At the Vienna Exposition in 1873, the first mammoth saw of this description was exhibited. The saw itself was made by the celebrated firm of Perin & Co., of Paris, upon machinery the drawings of which were made by Mr. Van Pelt of New York, and constructed by Richards, Loudon and Kelly of Philadelphia. The saw was fifty-five feet long, and sawed planks from a pine log three feet thick, at the rate of sixty superficial feet per minute. The difficulty of securing a perfectly reliable weld in the endless steel band was overcome by M. Perin, who received at the Paris Exhibition in 1867 the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Now gangs of such saws may be found in America and elsewhere, and circular saws have also been added. Saws that both cut, form, and plane the boards at the same time are now known.
Boring tools, both for hand and machinery, demanded improvement. Formerly augers and similar boring tools had merely a curved sharpened end and a concavity to hold the chips, and the whole tool had to be withdrawn to empty the chips. It was known as a pod auger. In 1809, L’Hommedieu, a Frenchman, invented an auger with two pods and cutting lips, a central screw and a twisted shank. About the same time Lilley of Connecticut made a twisted auger, and these screw-form, twisted, cutting tools of various kinds, with their cutting lips, and by which the shavings or chips were withdrawn continuously from the hole as the cutting proceeded, became so improved in the United States that they were known as the American augers and bits. The planing machines of General Bentham were improved by Bramah, and he and Maudsley also greatly improved other wood-working machines and tools in England—1802-1810.
We have before, in the chapter on metal-working, shown the importance of the slide-rest, planer and lathe, when combined, and which also are extensively adapted to wood-working. In Bramah’s machine, a vertical spindle carried at its lower extremity a horizontal wheel having twenty-eight cutter blades, followed by a plane also attached to a wheel. A board was by these means perfectly trimmed and smoothed from end to end, as it was carried against the cutters by suitable moving means. William Woodworth of New York, in 1828, patented a celebrated planing machine which became so popular and its use was regarded so necessary in the wood-working trades, that the patent was looked upon as an odious monopoly. It consisted of a combination of rollers armed with cutters, attached to a horizontal shaft revolving at a great speed, and of means for feeding the boards to the cutters. With Bentham’s, Bramah’s, Blanchard’s, and Woodworth’s ideas for a basis, those innumerable improvements have been made in machinery, by which wood is converted with almost lightning rapidity into all the forms in which we see it, whether ornamental or useful, in modern homes and other structures.
Some machines are known as “Universal Wood Workers.” In these a single machine is provided with various tools, and adapted to perform a great variety of work by shifting the position of the material and the tools. The following operations can be performed on such a machine:—Planing, bevelling, tapering, tenoning, tongueing and grooving (grooves straight, circular or angular), making of joints, twisting and a number of other operations.
The later invention by Stow of Philadelphia of a flexible shaft, made up of a series of coils of steel wire, given a leather covering, and to which can be attached augers, bits, or metal drills, the tool applied to its work from any direction, and its direction varied while at work, has excited great attention.
Shingles are as old in the art as the framework of buildings. Rome was roofed with shingles for centuries, made of oak or pine.
Tiles, plain and fancy, and slates, have to a certain extent superseded wood shingling, but the wood will always be used where it can be found in plenty, as machines will now turn them out complete faster than they can be hauled away. A shingle is a thin piece of wood, thicker at one end than at the other, having parallel sides, about three times as long as it is wide, having generally smooth surfaces and edges. All these features are now given to the shingle by modern machines.
A great log is rolled into a mill at one end and soon comes out at the other in bundles of shingles; the logs sawed into blocks, the blocks split or sawed again into shingle sizes, tapered, planed in the direction of the grain of the wood, the complete shingles collected and bound in bundles, each operation by a special machine, or by a series of mechanisms.
Veneering, that art of covering cheap or ordinary wood with a thin covering of more ornamental and valuable wood, known from the days of the Egyptians, has been vastly extended by modern machinery. The practice, however, so emphatically denounced centuries ago by Pliny, as “the monstrous invention of paint and dyes applied to the woods or veneers, to imitate other woods,” has yet its practitioners and admirers.
T. M. Brunel, in 1805-1808, devised a set of circular saws run by a steam engine, which cut sheets of rosewood and mahogany, one-fourteenth of an inch thick, with great speed and accuracy. Since that day the veneer planing machine, for delicately smoothing the sheets, the straightening machine, for straightening scrolls that have been cut from logs, the polishing machines for giving the sheets their bright and glossy appearance, the pressing machine for applying them to the surfaces to which they are to be attached, the hammering machine for forcing out superfluous glue from between a veneer and the piece to which it is applied; all of these and numerous modifications of the same have been invented, and resulted in placing in the homes everywhere many beautiful ornamental articles of furniture, which before the very rich only could afford to have.
Special forms of machinery for making various articles of wood are about as numerous as the articles themselves.
We appear before the house and know before entering that its doors and sills, clapboards and window frames, its sashes and blinds, its cornices, its embrasures and pillars, and shingles, each or all have had a special machine invented for its manufacture. We enter the house and find it is so with objects within—the flooring may be adorned with the beautiful art of marquetry and parquetry, wood mosaic work, the wainscoting and the frescoes and ceilings, the stairs and staircases, its carved and ornamental supporting frames and balusters, the charming mantel frames around the hospitable fireplaces, and every article of furniture we see in which wood is a part. So, too, it is with every useful wooden implement and article within and without the house,—the trays, the buckets, the barrels, the tubs, the clothes-pins, the broom-handles, the mops, the ironing and bread boards; and outside the house, the fences, railings and posts—many of these objects entirely unknown to the poor of former generations, uncommon with the rich, and the machinery for making them unknown to all.
It was a noble array of woodwork and machinery with which the nations surprised and greeted the world, at each of its notable international Expositions during the century. Each occasion surpassed its predecessor in the beauty of construction of the machines displayed and efficiency of their work. The names of the members of this array were hard and uncouth, such as the axe, the adze, and the bit, the auger, bark-cutting and grinding machines, blind-slat boring, and tenoning, dovetail, mortising, matching and planing, wood splitting, turning, wheeling and planing, wood-bending, rim-boring dowelling, felly-jointing, etc., etc. These names and the clamour of the machines were painful to the ear, but to the thoughtful, they were converted into sweeter music, when reflection brought to mind the hard toil of human hands they had saved, the before unknown comforts and blessings of civilisation they had brought and were bringing to the human race, and the enduring forms of beauty they had produced.
To the invention of wood-working machinery we are also indebted for the awakening of interest in the qualities of wood for a vast number of artistic purposes. It was a revelation, at the great Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, to behold the specimens of different woods from all the forests of the earth, selected and assembled to display their wonderful grain and other qualities, and showing how well nature was storing up for us in its silent shades those growths which were waiting the genius of invention to convert into forms of use and beauty for every home.
CHAPTER XXII.
FURNITURE.
