Prior to 1800, in the weaving of figures into cloths, it was customary to employ boys to pull the cords in the loom harness in order to arrange the coloured threads in their relative positions. In that year appeared at the front Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French mechanician and native of Lyons, whose parents were weavers, a prolific inventor in his youth, a wayward wanderer after fortune and a wife, a soldier in the Revolution, losing a son fighting by his side, eking out a poor living with his wife’s help at straw weaving, finally employed by a silk manufacturer, and while thus engaged, producing that loom which has ever since been known by his name. This loom was personally inspected by Napoleon, who rewarded the inventor with honours and a pension. It was then demolished by a mob and its inventor reviled, but it afterward became the pride of Lyons and the means of its renown and wealth in the weaving of silks of rich designs.
The leading feature of the Jacquard loom consists of a chain of perforated pattern cards made to pass over a drum, through which cards certain needles pass, causing certain threads of the warp to rise and fall, according to the holes in the cards, and thus admitting at certain places in the warp coloured weft threads thrown by the shuttle, and reproducing the pattern which is perforated in the cards. The Jacquard device could be applied to any loom, and it worked a revolution in the manufacture of figured goods. The complexity and expensiveness of Jacquard’s loom were greatly reduced by subsequent improvements. In 1854 M. Bonelli constructed an electric loom in which the cards of the Jacquard apparatus are superseded by an endless band of tin-foiled paper, which serves as an electrical conductor to operate the warp thread needles, which before had each been actuated by a spiral spring. The Jacquard loom was also greatly improved by the English inventors, Barlow, Taylor, Martain and others.
Radcliffe and Johnson, also of England, had invented and introduced the machines for dressing the yarns in one operation before the weaving; Horrocks and Marsland of Stockport greatly improved the adaptation of steam to the driving of looms, and Roberts of Manchester made striking advances in their mechanical parts and in bringing them to their present state of wonderful efficiency.
In America, in 1836, George Crompton of Taunton, Massachusetts, commenced a series of inventions in power looms for the manufacture of fancy woollen goods, and in the details of such looms generally, particularly in increasing the speed of the shuttle, which vastly increased the production of such goods and gave to his looms a world-wide reputation.
E. B. Bigelow of Massachusetts in 1848 invented a power loom, which was exhibited at the Exhibition at London in 1851, and astonished the world by his exhibition of carpets superior to any woven by hand. By the later improvements, and the aid of steam power, a single American Bigelow carpet loom can turn out now one hundred yards of Brussels carpet in a day, far superior in quality to any carpet which could possibly be made by hand, when a man toiled painfully to produce five yards a day. Mr. Bigelow was also a pioneer inventor of power machines for weaving coach lace, and cotton checks and ginghams. James Lyall of New York invented a power loom applicable either to the weaving of very wide and heavy fabrics, such as jute canvas for the foundation of floor oil cloth, or to fabrics made of the finest and most delicate yarns.
It would be interesting, if space permitted, to describe the great variety of machines that have been invented for dressing, finishing and treating cloths after they are woven: The teasling machine, by which the nap of woollen cloth is raised; the cloth drying machine, with heated rollers, over which the cloth is passed to drive off the moisture acquired in dyeing, washing, etc., the cloth printing, figuring, colouring and embossing machines, with engraved cylinders; cloth pressing and creasing machines, and the cloth cutting machines for cutting the cloth into strips of all lengths, or for cutting piles of cloth in a single operation into parts of garments corresponding to the prearranged pattern; machines for making felt cloth, and stamping or moulding different articles of apparel from felt, etc., etc.
For the making of ribbons and other kind of narrow ware, the needle power loom has been invented, in which the fine weft thread is carried through the web by a needle instead of a shuttle. This adaptation of the needle to looms has placed ribbons within the reach of the poor as well as the rich girl.
What a comparison between the work of the virtuous Penelopes and the weavers of a century ago and to-day! Then with her wheel, and by walking to and from it as the yarn was drawn out, and wound up, a maiden could spin twelve skeins of thread in ten hours, producing a thread a little more than three miles in length, while the length of her walk to and fro was about five miles. Now one Penelope can attend to six or eight hundred spindles, each of which spins five thousand yards of thread a day, or, with the eight hundred spindles, four million yards, or nearly twenty-one hundred miles of thread in a day, while she need not walk at all.
It was when the weaver threw the shuttle through the warp by hand that Job’s exclamation, “My days are like a weaver’s shuttle” was an appropriate text on the brevity of human life. It may be just as appropriate now, but far more striking, when it is realised that machines now throw the shuttle one hundred and eighty times a minute, or three times a second. Flying as fast as it does, when the shuttle becomes exhausted of yarn a late invention presents a new bobbin and a new supply of yarn to the shuttle without stopping the machine.
As to knitting, the century has seen the day pass when all hosiery was knit by hand. First, machines were invented for knitting the leg or the foot of the stocking, which were then joined by hand, and then came machines that made the stocking complete. The social industry so quietly but slowly followed by the good women in their chimney corners with their knitting needles, by which a woman might possibly knit a pair a day, was succeeded a quarter of a century ago by machines, twelve of which could be attended to by a boy, which would knit and complete five thousand pairs a week. Such a machine commences with the stocking at the top, knits down, widening and narrowing, changes the stitch as it goes on to the heel, shapes the heel, and finishes at the end of the toe, all one thread, and then it recommences the operation and goes on with another and another. Fancy stockings, with numerous colours blended, are so knit, and if the yarn holds out a mile of stockings may be thus knit, without a break and without an attendant. By these machines the astounding result was reached of making the stockings at the cost of one-sixth of a mill per pair.
The wonderful reduction in the cost of all kinds of textile fabrics due to the perfection of spinning and loom mechanisms, and its power to meet the resulting enormous increase in demand, has enabled the poor of to-day to be clad better and with a far greater variety of apparel than it was possible for the rich a hundred years ago; and the increased consumption and demand have brought into these fields of labour, and into other fields of labour created by these, great armies of men and women, notwithstanding the labour-saving devices.
The wants of the world can no longer be supplied by skilled hand labour. And it is better that machines do the skilled labour, if the product is increased while made better and cheaper, and the number of labourers in the end increased by the development and demands of the art.
Among the recent devices is one which dispenses with the expensive and skilful work by hand of drawing the warp threads into the eyes of the heddles and through the reed of the loom.
Cane-backed and bottomed chairs and lounges only a few years ago were a luxury of the rich and made slowly by hand. Now the open mesh cane fabric, having diagonal strands, and other varieties, are made rapidly by machinery. Turkish carpets are woven, and floors the world over are carpeted with those rich materials the sight of which would have astonished the ordinary beholder a half century ago. Matting is woven; wire, cane, straw, spun glass; in fact, everything that can be woven by hand into useful articles now finds its especially constructed machine for weaving it.
