ILLUSTRATIONS.
| PAGE | |
| Portrait of the Author | [Frontispiece] |
| The Laboratory of Carpentry | [23] |
| Course in the Laboratory of Carpentry | [27] |
| The Wood-turning Laboratory | [31] |
| Course in the Wood-turning and Pattern Laboratory | [41] |
| The Founding Laboratory | [49] |
| Course in the Founding Laboratory | [53] |
| The Forging Laboratory | [59] |
| Course in the Forging Laboratory | [67] |
| The Machine-tool Laboratory | [79] |
| The Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory | [89] |
| Course in the Machine-tool Laboratory | [95] |
| The Students with their Books | [107] |
| M. Victor Della-Vos, the Founder of Manual Training in Russia | [329] |
| Dr. John D. Runkle, the Founder of Manual Training in the United States | [335] |
POWER.
“His tongue was framed to music,
And his hand was armed with skill;
His face was the mould of beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.”
—Emerson.
MIND AND HAND:
MANUAL TRAINING THE CHIEF FACTOR IN EDUCATION.
CHAPTER I.
THE IDEAL SCHOOL.
Its Situation. — Its Tall Chimney. — The Whir of Machinery and Sound of the Sledge-hammer. — The School that is to dignify Labor. — The Realization of the Dream of Bacon, Rousseau, Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. — The School that fitly represents the Age of Steel.
The Ideal School is an institution which develops and trains to usefulness the moral, physical, and intellectual powers of man. It is what Comenius called Humanity’s workshop, and in America it is becoming the natural center of the Public School system. The building, well-designed for its occupancy, is large, airy, open to the light on every side, amply provided with all appliances requisite for instruction in the arts and sciences, and finished interiorly and exteriorly in the highest style of useful and beautiful architectural effects. The distinguishing characteristic of the Ideal School building is its chimney, which rises far above the roof, from whose tall stack a column of smoke issues, and the hum and whir of machinery is heard, and the heavy thud of the sledge-hammer resounding on the anvil, smites the ear.
It is, then, a factory rather than a school?
No. It is a school; the school of the future; the school that is to dignify labor; the school that is to generate power; the school where every sound contributes to the harmony of development, where the brain informs the muscle, where thought directs every blow, where the mind, the eye, and the hand constitute an invincible triple alliance. This is the school that Locke dreamed of, that Bacon wished for, that Rousseau described, and that Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel struggled in vain to establish.
It is, then, science and the arts in apotheosis. For if it be, as claimed, the Ideal school, it is destined to lift the veil from the face of Nature, to reveal her most precious secrets, and to divert to man’s use all her treasures.
Yes; it is to other schools what the diamond is to other precious stones—the last analysis of educational thought. It is the philosopher’s stone in education; the incarnated dream of the alchemist, which dissolved earth, air, and water into their original elements, and recombined them to compass man’s immortality. Through it that which has hitherto been impossible is to become a potential reality.
In this building which resembles a factory or machine-shop an educational revolution is to be wrought. Education is to be rescued from the domination of mediæval ideas, relieved of the enervating influence of Grecian æstheticism, and confided to the scientific direction of the followers of Bacon, whose philosophy is common sense and its law, progress. The philosophy of Plato left in its wake a long line of abstract propositions, decayed civilizations, and ruined cities, while the philosophy of Bacon, in the language of Macaulay, “has lengthened life; mitigated pain; extinguished diseases; increased the fertility of the soil; given new securities to the mariner; spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; extended the range of the human vision; multiplied the power of the human muscles; accelerated motion; annihilated distance; facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind.”
It is this beneficent work of Bacon that the Ideal school is to continue—the work of demonstrating to the world that the most useful thing is the most beautiful thing—discarding Plato, the apostle of idle speculation, and exalting Bacon, the minister of use.
In laying the foundations of education in labor it is dignified and education is ennobled. In such a union there is honor and strength, and long life to our institutions. For the permanence of the civil compact in this country, as in other countries, depends less upon a wide diffusion of unassimilated and undigested intelligence than upon such a thorough, practical education of the masses in the arts and sciences as shall enable them to secure, and qualify them to store up, a fair share of the aggregate produce of labor.
If this school shall appear like a hive of industry, let the reader not be deceived. Its main purpose, intellectual development, is never lost sight of fora moment. It is founded on labor, which, being the most sacred of human functions, is the most useful of educational methods. It is a system of object-teaching—teaching through things instead of through signs of things. It is the embodiment of Bacon’s aphorism—“Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things.” The students draw pictures of things, and then fashion them into things at the forge, the bench, and the turning-lathe; not mainly that they may enter machine-shops, and with greater facility make similar things, but that they may become stronger intellectually and morally; that they may attain a wider range of mental vision, a more varied power of expression, and so be better able to solve the problems of life when they shall enter upon the stage of practical activity.
It is a theory of this school that in the processes of education the idea should never be isolated from the object it represents;[E1] (1) because the idea, being the reflex perception or shadow of the object, is less clearly defined than the object itself, and (2) because joining the object and the idea intensifies the impression. Separated from its object the idea is unreal, a phantasm. The object is the flesh, blood, bones, and nerves of the idea. Without its body the idea is as impotent as the jet of steam that rises from the surface of boiling water and loses itself in the air. But unite it to its object and it becomes the vital spark, the animating force, the Promethean fire. Thus steam converts the Corliss engine—a huge mass of lifeless iron—into a thing of grace, of beauty, and of resistless power. Suppose the teacher, for example, desires to convey to the mind of a child having no knowledge of form an impression of the shape of the earth; he says, “It is globular.” The child’s face expresses nothing because there is in its mind no conception of the object represented by the word globular. The teacher says, “It is a sphere,” with no better success. He adds, “A sphere is a body bounded by a surface, every point of which is equally distant from a point within called the centre.” The child’s face is still expressionless. The teacher takes a handful of moist clay and moulds it into the form of a sphere, and exhibiting it, says, “The earth is like this.” The child claps its hands, utters a cry of delight, and exclaims, “It is round like a ball!”
This is an illustration of the triumph of object-teaching, the method alike of the kindergarten and the manual training school. As the child is father of the man, so the kindergarten is father of the manual training school. The kindergarten comes first in the order of development, and leads logically to the manual training school. The same principle underlies both. In both it is sought to generate power by dealing with things in connection with ideas. Both have common methods of instruction, and they should be adapted to the whole period of school life, and applied to all schools.
The Ideal school, most precisely representative of the present age—the age of science—is dedicated to a homogeneous system of mental and manual training, to the generation of power, to the development of true manhood. And above all, this school is destined to unite in indissoluble bonds science and art, and so to confer upon labor the highest and justest dignity—that of doing and responsibility. The reason of the degradation of labor was admirably stated by America’s most distinguished educational reformer, the late Mr. Horace Mann, who said, “The labor of the world has been performed by ignorant men, by classes doomed to ignorance from sire to son; by the bondmen and bondwomen of the Jews, by the helots of Sparta, by the captives who passed under the Roman yoke, and by the villeins and serfs and slaves of more modern times.”
When it shall have been demonstrated that the highest degree of education results from combining manual with intellectual training, the laborer will feel the pride of a genuine triumph; for the consciousness that every thought-impelled blow educates him, and so raises him in the scale of manhood, will nerve his arm, and fire his brain with hope and courage.
[E1] “And the attempt to convey scientific conceptions without the appeal to observation, which can alone give such conceptions firmness and reality, appears to me to be in direct antagonism to the fundamental principles of scientific education.”—“Physiography,” [Preface], p. vii. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1878.
This theory is the antithesis of that of Plato, namely; “that the simplest and purest way of examining things, is to pursue every particular by thought alone, without offering to support our meditation by seeing or backing our reasonings by any other corporal sense.”—Plato’s “Divine Dialogues,” p. 180. London: S. Cornish & Co., 1839.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAJESTY OF TOOLS.
Tools the Highest Text-books. — How to Use them the Test of Scholarship. — They are the Gauge of Civilization. — Carlyle’s Apostrophe to them. — The Typical Hand-tools. — The Automata of the Machine-shop. — Through Tools Science and Art are United. — The Power of Tools. — Their Educational Value. — Without Tools Man is Nothing; with Tools he is All. — It is through the Arts alone that Education touches Human Life.
Sacred to the majesty of tools might be appropriately inscribed over the entrance to this Ideal school; for its highest text-books are tools, and how to use them most intelligently is the test of scholarship. To realize the potency of tools it is only necessary to contrast the two states of man—the one without tools, the other with tools. See him in the first state, naked, shivering with cold, now hiding away from the beasts in caves, and now, famished and despairing, gaunt and hollow-eyed, creeping stealthily like a panther upon his prey. Then see him in the poetic, graphic apostrophe of Carlyle:—“Man is a tool-using animal. He can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountains melt into light dust before him; he kneads iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all!”
What a picture of the influence of tools upon civilization! It is through the use of tools that man has reached the place of absolute supremacy among animals. As he increases his stock of tools he recedes from the state of savagery. The great gulf between the aboriginal savage and the civilized man is spanned by the seven hand-tools—the axe, the saw, the plane, the hammer, the square, the chisel, and the file. These are the universal tools of the arts, and the modern machine-shop is an aggregation of them rendered automatic and driven by steam.
The ancients constructed automata which were exceedingly ingenious. In the statues that could walk and talk, the Chinese puppets and the marionettes of the Greeks there was a hint of the modern automatic tools, which, driven by steam, fashion with equal accuracy the delicate parts of the watch and the huge segments of the marine engine. The ancients knew more of science than of art. They were familiar with the power of steam, but knew not how to apply it to the wants of man. They knew that steam would turn a spit, but they had not a sufficient knowledge of art to convert the power they had discovered into a monster of force, and train it to bear the burdens of commerce. They never thought to apply the jet of steam used to turn a spit to great automatic machines, and to fit into them saws and files, and needles and drills, and gimlets and planes, and compel them to do the work of thousands of men. But this is precisely what the modern mechanic has accomplished. In making a slave of steam, science and art have combined to free mankind.
We marvel at the dulness of the ancients as shown in their failure to utilize in the useful arts the discoveries of science. That they should have studied the stars over their heads to the neglect of the earth under their feet is incomprehensible to the modern mind. But will not future generations marvel at us? Is it not an astounding fact that, with a knowledge of the tremendous influence of tools upon the destiny of the human race so graphically depicted by Carlyle, the nations have been so slow in incorporating tool-practice into educational methods? The distinguishing features of modern civilization sprang as definitively from cunningly devised and skilfully handled tools as any effect from its cause. And yet the world’s statesmen have failed to discover the value of tool-practice as an educational agency. The face of the globe has been transformed by the union of art and science, but the world’s statesmen have not discerned the importance of uniting them in the curriculum of the schools. If the ancients could see us as we see them, they would doubtless laugh at us as we laugh at them.
