Part 13 (1/2)
The head of a pin is a more difficult thing to make even than the body.
It is formed of a small piece of wire twisted round so as to fit upon the other wire. It is said that by a machine fifty thousand heads can be made in an hour. We should think that a man would be very skilful to make fifty in an hour by hand, in the roughest manner; if so, the machine does the work of a thousand men. The machine, however, does not do all the work. The head is attached to the body of a pin by the fingers of a child, while another machine rivets it on. The operations of cutting and pointing the pins are also done by machinery; and they are polished by a chemical process.
It is by these processes,--by these combinations of human labour with mechanical power,--that it occurs that fifty pins can be bought for one halfpenny, and that therefore four or five thousand pins may be consumed in a year by the most economical housewife, at a much less price than fifty pins of a rude make cost two or three centuries ago. A woman's allowance was formerly called her _pin-money_,--a proof that the pins were a sufficiently dear article to make a large item in her expenses.
If pins now were to cost a halfpenny apiece instead of being fifty for a halfpenny, the greater number of females would adopt other modes of fastening their dress, which would probably be less neat and convenient than pins. No such circ.u.mstance could happen while the machinery of pin-making was in use.
Needles are not so cheap as pins, because the material of which they are made is more expensive, and the processes cannot be executed so fully by machinery. But without machinery how could that most beautiful article, a _fine_ needle, be sold at the rate of six for a penny?
As in the case of pins, machinery is at work at the first formation of the material. Without the tilt-hammer, which beats out the bar of steel, first at the rate of ten strokes a minute, and lastly at that of five hundred, how could that bar be prepared for needle-making at anything like a reasonable price? In all the processes of needle-making, labour is saved by contrivance and machinery. What human touch, without a machine, would be accurate enough to make the eye of the finest needle, through which the most delicate silk is with difficulty pa.s.sed? There are two needles to be formed out of one piece of wire; in the previous preparation of which the eyes are marked. The workman, holding in his hand several wires, drops one at a time on the bed-iron of the machine, adjusts it to the die, brings down the upper die upon it by the action of the foot, and allows it to fall into a little dish when done. This he does with such rapidity that one stamper can stamp four thousand wires, equivalent to eight thousand needles, in an hour.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Stamping the eye of a needle.]
Needles are made in such large quant.i.ties, that it is even important to save the time of the child who lays them all one way when they are completed. Mr. Babbage, who is equally distinguished for his profound science and his mechanical ingenuity, has described this process as an example of one of the simplest contrivances which can come under the denomination of a tool. ”It is necessary to separate the needles into two parcels, in order that their points may be all in one direction.
This is usually done by women and children. The needles are placed sideways in a heap, on a table, in front of each operator. From five to ten are rolled towards this person by the forefinger of the left hand; this separates them a very small s.p.a.ce from each other, and each in its turn is pushed lengthways to the right or to the left, according as its eye is on the right or the left hand. This is the usual process, and in it every needle pa.s.ses individually under the finger of the operator. A small alteration expedites the process considerably; the child puts on the forefinger of its right hand a small cloth cap or finger-stall, and, rolling from the heap from six to twelve needles, it keeps them down by the forefinger of the left hand; whilst it presses the forefinger of the right hand gently against the ends of the needles, those which have their points towards the right hand stick into the finger-stall; and the child, removing the finger of the left hand, allows the needles sticking into the cloth to be slightly raised, and then pushes them towards the left side. Those needles which had their eyes on the right hand do not stick into the finger-cover, and are pushed to the heap on the right side previous to the repet.i.tion of the process. By means of this simple contrivance, each movement of the finger, from one side to the other, carries five or six needles to their proper heap; whereas, in the former method, frequently only one was moved, and rarely more than two or three were transported at one movement to their place.”
A large number of people are employed, at Birmingham chiefly, in the manufacture of b.u.t.tons. The census return gives about seven thousand. In the manufacture of a single b.u.t.ton there is great division of labour amongst piercers, cutters, stampers, gilders, and burnishers. The engraving exhibits the operations of stamping, pressing, and punching, as carried on in a great factory. The shank of a b.u.t.ton is made by very complicated machinery as a distinct cla.s.s of manufacture, and the b.u.t.ton-makers buy the shanks. It has been stated that three firms in Birmingham annually make six hundred million of b.u.t.ton-shanks.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Stamping, pressing, and punching b.u.t.tons.--Elliott's factory.]
