Part 14 (1/2)
a.s.sumed the name under which it is now known of 'The Company of Mirrors and Chemical Products of St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey.' In 1863 it bought up the works at s...o...b..rg near Aix-la-Chapelle in Rhenish Prussia, in 1868 a minor manufactory at Montlucon in the Department of the Allier, and finally during this current year 1889 it is establis.h.i.+ng a manufactory at Pisa in Italy.
The operations of the company, as it now exists, extend to six manufactories of mirrors, six manufactories of chemicals, a mine of iron pyrites, a salt mine, many thousand hectares of forests in this department of the Aisne and in the province of Lorraine, and to a local railway connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate gla.s.s cast at St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain, besides the plate gla.s.s mirrors, gla.s.s is made for roofs, for floors, for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into s.p.a.ce and shoots for miles athwart the sky, to the inexpressible delight of the gaping crowds below, and I hope to the edification of the world of science.
Since 1870 the output of the company from its various manufactories has more than doubled. It now amounts, in round numbers, to 800,000 square metres a year of polished plate gla.s.s; to 500,000 square metres a year of rough gla.s.s; to a million kilogrammes a year of blocks and castings for floors and roofings, and to eighty thousand kilogrammes a year of optical gla.s.ses of all sorts.
In the time of Louis XIV. and before Lucas de Nehou had made his invention of plate gla.s.s, there was absolutely no public demand for what in those days were called 'large mirrors' made in the Venetian fas.h.i.+on, mirrors which to-day would not find a market in the most remote frontier towns of America or Australia. Colbert then wrote to the Comte d'Avaux apropos of the works of Lucas de Nehou in Normandy, that 'there was absolutely no market for large mirrors in the kingdom, the king being the only person who could possibly need them!'
This was in 1673.
In 1702, ten years after the invention of the process by which plate gla.s.s is made, a mirror with a surface area of one metre cost 165 francs. In 1889 such a mirror costs 30 f. 25 c. A mirror with four metres of surface area cost, in 1702, 2,750 francs. In 1889 it costs 136 francs.
When we come down to modern times and to the much larger mirrors produced of late years, the fall in prices is extraordinary. In 1873 a mirror with ten square metres of surface cost 1,200 francs. To-day such a mirror can be bought at St.-Gobain for 467 francs, showing a fall of nearly two-thirds in price within sixteen years!
To-day the total production of polished plate gla.s.s in the world is estimated as follows:--
square metres England (4 companies) 900,000 Belgium (6 companies) 600,000 Germany (4 companies) 150,000 United States (7 companies) 500,000 France (not including St.-Gobain) 130,000 St.-Gobain 800,000 --------- Total 3,080,000
From this it will be seen that nearly one quarter of the plate gla.s.s of a world in which plate gla.s.s, like champagne, is rapidly ceasing to be a luxury and becoming a necessity, is produced at this ancient establishment. With a keen perception of the tendencies of this age St.-Gobain, of late years, has been fitting its machinery to produce the very largest plates of gla.s.s possible to be made. Go where you like, from the Eden Theatre in Paris to the Casino of Monte Carlo, from the new monster hotel at the Gare St.-Lazare to the enormous edifice which an enterprising firm of tradesmen has planted in the centre of the Corso at Rome, and the vast glittering sheets of silvered gla.s.s turned out from the great forges everywhere confront you. At the French Exposition of 1878 St.-Gobain enabled the 'fly gobblers' of two hemispheres to admire themselves in the most gigantic mirror ever made down to that date. It measured six metres and a half in height, by four metres and eleven centimetres in width, which gave it a surface area of 26 metres 12 centimetres. Naturally M. Henrivaux determined to surpa.s.s this prodigy in 1889, and to match the Eiffel Tower with a mirror. The Belgian rivals of St.-Gobain suspected this, it seems, and sent forth subtle persons to spy out the plans of the great French manufactory.
These colossal plates of gla.s.s are cast upon immense 'tables' of metal, and by ascertaining the dimensions of the tables ordered for St.-Gobain the ingenious Belgians hoped to get the measure of the effort it would be necessary for them to outdo. In antic.i.p.ation of this subtlety the director of St.-Gobain ordered two immense tables, and when these were sent to the manufactory, had them skilfully thrown into one. Upon the gigantic table thus prepared the grand mirror of the Exposition of 1889 was cast at the eleventh hour. This mirror was the special delight of the Shah of Persia during his visit of this year to Paris; and as I suppose the seven plate-gla.s.s manufactories which have grown up in my own beloved country under the benediction of the Protective Tariff, since a prohibitive duty was originally clapped on plate gla.s.s to encourage the one solitary establishment of the sort then existing in America, will give themselves up to producing something more stupendous still for the New York Exposition of 1892, I here set down its dimensions. It measures in height 7 metres 63 centimetres, and in width 4 metres 10 centimetres, giving it a superficial area of 34 metres 24 centimetres. It is 12 millimetres thick, and weighs 940 kilogrammes.
