Kitabı oku: «Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 688», sayfa 5

CURIOSITIES OF THE RAILWAY-TICKET MANUFACTURE

In an article on 'Railway Tickets' in this Journal for September 23, 1876, it was stated that all the railway tickets for the whole world, except North America, are made in one establishment in the north of England. This statement we have since found requires correction, and in the correcting we gladly avail ourselves of an opportunity for noticing a celebrated factory in London, which by the courtesy of the proprietors, Messrs Waterlow and Sons (now a Company, 'Limited'), we are enabled to do.

Like many other great establishments, Messrs Waterlow's has grown from a small affair to gigantic proportions. Beginning with law-stationery, then advancing to account-book manufacture, then to various kinds of commercial printing, it has gone on step by step, until at present it gives employment to between three and four thousand persons. Where the several factories and commercial offices are situated would be hardly intelligible save to Londoners; suffice it to say that most of them are near Finsbury Square.

One of the factories, consisting of lofty buildings surrounding an open quadrangle, is devoted to ticket making and printing, chiefly railway tickets; and to the process as carried on there, we will now direct our readers' attention.

The cardboard for tickets is made of a slightly spongy texture, well fitted to take paste. It is known technically as 'middles,' and is the foundation for two external surfaces of paper, white or coloured as the case may be. The primitive paste-brush has long been discarded. A cleverly constructed machine pours out a stream of paste on two rollers, under or over which pass two sheets of paper, each of which becomes thoroughly pasted on one side. These are then quickly applied to the surfaces of the 'middle.' The paste-caldrons, in a compartment by themselves, have a vigorous appetite for flour, alum, and water, and pour forth volumes of steam. To shew what a 'bit of paste' may become when multiplied by millions, it will suffice to say that thirteen sacks of flour per week are used in this one factory! After the pasting, each sheet of cardboard, large enough for one hundred and twenty-five railway tickets, is, with others of the same kind, subjected to flat-pressure, rolling-pressure, and heat, until the surface-papers are firmly and smoothly attached to the 'middle;' exposure to a high temperature in heated chambers thoroughly dries them. Cutting-machines sever the sheets into single tickets, the well-known railway-ticket size, all precisely alike in dimensions.

Next comes the printing. Messrs Waterlow adopt four different commercial systems in the supply of these tickets. In the first system they manufacture the tickets throughout for the railway Companies, who issue them ready for use to the booking-clerks at the several stations. In the second, they partially print the tickets, leaving the Companies to finish them according to the varying exigences of the traffic. In the third, they sell the blank tickets, properly prepared and cut, to the Companies; the printing in this case being wholly carried on by the Companies. And in the fourth, they sell the machines to the Companies, with a license to use them. To specify the railway Companies that adopt one or other of these systems would be tedious detail. The principal machine is a beautiful contrivance invented and patented many years ago by Mr Lewthwaite, of Halifax, Yorkshire; and various improvements and new adaptations have been made in it from time to time by Messrs Waterlow.

A pile of about five hundred blank tickets is placed in an upright tube or hopper, with just room to sink down readily. The bottom of the tube is open, allowing the lowermost blank to rest upon a flat metal plate. A slider, with a rapid reciprocating horizontal motion, strikes the lowermost blank dexterously aside to a spot where it can be printed on the back with those cautions, instructions, and references to by-laws which most of the Companies deem proper to communicate to the public. Another sharp stroke drives the blank farther on, where the printing and numbering of the front or principal surface are effected. When the blank is printed on both surfaces it is struck onward again, and comes underneath an exit or delivery-tube, just the same height and dimensions as the hopper or feeding-tube. Up this it is driven by a series of jerks, until a pile of (say) five hundred is finished. In travelling horizontally from tube to tube, and vertically up the delivery-tube, each ticket acts as a kind of cardboard policeman, saying to its predecessor: 'Move on, if you please.' And they do move on, all undergoing some process or other at each stage of the movement. As the pile in one tube lessens, so does that in the other increase in height, like the two columns of liquid in a syphon. The whole pile can be removed from the delivery-tube at once by a dexterous hand; but woe betide the luckless wight who 'makes pie' (as the printers call the dropping and disordering of types in 'composing' or 'distributing'); for if a single ticket be disarranged, extra trouble is given in the after checking and correction.

As to the various colours displayed on railway tickets, some depend on the use of coloured sheets of paper in the first instance; some on the production of stripes of colour in a way bearing a resemblance to the making of coloured stripes on earthenware or stoneware in the pottery district; and some by a process more nearly resembling ordinary printing. One of the Companies adopts a particular diagonal red line on all tickets, distinguishing them from other tickets which have to pass through the railway clearing-house.

