Kitabı oku: «Inventions in the Century», sayfa 20

The wonderful things done in the manufacture of boots and shoes and rubber goods will be referred to in subsequent chapters.

Although it was old from time immemorial to colour cotton goods, and the calico power printing cylinder was invented and introduced into England in the latter part of the 18th century and began to turn out at once immense quantities of decorated calicoes and chintz, yet figured woven goods were a novelty sixty years ago.

In 1834, Mr. Bonjeau, a prominent wool manufacturer in Sedan, France, and an élève of the Polytechnic School, conceived the idea of modifying the plain cloths, universally made, by the union of different tints and patterns. This he was enabled to do by the Jacquard loom. The manufacture of fancy woven cloths, cassimeres, worsted coatings, etc., of great beauty, combined with strength of fabrication, followed in all civilised countries, but their universal adoption as wearing apparel was due in part to the lessening of the expense in the making them into garments by the sewing machine.

As to the effect of modern inventions on wearing apparel, it is not apparent that they were necessary to supply the wardrobes of the rich. The Solomons and the Queen of Sheba of ancient days, and all their small and great successors in the halls of Fortune, have had their rich robes, their purple and their fine linen, whether made in one way or another; but modern inventions have banished the day when the poor man's hard labour of a long day will not suffice to bring his wife a yard of cheapest cloth. Toil, then, as hard as he and his poor wife and children might, their united labours would hardly suffice to clothe them in more than the poorly-dressed skins of animals and the coarsest of homespun wool.

Now, cottons and calicoes are made and sold at a profit for three cents a yard; and the poorest woman in the land may appear in neat, comfortable and tasteful dress, the entire cost of material and labor of which need not exceed fifty cents. The comfort, respectability and dignity of a large family, which depend so much on clothes, may be ensured at the cost of a few dollars.

And as to the condition of the sewing woman, trying and poor as it is in many instances, yet she can earn more money with less physical exhaustion than under the old system.

The epoch of good clothes for the people, with all that it means in the fight upward from degradation, began in this century, and it was due to the inventions which have been above outlined.

CHAPTER XX.
INDUSTRIAL MACHINES

One invention engenders another, or co-operates with another. None lives, or stands, or dies, alone.

So, in the humble but extensive art of broom-making, men and women worked along through ages binding with their hands the supple twigs of trees or bushes, or of corn, by thongs, or cords, or wire, upon the rudely-formed collar of a hand-smoothed stick, until the modern lathe and hollow mandrel armed with cutters, the power-driven shuttle, and the sewing machine, were invented.

The lathe and mandrel to hold the stick while it was cut was used before, but it was long within the century that a hollow mandrel was first invented, which was provided internally with cutting bevelled knives, and into which the stick was placed, carried through longitudinally, and during its passage cut smooth and finished. As broom corn became the chief product from which brooms are made, it became desirable to have a machine, after the corn had been scraped of its seed, to size and prepare the stems in regular lengths for the various sizes of brooms, and accordingly such a machine was invented. Then a machine was needed and invented to wind the corn-brush with the cord or wire and tie it in a round bunch, preparatory to flattening and sewing it.

Then followed different forms of broom-sewing machines. Among the pioneers was one which received the round bunch between two compressing jaws, and pressed it flat. While so held a needle with its coarse thread was forced through the broom above the binding and the cord twined around it. Then a shuttle, also carrying a stout thread, was thrown over the cord, the needle receded and was then forced through the broom again under the binding cord. Thus in conjunction with the shuttle the stitches were formed alternately above and below the binding twine, the holding jaws being raised intermittently for that purpose. As each stitch was formed the machine fed the broom along laterally and intermittently. By another ingenious device the cord was tied and cut, when the sewing was completed.

It is only by such machines which treat the entire article from the first to the last step, that the immense number of brooms now necessary to supply the market are made. True it is that at first labour was displaced. At one time seventeen skilled workmen would manufacture five hundred dozen brooms per week.