This enormous gla.s.s was cast from a single crucible, containing 1,600 kilogrammes of vitreous matter. To have seen this operation would have been worth a very much longer journey than that from New York to St.-Gobain, for the colour and glow of such a ma.s.s of vitreous matter in fusion can only be matched by the evanescent hues of a crimson aurora on a fine night in the North, or by the intense lights which play over the surface of a stream of molten lava.
At every stage in the operation the utmost skill and delicacy of handling are required to convert what might easily pa.s.s for a heap of rubbish swept together from a macadamised roadway into the smooth, glittering, l.u.s.trous plate which the French so picturesquely call a _glace_, and which indeed most nearly resembles the evenly frozen surface of a crystal lakelet. These sands, silicates, chalks, and carbonates--rough contributions from Oken's 'silent realm of the minerals'--are first crushed and mingled together by machines--one of the best of them, I was glad to hear, of American invention--then pa.s.sed on into the great rectangular hall, in which they are shot into the crucibles of the melting furnaces and fused, mainly by gas, on a system invented and perfected by the late Dr. Siemens, I believe, who made such a stir a decade ago at Glasgow by his discourse on the storage of force before the British a.s.sociation. The furnaces which, according to their varying capacity, now require from eight to ten tons of coal a day, consumed, before the development of the Siemens system, from sixteen to twenty tons. Twenty-four hours now suffice for the fusion and the casting of the gla.s.s, and if the casting were now to be conducted as ceremoniously as in the time of that fine old martinet M. Deslandes, M.
Henrivaux would pa.s.s his life in a c.o.c.ked hat, knee-breeches, peruke, embroidered coat, and sword, for the casting now takes place every day and at a fixed hour. None the less, rather the more, it is a work still of extreme nicety, one to be done by experts, who must be as cool as soldiers under fire. In a certain way and measure it is like ladling out the molten lava of Vesuvius and pressing it into slabs for a lady's toilette-table. The plates, once cast, must be smoothed and made even.
This is a very pretty process, and used to be performed by machines which bore the very pretty names of _valseuses_. That paviour's rammers should be called _demoiselles_ has always seemed to me an outrage and an impertinence, though I may suppose it finds its excuse in the short-waisted costumes of our grandmothers. But the movement of the gla.s.s-smoothing _valseuses_ was really a sort of waltz movement. The plates of gla.s.s were fixed with plaster on a solid rectangular table.
Granite-dust was scattered upon the plates, and then a wooden plateau, armed on the under side with bands of cast iron or steel, was set to waltzing over it backwards and forwards with a semi-rotatory motion, the granite-dust supplied becoming finer and finer as the waltzing went on.
Instead of these _valseuses_ two great plates of gla.s.s are now fixed side by side with plaster on huge tables, and two large ashlars are set turning by steam on their own axes while they describe a great orbit over the plates of gla.s.s. A stream of water constantly plays upon the plates, which are also constantly powdered with fine sand. The ashlars turn on their axes thirty or forty times a minute, and the plates of gla.s.s are usually smoothed and 'evened' on both faces now by these machines in from eight to nine hours, including the time spent in taking them out of the plaster after one face has been smoothed, and fixing them anew in the plaster, that the other face may fare as well. Here again a considerable economy of time has been made. And, after all, when one looks into the practical production of any of these great marvels of human industry, it is in this economy of time that the real advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist.
With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain--for the most part, uncertain and forgotten--men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an absurdity. The 'invention' was the engine, an invention as old as Egypt or China. The discovery that steam could be made to work the engine is the more modest modern achievement. In this industry of gla.s.s-making the amazing thing is that it should have come into the mind of a man so to apply the heat of burning wood to sands and silicates enclosed in an earthen vessel as to convert them into an entirely new substance possessing qualities not perceivable by any human sense in the sands, the silicates, or the earth.
What our modern progress in chemistry and in mechanics has enabled the makers of gla.s.s to do, is greatly to reduce the trouble and cost of producing this entirely new substance, greatly to improve the quality of the substance produced, and to extend the range of the uses to which it can be applied.
What would the Egyptians, who paid their tribute in gla.s.s to Rome, have thought of a serious order to pave the Via Sacra with blocks of purple gla.s.s? Yet such an order could be executed now at St.-Gobain, and when one sees the great flags weighing nine kilogrammes made here and used to let light into the cellarage below the carriage-ways, for example, of the huge Hotel Continental, at Paris, it comes easily within the probabilities that the whole underworld of our great cities in time may thus come to be made available for divers uses, as so much of the underworld of Broadway now is in New York.
