Twenty-four manly-looking Boys with Sledge-hammer in Hand — their Muscle and Brawn. — The Pride of Conscious Strength. — The Story of the Origin of an Empire. — The Greater Empire of Mechanics. — The Smelter and the Smith the Bulwark of the British Government. — Coal — its Modern Aspects; its Early History; Superstition regarding its Use. — Dud. Dudley utilizes “Pit-coal” for Smelting — the Story of his Struggles; his Imprisonment and Death. — The English People import their Pots and Kettles. — “The Blast is on and the Forge Fire sings.” — The Lesson, first on the Black-board, then in Red-hot Iron on the Anvil. — Striking out the Anvil Chorus — the Sparks fly whizzing through the Air. — The Mythological History of Iron. — The Smith in Feudal Times. — His Versatility. — History of Damascus Steel. — We should reverence the early Inventors. — The Useful Arts finer than the Fine Arts. — The Ancient Smelter and Smith, and the Students in the Manual Training School.

This is the Forging Laboratory. It is only a few steps from the laboratory for founding, where we lately saw twenty-four students taking off their leather aprons after a two hours’ lesson in moulding and casting. Here we find, also, twenty-four students, but not the twenty-four we saw in the laboratory for founding. This class is more advanced. The boys are a trifle taller; they show more muscle, more strength, and bear themselves with a still more confident air.

In the Forging Laboratory there are twenty-four forges with all essential accessories, as anvils, tubs, and sets of ordinary hand-tools.

The students, with coats off and sleeves rolled above their elbows, in pairs, as smith and helper, stand, sledge and tongs in hand, at twelve of the forges. They are manly-looking boys. Their feet are firmly planted, their bodies erect, their heads thrown a little back. Their arms show brawn; the muscles stand out in relief from the solid flesh. Their faces express the pride of conscious strength, and their eyes show animation.

As we regard the class with a sympathetic thrill of satisfaction, the story of the origin of the Turkish Empire is recalled: “A race of slaves, living in the mountain regions of Asia, are employed by a powerful Khan to forge weapons for his use in war. A bold chief persuades them to use the weapons forged for a master to secure their own deliverance. For centuries after they had thus conquered their freedom, the Turkish people celebrated their liberation by an annual ceremony in which a piece of iron was heated in the fire, and a smith’s hammer successively handled by the prince and his nobles.”

The greatest empire in the world to-day is the empire of the art of mechanism, and its most potent instrument is iron. Once the perpetuity of governments depended upon the mere possession of the dingy ore. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in the middle of the sixteenth century, England was almost defenceless, owing to the short supply of iron. Spain, much better equipped, hence relied confidently upon her ability to subdue the English. But the Virgin Queen, comprehending the nature of the crisis, imported iron from Sweden and encouraged the Sussex forges, and the Spanish Armada was defeated. Thus the smelter and the smith became the bulwark of the British government.

But at an earlier period the fraternity of smiths gave direction to the course of empire. The secret of the easy conquest of Britain by the Normans was their superior armor. They were clad in steel, and their horses were shod with iron. The chief farrier of William became an earl; and he was proud of his origin, for his coat of arms bore six horseshoes.

Iron and civilization are terms of equivalent import. Iron is king, and the smelter and smith are his chief ministers. It is not known when, by whom, or how the art of smelting iron was discovered. As well ask by whom and how fire was discovered? These are secrets of the early morning of human life—of that time when man made no record of his struggles.

In lieu of history the instructor resorts to tradition, repeating the following legend: “While men were patiently rubbing sticks to point them into arrows, a spark leapt forth and ignited the wood-dust which had been scraped from the sticks, and so fire was found.”

Now the “helper” looks to his “blast” with keen interest; for the management of the forge-fire is one of the niceties of the smith’s art. He stirs the fire a little impatiently. The instructor heeds the act, but not the movement of impatience. On the contrary he seizes the occasion to introduce the subject of coal. Question follows question in rapid succession, and the answers are prompt and satisfactory, touching all modern aspects of the subject, namely, the magnitude of the annual “output,” the localities of heaviest production, the cost of mining; the uses, respectively, to which different qualities are applied, demand and supply, and market value or price. Here the instructor remarks that the mining, transportation, and sale of coal are conducted in this country by a number of large corporations, with an aggregate capitalization and bonded indebtedness of six or seven hundred million dollars, and that through combinations between these corporations the price is often arbitrarily advanced. “But,” he concludes, “the discussion of that branch of the subject belongs more properly to the class in political economy.”