So far as machinery is concerned for converting wood into furniture, the same has been anticipated in the previous chapter, but much remains to be said about the articles of furniture themselves.
Although from ancient days the most ancient countries provided by hand elaborate and beautiful articles of furniture of many descriptions, yet it has been left for modern advances in machinery and kindred arts to yield that universal supply of convenient and ornamental furniture which now prevails.
The Egyptians used chairs and tables of a more modern form than the Greeks or Romans, who lolled about on couches even at their meals; but the Egyptians did not have the convenient section tables built in sliding sections, which permit the table to be enlarged to accommodate an increased number of guests. And now recently this modern form of table has been improved, by arranging the sections and leaves so that when the sections are slid out the leaves are automatically raised and placed in position, which is done either by lazy-tongs mechanism, or by a series of parallel links: Tables constructed with folding detachable and adjustable legs, tables constructed for special purposes as sewing machines, and typewriting machine tables, by which the machine head may be dropped beneath the table top when not in use; tables combined with desks wherein the table part may be slid into the desk part when not in use and the sliding cover pulled down to cover and lock from sight both the table and desk; surgical tables, adapted to be raised or lowered at either end or at either side and to be extended; “knock down” tables, adapted to be taken all apart for shipment or storage; tables combined with chairs to be folded down by the side of the chair when not in use; and many other useful forms have been added to the list.
Much ingenuity has been displayed in the construction of desks, to save and economise space. Mention has been made of a combined folding desk and extensible table. Another form is an arrangement of desk drawers, whereby when one drawer is locked or unlocked all the rest are locked or unlocked automatically. Whatever shape or function anyone desires in a desk may be met, except, perhaps, the performance of the actual work of the occupant.
In the matter of beds, the principal developments have been due to the advancement of wood-working machinery, and the manufacture of iron, steel, and brass. The old-fashioned ponderous bedsteads, put together by heavy screws, have given way to those mortised and tenoned, joined and matched, and by which they can easily be put up and taken down; and to iron and brass bedsteads, which are both ornamental and more healthful. No bed may be without an inexpensive steel spring frame or mattress for the support of the bedding. Folding beds made to economise space, and when folded upright become an ornamental bureau; and invalid bedsteads, designed for shifting the position of the invalid, are among the many modern improvements.
Kitchen Utensils.—A vast amount of drudgery in the kitchen has been relieved by the convenient inventions in labor-saving appliances: coffee and spice mills, can-openers, stationary washtubs, stopper extractors, superseding the old style of hand-corkscrews where large numbers of bottles are to be uncorked; refrigerators and provision safes, attaching and lifting devices and convenient culinary dishes and utensils of great variety.
Curtains, shades and screens have been wonderfully improved and their use made widely possible by modern inventions and new adaptation of old methods. Wood, cotton, silk, paper, combined or uncombined with other materials, in many novel ways unknown to our ancestors, have rendered these articles available in thousands of homes where their use was unknown and impossible a century ago. Among the most convenient attachments to shades is the spring roller, invented by Hartshorn of America, in 1864, whereby the shade is automatically rolled upon its stick to raise or lower it.
Window screens for the purpose of excluding flies, mosquitoes, and other insects, while freely admitting the air, are now made extensible and adjustable in different ways to fit different sizes of windows. Curtains and shades are provided with neat and most attractive supporting rods, to which they are attached by brass or wooden rings, and provided with easily manipulated devices to raise and securely hold them in any desired position.
The art of steaming wood and bending it, by iron pattern forms adjustable to the forms desired, as particularly devised in principle by Blanchard in America in 1828-1840, referred to in Wood-working, has produced great changes in the art of furniture making, especially in chairs. A particularly interesting illustration of the results of this art occurred in Austria. About forty years ago the manufacture in Germany and Austria of furniture by machinery, especially of bent wood-ware, became well established there; and by the time of the Vienna Exposition in 1873, factories on a most extensive scale for the construction of bed furniture were in operation among the vast mountain beech forests of Moravia and Hungary. The greatest of these works were located in Great Urgroez, Hungary, and Bisritz, Moravia, with twenty or more auxiliary establishments. Between five and six thousand work people were employed, the greater part of whom were females, and it was necessary to use steam and water motors, to the extent of many hundred horse power.
The forests were felled, and the tree-tops removed and made into charcoal for use in the glass works of Bohemia. The trunks were hauled to the mills and sawed into planks of suitable thickness by gang-saws. The planks in turn were cut with circular saws into square pieces for turning, and then the pieces turned and cut on lathes, to give them the size required and the rounded shape; the pieces then steamed while in their green state for twenty-four hours in suitable boilers, then taken out and bent to the desired shape on a cast-iron frame by hand, then subjected, with the desired pattern, to the pattern-turning table, and cut; then kept locked in the pattern’s iron embrace until the pieces were dried and permanently set in shape, then clamped to a bench, filed, rasped, stained, and French polished by the deft hands of the women; then assembled in proper position in frames of the form of the chair or other article to be made, their contact surface sawed to fit at the joints, and then finally the parts glued together and further secured by the addition of a few screws or balls.
Chairs, lounges and lighter furniture were thus made from bent pieces of wood with very few joints, having a neat and attractive appearance, and possessing great strength. The art has spread to other forests and other countries, and the turned, bent, highly polished and beautiful furniture of this generation would have been but a dream of beauty to the householder of a century ago.
Children’s chairs are made so that the seat may be raised or lowered, or the chair converted into a perambulator. Dentist’s chairs have been developed until it is only necessary for the operator to turn a valve governing a fluid, generally oil, under pressure to raise or lower the chair and the patient. In the more agreeable situation at the theatre or concert one may hang his hat on the bottom of the chair, upturned to afford access to it through a crowded row, and turning down the chair, sit with pleasure, as the curtain is rolled up by compressed air, or electricity, at the touch of a button.
To the unthinking and unobserving, the subject of bottle stoppers is not entrancing, but those acquainted with the art know with what long, continuous, earnest efforts, thousands of inventors have sought for the best and cheapest bottle stopper to take the place of corks—the enormous demand for which was exhausting the supply and rendering their price almost prohibitive.
One of the most successful types is a stopper of rubber combined with a metal disk, and hung by a wire on the neck of the bottle, so that the stopper can be used over and over again; another form composed of glass, or porcelain, and cork; another is a thin disk of cork placed in a thin metal cap which is crimped over a shoulder on the neck of the bottle, and still another is a thin disk of pasteboard adapted for milk bottles and pressed tightly within a rim on the inside of the neck of the bottle.
In this connection should be mentioned that self-sealing fruit jar, known from its inventor as “Mason’s fruit jar,” which came into such universal use—that combination of screw cap, screw-threaded jar-neck and the rubber ring, or gasket, on which the cap was screwed so tightly as to seal the jar hermetically.
In lamplighting, what a wonderful change from the old oil lamps of former ages! The modern lamp may be said to be an improved means of grace, as it will hold out much longer, and shed a far more attractive light for the sinner, whose return, by its genial light, is, even to the end, so greatly desired.