The great 'pavement question' is an open question still, in spite of asphalte and of wood, and there would seem to be nothing in the nature of things to prevent its being eventually solved by the gla.s.sworkers.
The roofing question clearly belongs to them. The casting of gla.s.s for roofs began, I believe, with England, in the time of Sir Joseph Paxton, but it has been immensely developed at St.-Gobain. Over a hundred thousand square metres of gla.s.s roofing made here were required for the building of the Exposition of this year at Paris. All the most important railway stations in France, from Nantes to Strasburg (unless the Germans have changed this), and from Calais to Ma.r.s.eilles, are thus roofed. In great warehouses, markets, public museums, street galleries--like those of Victor Emmanuel at Milan--factories, workshops all over France and the Continent, this conversion of the roof into a colossal window has revolutionised matters within the last twenty years. The light is making its way even into Turkey, where the great bazaar at Salonica has been roofed in gla.s.s by St.-Gobain, and as the Chinese, who, despite their early invention of gla.s.s, never got beyond using it for beads and little bottles, have condescended to admit great French mirrors into the Imperial Palace at Pekin, the gla.s.s roof may, ere long, make its way even into China.
In the form of tiles, such as are now made here, gla.s.s must inevitably, sooner or later, displace slates and s.h.i.+ngles and terra-cotta for the roofs, even of private houses, it being quite certain that these gla.s.s tiles can be so used as to give a much better light in the garrets of private houses than can possibly be got through the windows. When that comes to pa.s.s the burglar's occupation of clambering stealthily from roof to roof will be seriously interfered with. What with gla.s.s roofs and gla.s.s floors and electricity, indeed, the city of the future is likely to be much more easily 'policed' and patrolled, as well as incomparably more cheery and habitable, than the city of to-day.
Perhaps, too, when we all come to living in gla.s.s houses, the cause of peace and good neighbourhood may gain, and even Mrs. Grundy may grow more careful about looking into the affairs of her friends and acquaintances.
If that much maligned potentate the Emperor Nero had any real notion of the capabilities of gla.s.s when he established the first gla.s.sworks at Rome, the lamentation with which he took farewell of the world, '_qualis artifex pereo_,' may have been inspired by regret at his not being allowed time enough to develop them. Certainly such gigantic mirrors as those which St.-Gobain has this year sent to the Exposition would have shown to better advantage in his colossal 'Golden House' than in any of our petty modern palaces. In what palace in England or in France to-day could a mirror measuring 7 metres x 63 centimetres in height by 4 metres x 12 centimetres in width, and thus displaying a surface of more than 30 square metres, be placed, without dwarfing everything about it? These immense and magnificent mirrors must go hereafter to decorate palaces of public resort--'palaces of the people,' not palaces of princes. What was a royal luxury when Colbert wrote to D'Avaux in 1673 has become a popular attraction. The smallest restaurant in Paris would think itself discredited to-day were it decorated with one of the _grandes glaces_ for which Colbert in 1693 thought St.-Gobain would find no purchaser save the king; but the Grand Cafe and the Hotel Terminus of the Gare St.-Lazare order mirrors in 1889 which no king of our times would very well know what to do with.
Yet, once more, how the cost of these mirrors has fallen! In 1702 a plate-gla.s.s mirror showing two square metres only by surface, cost, at St.-Gobain, 540 francs. In 1889 such a mirror, showing four square metres of surface, costs, at St.-Gobain, 136 francs. A mirror showing ten square metres of surface, which could not have been made in 1702 at any price, can now be had for 467 francs!
In 1802, under Napoleon, a mirror showing four square metres of surface cost 3,644 francs, or very nearly three times the present cost of a mirror, not tinned like the mirrors of 1802, but silvered, of twice and a half that size. While new markets are constantly opening to this great industry all over the world, the progress of chemical science and of mechanics is as constantly suggesting new economies and new improvements in the manufacture of gla.s.s, and St.-Gobain, though one of the most thoroughly French of all French 'inst.i.tutions,' shows no Chauvinism in its incessant study and prompt appropriation of these economies and these improvements. During the invasion of 1814 the workmen of St.-Gobain marched off to Chauny to resist the advance of the Prussians, and the manufactory had to pay a heavy fine for its patriotism. But it avails itself as readily of German as of French science to-day, and I found M. Henrivaux entirely and minutely familiar with the very latest phenomena of the great change which is coming over the gla.s.sworks, as well as all the other industries, of Pittsburg, through the use there of natural gas instead of coal gas and coal. All the most recently invented furnaces--English, German, American--have been tried and tested here as soon as they were made; and the latest American 'crushers' and 'regulators' get to St.-Gobain as soon as they do to Pittsburg. The materials which go to the making of a plate-gla.s.s mirror pa.s.s through seven processes before the original heap of pebbles, dust, and ashes is transformed into a sheet of splendour and light.