The history of coal in its relation to iron smelting and manufacture forms a curious chapter in the vicissitudes of the useful arts. One hundred and fifty years ago not only all the smith’s fires but the smelter’s fires were kept up with charcoal. The forests of England were literally swept away, like chaff before the wind, to feed the yawning mouths of the iron mills. To make a ton of iron required the consumption of hundreds of cords of wood. To save the timber restrictive legislation was adopted, and the mills were gradually closed for want of fuel, until, in 1788, there was not one left in Sussex, and only a small number in the kingdom. Meantime the English iron supply came from Sweden, Spain, and Germany. England seemed to be following in the footsteps of the Roman Empire. The Romans accomplished in iron smelting and forging just what might be expected of a warlike people. They required iron for arms and armor, and in smelting skimmed the surface. This is proved by the cinder heaps, rich in ore, which they left in Britain. Archæologists trace the decline of Rome in her monuments, which show a steady deterioration in the soldier’s equipment. Alison attributes this decline to the exhaustion of her gold and silver mines. A far more plausible conjecture is found in the waste of timber in fuel for smelting purposes, and the resulting failure of the iron supply.

The fall of the Roman Empire may be accounted for by her neglect of the useful arts. The nation that converts all her iron into swords and spears shall surely perish. Had the city of Seven Hills possessed seven men of mechanical genius like Watt, Stephenson, Maudslay, Clement, Whitney, Neilson, and Nasmyth, her fall might have been averted, or if not averted, it need not have involved the practical extinction of civilization, thus imposing upon mankind the shame of the Dark Ages.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was much ignorant prejudice against the use of mineral coal. It was believed to be injurious to health. All sorts of diseases were attributed to its supposed malignant influence, and at one time to burn it in dwellings was made a penal offence. But this prejudice did not extend to its use in smelting iron, and whatever there was of inventive genius was devoted to a solution of the problem of its adaptation to such purposes. Mr. Samuel Smiles has collected the names of the most prominent of these Dutch and German mechanics, namely, Sturtevant, Rovenzon, Jordens, Francke, and Sir Philibert Vernatt, and given each a niche in the temple of fame. Some of them had a true conception of the required processes, but they all failed to render the application practically available.

It remained for Dud. Dudley to succeed in making a thoroughly practical application of mineral coal to iron-smelting purposes, and then curiously enough to fail of success in introducing it into general use. Dudley was born in 1599, in an iron-manufacturing district. His father owned iron-works near the town of Dudley, which was a collection of forges and workshops where “nails, horseshoes, keys, locks, and common agricultural tools” were made. Brought up in the neighborhood of “twenty thousand smiths and workers in iron,” young Dudley “attained considerable knowledge of the various processes of manufacture.” At twenty years of age he was taken from college and placed in charge of a furnace and two forges in Worcestershire, where there was a scarcity of wood but an abundance of mineral coal. He began immediately to experiment, with a view to the substitution of the latter for the former, and in a year succeeded in demonstrating “the practicability of smelting iron with fuel made from pit-coal, which so many before him had tried in vain.” But the charcoal iron-masters combined to resist the new method because it cheapened the product. They instigated mobs to destroy Dudley’s furnaces one after another, as soon as they were completed, harassed him with lawsuits, and finally beggared and drove him to prison. Then they tried to wring his secret from him. To this attempt Cromwell, who was interested in furnaces in the Forest of Dean, is said to have been a party. But all these efforts failed, and Dudley died in 1684 carrying his secret with him to the grave, and there the secret slumbered nearly one hundred years.

The story of Dud. Dudley, as told by Mr. Smiles in his “Iron-workers and Tool-makers,” is one of surpassing interest. It is worthy the careful perusal not only of every school-boy but of the philosophic student in search of the lessons of history, for it affords fresh evidence of the truth of the proposition that the progress of civilization depends upon progress in invention and discovery.

Under the influence of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition the iron industry of England continued to decline until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the British people imported their pots and kettles. Fifty years later, at the Coalbrookdale iron-works in Shropshire, when the furnaces had consumed all the wood in the neighborhood and a fuel famine was imminent, smelting with mineral coal was successfully resumed, and in 1766 two workmen of the “works”—the brothers Cranege—invented the reverberatory furnace, which added immensely to the application of coal to smelting purposes.