The discovery of petroleum and its introduction as a light produced a revolution in the construction of lamps. Wicks were not discarded, but changed in shape from round to flat, and owing to the coarseness and disagreeable odour of coal oil, especially in its early unrefined days, devices first had for their object the easy feeding of the wick, and perfect combustion. To this end the burner portion through which the wick passed was perforated at its base to create a proper draft, and later the cap over the base was also perforated. But with refined oil the disagreeable odour continued. It was found that this was mainly due to the fact that both in lamps and stoves the oil would ooze out of the wick on to the adjacent parts of the lamps or stove, and when the wick was lit the heat would burn or heat the oil and thus produce the odour. Inventors therefore contrived to separate the oil reservoir and wick part when the lamp or stove were not in use; and finally, in stoves, to dispense with the wick altogether. As wickless oil stoves are now in successful use the wickless lamp may be expected to follow.
The lamp, however, that throws all others into the shade is that odourless, heatless, magic, mellow, tempered light of electricity, that springs out from the little filament, in its hermetically sealed glass cage, and shines with unsurpassed loveliness on all those fortunate enough to possess it.
CHAPTER XXIII.
LEATHER.
It is interesting to speculate how prehistoric man came to use the skin of the beasts of the field for warmth and shelter. Originally no doubt, and for untold centuries, the use was confined to the hairy, undressed, fresh, or dried skins, known as pelts. Then came the use of better tools. The garments have perished, but the tools of stone and of bronze survived, which, when compared with those employed among the earliest historic tribes of men, were found to be adapted to cut and strip the hairy covering from the bodies of animals, and clean, pound, scrape and otherwise adapt them to use.
And ever since the story of man began to be preserved in lasting records from farthest Oriental to the northernmost limits of Europe and America, memorials of the early implements of labour in the preparation of hides for human wear have been found. The aborigines knew how to sharpen bones of the animals they killed to scrape, clean, soften or roughen their skins. They knew how to sweat, dry, and smoke the skins, and this crude seasoning process was the forerunner of modern tanning. But leather as we know it now, that soft, flexible, insoluble combination of the gelatine and fibrine of the skin with tannic acid, producing a durable and imputrescible article, that will withstand decay from the joint attack of moisture, warmth and air, was unknown to the earlier races of men, for its production was due to thorough tanning, and thorough tanning was a later art.
When men were skin-dressed animals they knew little or nothing of tanning. Tannic acid is found in nearly every plant that grows, and its combination with the fresh skins spread or thrown thereon, may have given rise to the observation of the beneficial result and subsequent practice. But whether discovered by chance, accident or experience, or invented from necessity, the art of tanning should have rendered the name of the discoverer immortal. The earliest records, however, describe the art, but not the inventor.
From the time the Hebrews covered the altars of their tabernacles with rams’ skins dyed red, as recorded in Exodus; when they and the Egyptians worked their leather, currying and stretching it with their knives, awls, stones, and other implements, making leather water buckets, resembling very much those now made by machinery, covering their harps and shields with leather, ornamental and embossed; from the days of the early Africans, famous for their yellow, red and black morocco; from the days of the old national dress of the Persians with their leather trousers, aprons, helmets, belts and shirts; from the time that the ancient Scythians utilised the skins of their enemies, and Herodotus described the beauty and other good qualities of the human hide; from the early days of that peculiar fine and agreeable leather of the Russians, fragrant with the oil of the birch; from the days of the white leather of the Hungarians, the olive-tanned leather of the Saracens; from the time of the celebrated Cordovan leather of the Spaniards; from the ancient cold periods of the Esquimaux and the Scandinavians, who, clad in the warm skins of the Arctic bears, stretched tough-tanned sealskin over the frame work of their boats; from the time of the introduction of the art of the leather worker to the naked Briton, down to almost the nineteenth century, substantially the same hand tools, hard hand labour, and the old elbow lubricant were known and practised.
Hand tools have improved, of course, as other arts in wood and iron making have developed, but the operations are about the same. There were and must be fleshing knives to scrape from off the hide the adherent flesh and lime,—for this the hide is placed over the convex edge of an inclined beam and the work is called beaming; the curriers’ knife for removing the hair; skiving, or the cutting off the rough edges and fleshy parts on the border of the hide; shaving and flattening; the cutting away of the inequalities left after skiving; stoning, the rubbing of the leather by a scouring stone to render it smooth; slicking, to remove the water and grease; or to smooth and polish, by a rectangular sharpened stone, steel or glass tool; whitening, to shave off thin strips of the flesh, leaving the leather thinner, whiter and more pliable; stuffing, to soften the scraped and pounded hides and make them porous; graining, the giving to the hair or grain side a granular appearance by rubbing with a grooved or roughened piece of wood; bruising or boarding to make the leather supple and pliable by bringing the two flesh sides together and rubbing with a graining board; scouring, by aid of a stream of water to whiten the leather by rubbing with a slicking stone or steel.
The inventions of the century consist in labour-saving machinery for these purposes, new tanning and dressing processes, and innumerable machines for making special articles of leather.
As before stated, the epoch of modern machinery commenced with the practical application of water power to other than grinding mills, and of steam in place of water, contemporaneously with the invention of spinning and weaving machinery in the last half of the eighteenth century. These got fairly to work at the beginning of the century, and the uses of machinery spread to the treatment of leather. John Bull was the appropriate name of the man who first patented a scraping machine in England, about 1780, and Joseph Weeks the next one, some years later.
One of the earliest machines of the century was the hide mill, which, after the hand tools had scraped and stoned, shaved and hardened the hides, was used to rub and dub them, and soften and swell them for tanning. Pegged rollers were the earliest form for this purpose, and later corrugated rollers and power-worked hammers were employed. Hundreds of hides could be softened daily by these means.
Then came ingenious machines to take the place of the previous operations of the hand tools,—the fleshing machine, in one form of which the hides are placed on a curved bed, and the fleshy parts scraped off or removed by revolving glass blades, or by curved teeth of steel and wood in a roller under which a table is given a to-and-fro movement; tanning apparatus of a great variety, by which hides, after they are thoroughly washed and softened, and the pores opened by swelling, are subjected to movements in the tanning liquor vats, such as rocking or oscillating, rotary, or vertical; or treated by an air exhaust, known as the vacuum process; in all of which the object is to thoroughly impregnate in the shortest time all the interstices and pores of the skin with the tannic acid, by which the fibrous and gelatinous matter is made to combine to form leather, and by which process, also, the hide is greatly increased in weight.
Reel machines are then employed to transfer the hides from one vat to another, thus subjecting them to liquors of increasing strength. Soaking in vats formerly occupied twelve or eighteen months, but under the new methods the time has been greatly reduced. And now since 1880, the chemists are pushing aside the vegetable processes, and substituting mineral processes, by which tanning is still further shortened and cheapened. The new processes depend chiefly on the use of chromium compounds.