They had reduced the force of earlier times by making larger quantities by better processes. Then when the broom-sewing machines and other inventions got fairly to work, nine men would turn out twelve hundred dozen brooms per week. Thus, while the force was reduced nearly one-half, the quantity of product was more than doubled. But as the cost of labour decreased and the product increased, the product became more plentiful and cheaper, the demand and use became greater, more broom-corn was raised, more broom-factories started, and soon the temporary displacement of labour was succeeded by a permanent increase in manufacture and in labourers, an increase in their wages, and an improvement in their condition.

Useful and extensive as is its use, the broom does not compare in variety and wide application to the brush. The human body, cloth, leather, metals, wood and grains, everything that needs rubbing, cleaning, painting and polishing, meets the acquaintance of the brush. Nearly a hundred species of brushes might be enumerated, each having an especial construction for a particular use.

Although the majority of brushes are still made by hand, yet a few most ingenious machines have been made which greatly facilitate and speed the operation, and many mechanical appliances have been invented in aid of hand-work. These machines and appliances, together with those which cut, turn, bore, smooth, and polish the handles and backs, to which the brush part is secured, have greatly changed and improved the art of brush-making during the last fifty years.

The first machine which attracted general attention was invented by Oscar D. and E. C. Woodbury of New York, and patented in 1870. As in hand-making and before subjected to the action of the machine, the bristles are sorted as to length and color. A brush-back, bored with holes by a gang of bits, which holes do not extend, however, all the way through the back, is placed in the machine under a cone-jointed plunger, adapted to enter the hole in the brush-back. A comb-shaped slitted plate in the machine has then each slit filled with bristles, sufficient in number to form a single tuft. When the machine is started, the bristles in a slit are forced out therefrom through a twisted guideway, which forms them into a round tuft, and which is laid horizontally beneath a plunger, which, descending, first doubles the tuft, and as the plunger continues to descend, forces the double end down into the hole. The plunger is supplied with a wire from a reel, turns as it descends, and twists the wire around the lower end of the tuft, the wire being directed in that way by a spiral groove within the plunger. The continuing action of the plunger is such as to screw the wire into the back. The wire is cut when the rotary plunger commences its descent, and when the tuft is thus secured the plunger ascends, the block is moved for another hole, and another set of bristles is presented for manipulation. Brushes with 70 holes can be turned out by this machine at the rate of one a minute.

Another most ingenious machine for this purpose is that of Kennedy, Diss, and Cannan, patented in the United States in 1892. In this, brush blocks of varying sizes, but of the same pattern, are bored by the same machine which receives the bristles, and the tufts are inserted as fast as the holes are bored. Both machines are automatic in operation.

Street-sweeping machines began to appear about 1831 in England, shortly after in France, and then in cities in other countries.

The simplest form and most effective sweeper comprises a large cylinder armed with spiral rows of splints and hung diagonally on the under side and across a frame having two or four wheels. This cylinder is connected by bevelled gearing with the wheels, and in revolving throws the dirt from the street into a ridge on one side thereof, where it is swept into heaps by hand sweepers, and is then carted off. King of the United States was the inventor.

A more recent improvement consists in the use of pneumatic means for removing the dust that is caused by the use of revolving brooms or brushes, such removal being effected by means of a hood that covers the area of the street beneath the body of the machine, and incloses an air exhaust, the sweepings being drawn through the exhaust mechanism and deposited in a receptacle for the purpose, or in some instances deposited in a furnace carried by the machine and there burned.

In cities having hard, smooth, paved streets and sufficient municipal funds, the most effective, but most expensive way, has been found to keep a large force of men constantly at work with hoes, shovels, brooms, bags and carts, removing the dirt as fast as it accumulates.

Abrading Machines

One of the most striking inventions of the century is the application of the sand-blast to industrial and artistic purposes.