We might take a lesson from the savage. He is taught to fight, to hunt, and to fish, and in these arts the brain, the hand, and the eye are trained simultaneously. He is first given object-lessons, as the pupil of the kindergarten is taught. Then the tomahawk, the spear, and the bow and arrow are placed in his hands, and he fights for his life, or fishes or hunts for his dinner. The young Indian is taught all that it is necessary for him to know, and he is educated, practically, in the savage’s three workshops—the battle-field, the forest and plain, the sea and lake. Thus the young savage enters upon the duties of his life with an exact practical knowledge of them. He has not been taught a theory of fighting, he has used the weapons of warfare; he has not studied the arts of fishing and hunting, he has handled the spear and the bow and arrow, and their use is as familiar to him as the multiplication table is to the boy in the public school.
We have more and better tools than the savage possesses. With the aid of science and art we harness steam to our chariot and compel it to draw us whither we will. We steal fire from the clouds and make it serve us as a messenger. We imprison the air, and with it stop the flying railway train; with the aid of science and art we reduce the most subtile forces of nature to servitude. But we neither teach our youth how to master their elements nor how to use them.
Tools represent the steps of human progress—in architecture, from the mud hut to the modern mansion; in agriculture, from the pointed stick used to tear the turf to a thousand and one ingenious instruments of husbandry; in ship-building, from the rudderless, sailless boat to the ocean steamer; in fabrics, from the matted fleece of the shepherd to the varied products of countless looms; in pottery, from the first rude Egyptian cup to the exquisite vase of the Sevres factory. And so of every art that contributes to the comfort and pleasure of man; the development of each has been accomplished by tools in the hands of the laborer.
Since, then, man owes so much to labor, he has doubtless educated the laborer and showered honors upon him (?). On the contrary, the labor of the world has been performed by the most ignorant classes, by bondmen, by helots and captives, by serfs and slaves. The laborer has been held in such contempt, and been so debased by ignorance, that he has often violently protested against improvements in the tools of the trades, and with vandal hands destroyed the mill, the factory, and the forge erected to ameliorate his condition. At the top of the social scale the sage has studied the stars and invented systems of abstract philosophy; at the bottom ignorance has deified itself and starved. This divorce of science from art has resulted in such incongruities as the Pyramids of Egypt and periodical famines; as the hanging gardens of Babylon and the horrors of Jewish captivity; as the Greek Parthenon and dwellings without chimneys; as the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles, and royal banquets without knives, forks, or spoons; as the Roman Forum and the Roman populace crying for bread and circuses; as Socrates, Plato, Seneca and Aurelius, and Caligula, Claudius, Nero and Domitian.
On the other hand the union of science with art tunnels the mountain, bridges the river, dams the torrent, and converts the wilderness into a fruitful field.
Science discovers and art appropriates and utilizes; and as science is helpless without the aid of art, so art is dead without the help of tools. Tools then constitute the great civilizing agency of the world; for civilization is the art of rendering life agreeable. The savage may own a continent, but if he possesses only the savage’s tools—the spear and the bow and arrow—he will be ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, and poorly protected both against cold and heat. He might be familiar with all the known sciences, but if he were ignorant of the arts his state, instead of being improved, would be rendered more deplorable; for with the thoughts, emotions, sensibilities, and aspirations of a sage he would still be powerless to steal from heaven a single spark of fire with which to warm his miserable hut.
In the light of this analysis Carlyle’s rhapsody on tools becomes a prosaic fact, and his conclusion—that man without tools is nothing, with tools all—points the way to the discovery of the philosopher’s stone in education. For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this is the last analysis of educational truth.
There is no better definition of education than that of Pestalozzi—“the generation of power.” But what kind of power? Not merely power to think abstractly, to speculate, to moralize, to philosophize, but power to act intelligently. And the power to act intelligently involves the exertion, in greater or less degree, of all the powers, both mental and physical. Education, then, is the development of all the powers of man to the culminating point of action. What kind of action? Action in art. What is art? “The power of doing something not taught by nature or instinct; power or skill in the use of knowledge; the practical application of the rules or principles of science.” Again we have the last analysis of education—“skill in the use of knowledge; the application of the rules or principles of science.” And this is tool practice.
It is unnecessary, in an educational view, to divide the arts by the employment of the terms “useful” and “fine;” for the fine arts can only exist legitimately where the useful arts have paved the way. In a harmonious development the artist will enter on the heels of the artisan. Art is cosmopolitan. It is not less worthily represented by the carpenter with his square, saw, and plane, and the smith with his sledge, than by the sculptor with his mallet and chisel, and the painter with his easel and brush; both classes contribute to the comfort and pleasure of man; for comfort is enhanced by pleasure, and pleasure is intensified by comfort. It follows that the ultimate object of education is the attainment of skill in the arts. To this end the speculations and investigations of philosophy and the experiments of chemistry lead. At the door of the study of the philosopher and of the laboratory of the chemist stands the artisan, listening for the newest hint that philosophy can impart, waiting for the result of the latest chemical analysis. In his hands these suggestions take form; through his skilful manipulation the faint indications of science become real things, suited to the exigencies of human life.
It is the most astounding fact of history that education has been confined to abstractions. The schools have taught history, mathematics, language and literature, and the sciences, to the utter exclusion of the arts, notwithstanding the obvious fact that it is through the arts alone that other branches of learning touch human life. As Bacon has so aptly expressed it, “The real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” In a word, public education stops at the exact point where it should begin to apply the theories it has imparted. At this point the school of mental and manual training combined—the Ideal School—begins; not only books but tools are put into the hands of the pupil, with this injunction of Comenius; “Let those things that have to be done be learned by doing them.”
CHAPTER III.
THE ENGINE-ROOM.
The Corliss Engine. — A Thing of Grace and Power. — The Growth of Two Thousand Years. — From Hero to Watt. — Its Duty as a School-master. — The Interdependence of the Ages. — The School in Epitome.
Let us enter the Ideal School building and take a bird’s-eye view of the visible processes of the new education.
The first object that attracts attention is the engine. It is a “Corliss,” fifty-two horse-power, and makes that peculiar kind of noise which conveys to the mind of the observer an impression of restrained power. When the student, upon entering the school, is shown this beautiful machine he is told that it, like all other inventions, is a growth—the growth of at least two thousand years; that the power of steam was known to the ancients—the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; that Hero, a philosopher of Alexandria, invented a crude steam-engine before the beginning of the Christian era, and that the engine before us, which throbs and trembles under the pressure of its battery of steel boilers in doing duty as a school-master, is the latest development of Hero’s conception. The educational idea underlying this fact is the interdependence of the ages; each generation is a link between the past and the future. “To show,” as Philarète Chasles says, “that man can only act efficiently by association with others, it has been ordained that each inventor shall only interpret the first word of the problem he sets himself to solve, and that every great idea shall be the résumé of the past at the same time that it is the germ of the future.”
The first word of the solution of the steam-power problem came from Hero down the ages, through Decans, Papin, Savory, Newcomen, Breighton, and Smeaton, to Watt. To Watt is awarded the honor of the invention of the modern steam-engine; but the first conception of his engine was derived from an atmospheric machine through the accident of it having been placed in his hands for repairs. Smeaton was the inventor of that atmospheric engine, and his mind was one of the links in the chain of intelligences extending back to Egypt, through whose united agency the steam-engine became a real thing of power in the cunning hands of James Watt, of whom the late Dr. Draper said, “He conferred on his native country more solid benefits than all the treaties she ever made and all the battles she ever won.” This law governing great achievements is full of encouragement to the student of mechanics, for while the thought of compassing any great discovery or invention may well appall even the boldest, the most humble may hope through studious industry to contribute something to the sum of human knowledge.
The engine-room of our school is neater than that of the ordinary machine-shop, but the furnace roars like any other, its open mouth shows a bank of glowing coals, and the “stoker,” with grimy hands, wipes the sweat from his sooty brow. The whole school is here seen in epitome: the “stoker” typifies the student toiling at the forge, and in the polished engine, exhibiting both grace and power in its automatic action, we see the student’s graduating project, a machine, the joint creation of brain, eye, and hand.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DRAWING-ROOM.
Twenty-four Boys bending over the Drawing-board. — Analysis and Synthesis in Drawing. — Geometric Drawing. — Pictorial Drawing. — The Principles of Design. — The Æsthetic in Art. — The Fundamentals. — Object and Constructive Drawing. — Drawing for the Exercises in the Laboratories. — The Educational Value of Drawing. — The Language of Drawing. — Every Student an expert Draughtsman at the end of the Course.
Passing from the engine-room we enter the room assigned to drawing,—the first step in art education—where twenty-four boys are bending over the drawing-board, pencil in hand. Every school-day for three years these boys will spend an hour in this room. Each division of drawing—free-hand and mechanical—is thoroughly taught. Every graduate of the institution will be an expert draughtsman. The room is very still, only the scratching sound of twenty-four pencils is heard. The instructor moves about among the students, with here and there a hint, a suggestion, a correction, or a word of commendation—“good.”
Drawing is the representation on paper of the facts, and the appearance to the eye of forms. The exercise proceeds by both analysis and synthesis. A cube is divided into all the geometric figures of which it is susceptible, and these figures are imitated with the pencil on paper. Then the figures are reunited, and the cube is similarly imitated. As the child in the kindergarten is taught several fundamental geometric facts through the use of variously subdivided cubes, so the student of drawing is taught by a similar process how to represent these fundamental facts on paper. For example (1), the student is taught to draw the following (sketches [1, 2, and 3]) geometric forms of the square, oblong, and circle; (2) he is taught (sketches [4, 5, 6, and 7]) to represent the facts of the oblong block and cylinder; (3) these facts are expressed as follows (sketches [8 and 9]) in working drawings. Sketches 8 and 9 are such drawings as would be placed in the hands of a mechanic as plans for the manufacture of the solids they represent; and the most elaborate working drawings for building and mechanical purposes are merely the complete development of this division of the art.
Another division of drawing consists in the representation of solids or objects as they appear to the eye or pictorially. The oblong block and cylinder, for example, appear to the eye very differently from their facts represented in the working drawings ([sketches 8 and 9]), as thus—(sketches [10 and 11]).