The application of machinery, or of peculiar scientific modes of working, to such apparently trifling articles as pins, needles, b.u.t.tons, and trinkets, may appear of little importance. But let it be remembered, that the manufacture of such articles furnishes employment to many thousands of our fellow-countrymen; and, enabling us to supply other nations with these products, affords us the means of receiving articles of more intrinsic value in exchange. In 1853 our exports of hardware and cutlery amounted to more than three millions and a half sterling. No article of ready attainment, and therefore of general consumption, whether it be a labourer's spade or a child's marble, is unimportant in a commercial point of view. The wooden figures of horses and sheep that may be bought for twopence in the toy-shops furnish employment to cut them, during the long winter nights, to a large portion of the peasantry of the Tyrol. The Swiss peasant cuts a piece of white wood into a boy or a cottage, as he is tending his herd on the side of a mountain. These become considerable articles of export. In the town of Sonneberg, near the forest of Thuringia, four thousand inhabitants are princ.i.p.ally employed in the toy-trade, and also find employment for the neighbouring villagers. Mr. Osler, of Birmingham, some years ago, addressing a Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject of his beads and trinkets, said,--”On my first journey to London, a respectable-looking man in the City asked me if I could supply him with dolls' eyes; and I was foolish enough to feel half offended. I thought it derogatory to my new dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls' eyes. He took me into a room quite as wide and perhaps twice the length of this (one of the large rooms for Committees in the House of Commons), and we had just room to walk between stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of dolls. He said, 'These are only the legs and arms--the trunks are below.' But I saw enough to convince me that he wanted a great many eyes; and as the article appeared quite in my own line of business, I said I would take an order by way of experiment; and he showed me several specimens. I copied the order. He ordered various quant.i.ties and of various sizes and qualities. On returning to the Tavistock Hotel, I found that the order amounted to upwards of five hundred pounds.”
Mr. Osler tells this story to show the importance of trifles. The making of dolls' eyes afforded subsistence to many ingenious workmen in gla.s.s toys; and in the same way the most minute and apparently insignificant article of general use, when rendered cheap by chemical science or machinery, produces a return of many thousand pounds, and sets in motion labour and labourers. Without the science and the machinery, which render the article cheap, the labourers would have had _no_ employ, for the article would not have been consumed. What a pretty article is a common tobacco-pipe, of which millions are used! It is made cheap and beautiful in a mould--a machine for copying pipes. If the pipe were made without the mould, and other contrivances, it would cost at least a s.h.i.+lling instead of a halfpenny:--the tobacco-smoker would go without his pipe, and the pipe-maker without his employment.
Amongst articles of great demand that have become of importance, though apparently insignificant, in our own day, there is nothing more worthy of notice than the Lucifer-Match. About twenty years ago chemistry abolished the tinder-box; and the burnt rag that made the tinder went to make paper. Slowly did the invention spread. The use of the lucifer-match is now so established that machines are invented to prepare the splints. In London one saw-mill annually cuts up four hundred large timber-trees for matches. The English matches are generally square, and thus thirty thousand splints are cut in a minute.
The American matches are round; and the process of shaping being more elaborate, four thousand five hundred splints are cut in a minute. We will follow a bundle of eighteen hundred of the square splints, each four inches long, through its conversion into three thousand six hundred lucifer-matches.
Without being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur. When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur, must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy, sitting on the floor with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. They have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces the pale, noiseless fire; the chlorate of potash, the sharp cracking illumination. After this application of the more inflammable substance, the matches are separated, and dried in racks. Thoroughly dried, they are gathered up again into bundles of the same quant.i.ty, and are taken to the boys who cut them; for the reader will have observed that the bundles have been dipped at each end. There are few things more remarkable in manufactures than the extraordinary rapidity of this cutting-process and that which is connected with it. The boy stands before a bench, the bundle on his right hand, a pile of half-opened empty boxes on his left. The matches are to be cut, and the empty boxes filled, by this boy. A bundle is opened; he seizes a portion, knowing by long habit the required number with sufficient exactness; puts them rapidly into a sort of frame, knocks the ends evenly together, confines them with a strap which he tightens with his foot, and cuts them in two parts with a knife on a hinge, which he brings down with a strong leverage. The halves lie projecting over each end of the frame; he grasps the left portion and thrusts it into a half-open box, which slides into an outer case; and he repeats the process with the matches on his right hand. This series of movements is performed with a rapidity almost unexampled; for in this way, two hundred thousand matches are cut, and two thousand boxes filled, in a day, by one boy.