Then came scouring machines, in which a rapidly revolving stiff brush is used to scour the grain or hair side, removing the superfluous colouring matter, called the bloom, and softening and cleansing the hide; the slicking or polishing machines to clean, stretch and smooth the leather by glass, stone, or copper blades on a rapidly-moving belt carried over pulleys; whitening, buffing, skiving, fleshing and shaving machines, all for cutting off certain portions and inequalities of the leather, and reducing its thickness.
In one form of this class of machines an oscillating pendulum lever is employed, carrying at its end a revolving cylinder having thirty or more spiral blades. The pendulum swings to and fro at the rate of ninety movements a minute, while the cylinder rolls over the leather at the rate of 2780 revolutions per minute. Scarfing, skiving, chamfering, bevelling, feather-edging, appear to be synonymous terms for a variety of machines for cutting the edges of leather obliquely, for the purpose chiefly of making lap seams, scarf-joints, and reducing the thickness and stiffness of leather at those and certain other points.
Then there are leather-splitting machines, consisting of one or more rollers and a pressure bar, which draw and press the leather against a horizontally arranged and adjustable knife, which nicely splits the leather in two parts, and thus doubles the quantity. This thin split leather is much used in making a cheap quality of boots and shoes and other articles.
There are also corrugating, creasing, fluting, pebbling, piercing and punching machines; machines for grinding the bark and also for grinding the leather; machines for gluing sections of leather together, and machines for sewing them; machines for rounding flat strips of leather, for the making of whips and tubes; machines for scalloping the edges; and a very ingenious machine for assorting leather strips or strings according to their size or thickness.
The most important improvements of the century in leather working relate to the manufacture of boots and shoes. It could well be said of boots and shoes, especially those made for the great mass of humanity, before the modern improvements in means and processes had been invented: “Their feet through faithless leather met the dirt.”
It is true that in the eighteenth century, both in Europe and America, the art of leather and boot and shoe making had so far advanced that good durable foot wear was produced by long and tedious processes of tanning, and by careful making up of the leather into boots and shoes by hand; the knife, the awl, the waxed thread, the nails and hammer and other hand tools of the character above referred to being employed. But the process was a tedious and costly one and the articles produced were beyond the limits of the poor man’s purse. Hence the wooden shoes, and those made of coarse hide and dressed and undressed skins, and of coarse cloth, mixed or unmixed with leather.
In 1809, David Mead Randolph of England patented machinery for riveting soles and heels to the uppers instead of sewing them together.
The celebrated civil engineer, Isambard M. Brunel, shortly thereafter added several machines of his own invention to Randolph’s method, and he established a large manufactory for the making chiefly of army shoes. The various separate processes performed by his machines involved the cutting out of the leather, hardening it by rolling, securing the welt on to the inner sole by small nails, and studding the outer sole with larger nails. Divisions of men were employed to work each separate step, and the shoes were passed from one process to another until complete.
Large quantities of shoes were made at reduced prices, but complaints were made as to the nails penetrating into the shoe and hurting the feet. The demand for army shoes fell off, and the system was abandoned; but it had incited invention in the direction of machine-made shoes and the day of exclusive hand labour was doomed.
About 1818 Joseph Walker of Hopkinston, Massachusetts invented the wooden peg. Making and applying pegs by hand was too slow work, and machines were at once contrived for making them. As one invention necessitates and begets others, so special forms of machines for sawing and working up wood into pegs were devised.
Such machinery was for first sawing the selected log of wood into slices across the grain a little thicker than the length of a peg and cutting out knots in the wood; then planing the head of the block smooth; grooving the block with a V-shaped cutting tool; splitting the pegs apart, and then bleaching, drying, polishing and winnowing them.
It took forty or fifty years to perfect these and kindred machines, but at the end of that time there was a factory at Burlington, Vermont, which from four cords of wood, made every day four hundred bushels of shoe pegs.
About 1858 B. F. Sturtevant of Massachusetts made a great improvement in this line. He was a very poor man, getting a living by pegging on the soles of a few pair of shoes each day. He devised a pegging machine, and out of his scanty earnings and at odd hours, with much pain and labour, and by borrowing money, he finally completed it. The machine made what was called “peg wood,” a long ribbon strip of seasoned wood, sharpened on one edge and designed to be fed into the machine for pegging shoes. The shoes were punctured by awls driven by machinery, and then as the peg strip was carried to it the machine severed the strip into chisel-edged pegs, and peg-driving mechanism drove them into the holes. Nine hundred pegs a minute were driven. It soon almost supplanted all other peg-driving machines, and after the machines were quite generally introduced, there were made in one year alone in New England fifty-five million pairs of boots and shoes pegged by the Sturtevant machines.
Other forms of pegs followed, such as the metal screw pegs, and machines to cut them off from a continuous spiral wire from which they were made. Lasts on which the shoes were made had been manufactured by the hundred thousand on the wood-turning lathes invented by Blanchard, described in the chapter on Wood-Working.
In 1858 also, about the same time the Sturtevant pegging machine was introduced, the shoe-sewing machine was developed. The McKay Shoe-Sewing Machine Co. of Massachusetts after an expenditure of $130,000, and three years’ time in experiments, were enabled to put their machines in practical operation. The pegging machines and sewing machines worked a revolution in shoemaking.
A revolution in the art of shoemaking thus started was followed up by wondrous machines invented to meet every part of the manufacture. Lasting machines for drawing and fitting the leather over lasts, in which the outer edges of the leather are drawn over the bottom of the last and tacked thereto by the hands and fingers of the machine instead of those of the human hand, were invented.
Indenting machines:—The welt is known as that strip of leather around the shoe between the upper and the sole, and machines were invented for cutting and placing this, indenting it for the purpose of rendering it flexible and separating the stitches, all a work until recently entirely done by hand. Machines for twining the seams in the uppers, and forming the scallops; machines especially adapted to the making of the heel, as heel trimming and compressing, rounding and polishing, and for nailing the finished heel to the boot or shoe; machines for treating the sole in every way, rolling it, in place of the good old way of pounding it on a lap stone; trimming, rounding, smoothing, and polishing it; machines for cutting out gores; machines for marking the uppers so that at one operation every shoe will be stamped by its size, number, name of manufacture, number of case, and any other convenient symbols; machines for setting the buttons and eyelets; all these are simply members in the long line of inventions in this art.
The old style of boot has given way to the modern shoe and gaiter, but for the benefit of those who still wear them, special machines for shaping the leg, called boot trees, have been contrived.
So far had the art advanced that twenty years ago one workingman with much of this improved machinery combined in one machine called the “bootmaker,” could make three hundred pairs of boots or shoes a day. Upward of three thousand such machines were then at work throughout the world; and one hundred and fifty million pairs of boots were then being made annually thereon. Now the number of machines and pairs of boots and shoes has been quadrupled.