The development of this division of drawing leads to general pictorial representation.
Finally the mastery of the art of drawing involves a study of the principles of design as applied to industrial articles with the purpose of enhancing their value, as designs for wall-paper, carpets, embroideries, tapestry, textiles generally, and decorative work in wood. This is the æsthetic element in the art which appeals to and develops the student’s taste. It is an important feature of drawing, not less on this account than from the fact that the designer’s profession is a very lucrative one, but it is less important than object and constructive drawing, because less fundamental. Besides, object and constructive work in drawing come first in the order of development, and it is an inexorable rule of the new education to follow implicitly the hints of nature.
The basis of the art of drawing is geometry, and its a, b, c consists in a knowledge of certain geometrical lines, curves, and angles. This knowledge is gained from examples on the black-board which are reproduced on paper. But to relieve the student of this school from the tedium of reproducing, hundreds of times in succession, the same lines, angles, and curves, object-drawing is introduced very early in the course; and to render the exercise more attractive, as well as to impress it more firmly upon the mind, the objects drawn during the day are made features of the construction lesson in the carpenter’s laboratory, the wood or iron turning laboratory, or the laboratory of founding on the following day. At first the objects selected for this exercise are of a very simple character, as a piece of plain moulding—a piece of elaborate moulding; parts of a drawing-board—an entire drawing-board; parts of a table or desk—an entire table or desk; parts of a draughtsman’s stool—an entire stool; parts of a chair—an entire chair.
As the student advances in the general course he advances in object and constructive drawing, from simple to complex forms. He draws, for example, various parts of the steam-heating apparatus, and from these draughts makes working drawings of patterns for moulding. These he works out in the Carpenter’s Laboratory, and thence takes them to the moulding-room, where they are used in the lesson given in moulding for casting. This method of instruction leads to a critical analysis of the entire interior of the school building. Each article is resolved into the original elements of its construction, and each element or part is first represented on paper, then expanded into working drawings, and then wrought out in wood and iron. Finally the student reaches the engine, every part of which is made the subject of exhaustive study; the facts of every part are represented on paper, working drawings of every part are made, and every part is reproduced in steel and iron in miniature, and, as a triumph of drawing, a representation on paper of the completed engine is produced.
The value of drawing as an educational agency is simply incalculable. It is the first step in manual training. It brings the eye and the mind into relations of the closest intimacy, and makes the hand the organ of both. It trains and develops the sense of form and proportion, renders the eye accurate in observation, and the hand cunning in execution.
The students are intent upon their work. The eye is busy acting as interpreter between the mind and the hand. Having conveyed the impression of an object to the mind, under its direction it now photographs the object on paper, and the hand obeying the will traces it out in lines. Thus the power is gained of multiplying forms of things with the pencil as words are multiplied by types.
Drawing is a language—the language in which art records the discoveries of science. It is not German, it is not French, it is not English—it is universal—common to all draughtsmen. The face of the student exhibits vivid flashes of intelligence as the picture reveals itself under his hand. Each line is a word, an angle completes the sentence; with a curve and a little delicate shading we have a paragraph. The picture begins to glow with thought. The student’s face flushes, his heart beats quick and his hand trembles. But he restrains himself, and adds more lines, more angles and curves, more shading, and the picture is complete. It stands out in bold relief, and looks like a real thing. If the student knows the story of the brazen statue of Albertus Magnus he half expects his picture of a locomotive to move. He listens for the sound of the hissing steam, and a smile lights up his face as the illusion vanishes. Presently he will take his drawing to the shop, and at the bench, the lathe, the anvil, and the forge, reproduce it in iron and steel, and actually vitalize it with steam.
CHAPTER V.
THE CARPENTER’S LABORATORY.
The Natural History of the Pine-tree. — How it is Converted into Lumber, what it is Worth, and how it is Consumed. — Where the Students get Information. — Working Drawings of the Lesson. — Asking Questions. — The Instructor Executes the Lesson. — Instruction in the Use and Care of Tools. — Twenty-four Boys Making Things. — As Busy as Bees. — The Music of the Laboratory. — The Self-reliance of the Students.
Passing from the Drawing-Room down a flight of stairs we enter the Carpenter’s Laboratory. Here we find twenty-four boys seated before a black-board. At their left stands the instructor with a piece of white pine in his hand. The piece of pine is the subject of his lecture. He frequently breaks the thread of his remarks to ask questions, and he is as frequently interrupted by questions from members of the class. The scene closely resembles an animated discussion, of which a desire to learn by asking questions is the chief characteristic. The discussion is about pine-trees and pine lumber. A pale-faced, city-bred boy rises to describe the pine-tree. He describes a fir-tree, such as may be seen in well-kept urban grounds and parks, and describes it in well-chosen, almost poetic phrase. The instructor shakes his head, but with a genial smile, and recognizes a boy whose face is tanned brown, and who rises at the nod and stands rather awkwardly as he speaks. He has seen the pine in its native wilds, and he describes quite graphically its long, bare trunk and slender limbs. But he says nothing of its narrow, linear leaves, of a dark green color, nor of its woody cones, nor of the Æolian-harp-like sound of the wind in its branches. Why, the instructor wants to know, and he propounds a series of questions, the answers to which afford a brief sketch of the boy’s history. His father is a dealer in pine logs, and once this boy went with him into the pineries of Northern Michigan in mid-winter, when the landscape was white with snow, and there saw the huge trees sway back and forth under the woodman’s axe, saw them topple over, and heard the loud crash of their fall, saw them trimmed and sawed into mill-logs. He took no note of the woody cones, nor of the narrow leaves of the pine, nor did the sound of the wind in its branches make any impression upon his mind. He saw the pine as his father saw it, with the eyes of a lumberman. He learned just one thing, and learned it so well that he is able to tell the story of the pine-tree from the moment of its fall from the stump in the great forest to its arrival at the mill, and thence, cut into boards, planks, and timber, to the raft or schooner bound for Chicago.
Then the different varieties of the pine-tree are enumerated, and the uses to which their woods are severally adapted mentioned. The countries which chiefly produce the pine-tree are named, and the climatic conditions most favorable to its growth briefly referred to. This discussion leads to the subject of commerce in pine lumber—quantity consumed, demand and supply, etc; and this in turn brings a boy to his feet with the statement that at the present rate of consumption the supply of pine in North America will be exhausted in fifty years. In answer to a question the boy says he read the statement in a newspaper. This leads to further inquiry as to the sources of information sought by the members of the class, whereupon it appears that fifteen boys have consulted the title “pine” in some encyclopedia with a view to the present lesson, and that eighteen boys have read the market report under the title “lumber” in a daily journal, in order to learn the value of white-pine boards. The value being stated by half a dozen boys, each member of the class computes the cost of the piece of pine in the hands of the teacher.
THE LABORATORY OF CARPENTRY.
Ten minutes having been consumed in the inquiry into the nature and value of the wood in which the lesson of the day is to be wrought, the instructor makes working drawings of the lesson on the black-board. It may consist of a plain joint, a mitre joint, a dove-tail joint, a tenon and mortise, or a frame involving all these, and more manipulations. In the few minutes devoted to this exercise any question that occurs to the mind of the student may be asked, and no impatience is manifested or felt if the questions are numerous and reiterated. But as a matter-of-fact very few questions are asked during the black-board exercise, because each student, having gone over every step of it in his drawing-class the day previous, is perfectly familiar with the subject.
The instructor now quits the black-board for the bench, where, in the presence of the whole class, he executes the difficult parts of the lesson, still propounding and answering questions. If a new tool is brought into requisition, instruction is given in its care and use. Now the boys repair to their benches, throw off their coats, and seize their tools. In a moment the silence and repose of the recitation-room are exchanged for the noise and activity of the laboratory. A quarter of an hour ago we left twenty-four boys, with bowed heads, making drawings of things; for a quarter of an hour we have listened to a peculiar kind of recitation involving much practical knowledge on the subject of the pine-tree and its product, lumber; now we stand in the presence of twenty-four boys, in twenty-four different attitudes of labor, making things. They are literally as busy as bees, using the square, the saw, the plane, and the chisel; they are, as the journeyman carpenter would say, “getting out stuff for a job.” The coarse, buzzing sound of the cross-cut saw resounds loudly through the room; above this bass note the sharp tenor tone of the rip-saw is heard, and the rasping sound of half a dozen planes throwing off a series of curling pine ribbons comes in as a rude refrain. The faces of the boys are ruddy with the glow of exercise; the pale-faced boy who mistook a fir-tree for a pine will have his revenge on the angular boy from the Michigan pinery, for he is doing a finer piece of work than the other.
COURSE IN THE LABORATORY OF CARPENTRY.
In the midst of the harmonious confusion caused by the use of saws, planes, mallets, and chisels, the instructor raps on his desk, and silence is restored; three or four boys stand in a group about the instructor’s desk, the others pause and wipe the perspiration from their brows. It is a picture full of interest—twenty-four boys, with flushed, eager faces, lifting their eyes simultaneously to the face of the instructor, waiting for the hint which is to come, and which is sure in these now active minds to result in a prompt solution of the main problem of the day’s lesson. A similar question from several boys shows the instructor that the lesson has not been made clear; hence the general explanation which follows the call to order. So the work goes on, with now and then an interruption. There is a student trying to fit a tenon into its mortise; he is nervous and impatient; the instructor observes him, foresees a catastrophe, and moves towards his bench. But it is too late! The tenon being forced the mortise splits, and the discomforted student makes a wry face. The instructor approaches with a word of good cheer, but with the warning aphorism that “haste makes waste.” The student’s face flushes, and he chronicles his failure as Huntsman, the inventor of cast-steel, did his, by burying the wreck under a pile of shavings, and commencing, as the lawyers say, de novo. Thus the lesson proceeds “by the usual laboratory methods employed in teaching the sciences;” the class learns the thing to be done by doing it. The students are at their best, because the lesson to be learned compels a close union between the three great powers of man—observation, reflection, and action. No student seeks aid from another, because such a course would be impossible without the knowledge of the whole class. A feeling of self-reliance is thus developed, the disposition to shirk repressed, and a sense of sturdy independence encouraged and promoted.
CHAPTER VI.
THE WOOD-TURNING LABORATORY.
