented in 1828. The latter consisted in the use of heated air as the blast instead of cold air—whereby ignition of the fuel was quickened, intensity of the heat and the expulsion of oxygen and carbon from the iron increased, and the operation shortened and improved in every way. The patent was infringed and assailed, but finally sustained by the highest courts of England. It produced an immense forward stride in the amount and quality of iron manufactured.
By the introduction of the hot air blast it became practicable to use the hard anthracite coal as a fuel where such coal abounded; and to use pig iron, scrap iron, and refractory ore and metals with the fuel to produce particular results. Furnaces were enlarged to colossal dimensions, some being a hundred feet high and capable of yielding 80 or 100 tons of metal per day.
The forms of furnaces and means for lining and cooling the hearth and adjacent parts have received great attention.
The discovery that the flame escaping from the throat of the blast furnace was nothing else than burning carbon led Faber du Faur at Wasseralfugen in 1837 to invent the successful and highly valuable method of utilising the unburnt gas from the blast furnace for heating purposes, and to heat the blast itself, and drive the steam engine that blew the blast into the furnace, without the consumption of additional fuel. This also led to the invention of separate gas producers. Bunsen in 1838 made his first experiments at Hesse in collecting the gases from various parts of the furnace, revealing their composition and showing their adaptability for various purposes. Thus, from a scientific knowledge of the constituents of ores and of furnace gases, calculations could be made in advance as to the materials required to make pig iron, cast iron, and steel of particular qualities.
In the process of puddling difficulty had been experienced in handling the bloom or ball after it was formed in the furnace. A sort of squeezing apparatus, or tongs, called the alligator, had been employed.
In 1840 Henry Burden of America invented and patented a method and means for treating these balls, whereby the same were taken directly from the furnace and passed between two plain converging metal surfaces, by which the balls were gradually but quickly pressed and squeezed into a cylindrical form, while a large portion of the cinders and other foreign impurities were pressed out.
We have described how by Cort’s puddling process tremendous labour was imposed on the workmen in stirring the molten metal by hand with “rabbles.” A number of mechanical puddlers were invented to take the place of these hand means, but the most important invention in this direction was the revolving puddlers of Beadlestone, patented in 1857 in England, and of Heaton, Allen and Yates, in 1867-68. The most successful, however, was that of Danks of the United States in 1868-69. The Danks rotary puddler is a barrel-shaped, refractory lined vessel, having a chamber and fire grate and rotated by steam, into which pig iron formed by the ordinary blast furnaces, and then pulverised, is placed, with the fuel. Molten metal from the furnace is then run in, which together with the fuel is then subjected to a strong blast. Successive charges may be made, and at the proper time the puddler is rotated, slowly at some stages and faster at others, until the operation is completed. A much more thorough and satisfactory result in the production of a pure malleable iron is thus obtained than is possible by hand puddling.
But the greatest improvements in puddling, and in the production of steel from iron, and which have produced greater commercial results than any other inventions of the century relating to metallurgy, were the inventions of Henry Bessemer of Hertfordshire, England, from 1855 to 1860. In place of the puddling “rabbles” to stir the molten metal, or matte, as it is called, while the air blast enters to oxidise it, he first introduced the molten metal from the furnace into an immense egg-shaped vessel lined with quartzose, and hung in an inclined position on trunnions, or melted the metal in such vessel, and then dividing the air blast into streams forced with great pressure each separate stream through an opening in the bottom of the vessel into the molten mass, thus making each stream of driven air a rabble; and they together blew and lifted the white mass into a huge, surging, sun-bright fountain. The effect of this was to burn out the impurities, silicon, carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus, leaving the mass a pure soft iron. If steel was wanted a small amount of carbon, usually in the form of spiegeleisen, was introduced into the converter before the process was complete.
A. L. Holley of the United States improved the Bessemer apparatus by enabling a greater number of charges to be converted into steel within a given time.
Sir Henry Bessemer has lived to gain great fortunes by his inventions, to see them afford new fields of labour for armies of men, and to increase the riches of nations, from whom he has received deserved honours.
The Bessemer process led to renewed investigations and discoveries as to heat and its utilisation, the constituents of different metals and their decomposition, and as to the parts played by carbon, silicon, and phosphorus. The carbon introduced by the charge of pig iron in the Bessemer process was at first supposed to be necessary to produce the greatest heat, but this was found to be a mistake; and phosphorus, which had been regarded as a great enemy of iron, to be eliminated in every way, was found to be a valuable constituent, and was retained or added to make phosphorus steel.
The Bessemer process has been modified in various ways: by changing the mode of introducing the blast from the bottom of the converter to the sides thereof, and admitting the blast more slowly at certain stages; by changing the character of the pig iron and fuel to be treated; and by changing the shape and operation of the converters, making them cylindrical and rotary, for instance.
The Bessemer process is now largely used in treating copper. By this method the blowing through the molten metal of a blast of air largely removes sulphur and other impurities.