And the world is having its feet clothed far more extensively, better and at less cost than was ever possible by the hand system. The number of workers in the art, both men and women, has vastly increased instead of being diminished, while their wages have greatly advanced over the old rates.
As an illustration of how rapidly modern enterprise and invention proceeds in Yankeeland, it has been related that some years ago in Massachusetts, after many of these shoe-making machines had got into use, a factory which was turning out 2400 pairs of shoes every day was completely destroyed by fire on a Wednesday night. On Thursday the manufacturer hired a neighbouring building and set carpenters at work fitting it up. On Friday he ordered a new and complete outfit of machinery from Boston; on Saturday the machinery arrived and the men set it up; on Monday work was started, and on Tuesday the manufacturer was filling his orders to the full number of 2400 pairs a day.
There are very many people in the world who still prefer the hand-made shoe, and there is nothing to prevent the world generally from going back to that system if they choose; but St. Crispin’s gentle art has blossomed into a vaster field of blessings for mankind under the fruitful impetus of invention than if left to vegetate under the simple processes of primitive man.
Horses, no less than man, have shared in the improvement in leather manufacture. The harnesses of the farmer’s and labouring man’s horses a century ago, when they were fortunate enough to own horses, were of the crudest description. Ropes, cords, coarse bands of leather were the common provisions. Now the strength and cheapness of harnesses enable the poor man to equip his horse with a working suit impossible to have been produced a hundred years ago.
To the beautiful effects produced by the use of modern embossing machines on paper and wood have been added many charming patterns in embossed leather. Books and leather cases, saddlery and household ornamentation of various descriptions have been either moulded into forms of beauty, or stamped or rolled by cameo and intaglio designs cut into the surface of fast-moving cylinders.
The leather manufactures have become so vastly important and valuable in some countries, especially in the United States—second, almost to agricultural products—that it would be very interesting to extend the description to many processes and machines, and to facts displaying the enormous traffic in leather, now necessarily omitted for want of space.
CHAPTER XXIV.
MINERALS—WELLS.
Dost thou hear the hammer of Thor,
Wielded in his gloves of iron?
As with leather, so with stone, the hand tools and hard labour have not changed in principle since the ancient days. The hammer for breaking, the lever for lifting, the saw for cutting, rubbing-stones and irons for smoothing and polishing, sand and water for the same purpose, the mallet and chisel, and other implements for ornamenting, the square, the level, and the plumb for their respective purposes, all are as old as the art of building.
And as for buildings and sculpture of stone and marble made by hand tools, we have yet to excel the pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens, which “Earth proudly wears as the best gem upon her zone,” the palaces, coliseums, and aqueducts of Rome, the grand and polished tombs of India, the exquisite halls of the Alhambra, and the Gothic cathedrals.
But the time came when human blood and toil became too dear to be the possession solely of the rulers and the wealthy, and to be used alone to perpetuate and commemorate riches, power and glory.
Close on the expansion of men’s minds came the expansion of steam and the development of modern inventions. The first application of the steam engine in fields of human labour was the drawing of water from the coal mines of England; then in drawing the coal itself.
It was only a step for the steam engine into a new field of labour when General Bentham introduced his system of wood-sawing machinery in 1800; and from sawing wood to sawing stone was only one more step. We find that taken in 1803 in Pennsylvania, when Oliver Evans of Philadelphia drove with a high-pressure steam engine, “twelve saws in heavy frames, sawing at the rate of one hundred feet of marble in twelve hours.” How long would it have taken hand sawyers of marble at ancient Paros and Naxos to have done the same?
Stone-cutting machines of other forms than sawing then followed.
It was desired to divide large blocks generally at the quarries to facilitate transportation. Machines for this purpose are called stone-channelling machines. They consist of a gang of chisels bound together and set on a framework which travels on a track adjacent to the stone to be cut, and so arranged that the cutters may be set to the stone at desired angles, moved automatically forward and back in the grooves they are cutting, be fed in or out, raised or lowered, detached, and otherwise manipulated in the operation.
Other stone-cutting machines had for their objects the cutting and moulding the edges of tables, mantels and slabs; and the cutting of circular and other curved work. In the later style of machine the cutter fixed on the end of a spindle is guided in the desired directions on the surface of the stone by a pointer, which, attached to the cutter spindle, moves in the grooves of a pattern also connected to the rotating support carrying the cutter.
Other forms of most ingenious stone-dressing and carving machines have been devised for cutting mouldings, and ornamental figures and devices, in accordance with a model or pattern fixed to the under side of the table which carries the stone or marble to be dressed; and in which, by means of a guide moving in the pattern, the diamond cutter or cutters, carried in a circular frame above the work and adjusted to its surface, are moved in the varying directions determined by the pattern. A stream of water is directed on the stone to clear it of the dust during the operations. The carving of stone by machinery is now a sister branch of wood carving. Monuments, ornamentation, and intricate forms of figures and characters are wrought with great accuracy by cutting and dressing tools guided by the patterns, or directed by the hand of the operator.
For the dressing of the faces of grindstones, special forms of cutting machines have been devised.
It was a slow and tedious task to drill holes through stone by hand tools; and it was indeed a revolution in this branch of the art when steam engines were employed to rotate a rod armed at its end with diamond or other cutters against the hardest stone. This mode of drilling also effected a revolution in the art of blasting. Then, neither height, nor depth, nor thickness of the stone could prevent the progress of the drill rod. Tunnels through mountain walls, and wells through solid quartz are cut to the depth of thousands of feet.
One instance is related of the wonderful efficiency on a smaller scale of such a machine: The immense columns of the State Capitol at Columbus, Ohio, were considered too heavy for the foundation on which they rested. The American Diamond Rock Boring Company of Providence, Rhode Island, bored out a twenty-four inch core from each of the great pillars, and thus relieved the danger.
In the most economical and successful stone drills compressed air is employed as the motive power to drive the drills, which may be used singly or in gangs, and which may be adjusted against the rock or quarry in any direction. When in position and ready for work a few moments will suffice to bore the holes, apply the explosive and blast the ledge. The cleaning away of submarine ledges in harbours, such as the great work at Hell Gate in the harbour of New York, has thus been effected.
Crushing:—Among the most useful inventions relating to stone working are machines for crushing stones and ores, and assorting them. The old way of hammering by hand was first succeeded by powerful stamp hammers worked by steam. Both methods of course are still followed, but they demand too great an expenditure of force and time.
About a third of a century ago, Eli Whitney Blake of New Haven, Connecticut, was a pioneer inventor of a new and most successful type of stone breaking machine, which ever since has been known as the “Blake Crusher.” This crusher consists of two ponderous upright jaws, one fixed and the other movable, between which the stones or ores to be crushed are fed. Each of the jaws is lined with the hardest kind of chilled steel. The movable jaw is inclined from its lower end from the fixed jaw and at its upper end is pivoted to swing on a heavy round iron bar. The movable jaw is forced toward the fixed jaw by two opposite toggle levers set, in one form of the crusher, at their inner ends in steel bearings of a vertical vibrating, rocking lever, one of the toggles bearing at its outer end against the movable jaw and the outer toggle against a solid frame-work. The rocking lever is operated through a crank by a steam engine, and as it is vibrated, the toggle joint forces the lever end of the movable jaw towards the fixed jaw with immense force, breaking the hardest stone like an eggshell.