A Radical Change. — From the Square to the Circle; from Angles to Spherical, Cylindrical, and Eccentric Forms. — The Rhythm of Mechanics. — The Potter’s Wheel of the Ancients and the Turning-lathe. — The Speculation of Holtzapffels on its Origin. — The Greeks as Turners. — The Turners of the Middle Ages. — George III. at the Lathe. — Maudslay’s Slide-rest, and the Revolution it wrought. — The Natural History of Black-walnut. — The Practical Value of Imagination. — Disraeli’s Tribute to it; Sir Robert Peel’s Want of it. — The Laboratory animated by Steam. — The Boys at the Lathes. — Their Manly Bearing. — The Lesson.
When the twenty-four boys of the Carpenter’s Laboratory have become expert in the use of the tools employed in carpentry they will be introduced to the Wood-turning Laboratory. The change is radical—from the square to the circle, from the prose to the poetry of mechanical manipulation. Carpentry is distinguished for its corners and angles, turnery for its spherical, cylindrical, and eccentric forms. In these forms Nature abounds and delights, and it is in these forms that the rhythm of mechanics exists. It is by the Turners that the arts are supplied with a thousand and one things of use and beauty. The machines, great and small, from the locomotive to the stocking-knitter—without which the work of the modern world could not be done—these wonderful contrivances, seemingly more cunning than the hand of man, owe their very existence to the turning-lathe.
THE WOOD-TURNING LABORATORY.
The skilled instructor in this department of the school loves to dwell upon the history of turning. Its origin is enveloped in the obscurity of early Egyptian traditions. It is the subject of one of the oldest myths, which runs thus: “Num, the directing spirit of the universe, and oldest of created beings, first exercised the potter’s art, moulding the human race on his wheel. Having made the heavens and the earth, and the air, and the sun and moon, he modelled man out of the dark Nilotic clay, and into his nostrils breathed the breath of life.”
The Potter’s Wheel of the ancients contained the germ of the turning-lathe found in every modern machine-shop, whether for the manipulation of wood or iron. Holtzapffels has an ingenious speculation as to the origin of the invention of the lathe. In his elaborate work on “Turning and Mechanical Manipulation” he says,
“It would appear probable that the origin of the lathe may be found in the revolution given to tools for piercing objects for ornament or use. At first it may be supposed that a spine or thorn from a tree, a splinter of bone or a tooth, was alone used and pressed into the work as we should use a brad-awl. The process would naturally be slow and unsuitable to hard materials, and this probably suggested to the primitive mechanic the idea of attaching a splinter of bone or flint to the end of a short piece of stick, rubbing which between the palms of his hands would give a rotary motion to the tool.”
Of the steps of progress in invention, from the rude turning-tools of the ancients down to the beginning of the present century, when Maudslay’s improvement made the lathe the king of the machine-shop, little is known. By the Greeks the invention of turning was ascribed to Dædalus. Phidias, who produced the two great masterpieces of Greek art, Athene and Jupiter Olympius, was familiar with the then existing system of wood-turning. In cutting figures on signets and gems in such stones as agate, carnelian, chalcedony, and amethyst, the Greek artificers used the wheel and the style. In the abundant ornamentation of Roman dwellings—their elaborately carved chairs, tables, bedsteads, sofas, and stools—there is ample evidence of a knowledge of the art of turning in wood. Improvements were made in turning-tools, and fine ornamental work was done by the artisans of the Middle Ages, to which the cathedrals and palaces of the time bear witness. Later, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, turning became a fashionable amusement among the French nobility and gentry. Louis XVI. was an expert locksmith, and spent much of his royal time in that pursuit. The fashion extended to England. George III. is said to have been an expert wood-turner, to have been “learned in wheels and treadles, chucks and chisels;” and as a matter of course a pursuit indulged by kings was followed by many nobles. There is, however, no evidence that those distinguished amateurs made any improvements in the tools they used; inventions and discoveries in this as in all departments of art came from the other end of the social scale. When the Spaniards sacked Antwerp in 1585 the Flemish silk-weavers fled to England and set up their looms there; and a century later, upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the silk industry of England received a new accession of refugee artisans consisting of persecuted Protestants. Doubtless with the Flemish weavers there crossed the British Channel representatives of all the useful arts, including that of turning; for in another hundred years England took the front rank among nations in nearly all industrial pursuits.
Among the great inventions and discoveries which distinguished the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Maudslay’s slide-rest attachment to the lathe was one of the greatest, if not the greatest. Without it Watt’s invention would have been of little more real service to mankind than the French automata of the first quarter of the same century—the mechanical peacock of Degennes, Vaucauson’s duck, or Maillardet’s conjurer. Mr. Samuel Smiles, in his admirable book on “Iron-workers and Tool-makers,” declares that this passion for automata, which gave rise to many highly ingenious devices, “had the effect of introducing among the higher order of artists habits of nice and accurate workmanship in executing delicate pieces of machinery.” And he adds, “The same combination of mechanical powers which made the steel spider crawl, the duck quack, or waved the tiny rod of the magician, contributed in future years to purposes of higher import—the wheels and pinions, which in these automata almost eluded the human senses by their minuteness, reappearing in modern times in the stupendous mechanism of our self-acting lathes, spinning-mules, and steam-engines.”
That there was a logical connection between the two eras of mechanical contrivance—that of the ingenious automata and that of the useful modern machines—is extremely probable. That the refugee artisans from Antwerp and from France had a stimulating effect upon English invention and discovery there can be little doubt; and that the French automata, which were much written about, and exhibited as a triumph of mechanical genius, became known to and exercised an influence upon the minds of intelligent mechanics is equally probable. We are therefore surprised to find Mr. Smiles arriving at a conclusion in such direct conflict with his general views of the gradual growth of inventions, namely, “that Maudslay’s invention was entirely independent of all that had gone before, and that he contrived it for the special purpose of overcoming the difficulties which he himself experienced in turning out duplicate parts in large numbers.”
But however this may be, Mr. Maudslay’s invention revolutionized the workshop. Before its introduction the tool of the artisan was guided solely by muscular strength and the dexterity of the hand; the smallest variation in the pressure applied rendered the work imperfect. The slide-rest acting automatically changed all that. With it thousands of duplicates of the most ponderous, as well as the most minute pieces of machinery, are executed with the utmost precision. Without it the steam-engine, whether locomotive or stationary, would have been hardly more than a dream of genius; for the monster that is to be fed with steam can be properly constructed only by automatic steam-driven tools; or, as another has expressed it, “Steam-engines were never properly made until they made themselves.”
Ten minutes are thus agreeably and profitably occupied by the instructor in a review of the history of a single invention, and its relations to the whole field of mechanical work.
Another branch of the lesson consists of an inquiry into the natural history, qualities, value, and common uses of the wood which is to be the material of the day’s manipulation—black-walnut. Holding a piece of the purplish brown wood high in his hand the instructor discharges, as it were, a volley of questions at the class, “What is it called?” “Where is it found?” “How large does the tree grow?” “For what is the wood chiefly used?” Up go a dozen hands. The owner of one of the hands is recognized, and he rises to tell all about it, but is only allowed to say “black-walnut.” The next speaker is permitted to say that “the black-walnut is found all over North America;” the next that it is more abundant west of the Alleghanies, and most abundant in the valley of the Mississippi; the next that in a forest it has a limbless trunk from thirty to fifty feet high, but in the “open” branches near the ground; the next that it is extensively used in house-finishing, in furniture, for all kinds of cabinet-work, and especially for gunstocks.
Further inquiry elicits the information that the black-walnut is a quick-growing, large tree; that its wood is hard, fine-grained, durable, and susceptible of a high polish, and that through use and exposure it turns dark, and with great age becomes almost black. One student describes the leaves, another the fruit or nuts, and states that they are used in dyeing; a third states that the black-walnut is a great favorite for planting in the treeless tracts of the West, on account of its rapid growth and the value of its timber. When the subject appears to be nearly exhausted, a boy at the farther end of one of the forms rises timidly and tells the story of the late Mr. W. C. Bryant’s great black-walnut-tree at Roslyn, Long Island. He concludes, excitedly, “It is one hundred and seventy years old and twenty-five feet in circumference.”[1] The timid boy dwells upon his story of the “big” tree with evident fondness, and his eyes dilate with satisfaction as he resumes his seat. The circumstance of the great age no less than the enormous size of the tree has captivated his imagination. The discriminating instructor will not fail to note such incidents of the lesson. It is through them that the special aptitudes of students are disclosed. The instructor will always bear prominently in mind that the purpose of the school is not to make mechanics but men. Nor will he forget, as Buckle remarked, that Shakespeare preceded Newton. Buckle pays a glowing tribute to the usefulness of the imagination. He says, “Shakespeare and the poets sowed the seed which Newton and the philosophers reaped.... They drew attention to nature, and thus became the real founders of all natural science. They did even more than this. They first impregnated the mind of England with bold and lofty conceptions. They taught the men of their generation to crave after the unseen.”
[1] “At Ellerslie, the birthplace of Wallace, exists an oak which is celebrated as having been a remarkable object in his time, and which can scarcely, therefore, be less than seven hundred years old. Near Staines there is a yew-tree older than Magna Charta (1215), and the yews at Fountains Abbey, in Yorkshire, are probably more than twelve hundred years old. Eight olive-trees still exist in the Garden of Olives at Jerusalem which are known to be at least eight hundred years old.”—“Vegetable Physiology.” By William B. Carpenter, M.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. London: Bell and Daldy. 1865. p. 78.
Disraeli, in his matchless biography of Lord George Bentinck, in summing up the character of a great English statesman is equally emphatic in praise of the imagination as a practical quality. He says,
“Thus gifted and thus accomplished, Sir Robert Peel had a great deficiency—he was without imagination. Wanting imagination, he wanted prescience. No one was more sagacious when dealing with the circumstances before him; no one penetrated the present with more acuteness and accuracy. His judgment was faultless, provided he had not to deal with the future. Thus it happened through his long career, that while he always was looked upon as the most prudent and safest of leaders, he ever, after a protracted display of admirable tactics, concluded his campaigns by surrendering at discretion. He was so adroit that he could prolong resistance even beyond its term, but so little foreseeing that often in the very triumph of his manœuvres he found himself in an untenable position.”
The timid boy has imagination; if he has application and the logical faculty he may become an inventor, or he may become an artist—an engraver or a designer of works of art—or he may become a man of letters. To the man of vivid imagination and industry all avenues are open; Disraeli’s wonderful career offers a striking illustration of the truth of this proposition. The true purpose of education is the harmonious development of the whole being, and the purpose of this turning laboratory is to educate these twenty-four boys, not to make turners of them.