The principles of reduction by the old style furnaces and methods we have described have been revived and combined with improvements. For instance, the old Catalan style of furnace has been retained to smelt the iron, but in one method the iron is withdrawn before it is reduced completely and introduced into another furnace, where, mixed with further reducing ingredients, a better result by far is produced with less labour.
It would be a long list that would name the modern discoverers and inventors of the century in the manufacture of iron and steel. But eminent in the list, in addition to Davy and Bessemer, and others already mentioned, are Mushet, Sir L. Bell, Percy, Blomfield, Beasley, Giers and Snellus of England; Martin, Chennot, Du Motay, Pernot and Gruner of France; Lohage, Dr. C. L. Siemens and Höpfer of Germany; Prof Sarnstrom and Akerman of Sweden; Turner of Austria; and Holley, Slade, Blair, Jones, Sellers, Clapp, Griffiths and Eames of the United States.
Some of the new metals discovered in the last century have in this century been combined with iron to make harder steel. Thus we have nickel, chromium, and tungsten steel. Processes for hardening steel, as the “Harveyized” steel, have given rise to a contest between “irresistible” projectiles and “impenetrable” armour plate.
If there are some who regard modern discoveries and inventions in iron and steel as lessening the number of workmen and cheapening the product too much, thus causing trouble due to labour-saving machinery, let them glance, among other great works in the world, at Krupp’s at Essen, where on January 1st, 1899, 41,750 persons were employed, and at which works during the previous year 1,199,610 tons of coal and coke were consumed, or about 4000 tons daily. Workers in iron will not be out of employment in the United States, where 16,000,000 tons of coke are produced annually, 196,405,953 tons of coal mined, 11,000,000 tons of pig iron and about 9,000,000 tons of steel made. The increase of population within the last hundred years bears no comparison with this enormous increase in iron and fuel. It shows that as inventions multiply, so does the demand for their better and cheaper products increase.
As the other metals, gold, silver, copper and lead often occur together, and in the same deposits with iron, the same general modes of treatment to extract them are often applied. These are known as the dry and the wet methods, and electro-reduction.
Ever since Mammon bowed his head in search for gold, every means that the mind of man could suggest to obtain it have been tried, but the devices of this century have been more numerous and more successful than any before. The ancient methods of simply melting and “skimming the bullion dross” have been superseded. Modern methods may be divided into two general classes, the mechanical and the chemical. Of the former methods, when gold was found loose in sand or gravel, washing was the earliest and most universally practised, and was called panning. In this method mercury is often used to take up and secure the fine gold. Rockers like a child’s cradle, into which the dirt is shovelled and washed over retaining riffles, were used; coarse-haired blankets and hides; sluices and separators, with or without quicksilver linings to catch the gold; and powerful streams of water worked by compressed air to tear down the banks. Where water could not be obtained the ore and soil were pulverised and dried, and then thrown against the wind or a blast of air, and the heavier gold, falling before the lighter dust, was caught on hides or blankets. For the crushing of the quartz in which gold was found, innumerable inventions in stamp mills, rollers, crushers, abraders, pulverisers and amalgamators have been invented; and so with roasters, and furnaces, and crucibles to melt the precious metal, separate the remaining impurities and convert it to use.
As to chemical methods for the precious metals, the process of lixiviation, or leaching, by which the ore is washed out by a solution of potash, or with dilute sulphuric acid, or boiling with concentrated sulphuric acid, is quite modern. About 1889 came out the great cyanide process, also known as the MacArthur-Forrest process (they being the first to obtain patents and introduce the invention), consisting of the use of cyanide potassium in solution, which dissolves the gold, and which is then precipitated by the employment of zinc. This process is best adapted to what are known as free milling or porous ores, where the gold is free and very fine and is attracted readily by mercury.
In 1807, Sir Humphry Davy discovered the metal potassium by subjecting moistened potash to the action of a powerful voltaic battery; the positive pole gave off oxygen and the metallic globules of pure potassium appeared at the negative pole. It is never found uncombined in nature. Now if potassium is heated in cyanogen gas (a gas procured by heating mercury) or obtained on a large scale by the decomposition of yellow prussiate of potash, a white crystalline body very soluble in water, and exceedingly poisonous, is obtained. When gold, for instance, obtained by pulverising the ore, or found free in sand, is treated to such a solution it is dissolved from its surrounding constituents and precipitated by the zinc, as before stated.
Chlorine is another metal discovered by Scheele in 1774, but not known as an elementary element until so established by Davy’s investigations in 1810, when he gave it the name it now bears, from the Greek chloras, yellowish green. It is found abundantly in the mineral world in combination with common salt. Now it was found that chlorine is one of the most energetic of bodies, surpassing even oxygen under some circumstances, and that a chlorine solution will readily dissolve gold.
These, the cyanide and chlorination processes, have almost entirely superseded the old washing and amalgamating methods of treating free gold—and the cyanide seems to be now taking the lead.