The setting of the movable jaw at an incline enables the large stone to be first cracked, the movable jaw then opens, and as the stone falls lower between the more contracted jaws, it is broken finer, until it is finally crushed or pulverized and falls through at the bottom. The movable jaw is adjustable and can be set to crush stones to a certain size.
As the rock drill made a revolution in blasting and tunnelling, so the Blake crusher revolutionised the art of road making. “Road metal,” as the supply of broken stones for roads is now called, is the fruit of the crusher. Hundreds of tons of stone per day can be crushed to just the size desired, and the machine may be moved from place to place where most convenient to use.
Other crushers have been invented, formed on the principle of abrasion. The stones, or ore, fall between two great revolving disks, having corrugated steel faces, which are set the desired distance apart, and between which the stones are crushed by the rubbing action. In this style of machine the principle of a gradual breaking from a coarse to a finer grade, is maintained by setting the disks farther apart at the centre where the stone enters, and nearer together at their peripheries where the broken stone is discharged. Large smooth or corrugated rollers, conical disks, concentric rollers armed with teeth of varying sizes, and yet so arranged as to preserve the feature of the narrowing throat at the bottom or place of discharge, have also been devised and extensively used.
A long line of inventions has appeared especially adapted to break up and separate coal into different sizes. To view the various monstrous heaps of assorted coals at the mouth of a coal mine creates an impression that some great witch had imposed on a poor victim the gigantic and seemingly impossible task of breaking and assorting a vast heap of coal into these separate piles within a certain time—a task which also seems to have been miraculously and successfully performed within such an exceedingly short time as to either satisfy or confuse the presiding evil genius.
Modern civilisation has been developed mostly from steam and coal, and they have been to each other as strong brothers, growing more and more mutually dependent to meet the demands made upon them.
The mining of coal, and its subsequent treatment for burning, before the invention of the steam engine, were long, painful, and laborious tasks, and the steam engine could never have had its modern wants supplied if its power had not been used to supplement, with a hundredfold increased effect, the labour of human hands.
It being impracticable to carry steam or the steam engine to the bottom of the mine for work there, compressed air is there employed, which is compressed by a steam engine up at the mouth. By this compressed air operated in a cylinder to drive a piston, and a connecting rod and a pick, a massive steel pick attached to the rod may be driven in any direction against the wall of coal at the rate of from ninety to one hundred and twenty blows per minute; and at the same time the discharged compressed, cold, pure, fresh air flows into and through the mine, affording ventilation when and where most needed.
In addition to these great drills, more recent inventors have brought out small machines for single operators, worked by the electric motor.
After the coal is lifted out, broken and assorted, it needs to be washed free of the adhering dust and dirt; and for this purpose machines are provided, as well as for screening, loading and weighing. The operations of breaking, assorting and washing are often combined in one machine, while an intermediate hand process for separating the pieces of slate from the coal may be employed; but additional automatic means for separating the coal and slate are provided, consisting in forcing with great power water through the coal as it falls into a chamber, which carries the lighter slate to the top of the chamber, where it is at once drawn off.
The chief of machines with ores is the ore mill, which not only breaks up the ore but grinds or pulverises it.
Some chemical and other processes for reducing ores have been referred to in the Chapter on Metallurgy.
Other mechanical processes consist of separators of various descriptions—a prominent one of which acts on the principal of centrifugal force. The crushed material from a spout being led to the centre of a rapidly rotating disk is thrown off by centrifugal force; and as the lighter portions are thrown farther from the disk, and the heavier portions nearer to the same, the material is automatically assorted as to size and weight. As the disk revolves these assorted portions fall through properly graded apertures into separate channels of a circular trough, from whence they are swept out by brushes secured to a support revolving with the disk.
Many forms of ore washing machines have been invented to treat the ore after it has been reduced to powder. These are known by various names, as jiggers, rifflers, concentrators, washing frames, etc. A stream of water is directed on, into, and through the mass of pulverised ore and dirt, the dirt and kindred materials, lighter than the ore, are raised and floated towards the top of the receptacle and carried away, while the ore settles.
This operation is frequently carried on in connection with amalgamated surfaces over which the metal is passed to still further attract and concentrate the ore. An endless apron travelling over cylinders is sometimes employed, composed of slats the surface of each of which is coated with an amalgam, and on this belt the powdered ore is spread thinly and carried forward. The vibrations of the belt tend to shake and distribute the ore particles, the amalgam attracts them, the refuse is thrown off as the belt passes down over the cylinder, while the ore particles are retained and brushed off into a proper receptacle. Amalgamators themselves form a large class of inventions. They are known as electric, lead, mercury, plate, vacuum, vapour, etc.
By the help of these and a vast number of other kindred inventions, the business of mining in all its branches has been revolutionised and transformed, even within the last half century. With the vast increase in the output of coal, and of ores, and the incalculable saving of hand labour, the number of operators has been increased in the same proportion, their wages increased, their hours of labour shortened, and their comforts multiplied in variety and quantity, with a diminished cost. The whole business of mining has been raised from ceaseless darkness and drudgery to light and dignity. Opportunity has been created for miners to become men of standing in the community in which they live; and means provided for educating their children and for obtaining comfortable homes adorned with the refinements of civilisation.
Well boring is an ancient art—known to the Egyptians and the Chinese. Wells were coeval with Abraham when his servant had the celebrated interview with Rebecca. “Jacob’s well at Sychar—the ancient Shechim—has been visited by travellers in all ages and has been minutely described. It is nine feet in diameter and one hundred and five feet deep, made entirely through rock. When visited by Maundrel it contained fifteen feet of water.”—Knight. Some kind of a drill must have been used to have cut so great a depth through rock. The Chinese method of boring wells from time immemorial has been by the use of a sharp chisel-like piece of hard iron on the end of a heavy iron and wood frame weighing four or five hundred pounds, lifted by a lever and turned by a rattan cord operated by hand, and by which wells from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred feet in depth and five or six inches in diameter have been bored.
This method has lately been improved by attaching the chisel part, which is made very heavy, to a rope of peculiar manufacture, which gives the chisel a turn as it strikes, combined with an air pump to suck up from the hole the accumulating dirt and water.
Artesian wells appear to have first been known in Europe in the province of Artois, France, in the thirteenth century. Hence their name. The previous state of the art in Egypt, China and elsewhere was not then known.
Other modern inventions in well-making machinery have consisted in innumerable devices to supplant manual labour and to meet new conditions.