The laboratory is a labyrinth of belts, large and small, of wheels, big and little, of pulleys and lathes. A student, at a word from the instructor, moves a lever a few inches, and the breath of life is breathed into the complicated mass of machinery. The throbbing heart of the engine far away sends the currents of its power along shafting and pulleys. The dull, monotonous whir of steam-driven machinery salutes the ear, and the twenty-four students take their places at the lathes. They are from fourteen to seventeen years of age, and range in height from undersize to “full-grown.” They look like little men. Their faces are grave, showing a sense of responsibility. They are to handle edge-tools on wood rapidly revolved by the power of steam. There is peril in an uncautious step, and death lurks in the shafting. Of these dangers they have been repeatedly warned; and there is in their bearing that manifestation of wary coolness which we call “nerve,” and which in an emergency develops into a lofty heroism capable of sublime self-sacrifice.
This is the very essence of education, its informing spirit. The student no longer thinks merely of becoming an expert turner; he thinks of becoming a man! All the powers of his mind are roused to vigorous action; imagination illumes the path, and reason, following with firm but cautious step, drives straight to the mark. Rapid development results from the combination of practice with theory—rapid because orderly, or natural. The knowledge acquired is at once assimilated, and becomes a mental resource, subject to draft like a bank account. But unlike a bank account it increases in the ratio of the frequency with which drafts are made upon it, and the result is the student leaves school at seventeen years of age with the reasoning experience of an ordinarily educated man of forty.
The lesson has been announced by the instructor, its chief points stated and analyzed, its place in the scale (so to speak) of the art of turnery defined, its educational value to the mind, the hand, and the eye shown, and the points of difficulty involved so emphasized as to lead to painstaking care in the execution of crucial parts. The new tool required by the lesson is handled in presence of the waiting class by the instructor; the time of its invention stated; the name of its inventor given; the method of its manufacture described; and how to sharpen, take care of, and use it explained with such minuteness of detail as to insure the making of a permanent impression upon the minds of students.
COURSE IN THE WOOD-TURNING AND PATTERN LABORATORY.
The wood-turner’s case contains more than a hundred tools, perhaps a hundred and fifty, but not more than a score of them are fundamental; the others are subsidiary, and require very little if any explanation.
The lesson may be one in simple turning, as a table-leg, the round of a chair, or parts of a section of a miniature garden-fence; or it may be a set of pulleys, or patterns for various forms of pipe. The pieces of wood to be wrought or manipulated lie at the feet of the student, and the working drawing (drawn by the student himself) lies on the bench before him. The piece of wood to be turned first is adjusted, the student touches a lever over his head which sets the lathe in motion, takes the required tool in hand, and the work begins. Guided by the automatic slide-rest, the sharp point of the tool chips away the revolving wood until it assumes the form of the drawing lying under the eye of the operator. Thus the lesson proceeds to the end of the prescribed period—two hours. The master watches every step of its progress. If a student is puzzled he receives prompt assistance, so that no time may be lost. Indeed the relations between instructor and students are such, or ought to be such, that the question is asked before the puzzled mind falls into a rut of profitless speculation through revolving in a circle. But if the true sequential method of study is followed the student rarely fails, from the vantage ground of a step securely taken, to comprehend the nature of the next step in the regular order of succession. This is the Russian system, and it is the method of the wood-turnery as well as of every department of the Manual Training School. Hence a certain tool having been mastered, the next tool in the regular order of succession is more easily understood, because (1) each tool contains a hint of the nature of its successor, and (2) each addition to the student’s stock of knowledge confers an increased capability of comprehension.
When the lesson is concluded the whir of the machinery ceases, and a great silence falls upon the class as the students assemble about the instructor, each presenting his piece of work. This is the moment of friendly criticism. The instructor handles each specimen, comments upon the character of the workmanship, points out its defects, and calls for criticisms from the class. These are freely given. There is an animated discussion, involving explanations on the part of the instructor of the various causes of defects, and suggestions as to suitable methods of amendment. Then the pieces of work are marked according to the various degrees of excellence they exhibit, and the class is dismissed.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FOUNDING LABORATORY.
The Iron Age. — Iron the King of Metals. — Locke’s Apothegm. — The Moulder’s Art is Fundamental. — History of Founding. — Remains of Bronze Castings in Egypt, Greece, and Assyria. — Layard’s Discoveries. — The Greek Sculptors. — The Colossal Statue of Apollo at Rhodes. — The Great Bells of History. — Moulding and Casting a Pulley. — Description of the Process, Step by Step. — The Furnace Fire. — Pouring the Hot Metal into the Moulds. — A Pen Picture of the Laboratory. — Thus were the Hundred Gates of Babylon cast. — Neglect of the Useful Arts by Herodotus. — How Slavery has degraded Labor. — How Manual Training is to dignify it.
As we enter the Founding Laboratory we recall Locke’s apothegm: “He who first made known the use of that contemptible mineral [iron] may be truly styled the father of arts and the author of plenty.” We reflect, too, that the mineral that has given its name to an age of the world—our age—is worthy of careful study.
The Founding Laboratory, like all the laboratories of the school, is designed for twenty-four students. There are twenty-four moulding-benches, combined with troughs for sand, and a cupola furnace where from five hundred to one thousand pounds of iron may be melted.
The students we lately parted from in the Wood-turning Laboratory are here. Their training has been confined to manipulations in wood; they are now to be made acquainted with iron—iron in considerable masses. They should know something, in outline, of the history of the king of metals in the Founding Laboratory. The instructor speaks familiarly to them, somewhat as follows:
The art of the founder is fundamental in its nature. The arts of founding and forging are, indeed, the essential preliminary steps which lead to the finer manipulations entering into all metal constructions. Whether forging preceded founding or founding forging is immaterial; both arts are as old as recorded history—much older indeed. Moulding, which is the first step in the founder’s art, should be among the oldest of human discoveries, since man had only to take in his hand a lump of moist clay to receive ocular evidence of his power to give it any desired form.
Moulding for casting is closely allied to the potter’s art. The potter selects a clay suitable for the vessel he desires to mould, and the founder prepares a composition of sand and loam of the proper consistency to serve as a matrix for the vessel he desires to cast.
The art of founding was doubtless first applied to bronze. The ruins of Egypt and Greece abound in the remains of bronze castings, an analysis of which reveals about the same relative proportions of tin and copper in use now for the best qualities of statuary bronze. The bronze castings of the Assyrians show a high degree of art. Many specimens of this fine work of the Assyrian founder have been rescued from the ruins of long-buried Nineveh—buried so long that Xenophon and his ten thousand Greeks marched over its site more than two thousand years ago without making any sign of a knowledge of its existence, and Alexander fought a great battle in its neighborhood in apparent ignorance of the fact that he trod on classic ground. But there, delving beneath the rubbish and decayed vegetation of four thousand years or more, Layard found great treasures of art in the palaces of Sennacherib and other Assyrian monarchs—vases, jars, bronzes, glass-bottles, carved ivory and mother-of-pearl ornaments, engraved gems, bells, dishes, and ear-rings of exquisite workmanship, besides arms and a variety of tools of the practical arts.
In Greece, in the time of Praxiteles, bronze was moulded into forms of rare beauty and grandeur. The colossal statue of Apollo at Rhodes affords an example of the magnitude of the Greek castings. It was cast in several parts, and was over one hundred feet high. About fifty years after its erection it was destroyed by an earthquake. Its fragments lay on the ground where it fell, nearly a thousand years; but when the Saracens gathered them together and sold them, there was a sufficient quantity to load a caravan consisting of nine hundred camels. One of the finest existing specimens of ancient bronze casting is that of a statue of Mercury discovered at Herculaneum, and now to be seen in the museum at Naples.
During the era of church bells the founder exercised his art in casting bells of huge dimensions. Early in the fifteenth century a bell weighing about fifty tons was cast at Pekin, China. This bell still exists, is fourteen and a half feet in height and thirteen feet in diameter. But the greatest bell-founding feat was, however, that of 1733, in casting the bell of Moscow. This bell is nineteen feet three inches in height and sixty feet nine inches in circumference, and weighs 443,772 pounds. The value of the metal entering into its construction is estimated at $300,000. It long lay in a pit in the midst of the Kremlin, but Czar Nicholas caused it to be raised, mounted upon a granite pedestal, and converted into a chapel. The methods of casting employed by the founder of this king of bells are not known. The bell has outlived the Works where it was cast. The melting and handling of two hundred and twenty tons of bronze metal certainly required appointments, mechanical and otherwise, of the most stupendous character; and the existence of such Works presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the most minute details of the founder’s art, since the natural order of development is from the less to the greater. That is to say, the founder who could manipulate scores of tons of metal in a single great casting could doubtless manipulate a few pounds of metal; or, the founder who could cast a bell weighing two hundred and twenty tons, could cast pots and kettles and hundreds of other little useful things. What we hope to do in this school Founding Laboratory is to gain a correct conception of great things by making ourselves thoroughly familiar with many forms of little things in moulding and casting.
The lesson of the day is the moulding and casting of a plain pulley. In the Pattern Laboratory each student has already executed a pattern of the pulley to be cast, and the pattern lies before him on his moulding-bench. Now the instructor, at the most conspicuous bench in the room, proceeds to execute the first part of the lesson, which consists of moulding. Taking from the trough a handful of sand, he explains that it is only by the use of sand possessing certain properties, as a degree of moisture, but not enough to vaporize when the metal is poured in, and a small admixture of clay, but not enough to make of the compound a loam, that the mould can be saved from ruin through vaporization, and, at the same time, given the essential quality of adhesiveness and plasticity. In the course of this explanation he remarks that the sand used in some parts of the mould is mixed with pulverized bituminous coal, coke, or plumbago, in order to give a smoother surface. Now he takes the “flask”—a wooden apparatus containing the sand in which the mould is made—and explains its construction and use. From this point—the sifting of facing sand on the turn-over board, to the final one of replacing the cope and securing it with keys or clamps—every step of the process is carefully gone through with and explained.
THE FOUNDING LABORATORY.