But while we are discussing the history of coal we are consuming coal to little purpose, for the blast is on and the furnace fires glow like miniature volcanic craters. Let us to work. Before the black-board, chalk in hand, the instructor stands and gives out the lesson. He presents it in the form of drawings, complete and in detail. It may involve only the single process of “drawing,” or it may involve several processes, as “drawing,” “bending,” and “welding.” The first sketch, for example, represents a flat bar of iron, the counterpart of the bars resting against the several forges. The second sketch shows the bar wrought into the form of a cylinder. The third sketch shows it “drawn” or lengthened, and hence reduced in size. The fourth sketch presents two rods the united lengths of which equal the length of the original rod. The fifth sketch represents the two rods “bent” into the form of chain-links, and a sub-sketch shows the proper shape of the ends of the links for “welding.” The sixth sketch shows the two links joined and welded.

The black-board illustrations may be omitted if the school is provided with a complete set of samples. The school of mechanic arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a hundred samples representing the successive steps in blacksmithing manipulation, including welding, and the welding samples consist of two parts, the first representing the details of the piece prepared for welding, and the second the welded piece. These samples are part of a collection of three hundred and twenty pieces of exquisite workmanship, covering every department of a complete manual training course, presented to the Institute in 1877 by the Emperor of Russia.

The black-board illustrations or the samples having been exhibited and explained as clearly as is possible in words, the instructor takes his place at one of the forges, and, surrounded by the class, goes through with the successive steps of any manipulation contained in the lesson which has not been actually wrought out in some previous lesson.

If the manipulation is a simple one the silence is only broken by the sound of the blast and the stroke of the hammer—the students understand every turn of the iron and every blow struck by the instructor—but if the manipulation is complicated, involving a fresh principle, the instructor is saluted by a volley of questions, and he often pauses to answer them. It is the time for questions; the more questions now, the fewer questions when all the blasts shall be on, and all the sledges flying through the air and making music on the anvils. A question now may lead to the enlightenment of twenty-four students; a question later is sure to cost the time of twenty-four students, and the answer to it may enlighten only one student.

At last the instructor drops the sledge, straightens up to his full height, and wipes the sweat from his brow. If the students respect the instructor they will respect labor, and they will respect the instructor if he is worthy of respect.

Now the school-room is a smithy and yet it is not. It is neither very hot nor very smoky, for there is an exhaust fan in operation which vitalizes the circulation. But the atmosphere resounds with the clangorous strokes of a dozen sledges, mingled with the sullen roar of as many forge-fires; and there are traces of soot on the walls, and pale smoke-wreaths creep along the ceilings, and hide in corners, and circle about columns in fantastic shapes. It is a smithy, but a smithy adapted, by its extraordinary neatness, to the manufacture of watch-springs, palate-arbors, and Damascus blades.

The faces of the students are aglow with the flush of health-giving exercise; their brows are “wet with honest sweat,” their heart-beats are full and strong, and the crimson life-currents surge hotly through every vein to their very finger-tips. They strike out the anvil chorus in all the keys and in every measure of the scale, and the burning sparks fly whizzing through the air.

At a sign from the instructor there is a pause. The students stand at ease and the work is inspected. This is the time for more questions if any student is in doubt; and the rest of five minutes affords opportunity for a brief lecture on the subject of the early history of the fraternity of smiths.

Mythology gives the highest place in its pantheon to Vulcan, the God of Fire. For notwithstanding he is represented as bearded, covered with dust and soot, blowing the fires of his forges and surrounded by his chief ministers, the cyclops, he is given Venus to wife and made the father of Cupid. Among the Scythians the iron sword was a god. When Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonians they made captives of all the smiths and other craftsmen of the city—a more grievous act than the thousand million dollar tribute levied upon France by Germany at the close of the war of 1870. For to be deprived of the use of iron is to be relegated to a state of barbarism.

The vulgar accounted for the keenness of the first sword-blades on the score of magic, and the praises of the smiths who forged were sung with the chiefs of chivalry who wielded them. So highly was this mysterious power regarded by Tancred, the crusader, that in return for the present of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibar, by Richard I., he paid for it with “four great ships and fifteen galleys.”