For ages the sands of the desert and wild mountain plains, lifted and driven by the whirling winds, had sheared and polished the edges and faces of rocks, and cut them into fantastic shapes, and the sands of the shore, tossed by the winds of the sea, had long scratched and bleared the windows of the fisherman's hut, before it occurred to the mind of man that here were a force and an agent which could be harnessed into his service.

It was due finally to the inventive genius of B. F. Tilghman of Philadelphia, Pa., who, in 1870, patented a process by which common sand, powdered quartz, emery, or other comminuted sharp cutting material, may be blown or driven with such force upon the surface of the hardest materials, as to cut, clean, engrave, and otherwise abrade them, in the most wonderful and satisfactory manner.

Diamonds are abraded; glass depolished, or engraved, or bored; metal castings cleaned; lithographic zinc plates grained; silverware frosted; stone and glass for jewelry shaped and figured; the inscriptions and ornaments of monuments and tombstones cut thereon; engravings and photographs copied; steel files cleaned and sharpened, and stones and marble carved into forms of beauty with more exactness and in far less time than by the chisel of the artisan.

The gist of the process is the employment of a jet of sand or other hard abrading material, driven at a high velocity by a blast of air or steam, under a certain pressure, in accordance with the character of the work to be done. The sand is placed in a box-like receptacle into which the air or steam is forced, and the sand flowing into the same chamber is driven through a narrow slit or slits in the form of a thin sheet, directly on to the object to be abraded.

By one method the surface of the object is first coated with tinfoil on which the artist traces his design, and this is then coated with melted transparent wax. Then when the wax is hardened it is cut away along the lines already indicated, and seen through the wax. The object now is subjected to the blast, and as the sand will not penetrate a softened material sufficient to abrade a surface beneath, the exposed portions alone will be cut away. The sand after it strikes is carried off by a blast to some receptacle, from which it is returned to its former place for further use. Other means may be used in the place of a slitted box, as a small or larger blow-pipe; but the driving of the sand, or similar abrading material, with great force by the steam or air blast, is the essential feature of the process.

Emery, that variety of the mineral corundum, consisting of crystalline alumina, resembling in appearance dark, fine-grained iron ore, ranking next to the diamond in hardness, and a sister of the sapphire and the ruby, has long been used as an abradant. The Eastern nations have used corundum for this purpose for ages. Turkey and Greece once had a monopoly of it. Knight says: "The corundum stone used by the Hindoos and Chinese is composed of corundum powdered, two parts; lac resin, one part. The two are intimately mixed in an earthen vessel, kneaded and flattened, shaped and polished. A hole in the stone for the axis is made by a heated copper rod."

However ancient the use of artificial stones for grinding and polishing, nevertheless it is true that the solid emery wheel in the form that has made it generally useful, in machines known as emery grinders, is a modern invention, and of American origin.

In the manufacture of such machines great attention and the highest scientific skill has been paid, first, to the material composing the wheel, and to the cementing substances by which the emery is compacted and bound in the strongest manner, to prevent bursting when driven at great speed; secondly, to the construction of machines and wheels of a composition varying from the finest to the coarsest; and thirdly, to the proper balancing of the wheels in the machines, an operation of great nicety, in order that the wheel may be used on delicate tools, when driven at high speed, without producing uneven work, marking the objects, or endangering the breaking, or bursting of the wheel.

Such machines, when properly constructed, although not adapted to take the place of the file, other steel-cutting tools, and the grindstone for many purposes, yet have very extensively displaced those tools for cutting edges, and the grinding and polishing of hardened metals, by reason chiefly of their greater convenience, speed, and general adaptability. Not only tools of all sizes are ground and polished, but ploughshares, stove and wrought-iron plates, iron castings, the inner surfaces of hollow ironware, the bearings of spindles, arbours, and the surfaces of steel, chilled or cast-iron rolls, etc.