It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer than in the winter. The increased summer demand for the lucifer-matches shows that the great consumption is among the ma.s.ses--the labouring population--those who make up the vast majority of the contributors to duties of customs and excise. In the houses of the wealthy there is always fire; in the houses of the poor, fire in summer is a needless hourly expense. Then comes the lucifer-match to supply the want--to light the candle to look in the dark cupboard--to light the afternoon fire to boil the kettle. It is now unnecessary to run to the neighbour for a light, or, as a desperate resource, to work at the tinder-box. The lucifer-matches sometimes fail, but they cost little, and so they are freely used, even by the poorest. Their value was sufficiently shown when an officer in camp at Balaclava wrote home that no want was greater than that of the ready means of procuring fire and light, and that he should hold a box of lucifer-matches cheap at half-a-crown.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Envelope-making machine.]
We may notice one other article of almost universal use, which is of very recent introduction--the Envelope. It is a labour-saving contrivance for the writer of letters. The use of the envelope has been mainly created by the penny postage. We find, in the census, that seven hundred persons, chiefly females, are employed in making envelopes. But there is a beautiful machine also for making them, at the rate of twenty-five thousand a day. The envelope-making machine was one of the most attractive objects in the Great Exhibition.
CHAPTER XIX.
Labour-saving contrivances--The nick in types--Tags of laces--Casting shot--Candle-dipping--Tiring a wheel--Globe-making--Domestic aids to labour--Aids to mental labour--Effects of severe bodily labour on health and duration of life.
We drew attention in the last chapter to a particular process in needle-making--the sorter's sheath--to show that great saving of labour may be effected by what is not popularly called machinery. In modern times, wherever work is carried on upon a large scale, the division of labour is applied; by which one man attending to one thing learns to perform that one thing more perfectly than if he had attended to many things. He thus saves a considerable portion of the whole amount of labour. Every skilful workman has individually some mode of working peculiar to himself, by which he lessens his labour. An expert blacksmith, for instance, will not strike one more blow upon the anvil than is necessary to produce the effect he desires. A compositor, or printer who arranges the types, is a swift workman when he makes no unnecessary movement of his arms or fingers in lifting a single type into what is called his composing-stick, where the types are arranged in lines. There is a very simple contrivance to lessen the labour of the compositor, by preventing him putting the type into his composing-stick the wrong side outwards. It is a nick, or two or three nicks, on the side of the type which corresponds with the lower side of the face of the letter. By this nick or nicks he is enabled to see by one glance of his eye on which side the letter is first to be grasped, and then to be arranged. If the nick were not there he would have to look at the face of every letter before he could properly place it. This is a labour-saving contrivance; and if the labour were not thus saved, two compositors would certainly be required to do the work of one; and the natural and inevitable effect would be that, as the funds for the payment of the compositor's labours would not be increased, the wages of each compositor would be diminished by one-half. The new labour that would be required would enter into compet.i.tion with the old labour, and depreciate its value, because each individual labourer had lost one-half of his efficiency.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Compositor at work.]
Contrivances to economize labour, such as that of the needle-sorter's sheath, and the nicks in the type of the compositor, are constantly occurring in manufactures. The tags of laces, which are made of thin tin, are sometimes bent into their requisite form by the same movement of the arm that cuts them. A piece of steel, adapted to the side of the shears, gives them at once their proper shape. The writer can remember that when he was a boy, and was fitted with a pair of laced boots, he used to wait with patience in the shoemaker's shop, whilst he clumsily bent a piece of tin into the form of a tag, and then as clumsily hammered it round the lace. In a silk manufactory boot-laces are now prepared with tags made by machinery. One machine cuts and hollows the tags much more efficiently than the shears mentioned above; and at another machine, worked by a boy, the tags are fitted to the laces with a rapidity which is acquired by continued practice.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Machine for fixing tags to laces.]
If the small shot which is used by sportsmen were each cast in a mould, the price would be enormous; but by pouring the melted lead, of which the shot is made, through a sort of cullender, placed at the top of a tower, high enough for the lead to cool in its pa.s.sage through the air, before it reaches the ground, the shot is formed in a spherical or round shape by the mere act of pa.s.sing through the atmosphere. Some of the shots thus formed are not perfectly spherical--they are pear-shaped.
If the selection of the perfect from the imperfect shots were made by the eye, or the touch, the process would be very tedious and insufficient, and the price of the article much increased. The simplest contrivance in the world divides the bad from the good. The shots are poured down an inclined plane, and, without any trouble of selection, the spherical ones run straight to the bottom, while the pear-shaped ones tumble off on one side or the other of the plane.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Inclined plane for separating shot.]