Alloys.—The art of fusing different metals to make new compounds, although always practised, has been greatly advanced by the discoverers and inventors of the century. As we have seen, amalgamating to extract gold and silver, and the making of bronze from tin and copper were very early followed. One of the most notable and useful of modern inventions or improvements of the kind was that of Isaac Babbitt of Boston in 1839, who in that year obtained patents for what ever since has been known as “babbitting.” The great and undesirable friction produced by the rubbing of the ends of journals and shafts in their bearings of the same metal, cast or wrought iron, amounting to one-fifth of the amount of power exerted to turn them, had long been experienced. Lubricants of all kinds had been and are used; but Babbitt’s invention was an anti-friction metal. It is composed of tin, antimony, and copper, and although the proportions and ingredients have since been varied, the whole art is still known as babbitting.
Other successful alloys have been made for gun metal, sheathing of ships, horseshoes, organ pipes, plough shares, roofing, eyelets, projectiles, faucets, and many and various articles of hardware, ornamental ware, and jewelry.
Valuable metals, such as were not always rare or scarce, but very hard to reduce, have been rendered far less in cost of production and more extensive in use by modern processes. Thus, aluminium, an abundant element in rocks and clay, discovered by the German chemist Wöhler, in 1827, a precious metal, so light, bright, and tough, non-oxidizing, harder than zinc, more sonorous than silver, malleable and ductile as iron, and more tenacious, has been brought to the front from an expensive and mere laboratory production to common and useful purposes in all the arts by the processes commencing in 1854 with that of St. Clair Deoville, of France, followed by those of H. Rose, Morin, Castner, Tissier, Hall, and others.
Electro-metallurgy, so far, has chiefly to do with the decomposition of metals by the electric current, and the production of very high temperatures for furnaces, by which the most refractory ores, metals, and other substances may be melted, and results produced not obtainable in any other way. By placing certain mixtures of carbon and sand, or of carbon and clay, between the terminals of a powerful current, a material resembling diamonds, but harder, has been produced. It has been named carbonundrum. The production of diamonds themselves is looked for. Steel wire is now tempered and annealed by electricity, as well as welding done, of which mention further on will be made.
Thus we have seen how the birth of ideas of former generations has given rise in the present age to children of a larger growth. Arts have grown only as machinery for the accomplishment of their objects has developed, and machinery has waited on the development of the metals composing it. The civilisation of to-day would not have been possible if the successors of Tubal Cain had not been like him, instructors “of every artificer in brass and iron.”
CHAPTER XV.
METAL WORKING.
We referred in the last chapter to the fact that metal when it came from the melting and puddling furnace was formerly rolled into sheets; but, when the manufacturers and consumers got these sheets then came the severe, laborious work by hand of cutting, hammering, boring, shaping and fitting the parts for use and securing them in place.
It is one of the glories of this century that metal-working tools and machinery have been invented that take the metal from its inception, mould and adapt it to man’s will in every situation with an infinite saving of time and labour, and with a perfection and uniformity of operation entirely impossible by hand.
Although the tools for boring holes in wood, such as the gimlet, auger, and the lathe to hold, turn and guide the article to be operated on by the tool, are common in some respects with those for drilling and turning metal, yet, the adaptation to use with metal constitutes a class of metal-working appliances distinct in themselves, and with some exceptions not interchangeable with wood-working utensils. The metal-working tools and machines forming the subject of this chapter are not those which from time immemorial have been used to pierce, hammer, cut, and shape metals, directed by the eye and hand of man, but rather those invented to take the place of the hand and eye and be operated by other powers.
It needs other than manual power to subdue the metals to the present wants of man, and until those modern motor powers, such as steam, compressed air, gas and electricity, and modern hydraulic machinery, were developed, automatic machine tools to any extent were not invented. So, too, the tools that are designed to operate on hard metal should themselves be of the best metal, and until modern inventors rediscovered the art of making cast steel such tools were not obtainable. The monuments and records of ancient and departed races show that it was known by them how to bore holes in wood, stone and glass by some sharp instruments turned by hand, or it may be by leather cords, as a top is turned.
The lathe, a machine to hold an object, and at the same time revolve it while it is formed by the hand, or cut by a tool, is as old as the art of pottery, and is illustrated in the oldest Egyptian monuments, in which the god Ptah is shown in the act of moulding man upon the throwing wheel. It is a device as necessary to the industrial growth of man as the axe or the spade. Its use by the Egyptians appears to have been confined to pottery, but the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Africans, and Hindoos used lathes, for wood working in which the work was suspended on horizontal supports, and adapted to be rotated by means of a rope and treadle and a spring bar, impelled by the operator as he held the cutting tool on the object. Joseph Holtzapffel in his learned work on Turning and Mechanical Manipulation, gives a list of old publications describing lathes for turning both wood and metal. Among these is Hartman Schapper’s book published at Frankfort, in 1548. A lathe on which was formed wood screws is described in a work of Jacques Besson, published at Lyons, France, in 1582.