The smith was a mighty man in England in the early time. “In the royal court of Wales he sat in the great hall with the king and queen, and was entitled to a draught of every kind of liquor served.” His person was sacred; his calling placed him above the law. He was necessary to the feudal state; he forged swords “on the temper of which life, honor, and victory in battle depended.” The smith, after the Norman invasion, gained in importance in England. He was the chief man of the village, its oracle, and the most cunning workman of the time. His name descended to more families than that of any other profession—for the origin of the name Smith is the hot, dusty, smoky smithy, and however it may be disguised in the spelling, it is entitled to the proud distinction which its representatives sometimes seek to conceal.

Mr. Smiles draws the following graphic picture of the versatility of the smith of the Middle Ages:

“The smith’s tools were of many sorts, but the chief were his hammer, pincers, chisel, tongs, and anvil. It is astonishing what a variety of articles he turned out of his smithy by the help of these rude implements. In the tooling, chasing, and consummate knowledge of the capabilities of iron he greatly surpassed the modern workman. The numerous exquisite specimens of his handicraft which exist in our old gate-ways, church doors, altar railings, and ornamented dogs and andirons, still serve as types for continual reproduction. He was, indeed, the most ‘cunning workman’ of his time. But besides all this he was an engineer. If a road had to be made, or a stream embanked, or a trench dug, he was invariably called upon to provide the tools, and often to direct the work. He was also the military engineer of his day, and as late as the reign of Edward III. we find the king repeatedly sending for smiths from the Forest of Dean to act as engineers for the royal army at the siege of Berwick.”

But the most signal triumph of the art, both of the smelter and the smith, is found in the famous swords of Damascus, whose edge and temper were so keen and perfect that they would sever a gauze veil floating in the air, or crash through bones and helmets without sustaining injury. These Damascus blades, long renowned in the East, but first encountered by Europeans during the crusades, in the hands of the followers of Mahomet, were made of Indian steel or “wootz.” This steel, produced in the form of little cakes weighing about two pounds each, in the neighborhood of the city of Golconda, in Hindostan, was transported on the backs of camels two thousand miles to the city of Damascus, and there converted into swords, sabres, and scimitars.

This smith’s work has never been excelled, if equalled. Millions of dollars have been expended in efforts to produce the equal of Indian steel. Among the investigators of the subject the most noted was a Russian general, Anossoff, who died in 1851. His experiments were of a very elaborate and exhaustive character. They occupied a lifetime, and resulted in the establishment of works in the Ural Mountains, on the Siberian border, for the production of Damascus steel by a process of his own invention. After General Anossoff’s death the quality of the steel produced at his works deteriorated.

We should treat with reverence these obscure hints of the triumphs of the ancients in certain departments of art as suggestive of like great achievements in other directions, for without a knowledge of types they could neither teach the many what the few knew, nor preserve what they had acquired for the instruction of future ages. All art is the product of a sequential series of ideas, each idea containing the germ of the next; hence the preservation of each idea is essential to progress. The art of printing alone enables man to preserve such a record. It follows presumptively that the art of printing constitutes the predominant feature of difference between the civilization of the moderns and that of the ancients. And it is important to observe that the art of printing is far more necessary to progress in the useful arts than in the so-called fine arts. The ancient temples with their sculptured splendors—the Parthenon, the Jupiter Olympius, and scores of others—remained long to testify to the genius of Phidias, Praxiteles, and their gifted colleagues of the chisel. These souvenirs of Greek genius still serve as models for the architect and the sculptor. It needs no chronicle to prove that they mark the culmination of the fine arts. If the moderns have failed to excel, or even equal them, it is not because their conception, design, or construction involved occult processes. It is rather because there is a limit to the development of the so-called fine arts, and that limit in architecture and sculpture was reached in Greece more than two thousand years ago.

But with the Damascus blade, which typifies the useful arts, it is entirely different. It, too, is in itself a triumph of genius not less pronounced than the Athena of Phidias. But above and beyond this the arts of smelting and forging are so subtile as almost to elude the grasp of analysis. Not only the method of the fabrication of the Damascus blade but the processes involved in the production of the steel entering into its composition—all these are shrouded in impenetrable mystery. It follows that the useful arts are finer than the so-called fine arts. Their processes are more intricate, and hence more difficult of comprehension. To a solution of the questions presented in the course of their study an extended acquaintance with the sciences is essential. The highest departments of the fine arts, so-called, require only a study of the features, figure, and character of man, and of certain visible forms of nature, while the useful arts make incessant demands upon the resources of natural philosophy. The chemist toils in his laboratory, and the botanist and the geologist explore forest, field, and mine in search of new truths, with the single purpose of enlarging the sphere of the useful arts, and so of ministering more effectively to the ever increasing needs of man. Hence there can be no limit to the development of the useful arts except the limit to be found in the exhaustion of the forces of nature.

