John Lovell

“ Hurrying through shop after shop—one filled with workmen, another with workwomen, all resounding with the busy hum of labour, we at length descend into another courtyard surrounded by ranges of shopping whose windows and walls are bespattered with yellow mud flung off the grinding stones that are whirling madly round inside, amidst a steam-driven labyrinth of bands and a grating, grinding, hissing whiz that fairly sets one’s teeth on edge. Entering, we find grindstones and polishing wheels of all sorts and sizes, and behind each a workman bending closely over his work. ”

“ Thence he takes us through an engine room—where three bright pistons are for ever plunging down to get strength, and leaping up to expend it on a labyrinth of leathern bands that turn thousands of wheels all over the manufactory, up-stairs and down—to an apartment where a score or two of queer-looking iron machines seem to be quietly chewing up, in a score or two pairs of gigantic jaws, the metal we have seen below. ”

“ And over the whole community of chimneys there hangs a great cloud of writhing smoke in which many shades of colour seem to be wildly struggling for individual mastery. The works are more like a town in Pluto’s regions than a manufactory upon earth. And their size is immense. They occupy many acres of land, and they are inhabited daily by nearly two thousand workmen. A railway runs into them to whisk away their products to all parts of the world, and a canal rolls sluggishly through them, under the pretence of helping the railway at its work. ”

“ The manufactory itself—an ancient three-story dwellinghouse, enlarged from time to time by the addition of surrounding buildings of all sorts and sizes, and in all stages of repair—looks, externally, for all the world like a band of tipsy tenements hugging each other; and, internally, is a complete structural puzzle. To pass from one room to another, even on the same floor, you have to go up flights of stairs here, and down flights of stairs there, and through dark passages, and along crazy out-door galleries, until you become perfectly bewildered ”

“ We have seen that the lives of the whole of these workpeople are in continual peril, and common sense suggests an instant remedy. Remove the fulminate of mercury from the cellar, give the primer and mixer rooms of their own at some distance from each other and the manufactory, take all those little girls away from the priming room, and let them pursue their harmless calling out of harm’s way; and then, even if the worst come to the worst, more than one life need not be sacrificed by the most terrific of explosions. ”

“ Then, there are square, hard-fisted looking shafts—a sort of artisan chimneys—red-hot at the mouth, and labouring forth fierce flames that flash the thin blue smoke high up into the air; and there are little infant chimneys—steam outlets—that hilariously pant out an innocent-looking silvery white smoke all day long, and here and there and everywhere. ”

“ Nevertheless, the nineteen poor creatures we saw buried just now lost their lives by an explosion in just such another room—the whole building crashed down and killed them, though there was not more than a pound of fulminate in the place.
To return: the sole occupant of the attic, at the door of which we now stand, is an elderly woman, whose length of service has proved her general carefulness, and, in the mind of her employer, has rendered her a fitting person to hold in her withered hands the lives of more than a hundred human beings. ”

“ Some are spinning round swiftly, others sluggishly, some edgewise, some flatwise; but all are in motion, and all seem to be deliriously devouring great cakes of red-hot metal, with which they are being fed by some forty or fifty grimy workmen. Close to us are two great iron rollers revolving one over the other, and on either side of them are half-a-dozen workmen, who are passing and repassing an immense sheet of red-hot metal from one to the other through the wheels. The moment the metal is through, bang! ”

“ Our guide is the light porter of the establishment—a good-natured looking old man, weighing about eighteen stone. We tell him that our object is to see every process in the manufacture of a percussion-cap; and, in order that we may complain of no lack of courtesy on his part, he at once conducts us into a large cellar, where thousands of oblong sheets of thin metal, resembling brass, are being stored away. ”

“ We learn from further inspection and the comments of our guide that there are two methods of colouring the bubbles we see all around us. The one is by using coloured “metal” entirely; the other by “flashing”—coating white glass with a thin film of colour only. All colours may be “flashed;” red must be, because the colouring matter used would render the glass blown entirely from red “metal,” opaque. So, in order to be inducted into the mysteries of “flashing,” we seek out a workman who is about to blow a red bubble. The process, we find, is very simple. ”

“ That is the position of the matter now, and no doubt will be until another frightful explosion shall occur to wake a dreaming legislature from its slumbers. Then, perhaps, we may get what is wanted—an Act of Parliament that shall compel percussion-cap manufacturers, like powder makers, to carry on their business in some secluded country place, where each dangerous process shall be carried on in light sheds, sufficiently far apart to prevent the destruction of one involving the destruction of the whole—workpeople, neighbours, and property. ”

“ In her every motion there is danger. If any part of that powder be too dry; if the paper be shaken too roughly; if one end of it fall and drop the powder; if any foreign substance get amongst it, or if it even come into violent contact with the thumb or finger-nail, there is danger of the whole exploding; and, the whole exploding, the operator is blown to atoms and the manufactory laid in ruins. No wonder, then, that the old woman should breathe harder and harder, and tremble more and more as she sways to and fro with her paper, in an agony of carefulness. ”

“ As I am now about to accept my old friend’s offer, I hereby invite as many of my readers as are desirous of knowing out of what wire is produced, and how it comes into existence, to accompany me to Birmingham. There is no difficulty about getting there. Travelling by that quickest of all conveyances, the imagination, it is the easiest thing in the world to suppose ourselves, not only at New Street Station, but fairly out of its Pandemoniac din, and on our way to the manufactory we purpose visiting. ”