It is stated that there is on exhibition in the Abbott museum of the Historical Society, New York, a bronze drinking vessel, five inches in diameter, that was exhumed from an ancient tomb in Thebes, and which bears evidence of having been turned on a lathe. It is thought by those skilled in the art that it was not possible to have constructed the works of metal in Solomon’s Temple without a turning lathe. One of the earliest published descriptions of a metal turning lathe in its leading features is that found in a book published in London, in 1677-83, by Joseph Moxon, “hydographer” to King Charles II., entitled, Mechanical Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy Works. He therein also described a machine for planing metal. Although there is some evidence that these inventions of the learned gentleman were made and put to some use, yet they were soon forgotten and were not revived until a century later, when, as before intimated, the steam engine had been invented and furnished the power for working them.
Wood-working implements in which the cutting tool was carried by a sliding block were described in the English patents of General Sir Samuel Bentham and Joseph Bramah, in 1793-94. But until this century, and fairly within its borders, man was content generally to use the metal lathe simply as a holding and turning support, while he with such skill and strength as he could command, and with an expenditure of time, labour and patience truly marvellous, held and guided with his hands the cutting tool with which the required form was made upon or from the slowly turning object before him. The contrivance which was to take the place of the hand and eye of man in holding, applying, directing and impelling a cutting tool to the surface of the metal work was the slide-rest. In its modern successful automatic form Henry Maudsley, an engineer in London, is claimed to be the first inventor, in the early part of the century. The leading feature of his form of this device consists of an iron block which constitutes the rest, cut with grooves so as to adapt it to slide upon its iron supports, means to secure the cutting tool solidly to this block, and two screw handles, one to adjust the tool towards and against the object to be cut in the lathe, and the other to slide the rest and tool lengthwise as the work progresses, which latter motion may be given by the hand, or effected automatically by a connection of the screw handle of the slide and the rotating object on the lathe.
A vast variety of inventions and operations have been effected by changes in these main features. Of the value of this invention, Nasmyth, a devoted pupil of Maudsley and himself an eminent engineer and inventor, thus writes:—“It was this holding of a tool by means of an iron hand, and constraining it to move along the surface of the work in so certain a manner, and with such definite and precise motion, which formed the great era in the history of mechanics, inasmuch as we thenceforward became possessed, by its means, of the power of operating alike on the most ponderous or delicate pieces of machinery with a degree of minute precision, of which language cannot convey an adequate idea; and in many cases we have, through its agency, equal facility in carrying on the most perfect workmanship in the interior parts of certain machines where neither the hand nor the eye can reach, and nevertheless we can give to these parts their required form with a degree of accuracy as if we had the power of transforming our-selves into pigmy workmen, and so apply our labour to the innermost holes and corners of our machinery.”
The scope of the lathe, slide-rest and operating tool, by its adaptation to cut out from a vast roll of steel a ponderous gun, or by a change in the size of parts to operate in cutting or drilling the most delicate portions of that most delicate of all mechanisms, a watch, reminds one of that other marvel of mechanical adaptation, the steam hammer, which makes the earth tremble with its mighty blows upon a heated mass of iron, or lightly taps and cracks the soft-shelled nut without the slightest touch of violence upon its enclosed and fragile fruit.
The adaptation of the lathe and slide to wood-working tools will be referred to in the chapter relating to wood-working.
Following the invention of the lathe and the slide-rest, came the metal-planing machines. It is stated in Buchanan’s Practical Essays, published in 1841, that a French engineer in 1751, in constructing the Marly Water Works on the Seine in France, employed a machine for planing out the wrought iron pump-barrels used in that work, and this is thought to be the first instance in which iron was reduced to a plane surface without chipping or filing. But it needed the invention of the slide-rest and its application to metal-turning lathes to suggest and render successful metal-planing machines. These were supplied in England from 1811 to 1840 by the genius of Bramah, Clement, Fox, Roberts, Rennie, Whitworth, Fletcher, and a few others. When it is considered how many different forms are essential to the completion of metal machines of every description, the usefulness of machinery that will produce them with the greatest accuracy and despatch can be imagined. The many modifications of the planing machine have names that indicate to the workman the purpose for which they are adapted—as the jack, a small portable machine, quick and handy; the jim crow, a machine for planing both ways by reversal of the movement of the bed, and it gets its name because it can “wheel about and turn about and do just so”; the key groove machine, the milling machine with a serrated-faced cutter bar, shaping machine and shaping bar, slotting machine, crank planer, screw cutting, car-wheel turning, bolt and nut screwing, etc.
As to the mutual evolution and important results of these combined inventions, the slide-rest and the planer, we again quote Nasmyth:—
“The first planing machine enabled us to produce the second still better, and that a better still, and then slide rests of the most perfect kind came streaming forth from them, and they again assisted in making better still, so that in a very short time a most important branch of engineering business, namely, tool-making, arose, which had its existence not merely owing to the pre-existing demand for such tools, but in fact raised a demand of its own creating. One has only to go into any of these vast establishments which have sprung up in the last thirty years to find that nine-tenths of all the fine mechanisms in use and in process of production are through the agency, more or less direct, of the slide rest and planing machine.”