We should, then, venerate the artisan rather than the artist. Let us invoke the shade of the dusky Indian smelter. See him in the dark recesses of the forest, bending in rapt attention over his furnace, or holding aloft a little lump of his matchless steel. Alas, he is dumb! His secret perished with him. But the Indian smelter and the Damascus smith are kin to all the inventors and discoverers of all the ages. Across continents and seas, over trackless wastes of history—epochs during which ignorance and superstition prevailed and the intellect of man slumbered—the ancient smelter and the ancient smith extend their shadowy hands to the students in this school of the nineteenth century—extend them in token of the fellowship of a common struggle and a common hope of triumph—the struggle after truth[E2], and the hope of the triumph of industry.

The instructor raps on the black-board, and the school-room is at once transformed into a smithy. Again the forge-fires roar, and again the anvils resound under the stroke of the hammer. For half an hour the lesson goes on, and then comes the wind-up, and the several tests of excellence are applied to the completed task of each student. Form, dimensions, finish—these are the tests. The instructor marks the several pieces of work, makes a record of the result, reads the record, and is on the point of dismissing the class when an idea occurs to his mind and he enjoins silence. Taking in his hand a heavy sledge, and resting it on the anvil before him, he says, “This is a baby-hammer, and all the forging we do here is baby-forging. I hope soon to have an opportunity to take you to the great works of Mr. Crane, in this city, and there show you a steam-hammer which weighs a ton striking fifty to one hundred blows a minute—blows, too, that shame the fabled power of Vulcan, the God of Fire. At Pittsburg, Pa., there is an anvil of 150 tons weight which serves for forging with a 15-ton hammer. But the monster steam-hammer is to be found in Krupp’s cast-steel works at Essen, Germany. The hammer-head is 12 feet long, 5¹⁄₂ feet wide, 4 feet thick, weighs 50 tons, and has a stroke of 9 feet. The depth of the foundation is 100 feet, consisting of three parts, masonry, timber, and iron, bolted together. Four cranes, each capable of bearing 200 tons, serve the hammer with material.”

The steam-hammer was invented in 1837 by James Nasmyth, of England, in response to a demand for a hammer that would forge a steamship paddle-shaft of unprecedented size. The nature of the emergency being presented to his mind, Mr. Nasmyth conceived the idea of the steam-hammer instantaneously, as it were, and at once proceeded to sketch the child of his brain on paper. He was too poor to defray the cost of patenting his invention; nor was he able to procure the necessary funds for that purpose until he had seen in France a hammer made from his own original sketch in operation.

The steam-hammer came rapidly into use, superseding all others of the ponderous sort, increasing the quantity of products and reducing the cost of manufacture by fifty per cent. It was through the steam-hammer only that the fabrication of the immense wrought-iron ordnance and the huge plates for covering ships-of-war of modern times became possible. In the hands of the giant, steam, Mr. Nasmyth’s hammer, even if it weigh fifty tons, is susceptible of more accurate strokes than the tack-hammer in the hands of the upholsterer, or the sledge in the hands of the most skilled blacksmith. It crushes tons of iron into a shapeless mass at one blow, and at the next drives a tack, or cracks an egg-shell in an egg-cup without injuring the cup.

Mr. Nasmyth, in 1845, applied the steam-hammer principle to the pile-driver. With this wonderful machine the “driving-block,” weighing several tons, descends eighty times a minute on the head of the pile, sending it home with almost incredible rapidity. The saving of time as compared with the old method is in the ratio of 1 to 1800; that is, a pile can be driven in four minutes that before required twelve hours.

The course in the Forging Laboratory extends from the making and care of forge-fires to case-hardening iron and hardening and tempering steel; and competent and experienced instructors declare that the student in the educational smithy gains as much skill in a day as the smith’s apprentice gains in a year in the ordinary shop.