CHAPTER XIX.
GARMENTS.
“Man is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.... Man is a tool-using animal, of which truth, clothes are but one example.”—Sartor Resartus.
In looking through the records of man’s achievements to find the beginnings of inventions, we discover the glimmering of a change in the form of the immemorial needle, in an English patent granted to Charles F. Weisenthal, June 24, 1775. It was a needle with a centrally located eye, and with both ends pointed, designed for embroidery work by hand, and the object of the two points was to prevent the turning of the needle end for end after its passage through the cloth. But it was not until the 19th century that the idea was reduced to practice in sewing machines.
To Thomas Saint, a cabinet maker by trade, of Greenhills Rents, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, Middlesex County, England, the world is indebted for the first clear conception of a sewing machine. Saint’s attention was attracted to the slow way of sewing boots and shoes and other leather work, so he determined to improve the method. He took out a patent September 17, 1790, and although the germs of some of the leading parts of the modern sewing machine are there described, it does not appear that his patent was applied to practice. In fact, it slumbered in the archives of the British patent office for two generations, and after the leading sewing machines of the century had been invented and introduced, before it was rediscovered, and its contents appreciated in the light of more recent developments. Probably Saint’s machine, if constructed in accordance with his plans, would not have done much good work, certainly not with woven cloth, as he proposed to employ a hooked needle to carry a loop through the material, which would have been snarled by the cloth threads; but from his drawings and description it is clearly established that he was first to conceive of a vertically reciprocating needle for forming a seam from a continuous thread drawn from a spool; a seam in which each loop is locked, or enchained with a subsequent loop, to form what is known as the chain, or single thread stitch; and a horizontal sliding plate, to support the material to be sewed, and by which the material was also moved sideways after each stitch.
May 30, 1804, John Duncan received an English patent for “tamboring on cloth.” He proposed to employ a series of hooked needles attached in a straight line to a horizontal bar, which, when threaded, were first thrust forward and their hooked ends carried through the cloth, where each needle hook was supplied with a thread by a thread carrier. Then the motion of the bar was reversed, which drew the thread back through the cloth in the form of loops, and through the loops first formed, thus producing a chain stitch. The cloth was automatically shifted to correspond to the pattern to be produced, and thus was chain stitch embroidery first manufactured. From this point of time successful embroidery machines were made.
In 1807 another Englishman patented a machine for making a sort of rope matting, in which he describes two eye-pointed, thread-carrying, perforating needles, each held in a reciprocating needle bar, and designed to unite several small ropes laid parallel, by a reciprocating movement.
A German publication, the Kunst and Generbe Blatt, for 1817, and Karmarsch’s History of Technology, made mention of a sewing machine invented by one Mr. Joseph Madersperger of Vienna, formerly from Kuefstein in the Tyrol, and for which he received royal letters patent in 1814. From these descriptions it appears Madersperger used a needle pointed at both ends, and the eye in the centre, invented many years before by Weisenthal, as above stated, which was moved vertically up and down, piercing alternately the top and bottom of the stuff, and which carried a short thread, enough to make about one hundred and thirty stitches, which machine was driven by a crank and handle, on which sewing was made of many different shaped forms, by slight changes, and which sewed with far greater accuracy and rapidity than hand work. The inventor was striving to simplify the machine, but to what extent it had been used or had been improved, or what finally became of it, does not appear. Yet it is a bit of evidence showing that Germany came next to England in the earlier ideas, conceptions of, and struggles after a sewing machine.
France then entered the list, and it was in 1830 that Barthelmy Thimonnier there produced and patented a sewing machine, which he continued to improve and to further patent in 1848 and in 1850 in France, England, and the United States. The Thimonnier resembled in some prominent respects the machine that had been described in the Saint patent, but unlike Saint’s, it was reduced to successful practice, and possessed some points in common with more modern machines. These were the flat cloth plate, vertical post, overhung arm, vertically reciprocating needle, and continuous thread. The crochet or barbed needle was worked by a treadle, and upon pushing the needle down through the cloth, it there caught a thread from a carrier, carried the loop to and laid it upon the upper surface of the cloth. Again descending, it brought up another loop, enchained it with the one last made, making a chain stitch, consisting of a series of loops on the upper side.
Thimonnier made quite a large number of machines, constructed mostly of wood, and which were used to make army clothing at Paris. They were best adapted to work on leather and in embroidering. They were so far successful as to arouse the jealousy and fear of the workmen and working women, and, as in the case of Hargreaves, Jacquard, and others, a mob broke into his shop, destroyed his machines, ruined his business, and he died penniless in 1857.
In the meantime an English patent, No. 8948, of May 4, 1841, had been issued to Newton and Archbold for a machine for embroidering the backs of gloves, having an eye-pointed needle, worked by a vibrating lever, and adapted to carry a thread through the back of the glove, held on a frame—the frame and glove moving together after each stitch.
The germs of inventions often develop and fructify simultaneously in distant places, without, so far as any one can ascertain, the slightest mutual knowledge or co-operation on the part of the separate inventors. Between 1832 and 1834, while Thimonnier was in the midst of his early struggles in Paris, Walter Hunt was inventing a sewing machine in New York, which he completed at that time and on which he sewed one or two garments. But as it was experimental in form, and Hunt was full of other inventions and schemes, he put it aside, and it probably would never have been heard of had not Elias Howe of Massachusetts, ten years after Hunt had abandoned his invention, but without knowledge of Hunt’s efforts, made the first practical successful sewing machine for commercial purposes the world had ever seen, obtained his patent, and made claims therein which covered not only his special form of improvements, but Hunt’s old device as well.
Howe’s patent was issued September 10, 1846. In that he claimed to be the first and original inventor of “A sewing machine, constructed and operated to form a seam, substantially as described.”
Also “The combination of a needle and a shuttle, or equivalent, and holding surfaces, constructed and operating substantially as described.”
Also “The combination of holding surfaces with a baster plate or equivalent, constructed and operating substantially as described.”
Also “A grooved and eye-pointed needle, constructed and adapted for rapid machine sewing substantially as described.”
When the machine commenced to be a practical success this patent was infringed, and when Howe sued upon it a few years after its issue, it woke up Hunt and all other alleged prior inventors; and all prior patents and publications the world over, relating to sewing machines, were raked up to defeat Howe’s claims.