Springing out of these inventions, as from a fruitful soil, came the metal-boring machines, one class for turning the outside of cylinders to make them true, and another class for boring and drilling holes through solid metal plates. The principle of the lathe was applied to those machines in which the shaft carrying the cutting or boring tool was held either in a vertical or in a horizontal position.
Now flowed forth, as from some Vulcan’s titanic workshop, machines for making bolts, nuts, rivets, screws, chains, staples, car wheels, shafts, etc., and other machines for applying them to the objects with which they were to be used.
The progress of screw-making had been such that in 1840, by the machines then in use for cutting, slotting, shaving, threading, and heading, twenty men and boys were enabled to manufacture 20,000 screws in a day. Thirty-five years later two girls tending two machines were enabled to manufacture 240,000 screws a day. Since then the process has proceeded at even a greater rate. So great is the consumption of screws that it would be utterly impossible to supply the demand by the processes in vogue sixty years ago.
In England’s first great International Fair, in 1851, a new world of metallurgical products, implements, processes, and metal-working tools, were among the grand results of the half century’s inventions which were exhibited to the assembled nations. The leading exhibitor in the line of self-acting lathes, planing, slotting, drilling and boring machines was J. Whitworth & Co., of Manchester, England. Here were for the first time revealed in a compact form those machines which shaped metal as wood alone had been previously shaped. But another quarter of a century brought still grander results, which were displayed at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, in 1876.
As J. Whitworth & Co. were the leading exhibitors at London in 1851, so were William Sellers & Co., of Philadelphia, the leading exhibitors in the 1876 exhibition. As showing the progress of the century, the official report, made in this class by citizens of other countries than America, set forth that this exhibit of the latter company, “in extent and value, in extraordinary variety and originality, was probably without parallel in the past history of international exhibitions.” Language seemed to be inadequate to enable the committee to describe satisfactorily the extreme refinement in every detail, the superior quality of material and workmanship, the mathematical accuracy, the beautiful outlines, the perfection in strength and form, and the scientific skill displayed in the remarkable assemblage of this class of machinery at that exhibition.
An exhibit on that occasion made by Messrs. Hoopes & Townsend of Philadelphia attracted great attention by the fact that the doctrine of the flow of solid metal, so well expounded by that eminent French scientist, M. Tresca, was therein well illustrated. It consisted of a large collection of bolts and screws which had been cold-punched, as well as of elevator and carrier chains, the links of which had been so punched. This punching of the cold metal without cutting, boring, drilling, hammering, or otherwise shaping the metal, was indeed a revelation.
So also at this Exhibition was a finer collection of machine-made horseshoes than had ever previously been presented to the world. A better and more intelligent and refined treatment of that noble animal, the horse, and especially in the care of his feet, had sprung up during the last half century, conspicuously advocated by Mr. Fleming in England, and followed promptly in America and elsewhere. Within the last forty years nearly two hundred patents have been taken out in the United States alone for machines for making horseshoes. Prejudices, jealousies and objections of all kinds were raised at first against the machine-made horseshoe, as well as the horseshoe nail, but the horses have won, and the blacksmiths have been benefited despite their early objections. The smiths make larger incomes in buying and applying the machine-made shoes. The shoes are not only hammered into shape on the machine, but there are machines for stamping them out from metal at a single blow; for compressing several thicknesses of raw hide and moulding them in a steel mould, producing a light, elastic shoe, and without calks; furnishing shoes for defective hoofs, flexible shoes for the relief and cure of contracted or flat feet, shoes formed with a joint at the toe, and light, hard shoes made of aluminium.
Tube Making.—Instead of heating strips of metal and welding the edges together, tubes may now be made seamless by rolling the heated metal around a solid heated rod; or by placing a hot ingot in a die and forcing a mandrel through the ingot. And as to tube and metal bending, there are wonderful machines which bend sheets of metal into great tubes, funnels, ship masts and cylinders.
Welding.—As to welding—the seams, instead of being hammered, are now formed by melting and condensing the edges, or adjoining parts, by the electric current.
Annealing and Tempering.—Steel wire and plates are now tempered and annealed by electricity. It is found that they can be heated to a high temperature more quickly and evenly by the electric current passed through them than by combustion, and the process is much used in making clock and watch springs.
One way of hardening plates, especially armour plates, by what is called the Harveyized process, is by embedding the face of the plate in carbon, protecting the back and sides with sand, heating to about the melting point of cast iron, and then hardening the face by chilling, or otherwise.