Meantime, before the moulding lesson has proceeded far, a fire is kindled in the furnace and it is “charged;” that is to say, filled with alternate layers of coal and pig-iron, with occasional fluxes of limestone. During the process of charging the furnace the instructor explains the principle of its construction, and shows how it operates. At every subsequent rest in moulding the students surround the furnace to witness the progress of the fire, the position of the layers of coal, and the state of combustion. They pass the furnace in procession, and each peeps in through the isinglass windows upon the glowing fire, asks a question, or a dozen questions, perhaps, and gives place to the next student in line. In the intervals of these visits to the furnace the work of making twenty-four moulds goes on under the eye of the instructor, the students explaining each step in advance. He is omnipresent, answering a question here, preventing a fatal mistake there, cheering, inspiring, and guiding the whole class, but never insisting upon a slavish adherence to strict identity in processes. And it is to be noted that there is in moulding more latitude for independence than in almost any other mechanical manipulation. Certain essentials there are, of course, but these being secured, the student may exercise his ingenuity in the execution of many minor details. That there is considerable individuality in the class may be seen by observation of the different methods employed by the several young moulders to compass various details of the same general process.
The moulds are nearly completed. The instructor assists a student who is found to be a little behind in his work, and interposes a warning against haste at the critical moment. Within a period of ten minutes the twenty-four patterns are “tapped,” loosened, and lifted from their beds, imperfections are carefully repaired with the trowel, or some other tool, channels to the pouring holes are cut in the surfaces, the pieces remaining in the copes are removed, the particles of loose sand are blown from the surfaces of the moulds, and the twenty-four copes are replaced, and secured in their correct positions with keys or clamps.
A final visit is now made to the furnace. The fusion is found to be complete; the “pigs” are converted into a molten pool. It only remains to pour the hot metal into the moulds. The instructor seizes an iron ladle lined with clay, holds it under the spout of the furnace reservoir until it is nearly filled with the glowing fluid, lifts and carries it carefully across the room, and pours the contents into a mould. Then the students, in squads, after having been cautioned as to the deadly nature of the molten mass they are to handle, follow the example of their instructor. At this moment the laboratory appeals powerfully to the imagination. The picture it presents is weird in the extreme. From the open furnace door a stream of crimson light floods the room. The students wear paper caps and are bare-armed; their faces glow in the reflected glare of the furnace-fire; they march up to the furnace one by one, each receiving a ladleful of steaming hot metal, and countermarch to their benches, where they pour the contents of their ladles into the moulds.
COURSE IN THE FOUNDING LABORATORY.
Still holding his empty ladle in his hand, the instructor watches the progress of the lesson with keen interest until the last stream of metal has found its way into the throat of the last mould. He recalls the story of Vulcan, the God of Fire, and of all the arts and industries dependent upon it, and wonders why he was not depicted pouring tons of molten metal, in the foundery, rather than sledge in hand at the forge. Then he regards the class with a benignant expression of pride, begs for silence, and says, “Thus were the hundred brazen gates of ancient Babylon cast long before the beginning of the Christian era.” Herodotus did not think to tell us much of the state of the useful arts in the early time of which he wrote, but the brazen gates attracted his attention, and he described them: “At the end of each street a little gate is found in the wall along the river-side, in number equal to the streets, and they are all made of brass, and lead down to the edge of the river.” Could Herodotus have foreseen what a deep interest his readers of this remote time would take in the history of the useful arts, he would have written less about the walls, palaces, and temples of Babylon, and more about the artificers. He would have begged admission to the forges and founderies of the city; he would have visited the Assyrian founder at his work, questioned him about his processes, and set down his answers with painstaking care. Then he would have sought an introduction to the smithy, and from the grimy forger learned what he could tell of his art and of kindred arts. So the father of history might have made an enduring record of the real things which throughout all time have contributed to the advancement of the human race, rather than of events growing out of the ambitions and passions of men—the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, the varying fortune of battle, the treacheries, crimes, and brutalities of rulers, and the cringing submission of millions of subjects. But, alas, the founders and smiths, and all the other cunning artificers of the vast empire of Syria, were slaves! and through their ancestry for unnumbered generations the stigma of slavery had attached to labor. Ay, on the bare backs of the founders of Babylon’s brazen gates the popular scorn of labor had doubtless left its livid brand.
With these pariahs of Assyrian society, these outcasts of the social circle, the great Greek historian could not even speak. Descended from a long line of noble Halicarnassian families, Herodotus felt all the prejudices of the hereditary aristocracy of his country. Hence he dilates upon the wonders of Babylon, but is silent as to its architects and artisans. He describes with great minuteness of detail the tower of Jupiter Belus, but gives no hint of the name of its designer and builder. He declares that Babylon was adorned in a manner surpassing any city of the time, but in regard to the artificers through whose ingenuity and skill such pleasing effects were produced he gives no sign.
The silence of Herodotus on the subject of the useful arts in Babylon does not indicate a want of appreciation of their value, but merely shows contempt of the Assyrian artisan, and this not because he was an artisan, but because he was a slave. The story of Solon and Crœsus, which antedates Herodotus, whether true or a myth, shows that iron and artisanship were appreciated by both Greeks and barbarians. When Crœsus had exhibited to the Greek sage his vast hoard of treasures, Solon said, “If another comes that hath better iron than you he will be master of all this gold.” Here is a recognition of the immense value of the arts of smelting and forging, coupled with a contemptuous silence regarding as well the smelter and the smith as the rank and file of the armies who should wield the swords and spears drawn by science from the recesses of the earth, and by art wrought and tempered at the forge. Through all the early ages the brand and scorn of slavery adhered to labor, while the arts, the products of labor, were often deified. Thus the Scythian, who from a grinning skull drank the warm blood of his captive, regarded with superstitious awe as a god the iron sword with which he cut off his captive’s head.
It was only with the revival of learning, after the intellectual and moral gloom of the Dark Ages, that labor began slowly to lift its bowed head and assert itself. But it does not yet stand erect. It still stoops as if in the presence of a master. Every now and then it winces and cringes as if the sound of the descending lash smote its ear. It remains for you, students in this school of the arts—all the arts that make mankind good and great—it remains for you to brush away from the tear-stained face of labor all the shadows accumulated there through all the dead ages of oppression and slavery. It remains for you to make labor bold by making it intelligent. It remains for you to dignify and ennoble labor by bestowing upon it the ripest scientific and artistic culture, and devoting to its service the best energies of body and mind.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FORGING LABORATORY.
Twenty-four manly-looking Boys with Sledge-hammer in Hand — their Muscle and Brawn. — The Pride of Conscious Strength. — The Story of the Origin of an Empire. — The Greater Empire of Mechanics. — The Smelter and the Smith the Bulwark of the British Government. — Coal — its Modern Aspects; its Early History; Superstition regarding its Use. — Dud. Dudley utilizes “Pit-coal” for Smelting — the Story of his Struggles; his Imprisonment and Death. — The English People import their Pots and Kettles. — “The Blast is on and the Forge Fire sings.” — The Lesson, first on the Black-board, then in Red-hot Iron on the Anvil. — Striking out the Anvil Chorus — the Sparks fly whizzing through the Air. — The Mythological History of Iron. — The Smith in Feudal Times. — His Versatility. — History of Damascus Steel. — We should reverence the early Inventors. — The Useful Arts finer than the Fine Arts. — The Ancient Smelter and Smith, and the Students in the Manual Training School.
This is the Forging Laboratory. It is only a few steps from the laboratory for founding, where we lately saw twenty-four students taking off their leather aprons after a two hours’ lesson in moulding and casting. Here we find, also, twenty-four students, but not the twenty-four we saw in the laboratory for founding. This class is more advanced. The boys are a trifle taller; they show more muscle, more strength, and bear themselves with a still more confident air.
In the Forging Laboratory there are twenty-four forges with all essential accessories, as anvils, tubs, and sets of ordinary hand-tools.
THE FORGING LABORATORY.
The students, with coats off and sleeves rolled above their elbows, in pairs, as smith and helper, stand, sledge and tongs in hand, at twelve of the forges. They are manly-looking boys. Their feet are firmly planted, their bodies erect, their heads thrown a little back. Their arms show brawn; the muscles stand out in relief from the solid flesh. Their faces express the pride of conscious strength, and their eyes show animation.
As we regard the class with a sympathetic thrill of satisfaction, the story of the origin of the Turkish Empire is recalled: “A race of slaves, living in the mountain regions of Asia, are employed by a powerful Khan to forge weapons for his use in war. A bold chief persuades them to use the weapons forged for a master to secure their own deliverance. For centuries after they had thus conquered their freedom, the Turkish people celebrated their liberation by an annual ceremony in which a piece of iron was heated in the fire, and a smith’s hammer successively handled by the prince and his nobles.”
The greatest empire in the world to-day is the empire of the art of mechanism, and its most potent instrument is iron. Once the perpetuity of governments depended upon the mere possession of the dingy ore. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in the middle of the sixteenth century, England was almost defenceless, owing to the short supply of iron. Spain, much better equipped, hence relied confidently upon her ability to subdue the English. But the Virgin Queen, comprehending the nature of the crisis, imported iron from Sweden and encouraged the Sussex forges, and the Spanish Armada was defeated. Thus the smelter and the smith became the bulwark of the British government.
But at an earlier period the fraternity of smiths gave direction to the course of empire. The secret of the easy conquest of Britain by the Normans was their superior armor. They were clad in steel, and their horses were shod with iron. The chief farrier of William became an earl; and he was proud of his origin, for his coat of arms bore six horseshoes.
Iron and civilization are terms of equivalent import. Iron is king, and the smelter and smith are his chief ministers. It is not known when, by whom, or how the art of smelting iron was discovered. As well ask by whom and how fire was discovered? These are secrets of the early morning of human life—of that time when man made no record of his struggles.
In lieu of history the instructor resorts to tradition, repeating the following legend: “While men were patiently rubbing sticks to point them into arrows, a spark leapt forth and ignited the wood-dust which had been scraped from the sticks, and so fire was found.”
Now the “helper” looks to his “blast” with keen interest; for the management of the forge-fire is one of the niceties of the smith’s art. He stirs the fire a little impatiently. The instructor heeds the act, but not the movement of impatience. On the contrary he seizes the occasion to introduce the subject of coal. Question follows question in rapid succession, and the answers are prompt and satisfactory, touching all modern aspects of the subject, namely, the magnitude of the annual “output,” the localities of heaviest production, the cost of mining; the uses, respectively, to which different qualities are applied, demand and supply, and market value or price. Here the instructor remarks that the mining, transportation, and sale of coal are conducted in this country by a number of large corporations, with an aggregate capitalization and bonded indebtedness of six or seven hundred million dollars, and that through combinations between these corporations the price is often arbitrarily advanced. “But,” he concludes, “the discussion of that branch of the subject belongs more properly to the class in political economy.”