In the great class of Industrial Mechanics, no machines of the century have contributed more to the comfort and cleanliness of mankind than those by which wearing apparel in its vast quantities is washed and ironed more thoroughly, speedily, and satisfactorily in every way than is possible by the old hand systems. When it is remembered how under the old system such a large part of humanity, and this the weaker part, devoted such immense time and labour to the universal washing and ironing days, the invention of these machines and appliances must be regarded as among the great labour-saving blessings of the century.

True, the individual washerwoman and washerman, and ironers, have by no means disappeared, and are still in evidence everywhere, yet the universal and general devotion of one-half the human race to the wash-tub and ironing-table for two or more days in the week is no longer necessary. And even for the individual worker, the convenient appliances and helps that have been invented have greatly relieved the occupation of pain and drudgery.

Among modern devices in the laundry, worked by hand, is, first, the washing-machine, in which the principle is adapted of rolling over or kneading the clothes. By moving a lever by hand up and down, the clothes are thoroughly rubbed, squeezed and lifted at each stroke. Then comes the wringer, a common form of which consists of two parallel rolls of vulcanized and otherwise specially treated rubber, fitted to shafts which, by an arrangement of cog-wheels, gearing and springs in the framework at the ends of rolls, and a crank handle, are made to roll on each other. The clothes are passed between the rollers, the springs permit the rollers to yield and part more or less, according to the thickness of the clothes.

Then the old-fashioned, or the new-fashioned mangle is brought into play. The old-style mangle had a box, weighted with stone, which was reciprocated on rollers, and was run back and forth upon the clothes spread upon a polished table beneath. One of the more modern styles is on the principle of the wringer above described, or a series of rollers arranged around a central drum, and each having a rubber spring attached, by which means the clothes are not subjected to undue pressure at one or two points, as in the first mentioned kind.

Starch is also applied by a similar machine. The cloth is dipped into a body of starch, or the same is applied by hand, and then the superfluous starch squeezed out as the clothes are passed through the rollers.

But for hotels and other large institutions washing is now done by steam-power machinery.

It is an attractive sight to step into a modern laundry, operated with the latest machinery on the largest scale. The first thing necessary in many localities is to clarify the water. This is done by attaching to the service pipe tanks filled with filtering material, through which the water flows before reaching the boiler. The driving engine and shafting are compactly placed at one end or side of the room, with boilers and kettles conveniently adjacent. The water and clothes are supplied to the washing-machine, and operated by the engine. Steam may be used in addition to the engine to keep it boiling hot, or steam may be substituted entirely for the water.

The machine may be one of several types selected especially for the particular class of goods to be washed. There is the dash-wheel, constructed on the principle of the cylinder churn; the outer case being stationary and the revolving dash-wheel water-tight, or perforated, which is the preferred form for collars and cuffs. In place of the dash-wheel cylinders are sometimes used, having from sixty to seventy revolutions a minute. Another form has vibrating arms or beaters, giving between four hundred and five hundred strokes a minute, and by which the clothes are squeezed between rubbing corrugated boards. The rubbing boards also roll the clothes over and over until they are thoroughly washed. In another form a rotating cylinder for the clothes is provided with an arrangement of pipes by which either steam, water or blueing can be introduced as desired, into the cylinder, through its hollow journals, so that the clothes can be washed, rinsed, and blued without removal from the machine.

Another type has perforated, reciprocating pistons, between which the clothes are alternately squeezed and released, a supply of fresh water being constantly introduced through one of the hollow cylinder journals, while the used water is discharged through the opposite journal; and in still another the clothes are placed in a perforated cylinder within an outer casing, and propeller blades, assisted by other spiral blades, force a continuous current of water through the clothes.

In ironing, hollow polishing rolls of various sizes are used, heated either by steam or gas. The articles to be ironed are placed in proper position upon a table and carried under and in contact with the rolls. Or the goods are ironed between a heated cylinder and a revolving drum covered with felting, and the polishing effected by the cylinder revolving faster than the drum. Ingenious forms of hand-operated ironing machines for turning over and ironing the edges of collars, and other articles, are in successful use.