But the courts, after long deliberation, held that although, so far as Hunt was concerned he had without doubt made a machine in many respects like Howe’s machine, that it had a curved, eye-pointed needle similar to Howe’s operated by a vibrating arm and going through the cloth, a shuttle carrying the thread that passed through the loop made by the needle thread, thus making a lock stitch by drawing it up to one side of the cloth, and that this machine did, to a certain extent, sew, yet that it ended in an experiment, was laid aside, destroyed, and never perfected nor used so as to give to the public the knowledge and benefit of a completed invention, and was not therefore an anticipation in the eye of the law of Howe’s completed, more successful and patented machine.
Public successful use is the fact in many cases which alone establishes the title of an inventor, when all other tests fail. And this is right in one sense, as the laws of all countries in respect to protection by patents for inventions are based upon the primary condition of benefit to society. This benefit is not derived from the inventor who hides his completed invention for years in his closet, or throws it on a dust heap. As to previous patents and publications, some were not published before Howe’s inventions were made, and others were insufficient in showing substantially the same machine and mode of operation. And as to prior use abroad, it was not regarded under the law of his country as competent evidence.
Seldom have the lives of great inventors presented a more striking example of the vicissitudes, the despair, and the final triumphs of fortune, which are commonly their lot, than is shown in the case of Howe. A machinist with a wife and children to support, his health too feeble to earn hardly a scanty living, he watches his faithful wife ply her constant needle, and wonders why a machine cannot be made to do the work. The idea cannot be put aside, and with such poor aids as he can command he commences his task.
At last, amid the trials of bitter poverty, he brings his invention to that stage in which he induces a friend to advance some money, by the promise of a share in the future patent, and thereby gains a temporary home for his family and a garret for his workshop. Day after day and night after night he labours, and finally, in April, 1845, the rather crude machine is completed, and two woollen suits of clothing are sewed thereon, one for a friend, and one for himself.
Then came the effort to make more machines and place them on the market. People admired the machines as a curiosity, but none were induced to buy them or help him pecuniarily. Finally, in September, 1846, he obtained his patent, but by that time his best friends had become discouraged, and he was compelled to return with his family to his father’s house in Cambridge, Mass. To earn his bread he sought and found employment on a railway locomotive. By some means his brother sold one of his machines to Mr. William Thomas, a corset maker of London, and Howe was induced to go there to make stays, and his machines. He took his wife and children with him. The arrangement made with his employer was not such as to enable him to keep his family there, and he soon sent them home.
Unable to sell his machines, he was soon reduced to want. He pawned his patent and his last machine, and procured money to return to New York, where he arrived penniless in 1849. He then learned that his wife was dying of consumption at Cambridge. He was compelled to wait until money could be sent him to pay his passage home, and reached there just before his wife’s death.
He then learned that during his absence his patent and machine had attracted attention, that others had taken the matter up, added their improvements to his machines, and that many in various places were being made and sold which were infringements of his patent. A great demand for sewing machines had sprung up. He induced friends to again help him. Suits were commenced which, although bitterly fought for six years, were finally successful.
Now fortune turned her smiling face upon him. Medals and diplomas, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and millions of money became his. When the great civil war broke out in 1861, he entered the army as a private soldier, and advanced the money to pay the regiment to which he belonged, when the Government paymaster had been long delayed. His life was saddened by the fact that his wife had not lived to share his fortune. He died in Brooklyn, New York, October 3, 1867, in the midst of life, riches, and honour, at the comparatively early age of forty-eight.
In referring to the early inventors of sewing machines in America who entered the field about the same time with Howe, mention should be made of J. J. Greenough and George Corliss, who had machines patented respectively in 1842 and 1843, for sewing leather, with double pointed needles; and the running stitch sewing machine used for basting, made and patented by B. W. Bean in 1843. About this time, both in England and America, machines had been devised for sewing lengths of calico and other cloths together, previous to bleaching, dyeing or printing. The edges of the cloths were first crimped or fluted and then sewed by a running stitch.
The decade of 1849-1859, immediately following the development of the Howe machine, was the greatest in the century for producing those successful sewing machines which were the foundation of the art, established a new industrial epoch, and converted Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” into a lament commemorative of the miseries of a slavish but dying industry.
It was during that decade that, in the United States, Batcheller invented the perpetual feed for moving the cloth horizontally under and past the needle. In Howe’s the cloth could be sewed but a certain distance at a time, and then the machine must be readjusted for a new length. Then Blodgett and Lerow imparted to the eye-pointed needle what is called the “dip motion,”—the needle being made to descend completely through the material, then to rise a little to form a loop; the shuttle then entered the loop, the needle descended again a short distance, while the shuttle passed through the loop of the needle thread, and then the needle was raised above the cloth.
It was then that Allen B. Wilson invented the still more famous “four-motion feed” for feeding the cloth forward. He employed a bar having saw like teeth on one edge which projected up through a slotted plate and engaged the cloth. He then first moved the bar forward carrying the cloth; second, dropped the bar; third, moved it back under the plate; and fourth, raised it to its first position to again engage the cloth. These motions were so timed with the movement of the needle and so quickly done that the cloth was carried forward while the needle was raised, the passage and quick action of the needle was not interfered with, and the feeding and the sewing seem to be simultaneous. The intermittent grasp and feed of the cloth were hardly perceptible, and yet it permitted the cloth to be turned to make a curved seam. Wilson also invented the rotating hook which catches the loop of the upper thread, and drops a disk bobbin through it to form the stitch. The shuttle was thus dispensed with, and an entirely new departure was made in the art. These with other improvements made up the celebrated “Wheeler and Wilson” machine.
Now also appeared “the Singer,” consisting chiefly of the invention of T. M. Singer. He improved the operation of the needle bar, devised a roughened feed wheel, as a substitute for Wilson’s serrated bar, introduced a spring presser foot, alongside the needle, to hold the work down in proper position while permitting it to be moved forward or in any other direction. A “friction pad” was also placed between the cloth seam and the spool, to prevent the thread from kinking or twisting under the point of the descending needle. He was the first to give the shuttle an additional forward movement after it had once stopped, to draw the stitch tight,—such operation being taken while the feed moved the cloth in the reverse direction, and while, the needle completed its upward motion, so that the two threads were simultaneously drawn, and finally a spring guide upon the shuttle to control the slack of the thread, and prevent its catching by the needle.
By reason of these improvements it is thought by many that Singer was the first to furnish the people with a successful operating and practical sewing machine. At any rate, the world at last so highly appreciated his machines, that it lifted him from poverty to an estate which was valued at between eight and ten millions of dollars at the time of his death in 1875. Singer was also the first to invent the “ruffler,” a machine for ruffling or gathering cloth, and a device which laid an embroidering thread upon the surface of the cloth under the needle thread.
The “Grover and Baker” another celebrated American machine, was invented by William O. Grover and William E. Baker in 1851. By certain changes they made in the thread carrier and connections, they were enabled to make a double looped stitch. This required more thread, but the stitch made was unexcelled in strength.