The history of coal in its relation to iron smelting and manufacture forms a curious chapter in the vicissitudes of the useful arts. One hundred and fifty years ago not only all the smith’s fires but the smelter’s fires were kept up with charcoal. The forests of England were literally swept away, like chaff before the wind, to feed the yawning mouths of the iron mills. To make a ton of iron required the consumption of hundreds of cords of wood. To save the timber restrictive legislation was adopted, and the mills were gradually closed for want of fuel, until, in 1788, there was not one left in Sussex, and only a small number in the kingdom. Meantime the English iron supply came from Sweden, Spain, and Germany. England seemed to be following in the footsteps of the Roman Empire. The Romans accomplished in iron smelting and forging just what might be expected of a warlike people. They required iron for arms and armor, and in smelting skimmed the surface. This is proved by the cinder heaps, rich in ore, which they left in Britain. Archæologists trace the decline of Rome in her monuments, which show a steady deterioration in the soldier’s equipment. Alison attributes this decline to the exhaustion of her gold and silver mines. A far more plausible conjecture is found in the waste of timber in fuel for smelting purposes, and the resulting failure of the iron supply.
The fall of the Roman Empire may be accounted for by her neglect of the useful arts. The nation that converts all her iron into swords and spears shall surely perish. Had the city of Seven Hills possessed seven men of mechanical genius like Watt, Stephenson, Maudslay, Clement, Whitney, Neilson, and Nasmyth, her fall might have been averted, or if not averted, it need not have involved the practical extinction of civilization, thus imposing upon mankind the shame of the Dark Ages.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was much ignorant prejudice against the use of mineral coal. It was believed to be injurious to health. All sorts of diseases were attributed to its supposed malignant influence, and at one time to burn it in dwellings was made a penal offence. But this prejudice did not extend to its use in smelting iron, and whatever there was of inventive genius was devoted to a solution of the problem of its adaptation to such purposes. Mr. Samuel Smiles has collected the names of the most prominent of these Dutch and German mechanics, namely, Sturtevant, Rovenzon, Jordens, Francke, and Sir Philibert Vernatt, and given each a niche in the temple of fame. Some of them had a true conception of the required processes, but they all failed to render the application practically available.
It remained for Dud. Dudley to succeed in making a thoroughly practical application of mineral coal to iron-smelting purposes, and then curiously enough to fail of success in introducing it into general use. Dudley was born in 1599, in an iron-manufacturing district. His father owned iron-works near the town of Dudley, which was a collection of forges and workshops where “nails, horseshoes, keys, locks, and common agricultural tools” were made. Brought up in the neighborhood of “twenty thousand smiths and workers in iron,” young Dudley “attained considerable knowledge of the various processes of manufacture.” At twenty years of age he was taken from college and placed in charge of a furnace and two forges in Worcestershire, where there was a scarcity of wood but an abundance of mineral coal. He began immediately to experiment, with a view to the substitution of the latter for the former, and in a year succeeded in demonstrating “the practicability of smelting iron with fuel made from pit-coal, which so many before him had tried in vain.” But the charcoal iron-masters combined to resist the new method because it cheapened the product. They instigated mobs to destroy Dudley’s furnaces one after another, as soon as they were completed, harassed him with lawsuits, and finally beggared and drove him to prison. Then they tried to wring his secret from him. To this attempt Cromwell, who was interested in furnaces in the Forest of Dean, is said to have been a party. But all these efforts failed, and Dudley died in 1684 carrying his secret with him to the grave, and there the secret slumbered nearly one hundred years.
The story of Dud. Dudley, as told by Mr. Smiles in his “Iron-workers and Tool-makers,” is one of surpassing interest. It is worthy the careful perusal not only of every school-boy but of the philosophic student in search of the lessons of history, for it affords fresh evidence of the truth of the proposition that the progress of civilization depends upon progress in invention and discovery.
Under the influence of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition the iron industry of England continued to decline until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the British people imported their pots and kettles. Fifty years later, at the Coalbrookdale iron-works in Shropshire, when the furnaces had consumed all the wood in the neighborhood and a fuel famine was imminent, smelting with mineral coal was successfully resumed, and in 1766 two workmen of the “works”—the brothers Cranege—invented the reverberatory furnace, which added immensely to the application of coal to smelting purposes.
But while we are discussing the history of coal we are consuming coal to little purpose, for the blast is on and the furnace fires glow like miniature volcanic craters. Let us to work. Before the black-board, chalk in hand, the instructor stands and gives out the lesson. He presents it in the form of drawings, complete and in detail. It may involve only the single process of “drawing,” or it may involve several processes, as “drawing,” “bending,” and “welding.” The first sketch, for example, represents a flat bar of iron, the counterpart of the bars resting against the several forges. The second sketch shows the bar wrought into the form of a cylinder. The third sketch shows it “drawn” or lengthened, and hence reduced in size. The fourth sketch presents two rods the united lengths of which equal the length of the original rod. The fifth sketch represents the two rods “bent” into the form of chain-links, and a sub-sketch shows the proper shape of the ends of the links for “welding.” The sixth sketch shows the two links joined and welded.
The black-board illustrations may be omitted if the school is provided with a complete set of samples. The school of mechanic arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a hundred samples representing the successive steps in blacksmithing manipulation, including welding, and the welding samples consist of two parts, the first representing the details of the piece prepared for welding, and the second the welded piece. These samples are part of a collection of three hundred and twenty pieces of exquisite workmanship, covering every department of a complete manual training course, presented to the Institute in 1877 by the Emperor of Russia.
COURSE IN THE FORGING LABORATORY.
The black-board illustrations or the samples having been exhibited and explained as clearly as is possible in words, the instructor takes his place at one of the forges, and, surrounded by the class, goes through with the successive steps of any manipulation contained in the lesson which has not been actually wrought out in some previous lesson.
If the manipulation is a simple one the silence is only broken by the sound of the blast and the stroke of the hammer—the students understand every turn of the iron and every blow struck by the instructor—but if the manipulation is complicated, involving a fresh principle, the instructor is saluted by a volley of questions, and he often pauses to answer them. It is the time for questions; the more questions now, the fewer questions when all the blasts shall be on, and all the sledges flying through the air and making music on the anvils. A question now may lead to the enlightenment of twenty-four students; a question later is sure to cost the time of twenty-four students, and the answer to it may enlighten only one student.
At last the instructor drops the sledge, straightens up to his full height, and wipes the sweat from his brow. If the students respect the instructor they will respect labor, and they will respect the instructor if he is worthy of respect.
Now the school-room is a smithy and yet it is not. It is neither very hot nor very smoky, for there is an exhaust fan in operation which vitalizes the circulation. But the atmosphere resounds with the clangorous strokes of a dozen sledges, mingled with the sullen roar of as many forge-fires; and there are traces of soot on the walls, and pale smoke-wreaths creep along the ceilings, and hide in corners, and circle about columns in fantastic shapes. It is a smithy, but a smithy adapted, by its extraordinary neatness, to the manufacture of watch-springs, palate-arbors, and Damascus blades.
The faces of the students are aglow with the flush of health-giving exercise; their brows are “wet with honest sweat,” their heart-beats are full and strong, and the crimson life-currents surge hotly through every vein to their very finger-tips. They strike out the anvil chorus in all the keys and in every measure of the scale, and the burning sparks fly whizzing through the air.
At a sign from the instructor there is a pause. The students stand at ease and the work is inspected. This is the time for more questions if any student is in doubt; and the rest of five minutes affords opportunity for a brief lecture on the subject of the early history of the fraternity of smiths.
Mythology gives the highest place in its pantheon to Vulcan, the God of Fire. For notwithstanding he is represented as bearded, covered with dust and soot, blowing the fires of his forges and surrounded by his chief ministers, the cyclops, he is given Venus to wife and made the father of Cupid. Among the Scythians the iron sword was a god. When Jerusalem was taken by the Babylonians they made captives of all the smiths and other craftsmen of the city—a more grievous act than the thousand million dollar tribute levied upon France by Germany at the close of the war of 1870. For to be deprived of the use of iron is to be relegated to a state of barbarism.
The vulgar accounted for the keenness of the first sword-blades on the score of magic, and the praises of the smiths who forged were sung with the chiefs of chivalry who wielded them. So highly was this mysterious power regarded by Tancred, the crusader, that in return for the present of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibar, by Richard I., he paid for it with “four great ships and fifteen galleys.”
The smith was a mighty man in England in the early time. “In the royal court of Wales he sat in the great hall with the king and queen, and was entitled to a draught of every kind of liquor served.” His person was sacred; his calling placed him above the law. He was necessary to the feudal state; he forged swords “on the temper of which life, honor, and victory in battle depended.” The smith, after the Norman invasion, gained in importance in England. He was the chief man of the village, its oracle, and the most cunning workman of the time. His name descended to more families than that of any other profession—for the origin of the name Smith is the hot, dusty, smoky smithy, and however it may be disguised in the spelling, it is entitled to the proud distinction which its representatives sometimes seek to conceal.
Mr. Smiles draws the following graphic picture of the versatility of the smith of the Middle Ages:
“The smith’s tools were of many sorts, but the chief were his hammer, pincers, chisel, tongs, and anvil. It is astonishing what a variety of articles he turned out of his smithy by the help of these rude implements. In the tooling, chasing, and consummate knowledge of the capabilities of iron he greatly surpassed the modern workman. The numerous exquisite specimens of his handicraft which exist in our old gate-ways, church doors, altar railings, and ornamented dogs and andirons, still serve as types for continual reproduction. He was, indeed, the most ‘cunning workman’ of his time. But besides all this he was an engineer. If a road had to be made, or a stream embanked, or a trench dug, he was invariably called upon to provide the tools, and often to direct the work. He was also the military engineer of his day, and as late as the reign of Edward III. we find the king repeatedly sending for smiths from the Forest of Dean to act as engineers for the royal army at the siege of Berwick.”
But the most signal triumph of the art, both of the smelter and the smith, is found in the famous swords of Damascus, whose edge and temper were so keen and perfect that they would sever a gauze veil floating in the air, or crash through bones and helmets without sustaining injury. These Damascus blades, long renowned in the East, but first encountered by Europeans during the crusades, in the hands of the followers of Mahomet, were made of Indian steel or “wootz.” This steel, produced in the form of little cakes weighing about two pounds each, in the neighborhood of the city of Golconda, in Hindostan, was transported on the backs of camels two thousand miles to the city of Damascus, and there converted into swords, sabres, and scimitars.