CHAPTER XXI.
WOOD-WORKING

In surveying the wonderful road along which have travelled the toiling inventors, until the splendid fields of the present century have been reached, the mind indulges in contrasts and reverts to the far gone period of man's deprivations, when man, the animal, was fighting for food and shelter.

 
"Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?"
 

– King Lear III, IV.

When the implements of labour and the weapons of war were chiefly made of stone, or bronze, or iron, such periods became the "age" of stone, or bronze, or iron; and we sometimes hear of the ages of steam, steel and electricity. But the age of wood has always existed, wherever forests abounded. It was, doubtless, the earliest "age" in the industries of man, but is not likely to be the latest, as the class of inventions we are about to consider, although giving complete dominion to man over the forests, are hastening their destruction.

As in every other class of inventions, there had been inventions in the class of wood-working through the ages preceding this century, in tools, implements and machines; but not until near the close of the eighteenth century had there been much of a break in the universal toil by hand. The implements produced were, for the most part, the result of the slow growth of experience and mechanical skill, rather than the product of inventive genius.

True, the turning-lathe, the axe, the hammer, the chisel, the saw, the auger, the plane, the screw, and cutting and other wood-shaping instruments in simple forms existed in abundance. The Egyptians used their saws of bronze. The Greeks deified their supposed inventor of the saw, Talus, or Perdix, and they claimed Theodore of Lamos as the inventor of the turning-lathe; although the main idea of pivoting an object between two supports, so that it could be turned while the hands were free to apply a tool to its shaping, was old in the potter's wheel of the Egyptians, which was turned while the vessel resting upon it was shaped and ornamented by the hand and tools. It appears also to have been known by the Hindoos and the Africans.

Pliny refers to the curled chips raised by the plane, and Ansonius refers to mills driven by the waters of the Moselle for sawing marble into slabs. Early records mention saw-mills run by water-power in the thirteenth century in France, Germany and Norway; and Sweden had them in the next century. Holland had them one hundred years at least before they were introduced into England.

Fearful of the entire destruction of the forests by the wood used in the manufacture of iron, and incited by the opposition and jealousy of hand sawyers, England passed some rigid laws on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, although preserving the forests, gave for a long time the almost exclusive manufacture of iron and lumber to Germany and Holland. Even as late as 1768, a saw-mill, built at Limehouse, under the encouragement of the Society of Arts, by James Stansfield, was destroyed by a mob. Saw-mills designed to be run by water-power had been introduced into the American colonies by the Dutch more than a century before they made their appearance in England. William Penn found that they had long been at work on the Delaware when he reached its shores in 1682.

It was nothing indigenous to the climate or race that rendered the Americans inventors. The early colonists, drawn from the most civilised countries of Europe, carried to the new world knowledge of the latest and best appliances known to their respective countries in the various arts. With three thousand miles of water between them and the source of such appliances, and between them and the source of arbitrary power and laws to hamper efforts and enterprise, with stern necessity on every hand prompting them to avail themselves of every means to meet their daily wants, all known inventions were put to use, and brains were constantly exercised in devising new means to aid, or take the place of, manual labour, which was scarce. Surrounded, too, by vast forests, from which their houses, their churches and their schools must be constructed, these pioneers naturally turned their thoughts toward wood-working machinery. The attention to this art necessarily created interest in and developed other arts. Thus constant devotion to pursuits strenuously demanding labour-saving devices evolved a race of keen inventors and mechanics. So that when Watt had developed his wonderful application of steam to industrial purposes, America was ready to substitute steam for water-power in the running of saw-mills.

Steam saw-mills commenced to buzz with the opening of the century.

