MAUDSLEY’S LEATHER COLLAR
All this seems very simple and one would suppose that the inventor of the hydraulic press must have been exceptionally free from the troubles and trials that beset most inventors. However, there is a vast difference between a laboratory apparatus and a commercial machine. When, towards the close of the eighteenth century, Joseph Bramah, the eminent British tool builder, invented the hydraulic press, he experienced all sorts of difficulty in holding the water in the ram cylinder. Of course, the ram has to slide freely into and out of the cylinder, but how could he prevent the water from leaking out past the ram? He resorted to all the plumbing expedients of the day. He used a stuffing box and gland, but when this was packed tight enough to hold the water in, it gripped the ram so tightly that the latter would not move down into the cylinder on the return stroke. Bramah had in his employ a very clever young mechanic named Henry Maudsley, who later became famous as an inventor and designer of machine tools. We read of him in Chapter III. Maudsley attacked the baffling problem of the hydraulic press and provided a solution that survives to this day. In place of the stuffing box which is a means of jamming a mass of cotton waste about the collar, he provided a cupped leather collar. When the pressure was applied it expanded the collar and made it bear tightly against the ram, but on relieving the hydraulic pressure the pressure of the cup leather was also reduced automatically.
There are many machines analogous to the hydraulic press in principle. They do not use water in every case for the fluid lever. Where the fluid is used over and over again oil is frequently employed. The compactness of this form of lever makes it most useful wherever an operation calls for the overcoming of a very heavy load or resistance through a relatively short distance. For instance, there are machines for bending pipe, for curving railroad rails, for punching holes in metal, for pulling wheels off their shafts, for jacking up heavy weights, for baling cotton, paper, and other materials, all of which operate on the same principle as the hydraulic press. Water pressure is supplied sometimes by a hand pump, sometimes by a power-driven pump, and sometimes it is taken from a reservoir in which compressed air imparts the requisite pressure to the water.