Coal Oil:—Reichenbach, the German chemist, discovered paraffine. Young, soon after, in 1850, patented paraffine oil made from coal. These discoveries, added to the long observed fact of coal oil floating on streams in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, led to the search for its natural source. The discovery of the reservoirs of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1855-1860, and subsequently of gas, which nature had concealed for so long a time, gave a great impetus to inventions to obtain and control these riches. With earth-augurs, drills, and drill cleaning and clearing and “fishing” apparatus, and devices for creating a new flow of oil, and tubing, new forms of packing, etc., inventors created a new industry.
Colonel E. Drake sank the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859. Since then, 125,000 oil wells have been drilled in that and neighbouring localities. The world has seldom seen such excitement, except in California on the discovery of gold, as attended the coal oil discovery. The first wells sunk gushed thousands of barrels a day. Farmers and other labouring men went to bed poor and woke up rich. Rocky wildernesses and barren fields suddenly became Eldorados. The burning rivers of oil were a reflection of the golden treasures which flowed into the hands and pockets of thousands as from a perpetual fountain touched by some great magician’s wand.
Old methods of boring wells were too slow, and although the underlying principle was the same, the new methods and means invented enabled wells to be bored with one-tenth the labour, in one-tenth the time, and at one-tenth the cost. Many great cities and plains and deserts have been provided with these wells owing to the ease with which they can now be sunk.
Another ingenious method of sinking wells was invented by Colonel N. W. Greene at Cortland, New York, in 1862. It became known as the “driven well,” and consisted of a pointed tube provided with holes above the pointed end, and an inclosed tube to prevent the passage of sand or gravel through the holes in the outer tube. When the pointed tube was driven until water was reached the inner tube was withdrawn and a pump mechanism inserted. This well, so simple, so cheap and effective, has been used in all countries by thousands of farmers on dry plains and by soldiers in many desert lands. With these and modern forms of artesian wells the deserts have literally been made to blossom as the rose.
CHAPTER XXV.
HOROLOGY AND INSTRUMENTS OF PRECISION.
“Time measures all things, but I measure it.”
So far as we at present know there were four forms of time-measuring instruments known to antiquity—the sun-dial, the clepsydra or water clock, the hour-glass, and the graduated candle.
The sun-dial, by which time was measured by the shadow cast from a pin, rod or pillar upon a graduated horizontal plate—the graduations consisting of twelve equal parts, in which the hours of the day were divided, were, both as to the instrument and the division of the day into hours, invented by the Babylonians or other Oriental race, set up on the plains of Chaldea, constructed by the Chinese and Hindoos—put into various forms by these nations, and adapted, but unimproved, by the learned Greeks and conquering Romans. It appears to have been unknown to the Assyrians and Egyptians, or if known, its knowledge confined to their wise men, as it does not appear in any of their monuments.
The clepsydra, an instrument by which in its earliest form a portion of time was measured by the escape of water from a small orifice in the bottom of a shell or vase, or by which the empty vase, placed in another vessel filled with water, was gradually filled through the orifice and which sank within a certain time, is supposed by many to have preceded the invention of the sun-dial. At any rate they were used contemporaneously by the same peoples.
In its later form, when the day and night were each divided into twelve hours, the vessel was correspondingly graduated, and a float raised by the inflowing water impelled a pointer attached to the float against the graduations.
Plato, it is said, contrived a bell so connected with the pointer that it was struck at each hour of the night. But the best of ancient clepsydras was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria about the middle of the third century B. C. He was the pupil of Archimedes, and adopting his master’s idea of geared wheels, he mounted a toothed wheel on a shaft extending through the vessel and carrying at one end outside of the vessel a pointer adapted to move around the face of a dial graduated with the 24 hours. The vertical toothed rod or rack, adapted to be raised or lowered by a float in a vessel gradually filled with water, engaged a pinion fixed on another horizontal shaft, which pinion in turn engaged the larger wheel. It was not difficult to proportion the parts and control the supply of water to make the point complete its circuit regularly. Then the same inventor dispensed with the wheel, rack, and pinion, and substituted a cord to which a float was attached, passing the cord over a grooved pulley and securing a weight at its other end. The pulley was fixed on the shaft which carried the hour hand. The float was a counterbalance to the weight, and as it was lifted by the water the weight stretched the cord and turned the pulley, which caused the pointer to move on the dial and indicate the hour. The water thus acted as an escapement to control the motive power. In one form the water dropped on wheels which had their motion communicated to a small statue that gradually rose and pointed with a rod to the hour upon the dial.
Thus the essential parts of a clock—an escapement, which is a device to control the power in a clock or watch so that it shall act intermittently on the time index, a motive power, which was then water or a weight, a dial to display the hours, and an index to point them out—were invented at this early age. But the art advanced practically no further for many centuries.
The hour-glass is too familiar to need description.
The incense sticks of the Chinese, the combustion of which proceeded so slowly and regularly as to render them available for time measures, were the precursors of the graduated candles.
With the ungraduated sun-dial the Greeks fixed their times for bathing and eating. When the shadow was six feet long it was time to bathe, when twice that length it was time to sup. The clepsydra became in Greece a useful instrument to enforce the law in restricting loquacious orators and lawyers to reasonable limits in their addresses. And in Rome the sun-dials, the clepsydras and the hour-glass were used for the same purpose, and more generally than in Greece, to regulate the hours of business and pleasure.
The graduated candles are chiefly notable as to their use, if not invention, by Alfred the Great in about 883. They were 12 inches long, divided into 12 parts, of which three would burn in one hour. In use they were shielded from the wind by thin pieces of horn, and thus the “horn lantern” originated. With them he divided the day into three equal parts, one for religion, one for public affairs, and one for rest and recreation.
Useful clocks of wondrous make were described in the annals of the middle ages, especially in Germany, made by monks and others for Kings, monasteries and churches. The old Saxon and Teutonic words cligga, and glocke, signifying the striking of a bell, and from which the name clock is derived, indicates the early combination of striking and time-keeping mechanism. The records are scant as to the particulars of inventions in horology during the middle ages and down to the sixteenth century, but we know that weights, and trains of wheels and springs, and some say pendulums, were used in clockwork, and that the tones of hourly bells floated forth from the dim religious light of old cathedrals. They all appear to have involved in different forms the principle of the old clepsydra, using either weights or water as the motive power to drive a set of wheels and to move a pointer over the face of a dial.
Henry de Vick of France about 1370 constructed a celebrated clock for Charles V., the first nearest approach to modern weight clocks. The weight was used to unwind a cord from a barrel. The barrel was connected to a ratchet and there were combined therewith a train of toothed wheels and pinions, an escapement consisting of a crown wheel controlled by two pallets, which in turn were operated alternately by two weights on a balanced rod. An hour hand was carried by a shaft of the great wheel, and a dial plate divided into hours. This was a great advance, as a more accurate division of time was had by improving the isochronous properties of the vibrating escapement. But the world was still wanting a time-keeper to record smaller portions of the day than the hour and a more accurate machine than Vick’s.