The automatic action of the machine or machines is very beautiful. For numbering each ticket, a peculiarly constructed wheel is used, which changes its particular digit every time a new blank is presented to it; and thus the consecutive numbers are produced on a series of tickets with unerring accuracy. A tell-tale index and a tell-tale bell, both automatically worked, give information as to the number of tickets printed, and the readiness of the machine to take in more food; but it is a matter of practical detail whether and when these tell-tales shall be deemed necessary. To give the reader an idea of how nicely this mechanism is adjusted, it refuses to work unless all the tickets are exactly of equal size, nicely squared, and in perfect order. It strikes one as being almost like a thing of life to see the machine detect a ticket from which a piece has purposely been torn off one end; its language is virtually, 'Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther,' for it prints as far as the defective ticket, and there stops.

As neither human fingers nor automatic machines are absolutely infallible, errors in numbering may occur in spite of all precautions. These are detected in a singular way. All the tickets in one series are made to pass through a machine with a velocity which the eye can scarcely follow. When stopped, the numbers are tested by two little index plates or wheels; if the same number is denoted on both indexes, all is well; but if any error has crept in, the index notifications differ, and afford means for determining at what part of the series the mishap has occurred.

A sheet of cardboard is certainly not a ponderous substance; but it is surprising how weighty the packages become when large quantities have to be dealt with. The tickets are tied up into small compact rows (string and tying being peculiar), and then packed into cubical masses in tin-lined boxes or cases – so firmly and closely pressed as to be as dense as a mass of wood. About fifty thousand tickets weigh one and a quarter hundredweight. The factory turns out two and a half millions of printed tickets (railway, steamboat, refreshment, &c.) per week, and ten millions of smoothly prepared but unprinted tickets; these numbers, multiplied by the fifty-two weeks in a year, give a total annual production of something like six hundred and fifty millions, weighing upwards of sixteen thousand hundredweight! If these tickets be taken at two inches in length, and if they were laid flat end to end, they would reach – But we will leave our junior readers to exercise their arithmetical skill in solving this problem: merely hinting that it would require many voyages from England to America, and back again, to cover a distance equal to the length of this cardboard ribbon. From such small beginnings do great results ensue.

FISHING EXTRAORDINARY

There are extraordinary ways of fishing practised by people of uncivilised countries, which are not the result of ignorance, but of that ingenuity which is always rendered fruitful by dire necessity and the instincts of self-support. The Chinese, amongst their many original ideas, have some curious ones on the subject, and doubtless fish now as they did a thousand years ago; and though on the coasts they may have adopted the generally accepted system of working nets, on the waters in the interior of the country they adhere to the methods peculiar to their own nation – methods quaint and curious. The lakes and rivers of China, and especially of the north, are so abundantly stocked with fish, that in some places the men called fish-catchers make their living by actually seizing and drawing them out with their hands. The man goes into the water, and proceeds half walking half swimming, raising his arms above his head, and letting them drop, striking the surface with his hands. Meanwhile his feet are moving on the muddy bottom. Presently he stoops with a rapid dive and brings up a fish in his hand. The striking of the surface was intended to frighten the fish, which when alarmed, sink to the bottom; then the naked feet feel them among the mud, and once felt, the practised hand secures them in a moment. Catching fish in this manner is of course a trade in itself, and the plentiful supply it implies is somewhat explained by the fact that even the little ponds of Northern China swarm with scaly life.

On the great Ning-po river the same principle is used on a more extended scale with boats and nets. The boats are ready for the flow of the tide to take them in crowds up the river, and when they halt, the nets are thrown out, and the oars and sculls beat the water with a loud plashing noise. After resting in the same place for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, they move on again to another station, and there repeat the beating and splashing. The noise on the surface is meant for an alarm, as in the case of the fish-catcher; and it is said that this mode of fishing soon loads the nets.

Another curious method employed by the Chinese is generally practised at night, and depends upon a peculiar power which a white screen, stretched under the water, seems to possess over the fishes, decoying them to it and making them leap. A man, sitting at the stern of a long narrow boat, steers her with a paddle to the middle of a river, and there stops. Along the right-hand side of his boat a narrow sheet of white canvas is stretched; when he leans to that side it dips under the surface, and if it be a moonlit night, gleams through the water. Along the other side of the boat a net is fastened so as to form a barrier two or three feet high. The boatman keeps perfectly still. If another boat passes by, he will not speak; he is only impatient at the slight breaking of the silence. While he keeps thus without a sound or stir, the fish, attracted by the white canvas, approach and leap, and would go over the narrow boat and be free in their native waters on the other side, but for the screen of netting, which stops them, and throws them down before the man's feet.