And so the work went on, from step to step, and from the completion of one machine after another, until when the Centennial Exhibition came to be held in Philadelphia in 1876, a fine array of excellent sewing machines was had, from the United States, principally, but also those of inventors and manufacturers in Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.
Up to that time about twenty-two hundred patents had been granted in the United States, all of which, with the exception of a very few, were for inventions made within the preceding quarter of a century. And during the last quarter of the century about five thousand more United States patents have been issued for devices in this art. This number includes many, of course, to inventors of other countries. When it is remembered that these patents were issued only after an examination in each case as to its novelty, and although slight as may have been the changes or additions, yet substantially different they must have been in nearly all respects, it may to some extent be realized how great and incessant has been the exercise of invention in this useful class of machines.
On this point of the exercise of invention in sewing machines, as well as on some others growing out of the subject, Knight, writing in his Mechanical Dictionary, about twenty years ago, remarks: “If required to name the three subjects on which the most extraordinary versatility of invention has been expended, the answer would be without hesitation, the sewing machine, reaping machine and breech-loading firearm. Each of these has thousands of patents, and although each is the growth of the last forty years, it is only during the last twenty-five years that they have filled any notable place in the world. It was then only by a combination of talents that any of these three important inventions was enabled to achieve remarkable success. The sewing machine previous to 1851, made without the admirable division of labour which is a feature in all well conducted factories, was hard to make, and comparatively hard to run. The system of assembling, first introduced in the artillery service of France by General Gribeauval in 1765 and brought to proximate perfection by Colonel Colt in the manufacture of the revolver at Hartford, Connecticut, has economised material and time, improved the quality as well as cheapened the product. There is to-day, and in fact has been for some years, more actual invention in the special machines for making sewing machines than in the machines themselves. The assembling system, that is, making the component parts of an article in distinct pieces of pattern, so as to be interchangeable, and the putting them together, is the only system of order. How else should the Providence Tool Company execute their order for 600,000 rifles for the Turkish Government? How otherwise could the Champion Harvesting Machine Company of Springfield, Ohio, turn out an equipped machine every four minutes each working day of ten hours? Or, to draw the illustration from the subject in hand, how by any other than the nicest arrangement of detail can the Singer Sewing Machine Company make 6,000 machines per week at Elizabethport, New Jersey?”
When sewing machines were so far completed as to be easily run by a hand crank, or treadle, the application of power to run them singly, or in series, and to run machines of a larger and more powerful description, soon naturally followed—so that garment-making factories of all kinds, whether of cloth or leather, have been established in many countries—in which steam or electric power is utilised as the motor, and thus human strain and labour saved, while the amount of production is increased.
No radical changes in the principle or mode of operation of sewing machines have been made in the last twenty-five years; but the efforts of inventors have been directed to improve the previously established types, and to devise attachments of all kinds, by the aid of which anything that can be sewed, can be sewed upon a machine. Tucking, ruffling, braiding, cording, hemming, turning, plaiting, gaging, and other attachment devices are numerous. Inventors have rivalled one another in originating new forms of stitches. About seventy-five distinct stitches have been devised, each of which must of course be produced by a change in mechanism.
When sewing machines were in their infancy, and confined to sewing straight seams and other plain sewing, it was predicted that it was not possible to take from the hands of women the making of fine embroidery from intricate patterns, or the working of button-holes, and the destruction of the quilting party was not apprehended. Nor was it expected that human hands could be dispensed with in the cutting out of garments. And yet these things have followed. Machines, by a beautiful but complex system of needles, working to some extent on the Jacquard system of perforated card boards, and by the help of pneumatic or electrical power, will work out on most delicate cloths embroidery of exquisite patterns.
The button-hole machines will take the garment, cut the button-hole at the desired point, and either, as in one class of machines, by moving the fabric about the stitch-forming mechanism, or, as in another class, moving the stitch-forming mechanism about the button-hole, complete the delicate task in the nicest and most effective manner.
Quilting machines have their own bees, consisting of a guide which regulates the spaces between the seams, and adjusts them to any width, and a single needle, or gang of needles, the latter under the control of cams which force the needles to quilt certain desired patterns.
And as to cutting, it is only necessary to place the number of pieces of fabric desired to be cut in cutting dies, or upon a table, and over them an “over-board” cutter, which comprises a reciprocating band-saw, or a rotary knife, all quick, keen and delicate, in an apparatus guided by hand, in order to produce in the operation a great pile of the parts formerly so slowly produced, one at a time, by scissors or shears.
If men were contented with that single useful garment of some savages, a blanket with a slit cut in it for the passage of the head and neck, not only would a vast portion of the joys and sorrows of social philosophy have been avoided, but an immense strain and trouble on the part of inventors of the century would have been obviated.
But man’s propensity for wearing clothes has led to the invention of every variety of tools for making them faster, cheaper, and better.
No machine has yet been invented that will take the place of the deft fingers of women in certain lines of ornamentation, as in final completion and trimming of their hats. The airy and erratic demands of fashion are too nimble to be supplied by the slow processes of machinery, although the crude ground-work, the frame, has been shaped, moulded and sewed by machines; and women themselves have invented and patented bonnet frames and patterns.
But no such difficulty in invention has occurred in hat-making for men. From the treating and cutting of the raw material, from the outer bound edge, and the band about the body, to the tip of the crown, a machine may be found for performing each separate step. Especially is this the case with the hard felt and the high silk hats.
Seventy-five years ago the making of hats was by hand processes. Now in all hat factories machines are employed, and the ingenuity displayed in the construction of some of them is marvellous. It is exceedingly difficult to find many of the old hand implements existing even as relics.
Wool and fur each has its special machines for turning it into a hat. The operations of cleaning and preparing the material, felting the fur, when fur is used, shaping the hat body, and then the brim, washing, dying, hardening and stiffening it, stretching, smoothing, finishing, sizing, lining, trimming, all are now done by machines devised for each special purpose. A description of these processes would be interesting, but even in an abbreviated form would fill a book.
The wonderful things done in the manufacture of boots and shoes and rubber goods will be referred to in subsequent chapters.
Although it was old from time immemorial to colour cotton goods, and the calico power printing cylinder was invented and introduced into England in the latter part of the 18th century and began to turn out at once immense quantities of decorated calicoes and chintz, yet figured woven goods were a novelty sixty years ago.