Coating with Metal.—Although covering metal with metal has been practised from the earliest times, accomplished by heating and hammering, it was not until this century that electro-plating, and plating by chemical processes, as by dipping the metal into certain chemical solutions, and by the use of automatic machinery, were adopted. It was in the early part of the century that Volta discovered that in the voltaic battery certain metallic salts were reduced to their elements and deposited at the negative pole; and that Wollaston demonstrated how a silver plate in bath of sulphate of copper through which a current was passed became covered with copper. Then in 1838, Spencer applied these principles in making casts, and Jacobi in Russia shortly after electro-gilded a dome of a cathedral in St. Petersburg. Space will not permit the enumeration of the vast variety of processes and machines for coating and gilding that have since followed.
Metal Founding.—The treatment of metal after it flows from the furnaces, or is poured from the crucibles into moulds, by the operations of facing, drying, covering, casting and stripping, has given rise to a multitude of machines and methods for casting a great variety of objects. The most interesting inventions in this class have for their object the chilling, or chill hardening, of the outer surfaces of articles which are subject to the most and hardest wear, as axle boxes, hammers, anvils, etc., which is effected by exposing the red-hot metal to a blast of cold air, or by introducing a piece of iron into a mould containing the molten metal.
In casting steel ingots, in order to produce a uniform compact structure, Giers of England invented “soaking pits of sand” into which the ingot from the mould is placed and then covered, so that the heat radiating outward re-heats the exterior, and the ingot is then rolled without re-heating.
Sheet Metal Ware.—Important improvements have been made in this line. Wonderful machines have been made which, receiving within them a piece of flat metal, will, by a single blow of a plunger in a die, stamp out a metal can or box with tightly closed seams, and all ready for the cover, which is made in another similar machine; or by which an endless chain of cans are carried into a machine and there automatically soldered at their seams; and another which solders the heads on filled cans as fast as they can be fed into the machine.
Metal Personal Ware.—Buckles, clasps, hooks and eyelets, shanked buttons, and similar objects are now stamped up and out, without more manual labour than is necessary to supply the machines with the metal, and to take care of the completed articles.
Wire Working.—Not only unsightly but useful barbed wire fences, and the most ornamental wire work and netting for many purposes, such as fences, screens, cages, etc., are now made by ingenious machines, and not by hand tools.
In stepping into some one of the great modern works where varied industries are carried on under one general management, one cannot help realising the vast difference between old systems and the new. In one portion of the establishment the crude ores are received and smelted and treated, with a small force and with ease, until the polished metal is complete and ready for manipulation in the manufacture of a hundred different objects. In another part ponderous or smaller lathes and planing machines are turning forth many varied forms; in quiet corners the boring, drilling, and riveting machines are doing their work without the clang of hammers; in another, an apparently young student is conducting the scientific operation of coating or gilding metals; in another, girls may be seen with light machines, stamping, or burnishing, or assembling the different parts of finished metal ware; and the motive power of all this is the silent but all-powerful electric current received from the smooth-running dynamo giant who works with vast but unseen energy in a den by himself, not a smoky or a dingy den, but light, clean, polished, and beautiful as the workshop of a god.
CHAPTER XVI.
ORDNANCE, ARMS AND EXPLOSIVES.
Although the progress in the invention of fire-arms of all descriptions seems slow during the ages preceding the 19th century, yet it will be found on investigation that no art progressed faster. No other art was spurred to activity by such strong incentives, and none received the same encouragement and reward for its development. The art of war was the trade of kings and princes, and princely was the reward to the subject who was the first to invent the most destructive weapon. Under such high patronage most of the ideas and principles of ordnance now prevailing were discovered or suggested, but were embodied for the most part in rude and inefficient contrivances.
The art waited for its success on the development of other arts, and on the mental expansion and freedom giving rise to scientific investigation and results.
The cannon and musket themselves became the greatest instruments for the advancement of the new civilisation, however much it was intended otherwise by their kingly proprietors, and the new civilisation returned the compliment through its trained intellects by giving to war its present destructive efficiency.
To this efficiency, great as the paradox may seem, Peace holds what quiet fields it has, or will have, until most men learn to love peace and hate the arts of war.
As to the Chinese is given the credit for the invention of gunpowder, so they must also be regarded as the first to throw projectiles by its means. But their inventions in these directions may be classed as fireworks, and have no material bearing on the modern art of Ordnance. It is supposed that the word “cannon,” is derived from the same root as “cane,” originally signifying a hollow reed; and that these hollow reeds or similar tubes closed at one end were used to fire rockets by powder.
It is also stated that the practice existed among the Chinese as early as 969 A. D. of tying rockets to their arrows to propel them to greater distances, as well as for incendiary purposes.