As to the relation of that humble machine, the saw-mill, to the progress of civilisation, it was once said: "The axe produces the log hut, but not until the saw-mill is introduced do framed dwellings and villages arise; it is civilisation's pioneer machine; the precursor of the carpenter, wheelwright and turner, the painter, the joiner, and legions of other professions. Progress is unknown where it is not. Its comparative absence in the Southern American continent was not the least cause of the trifling advancement made there during three centuries and a half. Surrounded by forests of the most valuable and variegated timber, with water-power in mountain streams, equally neglected, the masses of the people lived in shanties and mud hovels, not more commodious than those of the aborigines, nor more durable than the annual structures of birds. Wherever man has not fixed and comfortable homes, he is, as regards civilisation, stationary; improvement under such circumstances has never taken place, nor can it."

Miller, in England, in 1777, had described in his patent a circular saw, and Hatton, in 1776, had vaguely described a planing machine; but the inception of the marvellous growth in wood-working machinery in the nineteenth century occurred in England during the last decade of the eighteenth. It was due to the splendid efforts of General Samuel Bentham, and of Bramah and Branch, both as to metal-working and wood-working machinery.

General Bentham, a brother of the celebrated jurist, Jeremy Bentham, had his attention drawn to the slow, laborious, and crude methods of working in wood, while making a tour of Europe, and especially in Russia, and engaged in inspecting the art of ship-building in those countries, in behalf of the British Admiralty. On his return, 1791-1792, he converted his home into a shop for making wood-working machines. These included "Planing, moulding, rabbeting, grooving, mortising, and sawing, both in coarse and fine work, in curved, winding, and transverse directions, and shaping wood in complicated forms."

Of the amount of bills presented to and paid for by the Admiralty for these machines, General Bentham received about £20,000.

These machines were developed and in use just as the new century approached. Thus, with the exception of the saw-mill, it may be again said that prior to this century the means mankind had to aid them in their work in metals and in wood were confined to hand tools, and these were for the most part of a simple and crude description.

The ground-work now being laid, the century advanced into a region of invention in tools and machinery for wood-working of every description, far beyond the wildest dreams of all former carpenters and joiners. Not only were the machines themselves invented, but they gave rise in turn to a host of inventions in metal-working for making them.

In the same line of inventions there appeared in the first decade of the century one of the most ingenious of men, and a most fitting type of that great class of Yankee inventors who have carved their way to renown with all implements, from the jack-knife to the electrically-driven universal shaping machine.

Thomas Blanchard, born in Massachusetts in 1788, while a boy, was accustomed to astonish his companions by the miniature wind-wheels and water-wheels that he whittled out with his knife. While attending the parties of young people who gathered on winter evenings at different homes in the country to pare apples, the idea of a paring machine occurred to him, and when only thirteen years of age, he invented and made the first apple-paring machine, with which more apples could be pared in a given time than any twelve of his girl acquaintances could pare with a knife.

At eighteen, while working in a shop, driving the heads down on tacks, on an anvil, with a hammer, he invented the first tack-forming machine, which, when perfected by him, made five hundred tacks a minute, and which has never since been improved in principle. He improved the steam engine, and invented one of the first envelope machines. He made the first metal lathe for cutting out the butts of gun-barrels. But his greatest triumphs were in wood-working machinery.

Challenged to make a machine that would make a gun stock, always before that time regarded an impossible task, its every part being so irregular in form, he secluded himself in his workshop for six months, and after constant labour and experiments he at the end of that time had produced a machine that more than astonished the entire world, and which worked a revolution in the making of all irregular forms from wood. This was in 1819. This machine would not only make a perfect gun-stock, but shoe lasts, and ships' tackle-blocks, axe-handles, and a multitude of irregular-shaped blocks which before had always required the most expert hand operatives to produce. This machine became the subject of parliamentary inquiry on the part of England, and so great were the doubts concerning it, that successive commissions were appointed to examine and report upon it. Finally the English government ordered eight or ten of such machines for the making of gun-stocks for its army, and paid Blanchard about $40,000 for them. He was once jestingly asked at the navy department at Washington if he could turn a seventy-four? He at once replied, "Yes, if you will furnish me the block." Of course infringers appeared, but he maintained his rights and title as first and original inventor after the most searching trials in court.