In 1834, Mr. Bonjeau, a prominent wool manufacturer in Sedan, France, and an élève of the Polytechnic School, conceived the idea of modifying the plain cloths, universally made, by the union of different tints and patterns. This he was enabled to do by the Jacquard loom. The manufacture of fancy woven cloths, cassimeres, worsted coatings, etc., of great beauty, combined with strength of fabrication, followed in all civilised countries, but their universal adoption as wearing apparel was due in part to the lessening of the expense in the making them into garments by the sewing machine.
As to the effect of modern inventions on wearing apparel, it is not apparent that they were necessary to supply the wardrobes of the rich. The Solomons and the Queen of Sheba of ancient days, and all their small and great successors in the halls of Fortune, have had their rich robes, their purple and their fine linen, whether made in one way or another; but modern inventions have banished the day when the poor man’s hard labour of a long day will not suffice to bring his wife a yard of cheapest cloth. Toil, then, as hard as he and his poor wife and children might, their united labours would hardly suffice to clothe them in more than the poorly-dressed skins of animals and the coarsest of homespun wool.
Now, cottons and calicoes are made and sold at a profit for three cents a yard; and the poorest woman in the land may appear in neat, comfortable and tasteful dress, the entire cost of material and labor of which need not exceed fifty cents. The comfort, respectability and dignity of a large family, which depend so much on clothes, may be ensured at the cost of a few dollars.
And as to the condition of the sewing woman, trying and poor as it is in many instances, yet she can earn more money with less physical exhaustion than under the old system.
The epoch of good clothes for the people, with all that it means in the fight upward from degradation, began in this century, and it was due to the inventions which have been above outlined.
CHAPTER XX.
INDUSTRIAL MACHINES.
One invention engenders another, or co-operates with another. None lives, or stands, or dies, alone.
So, in the humble but extensive art of broom-making, men and women worked along through ages binding with their hands the supple twigs of trees or bushes, or of corn, by thongs, or cords, or wire, upon the rudely-formed collar of a hand-smoothed stick, until the modern lathe and hollow mandrel armed with cutters, the power-driven shuttle, and the sewing machine, were invented.
The lathe and mandrel to hold the stick while it was cut was used before, but it was long within the century that a hollow mandrel was first invented, which was provided internally with cutting bevelled knives, and into which the stick was placed, carried through longitudinally, and during its passage cut smooth and finished. As broom corn became the chief product from which brooms are made, it became desirable to have a machine, after the corn had been scraped of its seed, to size and prepare the stems in regular lengths for the various sizes of brooms, and accordingly such a machine was invented. Then a machine was needed and invented to wind the corn-brush with the cord or wire and tie it in a round bunch, preparatory to flattening and sewing it.
Then followed different forms of broom-sewing machines. Among the pioneers was one which received the round bunch between two compressing jaws, and pressed it flat. While so held a needle with its coarse thread was forced through the broom above the binding and the cord twined around it. Then a shuttle, also carrying a stout thread, was thrown over the cord, the needle receded and was then forced through the broom again under the binding cord. Thus in conjunction with the shuttle the stitches were formed alternately above and below the binding twine, the holding jaws being raised intermittently for that purpose. As each stitch was formed the machine fed the broom along laterally and intermittently. By another ingenious device the cord was tied and cut, when the sewing was completed.
It is only by such machines which treat the entire article from the first to the last step, that the immense number of brooms now necessary to supply the market are made. True it is that at first labour was displaced. At one time seventeen skilled workmen would manufacture five hundred dozen brooms per week.
They had reduced the force of earlier times by making larger quantities by better processes. Then when the broom-sewing machines and other inventions got fairly to work, nine men would turn out twelve hundred dozen brooms per week. Thus, while the force was reduced nearly one-half, the quantity of product was more than doubled. But as the cost of labour decreased and the product increased, the product became more plentiful and cheaper, the demand and use became greater, more broom-corn was raised, more broom-factories started, and soon the temporary displacement of labour was succeeded by a permanent increase in manufacture and in labourers, an increase in their wages, and an improvement in their condition.
Useful and extensive as is its use, the broom does not compare in variety and wide application to the brush. The human body, cloth, leather, metals, wood and grains, everything that needs rubbing, cleaning, painting and polishing, meets the acquaintance of the brush. Nearly a hundred species of brushes might be enumerated, each having an especial construction for a particular use.
Although the majority of brushes are still made by hand, yet a few most ingenious machines have been made which greatly facilitate and speed the operation, and many mechanical appliances have been invented in aid of hand-work. These machines and appliances, together with those which cut, turn, bore, smooth, and polish the handles and backs, to which the brush part is secured, have greatly changed and improved the art of brush-making during the last fifty years.
The first machine which attracted general attention was invented by Oscar D. and E. C. Woodbury of New York, and patented in 1870. As in hand-making and before subjected to the action of the machine, the bristles are sorted as to length and color. A brush-back, bored with holes by a gang of bits, which holes do not extend, however, all the way through the back, is placed in the machine under a cone-jointed plunger, adapted to enter the hole in the brush-back. A comb-shaped slitted plate in the machine has then each slit filled with bristles, sufficient in number to form a single tuft. When the machine is started, the bristles in a slit are forced out therefrom through a twisted guideway, which forms them into a round tuft, and which is laid horizontally beneath a plunger, which, descending, first doubles the tuft, and as the plunger continues to descend, forces the double end down into the hole. The plunger is supplied with a wire from a reel, turns as it descends, and twists the wire around the lower end of the tuft, the wire being directed in that way by a spiral groove within the plunger. The continuing action of the plunger is such as to screw the wire into the back. The wire is cut when the rotary plunger commences its descent, and when the tuft is thus secured the plunger ascends, the block is moved for another hole, and another set of bristles is presented for manipulation. Brushes with 70 holes can be turned out by this machine at the rate of one a minute.
Another most ingenious machine for this purpose is that of Kennedy, Diss, and Cannan, patented in the United States in 1892. In this, brush blocks of varying sizes, but of the same pattern, are bored by the same machine which receives the bristles, and the tufts are inserted as fast as the holes are bored. Both machines are automatic in operation.
Street-sweeping machines began to appear about 1831 in England, shortly after in France, and then in cities in other countries.
The simplest form and most effective sweeper comprises a large cylinder armed with spiral rows of splints and hung diagonally on the under side and across a frame having two or four wheels. This cylinder is connected by bevelled gearing with the wheels, and in revolving throws the dirt from the street into a ridge on one side thereof, where it is swept into heaps by hand sweepers, and is then carted off. King of the United States was the inventor.
A more recent improvement consists in the use of pneumatic means for removing the dust that is caused by the use of revolving brooms or brushes, such removal being effected by means of a hood that covers the area of the street beneath the body of the machine, and incloses an air exhaust, the sweepings being drawn through the exhaust mechanism and deposited in a receptacle for the purpose, or in some instances deposited in a furnace carried by the machine and there burned.