This basic idea had percolated from China through India to the Moors and Arabs, and in the course of a few centuries had developed into a crude artillery used by the Moors in the siege of Cordova in 1280. The Spaniards, thus learning the use of the cannon, turned the lesson upon their instructors, when under Ferdinand IV. they took Gibraltar from the Moors in 1309. Then the knowledge of artillery soon spread throughout Europe. The French used it at the siege of Puy Guillaume in 1338, and the English had three small guns at Crecy in 1346. These antique guns were made by welding longitudinal bars of iron together and binding them by iron rings shrunk on while hot. Being shaped internally and externally like an apothecary’s mortar, they were called mortars or bombards. Some were breech-loaders, having a removable chamber at the breech into which the charge of powder was inserted behind the ball. The balls were stone. These early cannon, bombards, and mortars were mounted on heavy solid wooden frames and moved with great difficulty from place to place. Then in the fifteenth century they commenced to make wrought-iron cannon, and hollow projectiles, containing a bursting charge of powder to be exploded by a fuse lit before the shell was fired. In the next century cannon were cast.
The Hindoos, when their acquaintance was made by the Europeans, were as far advanced as the latter in cannon and fire-arms. One cannon was found at Bejapoor, in India, cast of bronze, bearing date 1548, and called the “Master of the Field,” which weighed 89,600 pounds, and others of similar size of later dates. Great cast bronze guns of about the same weight as the Hindoo guns were also produced at St. Petersburg, Russia, in the sixteenth century.
Many and strange were the names given by Europeans to their cannon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to denote their size and the weight of the ball they carried: such as the Assick, the Bombard, the Basilisk, the cannon Royal, or Carthoun, the Culverin, Demi-culverin, Falcon, Siren, Serpentine, etc.
The bombards in the fifteenth century were made so large and heavy, especially in France, that they could not be moved without being taken apart.
When the heavy, unwieldy bombards with stone balls were used, artillery was mostly confined to castles, towns, forts, and ships. When used in the field they were dragged about by many yokes of oxen. But in the latter part of the fifteenth century, when France under Louis XI. had learned to cast lighter brass cannon, to mount them on carriages that could be drawn by four or six horses, and which carriages had trunnions in which the cannon were swung so as to be elevated or depressed, and cast-iron projectiles were used instead of stones, field artillery took its rise, and by its use the maps of the world were changed. Thus with their artillery the French under Charles VIII., the successor of Louis XI., conquered Italy.
In the sixteenth century Europe was busy in adopting these and other changes. Cannon were made of all sizes and calibres, but were not arranged in battle with much precision. Case shot were invented in Germany but not brought into general use. Shells were invented by the Italians and fired from mortars, but their mode of construction was preserved in great secrecy. The early breech-loaders had been discarded, as it was not known how to make the breech gas-tight, and the explosions rendered the guns more dangerous to their users than to the enemy.
In the seventeenth century Holland began to make useful mortar shells and hand grenades. Maurice and Henry Frederick of Nassau, and Gustave Adolphus, made many improvements in the sizes and construction of cannon. In 1674, Coehorn, an officer in the service of the Prince of Orange, invented the celebrated mortar which bears his name, and the use of which has continued to the present time. The Dutch also invented the howitzer, a short gun in which the projectiles could be introduced by hand. About the same time Comminges of France invented mortars which threw projectiles weighing 550 pounds. In this part of that century also great improvements were made under Louis XIV. Limbers, by which the front part of the gun carriage was made separable from the cannon part and provided with the ammunition chest; the prolonge, a cord and hook by which the gun part could be moved around by hand; and the elevating screw, by which the muzzle of the gun could be raised or depressed,—were invented.
In the early part of the eighteenth century it was thought by artillerists in England that the longer the gun the farther it would carry. One, called “Queen Ann’s Pocket Piece” still preserved at Dover, is twenty-five feet long and carries a ball only twenty-five pounds in weight. It was only after repeated experiments that it was learned that the shorter guns carried the projectile the greatest distance.
The greatest improvements in the eighteenth century were made by Gribeauval, the celebrated French artillerist, about 1765. He had guns made of such material and of such size as to adapt them to the different services to which they were to be put, as field, siege, garrison, and sea coast. He gave greater mobility to the system by introducing six-pound howitzers, and making gun carriages lighter; he introduced the system of fixed ammunition, separate compartments in the gun carriages for the projectiles, and the charges of powder in paper or cloth bags or cylinders; improved the construction of the elevating screw, adapted the tangent scale, formed the artillery into horse batteries, and devised new equipments and a new system of tactics.
It was with Gribeauval’s improved system that “Citizen Bonaparte, young artillery officer,” took Toulon; with which the same young “bronze artillery officer” let go his great guns in the Cul-de-Sac Dauphin against the church of St. Roch; on the Port Royal; at the Theatre de la Republique; “and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and became a thing that was.”
It was with this system that this same young officer won his first brilliant victories in Italy. When the fruit of these victories had been lost during his absence he reappeared with his favorite artillery, and on the threshold of the century, in May 1800, as “First Consul of the Republic” re-achieved at Marengo the supremacy of France over Austria.
As to small arms, as before suggested, they doubtless had their origin in the practice of the Chinese in throwing fire balls from bamboo barrels by the explosion of light charges of powder, as illustrated to this day in what are known as “Roman Candles.” Fire-crackers and grenades were also known to the Chinese and the Greeks.