Every one must have heard of the fishing cormorant, which is actually trained in China to catch fish. A man takes out ten or twelve of these web-footed birds in a boat, and as soon as the boat stops, at his word they plunge into the water and begin at once searching for and diving after fish. They are most diligent workers, for if one of them is seen swimming about idly, the Chinaman in the boat strikes the water near the bird with the end of a long bamboo; and, not touched, but recalled to a sense of duty, the cormorant at once turns to business again. As soon as a fish is caught, a word from the man brings the bird swimming towards him. He draws it into the boat, and it drops its prey from its bill. There is always a straw or string tied round the neck, to prevent the fish from being swallowed, and this string requires the nicest adjustment, lest it may choke the bird – a result which would certainly follow if it slipped lower down on the neck. The sagacity and workman-like method of the birds are shewn when they get into difficulties. If the fish caught is too large for one beak to secure, another cormorant comes up to the struggle, and the two with united efforts bring their prize to the boat. On the rivers and canals near Ning-po, Shanghae, and Foo-chow-foo, the employment of these birds is by no means an uncommon sight; but they are never to be seen fishing in the summer months, their work being in the winter, beginning always about October and ending in May. The birds have of course to be subjected to a system of training, which is carried on in the cormorant breeding and fishing establishments, one of which is at a distance of thirty or forty miles from Shanghae.

Some tribes of Indians catch fish by drugging them. They make the soft branches of the Indian milk-bush or the euphorbia into pulp, and throw it into the water of the ponds. When the fish taste it, they lose the power of swimming, and are easily taken floating helplessly in the water. They also mix with dough a powder made from the Cocculus Indicus, the effect of which is that when thrown into the water it intoxicates the fish, and they swim in circles on the surface, where they can be caught in a hand-net. Lime is sometimes used in the same way; but the disadvantage of that system is that it causes such wholesale slaughter that there is danger of small ponds being rapidly cleared.

A still more singular practice is to be found amongst the Chonos Indians, who train dogs to help them on their fishing expeditions in much the same way as the shepherd's dog helps the shepherd. The net is held by two men standing in the water, and the dogs, swimming out far and diving after the fish, drive them back towards it. They enjoy their work just as a good horse, though hard pressed, seems to enjoy the hunt; and every time they raise their heads from the water they tell their pleasure by clamorous barking. The Fuegians, one of the most miserable and degraded races on the earth, train their dogs in a similar manner to assist them in catching birds. They have a wonderful contrivance for killing the sharks which abound off their coasts. A log of wood shaped so as to appear something like a canoe is set afloat, with a rope and large noose hanging from one end of it. Before long a shark attacks the supposed canoe, swimming after it, and is caught in the noose hanging from the stern. It closes on him so that he cannot extricate himself, and the weight of the log keeps him swimming slowly without being able to sink. Then the Fuegians in their canoes, generally steered by women, approach at their leisure and finish the shark with their spears.

All these contrivances of savage nations or of the strangely civilised Chinese, are meant to kill or seize the fish by natural means. It is much nearer home that we have to look to find the element of superstition prevailing, and useless customs invested with the importance of charms. An instance may be found in the case of the Sicilian fishermen, who, when in search of sword-fish, chant a jargon of words the meaning of which even they themselves do not know. The song is supposed to be some old Greek verses, which, by time and use among those ignorant of their meaning, have become so altered as to be almost unrecognisable. The fishermen regard the medley as a sure means of attracting the sword-fish, which they harpoon from the boat, when the charm, as they suppose, has brought them within reach. Far away in northern regions there is a novel method of fishing under ice, which shews more ingenuity than the simple lowering and fastening of a net. A small square hole is cut in the ice, and in this is placed an upright stick, supported by a cross pin run through it and resting at each side on the ice; the end of the stick below this cross pin is short, and to it the line is fastened with the bait and hook attached, while at the top of the stick is a piece of coloured rag. Now, though we have called the stick upright, it is meant to fall from that position and lie along the ice, until a fish seizing the bait pulls its lower end, when with a jerk it rises. This contrivance is called a 'tip-up,' from the movement which is certain to follow the seizure of the bait. The fluttering of the coloured rag, as the stick rises, tells of the capture; and a great number of these self-acting fishers and indicators may be placed near together, each having its own hole in the ice; and each, by the fluttering rag, telling its own tale the moment a fish is caught.

The tip-up not only saves the fisher the trouble of holding his line in position and watching with particular care, but also makes the fish itself 'strike' and announce that it is ready to be pulled out! In fact its ingenuity is only surpassed in the old tale of the Irish monastery, where at the neighbouring salmon-leap a large pot was hung so as to be just clear of the falling water, but in the way of any salmon that leaped recklessly; and a bell was placed so that the fish could not fail to ring its own knell as it fell; thus announcing to the good brothers at the monastery that he was there, not only secured, but actually in the pot, ready to be boiled for dinner.