In cities having hard, smooth, paved streets and sufficient municipal funds, the most effective, but most expensive way, has been found to keep a large force of men constantly at work with hoes, shovels, brooms, bags and carts, removing the dirt as fast as it accumulates.
Abrading Machines.
One of the most striking inventions of the century is the application of the sand-blast to industrial and artistic purposes.
For ages the sands of the desert and wild mountain plains, lifted and driven by the whirling winds, had sheared and polished the edges and faces of rocks, and cut them into fantastic shapes, and the sands of the shore, tossed by the winds of the sea, had long scratched and bleared the windows of the fisherman’s hut, before it occurred to the mind of man that here were a force and an agent which could be harnessed into his service.
It was due finally to the inventive genius of B. F. Tilghman of Philadelphia, Pa., who, in 1870, patented a process by which common sand, powdered quartz, emery, or other comminuted sharp cutting material, may be blown or driven with such force upon the surface of the hardest materials, as to cut, clean, engrave, and otherwise abrade them, in the most wonderful and satisfactory manner.
Diamonds are abraded; glass depolished, or engraved, or bored; metal castings cleaned; lithographic zinc plates grained; silverware frosted; stone and glass for jewelry shaped and figured; the inscriptions and ornaments of monuments and tombstones cut thereon; engravings and photographs copied; steel files cleaned and sharpened, and stones and marble carved into forms of beauty with more exactness and in far less time than by the chisel of the artisan.
The gist of the process is the employment of a jet of sand or other hard abrading material, driven at a high velocity by a blast of air or steam, under a certain pressure, in accordance with the character of the work to be done. The sand is placed in a box-like receptacle into which the air or steam is forced, and the sand flowing into the same chamber is driven through a narrow slit or slits in the form of a thin sheet, directly on to the object to be abraded.
By one method the surface of the object is first coated with tinfoil on which the artist traces his design, and this is then coated with melted transparent wax. Then when the wax is hardened it is cut away along the lines already indicated, and seen through the wax. The object now is subjected to the blast, and as the sand will not penetrate a softened material sufficient to abrade a surface beneath, the exposed portions alone will be cut away. The sand after it strikes is carried off by a blast to some receptacle, from which it is returned to its former place for further use. Other means may be used in the place of a slitted box, as a small or larger blow-pipe; but the driving of the sand, or similar abrading material, with great force by the steam or air blast, is the essential feature of the process.
Emery, that variety of the mineral corundum, consisting of crystalline alumina, resembling in appearance dark, fine-grained iron ore, ranking next to the diamond in hardness, and a sister of the sapphire and the ruby, has long been used as an abradant. The Eastern nations have used corundum for this purpose for ages. Turkey and Greece once had a monopoly of it. Knight says: “The corundum stone used by the Hindoos and Chinese is composed of corundum powdered, two parts; lac resin, one part. The two are intimately mixed in an earthen vessel, kneaded and flattened, shaped and polished. A hole in the stone for the axis is made by a heated copper rod.”
However ancient the use of artificial stones for grinding and polishing, nevertheless it is true that the solid emery wheel in the form that has made it generally useful, in machines known as emery grinders, is a modern invention, and of American origin.
In the manufacture of such machines great attention and the highest scientific skill has been paid, first, to the material composing the wheel, and to the cementing substances by which the emery is compacted and bound in the strongest manner, to prevent bursting when driven at great speed; secondly, to the construction of machines and wheels of a composition varying from the finest to the coarsest; and thirdly, to the proper balancing of the wheels in the machines, an operation of great nicety, in order that the wheel may be used on delicate tools, when driven at high speed, without producing uneven work, marking the objects, or endangering the breaking, or bursting of the wheel.
Such machines, when properly constructed, although not adapted to take the place of the file, other steel-cutting tools, and the grindstone for many purposes, yet have very extensively displaced those tools for cutting edges, and the grinding and polishing of hardened metals, by reason chiefly of their greater convenience, speed, and general adaptability. Not only tools of all sizes are ground and polished, but ploughshares, stove and wrought-iron plates, iron castings, the inner surfaces of hollow ironware, the bearings of spindles, arbours, and the surfaces of steel, chilled or cast-iron rolls, etc.
In the great class of Industrial Mechanics, no machines of the century have contributed more to the comfort and cleanliness of mankind than those by which wearing apparel in its vast quantities is washed and ironed more thoroughly, speedily, and satisfactorily in every way than is possible by the old hand systems. When it is remembered how under the old system such a large part of humanity, and this the weaker part, devoted such immense time and labour to the universal washing and ironing days, the invention of these machines and appliances must be regarded as among the great labour-saving blessings of the century.
True, the individual washerwoman and washerman, and ironers, have by no means disappeared, and are still in evidence everywhere, yet the universal and general devotion of one-half the human race to the wash-tub and ironing-table for two or more days in the week is no longer necessary. And even for the individual worker, the convenient appliances and helps that have been invented have greatly relieved the occupation of pain and drudgery.
Among modern devices in the laundry, worked by hand, is, first, the washing-machine, in which the principle is adapted of rolling over or kneading the clothes. By moving a lever by hand up and down, the clothes are thoroughly rubbed, squeezed and lifted at each stroke. Then comes the wringer, a common form of which consists of two parallel rolls of vulcanized and otherwise specially treated rubber, fitted to shafts which, by an arrangement of cog-wheels, gearing and springs in the framework at the ends of rolls, and a crank handle, are made to roll on each other. The clothes are passed between the rollers, the springs permit the rollers to yield and part more or less, according to the thickness of the clothes.
Then the old-fashioned, or the new-fashioned mangle is brought into play. The old-style mangle had a box, weighted with stone, which was reciprocated on rollers, and was run back and forth upon the clothes spread upon a polished table beneath. One of the more modern styles is on the principle of the wringer above described, or a series of rollers arranged around a central drum, and each having a rubber spring attached, by which means the clothes are not subjected to undue pressure at one or two points, as in the first mentioned kind.
Starch is also applied by a similar machine. The cloth is dipped into a body of starch, or the same is applied by hand, and then the superfluous starch squeezed out as the clothes are passed through the rollers.
But for hotels and other large institutions washing is now done by steam-power machinery.
It is an attractive sight to step into a modern laundry, operated with the latest machinery on the largest scale. The first thing necessary in many localities is to clarify the water. This is done by attaching to the service pipe tanks filled with filtering material, through which the water flows before reaching the boiler. The driving engine and shafting are compactly placed at one end or side of the room, with boilers and kettles conveniently adjacent. The water and clothes are supplied to the washing-machine, and operated by the engine. Steam may be used in addition to the engine to keep it boiling hot, or steam may be substituted entirely for the water.