“ A Sheffield pocket-knife, therefore, passes through many hands before it is complete; there is a division of labour in its manufacture that has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages are, that each man, spending a lifetime in one branch of the trade only, is a better workman in that particular branch than another who has divided his attention amongst three or four branches. ”

“ But taking a broader view of the matter, and travelling out of our homes for a while, we shall find wire in use almost everywhere,—sometimes as a convenience, oftener as an essential. It is the highway along which our telegraphic messages are flashed with a swifter speed than lightning—the agent by which signals are turned on and off, and life preserved on our railways. In our manufactories it releases hundreds of tons of steam-power at a touch ”

“ Not many years ago the dry-grinder, whose services are mostly required in the grinding of forks, received that dust into his lungs, and there it settled and grew in bulk until it surely brought about his early death. Even now, I am sorry to say, the evil has not wholly been overcome, but what with air tubes and respirators, the dry-grinder’s life has been much prolonged. Let us hope that in course of time a perfect remedy may be devised, for human life is a heavy price to pay for forks. ”

“ The article to be ground and polished is passed over wheel after wheel, from the coarsest stone to the closest grained leather, until, if it be a blade, it becomes keen and dazzling, or, if it be a handle, it becomes smooth and glossy as glass. And now having seen the blades and handles separately prepared, let us pass on to see them put together.
“But your knife,” says the reader, “has more than blades and handle; it has a file and a button-hook, a gimlet, a corkscrew, a saw, and I don’t know how many more useful tools.” ”

“ Hundreds of grimy workmen, with what appear to be long red-hot drum-sticks in their hands, are flitting about amongst the strange lights and shadows in every direction, and some twenty or thirty are engaged in blowing gigantic bubbles of all the colours of the rainbow. ”

“ Taking one of the square strips of brass we have seen in the cutting-mill, he hammers its end to a point on a small anvil at one side of him, and passes it through the eye of a huge needle fixed in the bench on the other side of him. He then seizes the point of the strip of metal with a great pair of pincers attached by a chain to the drum, puts his foot upon a treadle beneath him, and round goes the drum—the Giant in the rolling-mill turns it—dragging the pincers with it, and drawing the strip of metal slowly but surely through the round eye of the needle. ”

“ Without it, electricity could scarcely be evolved for any useful purpose; to it chemistry owes many valuable discoveries and delicate tests. It is employed, in short, in most arts and some sciences, and may be found in almost every piece of mechanism in existence—from a rat-trap to a gold chronometer, from a child’s toy to a steam-engine. ”

“ In an incredibly short time the piece of steel assumes a shape somewhat resembling a knife-blade, and being now too cold to yield longer to the hammer, it is again thrust into the fire. One by one the remaining pieces are similarly treated, and that done, they are all drawn out again, to be jammed by a blow from the striker into a mould which completely shapes the whole blade. ”

“ But I mention this as an illustration of the fact that fine wire cannot be produced at one drawing, but must, so to speak, be coaxed down to the requisite degree of attenuation, even when so valuable a metal as gold is used. As a general rule, it may be taken that iron wire requires more coaxing than brass, brass more than copper, and copper more than the precious metals—their different degrees of malleability rendering them amenable to different degrees of treatment. ”

“ This loading involves several processes, all of which, by reason of the explosiveness of the material used, are frightfully dangerous. That little cake of hard, whitey-brown matter, which you hardly notice in the bottom of the cap as you hurriedly fix it to the nipple of your gun on the moors or at the rifle-range, has passed through seven stages of preparation, and at almost every stage the life of the preparer was jeopardised—and not only so, but the lives of all the workpeople we have seen on our way through the manufactory, and others besides. ”

“ But the “Grinder’s Asthma” is not the only danger to which these men subject themselves in the earning of their daily bread. It not unfrequently happens that one of the great stones is whirled asunder, and its huge fragments flung in all directions. In the roof of the very building in which we now stand, there is a great hole, rent, as we are told, by the passage of a grinding stone so broken ”

“ We enter the “works” through an enormous gateway, and, tapping at the door of the porter’s lodge, bring out an old man whose duty it is, provided we are furnished with the proper credentials, to hand us over to a guide. This done, on we go: over a canal bridge, across the railway, by long ranges of workshops, until we come to a large shed where several workmen are engaged in treading out clay and fashioning it into immense “pots,” or pans, as big as brewers’ vats of moderate dimensions. ”

“ That point reached, the striker leaves the bellows, and the maker brings one of the pieces to the anvil; and while the latter turns it over and over, and deals it skilful little blows with a small hammer, the former, armed again with his great “sledge,” comes down upon it with heavy blows, that smash out sparks in all directions. ”

“ Having gathered, upon the end of his blow-pipe, a ball of white metal, the operator, before carrying it to the “marver,” gives it a twirl in a pot of red metal, and then goes on with his blowing. The two colours retain their relative positions throughout every succeeding process; as the one grows thinner and thinner the other grows thinner and thinner; and the final result is a sheet of white glass coated with red on one side. Passing on from one workman to another, we notice that, though there are bubbles of every other colour, there are no yellow ones ”

“ One man drills holes through the various materials, another rivets the bone, or horn, or pearl to a thin plate of steel or brass; and a third rivets the handles and blades, and such other accessories as may be necessary, together. The knife is then passed on to the final polishers and burnishers—generally women—and is then ready for the market. ”

“ As soon as it is thus prepared, another workman advances with a kind of pole tipped with molten glass, which he affixes to that part of the bubble immediately opposite the blow-pipe. Workman number one then releases the blow-pipe, and the bubble becomes the property of workman number two, who at once carries it off to another furnace, whose flames roar far out into the workshop. ”