Two hundred years, nearly, elapsed before the next important advance in horology. By this time great astronomers like Tycho Brahe and Valherius had divided the time-recording dials into minutes and seconds.
About 1525 Jacob Zech of Prague invented the fusee, which was re-invented and improved by the celebrated Dr. Hooke, 125 years later.
Small portable clocks, the progenitors of the modern watch, commenced to appear about 1500. It was then that Peter Hele of Nuremberg substituted for weights as the motive power a ribbon of steel, which he wound around a central spindle, connecting one end to a train of wheels to which it gave motion as it unwound.
Then followed the famous observation of the swinging lamp by the then young Galileo, about 1582, while lounging in the cathedral of Pisa. The isochronism of the vibrations of the pendulum inferred from this observation was not published or put to practical application in clocks for nearly sixty years afterward. In 1639 Galileo, then old and blind, dictated to his son one of his books in which he discussed the isochronal properties of oscillating bodies, and their adaptation as time measures. He and others had used the pendulum for dividing time, but moved it by hand and counted its vibrations. But Huygens, the great Dutch scientist, about 1556 was the first to explain the principles and properties of the pendulum as a time measurer and to apply it most successfully to clocks. His application of it was to the old clock of Vick’s.
The seventeenth century thus opened up a new era in clock and watch making. The investigations, discoveries, and inventions of Huygens and other Dutch clock-makers, of Dr. Hooke and David Ramsey of England, Hautefeuille of France, and a few others placed the art of clock and watch making on the scientific basis on which it has ever since rested.
The pendulum and watch-springs needed to have their movements controlled and balanced by better escapements. Huygens thought that the pendulum should be long and swing in a cycloidal course, but Dr. Hooke found the better way to produce perfect isochronous movements was to cause the pendulum to swing in short arcs, which he accomplished by his invention of the anchor escapement.
The fusee which Dr. Hooke re-invented consists of a conical spirally-grooved pulley, around which a chain is wound, and which is connected at one end to a barrel, in which the main actuating spring is tightly coiled. The fusee is thus interposed between the wheel train and the spring to equalise the power of the latter.
To Dr. Hooke must also be credited the invention of that delicate but efficient device, the hair-spring balance for watches. His inventions in this line were directed to the best means of utilising and controlling the force of springs, his motto being “ut tensio sic vis,” (as the tension is so is the force.) Repeating watches to strike the hours, half-hours and quarters, made their appearance in the seventeenth century. In the next century Arnold made one for George III., as small as an English sixpence. This repeated the hours, halves and quarters, and in it for the first time in the art a jewel was used as a bearing for the arbors, and this particular one was a ruby made into a minute cylinder.
After the discovery and practical application of weights, springs, wheels, levers and escapements to time mechanisms, subsequent inventions, numerous as they have been, have consisted chiefly, not in the discovery of new principles, but in new methods in the application of old ones. Prior to the eighteenth century, however, clocks were cumbrous and expensive, and the watches rightly regarded as costly toys; and as to their accuracy in time-measuring, the cheaper ones were hardly as satisfactory as the ancient sun-dials.
With the coming of the machine inventions and the new industrial and social ideas of the eighteenth century came an almost sudden new appreciation of the value of time. Hours, minutes and seconds began to be carefully prized, both by the trades and professions, and the demand from the common people for accurate time records became great. This demand it has been the office of the nineteenth century to supply, and to place clocks and watches within the reach of the poor as well as the rich. While thus lessening the cost of time-keepers their value has been enhanced by increasing their accuracy and durability.
Among the other ideas for which the eighteenth century was famous in watch-making was that of dispensing with the key for winding, thus saving the losing of keys and preventing access of dust, an idea which, however, was perfected only in the last half of the nineteenth century.
The eighteenth century was chiefly distinguished by its scientific improvements in time-keepers, to adapt them for astronomical observations and for use at sea, in not only accurately determining the time, but the degrees of longitude. Chronometers were invented, distinguished from watches and clocks, by means by which the fluctuation of the parts caused by the variations in temperature are obviated or compensated. In clocks what are known as the mercurial and gridiron pendulums were invented respectively toward the close of the eighteenth century by Graham and Harrison, and the latter also subsequently invented the expanding and contracting balance wheel for watches. The principle in these appliances is the employment of two different metals which expand unequally, and thus maintain an uniformity of operation.
The Dutch, with Huygens in the lead, were long among the leading clock-makers. Germany ranked next. It was in the seventeenth century that a wonderful industry in clock-making there commenced, which lasted for two centuries. The Black Forest region of South Germany became a famous locality for the manufacture of cheap wooden clocks. The system adopted was a minute division of labour. From fourteen to twenty thousand hands twenty years ago were employed in the Schwarzwald district. Labour-saving machines were ignored almost entirely. The annual production finally reached nearly two million clocks, of the value of about five million dollars.
Switzerland in watch-making followed precisely the example of Germany in clock-making. It commenced there in the seventeenth and culminated in the nineteenth century. Many thousands of its population were engaged in the business and it flourished under the fostering care of the government—by the establishment of astronomical observations for testing the adjustment of the best watches, the giving of prizes, and the establishment and encouragement of schools of horology conducted on thorough scientific methods. A quarter of a century ago it was estimated that in Switzerland 40,000 persons out of a population of 150,000 were engaged in watch-making, and that the annual production sometimes reached 1,600,000 completed movements. The whole world was their market. The United States alone was in 1875 importing 134,000 watches annually from that country.
As in Germany, so one characteristic of the Swiss system was a minute sub-division of the labour. Individuals and entire families had certain parts only to make. It is said that the Swiss watch passed through the hands of one hundred and thirty different workmen before it was put upon the market. The use of machines was also, as in Germany, ignored. By this national devotion to a single trade and its sub-division of labour, the successful production of complicated watches became great and their prices comparatively low.
The United States in the commencement of its career and at the opening of the century had no clocks or watches of its own manufacture. But it soon followed the example of Germany and Switzerland and established cheap clock manufactories, first of wood, and then of metal, which became famous and of world-wide use. But it could make no headway against the cheap labour of Europe in watch-making, and the country was flooded with watches of all qualities, principally from Switzerland and England. Finally, at the half-way mark in the century, the inquiry arose among Americans, why could not the system of the minute sub-division of human labour followed in watch-making countries so cheaply and profitably, be accomplished by machinery? The field was open, the prize was great, and the government stood ready to grant exclusive patents to every inventor who would devise a new and useful machine. The problem was great, as the fields abroad had been filled for generations by skilled artisans who had reduced the complicated mechanism of watch-making to a fine art. Fortunately the habit had been established in America in several of the leading industries, principally in that of fire-arms, of fabricating separate machinery for the independent making of numerous parts of the same implement, whereby uniformity and interchangeability were established. Under such a practice, which was known as the American system, a duplicate of the smallest part of a complicated machine, lost or worn out thousands of miles from the factory, could soon be furnished by simply sending the number or name of such required part to the manufacturer, or to the nearest dealer in such machines.