Among ancient fire-arms the principal ones were the arquebus, also bombardelle, and the blunderbuss. They were invented in the fourteenth century but were not much used until the fifteenth century. These guns for the most part were so heavy that they had to be rested on some object to be fired. The soldiers carried a sort of tripod for this purpose. The gun was fired by a slow-burning cord, a live coal, a lit stick, or a long rod heated at one end, and called a match. The blunderbuss was invented in Holland. It was a large, short, funnel-shaped muzzle-loader, and loaded with nails, slugs, etc. The injuries and hardships suffered by the men who used it, rather than by the enemy, rendered its name significant. Among the earliest fire-arms of this period one was invented which was a breech-loader and revolver. The breech had four chambers and was rotated by hand on an arbour parallel to the barrel. The extent of its use is not learned. To ignite the powder the “wheel-lock” and “snap-haunce” were invented by the Germans in the sixteenth century. The wheel lock consisted of a furrowed wheel and was turned by the trigger and chain against a fixed piece of iron on the stock to excite sparks which fell on to the priming. The snap-haunce, a straight piece of furrowed steel, superseded the wheel-lock. The sixteenth century had got well started before the English could be induced to give up the cross-bow and arrow, and adopt the musket. After they had introduced the musket with the snap-haunce and wooden ramrod, it became known, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, as the “Brown Bess.”
The “old flint-lock” was quite a modern invention, not appearing until the seventeenth century. It was a bright idea to fix a piece of flint into the cock and arrange it to strike a steel cap on the priming pan when the trigger was fired; and it superseded the old match, wheel-lock, and snap-haunce. The flint-lock was used by armies well into the nineteenth century, and is still in private use in remote localities. As the arquebus succeeded the bow and arrow, so the musket, a smooth and single-barrel muzzle-loader with a flint-lock and a wooden ramrod, succeeded the arquebus. Rifles, which were the old flint-lock muskets with their barrels provided with spiral grooves to give the bullet a rotary motion and cause it to keep one point constantly in front during its flight, is claimed as the invention of Augustin Kutler of Germany in 1520, and also of Koster of Birmingham, England, about 1620. Muskets with straight grooves are said to have been used in the fifteenth century.
The rifle with a long barrel and its flint-lock was a favourite weapon of the American settler. It was made in America, and he fought the Indian wars and the war of the Revolution with it.
It would not do to conclude this sketch of antique cannon and fire-arms without referring to Puckle’s celebrated English patent No. 418, of May 15, 1718, for “A Defence.” The patent starts out with the motto:
“Defending King George, your Country, and Lawes,
Is defending Yourselves and Protestant Cause.”
It proceeds to describe a “Portable Gun or Machine” having a single barrel, with a set of removable chambers which are charged with bullets before they are placed in the gun, a handle to turn the chambers to bring each chamber in line with the barrel, a tripod on which the gun is mounted and on which it is to be turned, a screw for elevating and turning the gun in different directions, a set of square chambers “for shooting square bullets against Turks,” a set of round chambers “for shooting round bullets against the Christians;” and separate drawings show the square bullets for the Turks and the round bullets for the Christians. History is silent as to whether Mr. Puckle’s patent was put in practice, but it contained the germs of some modern inventions.
Among the first inventions of the century was a very important one made by a clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Forsyth, a Scotchman, who in 1803 invented the percussion principle in fire-arms. In 1807 he patented in England detonating powder and pellets which were used for artillery. About 1808 General Shrapnel of the English army invented the celebrated shell known by his name. It then consisted of a comparatively thin shell filled with bullets, having a fuse lit by the firing of the gun, and adapted to explode the shell in front of the object fired at. This fuse was superseded by one invented by General Bormann of Belgium, which greatly added to the value of case shot.
In 1814 Joshua Shaw of England invented the percussion cap. Thus, by the invention of the percussion principle by Forsyth, and that little copper cylinder of Shaw, having a flake of fulminating powder inside and adapted to fit the nipple of a gun and be exploded by the fall of the hammer, was sounded the death knell of the old flint-locks with which the greatest battles of the world had been and were at that time being fought. The advantages gained by the cap were the certain and instantaneous fire, the saving in time, power, and powder obtained by making smaller the orifice through which the ignition was introduced, and the protection from moisture given by the covering cap. And yet so slow is the growth of inventions sometimes that all Europe continued to make the flint-locks for many years after the percussion cap was invented; and General Scott, in the war between the United States and Mexico in 1847, declined to give the army the percussion cap musket. The cap suggested the necessity and invention of machines for making them quickly and in great quantities.
The celebrated “Colt’s” revolver was invented by Colonel Samuel Colt of the United States, in 1835. He continued to improve it, and in 1851 exhibited it at the World’s Fair, London, where it excited great surprise and attention. Since then the revolver has become a great weapon in both private and public warfare. The next great inventions in small arms were the readoption and improvement of the breech-loader, the making of metallic cartridges, the magazine gun, smokeless powder and other explosives, to which further reference will be made.