The machine may be one of several types selected especially for the particular class of goods to be washed. There is the dash-wheel, constructed on the principle of the cylinder churn; the outer case being stationary and the revolving dash-wheel water-tight, or perforated, which is the preferred form for collars and cuffs. In place of the dash-wheel cylinders are sometimes used, having from sixty to seventy revolutions a minute. Another form has vibrating arms or beaters, giving between four hundred and five hundred strokes a minute, and by which the clothes are squeezed between rubbing corrugated boards. The rubbing boards also roll the clothes over and over until they are thoroughly washed. In another form a rotating cylinder for the clothes is provided with an arrangement of pipes by which either steam, water or blueing can be introduced as desired, into the cylinder, through its hollow journals, so that the clothes can be washed, rinsed, and blued without removal from the machine.
Another type has perforated, reciprocating pistons, between which the clothes are alternately squeezed and released, a supply of fresh water being constantly introduced through one of the hollow cylinder journals, while the used water is discharged through the opposite journal; and in still another the clothes are placed in a perforated cylinder within an outer casing, and propeller blades, assisted by other spiral blades, force a continuous current of water through the clothes.
In ironing, hollow polishing rolls of various sizes are used, heated either by steam or gas. The articles to be ironed are placed in proper position upon a table and carried under and in contact with the rolls. Or the goods are ironed between a heated cylinder and a revolving drum covered with felting, and the polishing effected by the cylinder revolving faster than the drum. Ingenious forms of hand-operated ironing machines for turning over and ironing the edges of collars, and other articles, are in successful use.
CHAPTER XXI.
WOOD-WORKING.
In surveying the wonderful road along which have travelled the toiling inventors, until the splendid fields of the present century have been reached, the mind indulges in contrasts and reverts to the far gone period of man’s deprivations, when man, the animal, was fighting for food and shelter.
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
—King Lear III, IV.
When the implements of labour and the weapons of war were chiefly made of stone, or bronze, or iron, such periods became the “age” of stone, or bronze, or iron; and we sometimes hear of the ages of steam, steel and electricity. But the age of wood has always existed, wherever forests abounded. It was, doubtless, the earliest “age” in the industries of man, but is not likely to be the latest, as the class of inventions we are about to consider, although giving complete dominion to man over the forests, are hastening their destruction.
As in every other class of inventions, there had been inventions in the class of wood-working through the ages preceding this century, in tools, implements and machines; but not until near the close of the eighteenth century had there been much of a break in the universal toil by hand. The implements produced were, for the most part, the result of the slow growth of experience and mechanical skill, rather than the product of inventive genius.
True, the turning-lathe, the axe, the hammer, the chisel, the saw, the auger, the plane, the screw, and cutting and other wood-shaping instruments in simple forms existed in abundance. The Egyptians used their saws of bronze. The Greeks deified their supposed inventor of the saw, Talus, or Perdix, and they claimed Theodore of Lamos as the inventor of the turning-lathe; although the main idea of pivoting an object between two supports, so that it could be turned while the hands were free to apply a tool to its shaping, was old in the potter’s wheel of the Egyptians, which was turned while the vessel resting upon it was shaped and ornamented by the hand and tools. It appears also to have been known by the Hindoos and the Africans.
Pliny refers to the curled chips raised by the plane, and Ansonius refers to mills driven by the waters of the Moselle for sawing marble into slabs. Early records mention saw-mills run by water-power in the thirteenth century in France, Germany and Norway; and Sweden had them in the next century. Holland had them one hundred years at least before they were introduced into England.
Fearful of the entire destruction of the forests by the wood used in the manufacture of iron, and incited by the opposition and jealousy of hand sawyers, England passed some rigid laws on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, although preserving the forests, gave for a long time the almost exclusive manufacture of iron and lumber to Germany and Holland. Even as late as 1768, a saw-mill, built at Limehouse, under the encouragement of the Society of Arts, by James Stansfield, was destroyed by a mob. Saw-mills designed to be run by water-power had been introduced into the American colonies by the Dutch more than a century before they made their appearance in England. William Penn found that they had long been at work on the Delaware when he reached its shores in 1682.
It was nothing indigenous to the climate or race that rendered the Americans inventors. The early colonists, drawn from the most civilised countries of Europe, carried to the new world knowledge of the latest and best appliances known to their respective countries in the various arts. With three thousand miles of water between them and the source of such appliances, and between them and the source of arbitrary power and laws to hamper efforts and enterprise, with stern necessity on every hand prompting them to avail themselves of every means to meet their daily wants, all known inventions were put to use, and brains were constantly exercised in devising new means to aid, or take the place of, manual labour, which was scarce. Surrounded, too, by vast forests, from which their houses, their churches and their schools must be constructed, these pioneers naturally turned their thoughts toward wood-working machinery. The attention to this art necessarily created interest in and developed other arts. Thus constant devotion to pursuits strenuously demanding labour-saving devices evolved a race of keen inventors and mechanics. So that when Watt had developed his wonderful application of steam to industrial purposes, America was ready to substitute steam for water-power in the running of saw-mills.
Steam saw-mills commenced to buzz with the opening of the century.
As to the relation of that humble machine, the saw-mill, to the progress of civilisation, it was once said: “The axe produces the log hut, but not until the saw-mill is introduced do framed dwellings and villages arise; it is civilisation’s pioneer machine; the precursor of the carpenter, wheelwright and turner, the painter, the joiner, and legions of other professions. Progress is unknown where it is not. Its comparative absence in the Southern American continent was not the least cause of the trifling advancement made there during three centuries and a half. Surrounded by forests of the most valuable and variegated timber, with water-power in mountain streams, equally neglected, the masses of the people lived in shanties and mud hovels, not more commodious than those of the aborigines, nor more durable than the annual structures of birds. Wherever man has not fixed and comfortable homes, he is, as regards civilisation, stationary; improvement under such circumstances has never taken place, nor can it.”
Miller, in England, in 1777, had described in his patent a circular saw, and Hatton, in 1776, had vaguely described a planing machine; but the inception of the marvellous growth in wood-working machinery in the nineteenth century occurred in England during the last decade of the eighteenth. It was due to the splendid efforts of General Samuel Bentham, and of Bramah and Branch, both as to metal-working and wood-working machinery.
General Bentham, a brother of the celebrated jurist, Jeremy Bentham, had his attention drawn to the slow, laborious, and crude methods of working in wood, while making a tour of Europe, and especially in Russia, and engaged in inspecting the art of ship-building in those countries, in behalf of the British Admiralty. On his return, 1791-1792, he converted his home into a shop for making wood-working machines. These included “Planing, moulding, rabbeting, grooving, mortising, and sawing, both in coarse and fine work, in curved, winding, and transverse directions, and shaping wood in complicated forms.”
Of the amount of bills presented to and paid for by the Admiralty for these machines, General Bentham received about £20,000.
These machines were developed and in use just as the new century approached. Thus, with the exception of the saw-mill, it may be again said that prior to this century the means mankind had to aid them in their work in metals and in wood were confined to hand tools, and these were for the most part of a simple and crude description.
The ground-work now being laid, the century advanced into a region of invention in tools and machinery for wood-working of every description, far beyond the wildest dreams of all former carpenters and joiners. Not only were the machines themselves invented, but they gave rise in turn to a host of inventions in metal-working for making them.
In the same line of inventions there appeared in the first decade of the century one of the most ingenious of men, and a most fitting type of that great class of Yankee inventors who have carved their way to renown with all implements, from the jack-knife to the electrically-driven universal shaping machine.
Thomas Blanchard, born in Massachusetts in 1788, while a boy, was accustomed to astonish his companions by the miniature wind-wheels and water-wheels that he whittled out with his knife. While attending the parties of young people who gathered on winter evenings at different homes in the country to pare apples, the idea of a paring machine occurred to him, and when only thirteen years of age, he invented and made the first apple-paring machine, with which more apples could be pared in a given time than any twelve of his girl acquaintances could pare with a knife.
At eighteen, while working in a shop, driving the heads down on tacks, on an anvil, with a hammer, he invented the first tack-forming machine, which, when perfected by him, made five hundred tacks a minute, and which has never since been improved in principle. He improved the steam engine, and invented one of the first envelope machines. He made the first metal lathe for cutting out the butts of gun-barrels. But his greatest triumphs were in wood-working machinery.
Challenged to make a machine that would make a gun stock, always before that time regarded an impossible task, its every part being so irregular in form, he secluded himself in his workshop for six months, and after constant labour and experiments he at the end of that time had produced a machine that more than astonished the entire world, and which worked a revolution in the making of all irregular forms from wood. This was in 1819. This machine would not only make a perfect gun-stock, but shoe lasts, and ships’ tackle-blocks, axe-handles, and a multitude of irregular-shaped blocks which before had always required the most expert hand operatives to produce. This machine became the subject of parliamentary inquiry on the part of England, and so great were the doubts concerning it, that successive commissions were appointed to examine and report upon it. Finally the English government ordered eight or ten of such machines for the making of gun-stocks for its army, and paid Blanchard about $40,000 for them. He was once jestingly asked at the navy department at Washington if he could turn a seventy-four? He at once replied, “Yes, if you will furnish me the block.” Of course infringers appeared, but he maintained his rights and title as first and original inventor after the most searching trials in court.
The generic idea of Blanchard’s lathe for turning irregular forms consists in the use of a pattern of the device which is to be shaped from the rough material, placing such pattern in a lathe, alongside of the rough block, and having a guide wheel which has an arm having cutters, and which guide follows all the lines of the pattern, and which cutters, extending to the rough material, chip it away to the depth and in the direction imparted by the pattern lines to the guide, thus producing from the rough block a perfect representation of the pattern.
In the midst of his studies in the construction of his inventions Blanchard’s attention was drawn to the operations of a boring worm upon an old oak log. Closely examining and watching the same by the aid of a microscope, he gained valuable ideas from the work of his humble teacher, which he incorporated into his new cutting and boring machines.
His series of machines in gun-making were designed to make and shape automatically every part of the gun, whether of wood or metal. His machines, and subsequent improvements by others, for boring, mortising and turning, display wonderful ingenuity. A modern mortising machine, for instance, is adapted to quickly and accurately cut a square or oblong hole to any desired depth, width, and length by cutting blades; to automatically reciprocate the cutters both vertically and horizontally in order to cut the mortise, both as to length and depth, at one time, and to automatically withdraw the cutters when they have finished cutting the mortise. They are provided with simple means for setting and feeding the cutters to do this work, and while giving the cutters a positive action, ample clearance is provided for the removal of the chips as fast as they are cut.
From what such inventions will produce in the way of complicated and ornamental workmanship we may conclude that it is a law of invention that whatever can be made by hand may be made by a machine, and made better.
Carving Machines made their appearance early in the century. In 1800 a Mr. Watt of London produced one, on which he carved medallions and figures in ivory and ebony. Also subsequently, John Hawkins of the same city, and a Mr. Cheverton, invented machines for the same purpose. Another Englishman, Braithwaite, in 1840, invented a most attractive carving process in which, instead of cutting tools, he employed burning as his agent. Heated casts of previously carved models were pressed into or on to wet wood, and the charcoal surfaces then brushed off with hard brushes.
After Blanchard’s turning-lathes and boring apparatus, appeared machines in which a series of cutters were employed, guided by a tracing lever attached to a carved model, and actuating the cutter to reproduce on material placed upon an adjusting table a copy of the model.
Machines have been invented which consist of hard iron or steel rollers on the surface of which are cut beautiful patterns, and between which wood previously softened by steam is passed, and designs thus impressed thereon. A similar process of embossing, was devised in Paris and called Xyloplasty, by which steam-softened wood is compressed in carved moulds, which give it bas-relief impressions.
But in the carving of wood by hand, a beautiful art, which has been revived within the past generation, there are touches of sentiment, taste and human toil, which, like the touches of the painter and the master of music, appeal to cultivated minds in a higher than mechanical sense. The mills of the modern gods, the inventors, grind with exceeding and exact fineness, but the work of a human hand upon a manufactured article still appeals to human sympathy.
The bending of wood when heated by fire or steam had been known and practised to a limited extent, but Blanchard invented a clamping machine, to which improvements have been added, and by which ship timbers, furniture, ploughs, piano frames, carriage bows, stair and house banisters and balusters, wheel rims, staves, etc., etc., are bent to the desired forms, and without breaking. Bending to a certain extent does not weaken wood, but stretching the same has been found to impair and destroy its strength.
The principal problems which the inventors of the century have solved in the class of wood-working have been the adaptation to rapid-working machinery of the saw and other blades, to sever; the plane to smooth, the auger, the bit and the gimlet to bore, the hammer to drive, and a combination of all or a part of these to shape and finish the completed article.
It was a great step from the reciprocating hand saw, worked painfully by one or two men, to the band saw, invented by a London mechanic, William Newbury, in 1808. This was an endless steel belt serrated on one edge, mounted on pulleys, and driven continuously by the power of steam through the hardest and the heaviest work. Pliable, to conform to the faces of the wheels over which it is carried, it will bend with all the sinuosities of long timber, no time is lost in its operation, and no labour of human hands is necessary to guide it or the object on which it works.