This smith’s work has never been excelled, if equalled. Millions of dollars have been expended in efforts to produce the equal of Indian steel. Among the investigators of the subject the most noted was a Russian general, Anossoff, who died in 1851. His experiments were of a very elaborate and exhaustive character. They occupied a lifetime, and resulted in the establishment of works in the Ural Mountains, on the Siberian border, for the production of Damascus steel by a process of his own invention. After General Anossoff’s death the quality of the steel produced at his works deteriorated.
We should treat with reverence these obscure hints of the triumphs of the ancients in certain departments of art as suggestive of like great achievements in other directions, for without a knowledge of types they could neither teach the many what the few knew, nor preserve what they had acquired for the instruction of future ages. All art is the product of a sequential series of ideas, each idea containing the germ of the next; hence the preservation of each idea is essential to progress. The art of printing alone enables man to preserve such a record. It follows presumptively that the art of printing constitutes the predominant feature of difference between the civilization of the moderns and that of the ancients. And it is important to observe that the art of printing is far more necessary to progress in the useful arts than in the so-called fine arts. The ancient temples with their sculptured splendors—the Parthenon, the Jupiter Olympius, and scores of others—remained long to testify to the genius of Phidias, Praxiteles, and their gifted colleagues of the chisel. These souvenirs of Greek genius still serve as models for the architect and the sculptor. It needs no chronicle to prove that they mark the culmination of the fine arts. If the moderns have failed to excel, or even equal them, it is not because their conception, design, or construction involved occult processes. It is rather because there is a limit to the development of the so-called fine arts, and that limit in architecture and sculpture was reached in Greece more than two thousand years ago.
But with the Damascus blade, which typifies the useful arts, it is entirely different. It, too, is in itself a triumph of genius not less pronounced than the Athena of Phidias. But above and beyond this the arts of smelting and forging are so subtile as almost to elude the grasp of analysis. Not only the method of the fabrication of the Damascus blade but the processes involved in the production of the steel entering into its composition—all these are shrouded in impenetrable mystery. It follows that the useful arts are finer than the so-called fine arts. Their processes are more intricate, and hence more difficult of comprehension. To a solution of the questions presented in the course of their study an extended acquaintance with the sciences is essential. The highest departments of the fine arts, so-called, require only a study of the features, figure, and character of man, and of certain visible forms of nature, while the useful arts make incessant demands upon the resources of natural philosophy. The chemist toils in his laboratory, and the botanist and the geologist explore forest, field, and mine in search of new truths, with the single purpose of enlarging the sphere of the useful arts, and so of ministering more effectively to the ever increasing needs of man. Hence there can be no limit to the development of the useful arts except the limit to be found in the exhaustion of the forces of nature.
We should, then, venerate the artisan rather than the artist. Let us invoke the shade of the dusky Indian smelter. See him in the dark recesses of the forest, bending in rapt attention over his furnace, or holding aloft a little lump of his matchless steel. Alas, he is dumb! His secret perished with him. But the Indian smelter and the Damascus smith are kin to all the inventors and discoverers of all the ages. Across continents and seas, over trackless wastes of history—epochs during which ignorance and superstition prevailed and the intellect of man slumbered—the ancient smelter and the ancient smith extend their shadowy hands to the students in this school of the nineteenth century—extend them in token of the fellowship of a common struggle and a common hope of triumph—the struggle after truth[E2], and the hope of the triumph of industry.
The instructor raps on the black-board, and the school-room is at once transformed into a smithy. Again the forge-fires roar, and again the anvils resound under the stroke of the hammer. For half an hour the lesson goes on, and then comes the wind-up, and the several tests of excellence are applied to the completed task of each student. Form, dimensions, finish—these are the tests. The instructor marks the several pieces of work, makes a record of the result, reads the record, and is on the point of dismissing the class when an idea occurs to his mind and he enjoins silence. Taking in his hand a heavy sledge, and resting it on the anvil before him, he says, “This is a baby-hammer, and all the forging we do here is baby-forging. I hope soon to have an opportunity to take you to the great works of Mr. Crane, in this city, and there show you a steam-hammer which weighs a ton striking fifty to one hundred blows a minute—blows, too, that shame the fabled power of Vulcan, the God of Fire. At Pittsburg, Pa., there is an anvil of 150 tons weight which serves for forging with a 15-ton hammer. But the monster steam-hammer is to be found in Krupp’s cast-steel works at Essen, Germany. The hammer-head is 12 feet long, 51⁄2 feet wide, 4 feet thick, weighs 50 tons, and has a stroke of 9 feet. The depth of the foundation is 100 feet, consisting of three parts, masonry, timber, and iron, bolted together. Four cranes, each capable of bearing 200 tons, serve the hammer with material.”
The steam-hammer was invented in 1837 by James Nasmyth, of England, in response to a demand for a hammer that would forge a steamship paddle-shaft of unprecedented size. The nature of the emergency being presented to his mind, Mr. Nasmyth conceived the idea of the steam-hammer instantaneously, as it were, and at once proceeded to sketch the child of his brain on paper. He was too poor to defray the cost of patenting his invention; nor was he able to procure the necessary funds for that purpose until he had seen in France a hammer made from his own original sketch in operation.
The steam-hammer came rapidly into use, superseding all others of the ponderous sort, increasing the quantity of products and reducing the cost of manufacture by fifty per cent. It was through the steam-hammer only that the fabrication of the immense wrought-iron ordnance and the huge plates for covering ships-of-war of modern times became possible. In the hands of the giant, steam, Mr. Nasmyth’s hammer, even if it weigh fifty tons, is susceptible of more accurate strokes than the tack-hammer in the hands of the upholsterer, or the sledge in the hands of the most skilled blacksmith. It crushes tons of iron into a shapeless mass at one blow, and at the next drives a tack, or cracks an egg-shell in an egg-cup without injuring the cup.
Mr. Nasmyth, in 1845, applied the steam-hammer principle to the pile-driver. With this wonderful machine the “driving-block,” weighing several tons, descends eighty times a minute on the head of the pile, sending it home with almost incredible rapidity. The saving of time as compared with the old method is in the ratio of 1 to 1800; that is, a pile can be driven in four minutes that before required twelve hours.
The course in the Forging Laboratory extends from the making and care of forge-fires to case-hardening iron and hardening and tempering steel; and competent and experienced instructors declare that the student in the educational smithy gains as much skill in a day as the smith’s apprentice gains in a year in the ordinary shop.
[E2] “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it—is the sovereign good of human nature.”—Essays of Francis Bacon—“Truth,” p. 2. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852.
CHAPTER IX.
THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.
The Foundery and Smithy are Ancient, the Machine-tool Shop is Modern. — The Giant, Steam, reduced to Servitude. — The Iron Lines of Progress. — They converge in the Shop; its triumphs from the Watchspring to the Locomotive. — The Applications of Iron in Art is the Subject of Subjects. — The Story of Invention is the History of Civilization. — The Machine-maker and the Tool-maker are the best Friends of Man. — Watt’s Great Conception waited for Automatic Tools; their Accuracy. — The Hand-made and the Machine-made Watch. — The Elgin (Illinois) Watch Factory. — The Interdependence of the Arts. — The Making of a Suit of Clothes. — The Anteroom of the Machine-tool Laboratory. — Chipping and Filing. — The File-cutter. — The Poverty of Words as compared with Things. — The Graduating Project. — The Vision of the Instructor.
THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.
The transition from the laboratories for founding and forging to the Machine-tool Laboratory symbolizes a mighty revolution in the practical arts—a revolution so stupendous as to defy description, and so far-reaching as to appall the spirit of prophecy. The foundery and the smithy date back to the dawn of history; the machine-tool shop is a creation of yesterday. About the early manipulations of iron mythology wove a web of fancy: Vulcan forged Jove’s thunderbolts, the iron sword of the savage was a god, and even far down the course of time, late in the Middle Ages, Tancred, the crusader, paid an almost fabulous sum for King Arthur’s famous sword Excalibar—but the modern machine-tool shop is a huge iron automaton, without sentiment, and possessing no poetry except the rhythmic harmony of motion. In this shop steam is reduced to servitude, and compelled with giant hands to bore, mortise, plane, polish, fashion, and fit great masses of iron, and, anon, with delicate fingers to spin gossamer threads of burnished steel. With the hot steam coursing through its steel-ribbed veins the brain of this automaton thinks the thoughts foreordained by its inventor; its hands do his bidding, its arms fetch and carry for him, its feet come and go at his beck and nod. This automaton feeds on iron, steel, copper, and brass, and produces the watch-spring and the locomotive, the revolver and the Krupp gun, the surgeon’s lancet and the shaft of a steamship, the steel pen and the steam-hammer, the vault-lock and the pile-driver, the sewing-machine and the Corliss engine. The lever which wakens this automaton to life, which endows its brain with genius and its fingers with cunning, is the rod of empire. All the lines of modern development converge in the machine-tool shop, and they are all lines of iron, whether consisting of a fine wire strung on poles in mid-air or of huge bars resting on the solid earth. Iron is the king of metals but the slave of man. Its magnetic quality guides the mariner on the sea, and its tough fibre and density sustain the weight of the locomotive on the land. It constitutes the foundation of every useful art, from the plough of the husbandman to the Jacquard loom of the weaver. But it is only in the machine-tool shop that the great steam-driven machines of commerce and manufacture can be produced. The ancients possessed iron, which they cast in the foundery and forged in the smithy; they knew the power of steam, and the magicians of the time amused the populace with exhibitions of it, but they had no machine-tool shops in which steam could be harnessed for the journey across continents and seas. The thousand and one modern applications of iron to the needs of man have originated in the machine-tool shop. It is through these applications of iron, not through iron itself, that human pursuits have been so widely diversified, and human powers so richly developed and enlarged.
The contrasts presented by the development of the useful arts during the last hundred years are startling: The toilsome journey of a day reduced to an hour with the maximum of comfort; the few yards of fabric painfully woven by hand expanded into webs of cotton, linen, woollen, and silk cloths, rolling from thousands of steam-driven looms; the stocking once requiring hours to make, now dropping second by second from the iron fingers of the knitting-machine; the nails, screws, pins, and needles, forged one by one in the old village smithy, now flying from the hands of automatic machines by the thousand million; the numberless stitches of the sewing-machine as compared with the few of the olden time, which made the fingers and the hearts of women ache; the vast crop of cereals planted, cultivated, and gathered into barns with iron hands in contrast with the toilsome processes of even fifty years ago. These are only a few of the many illustrations that might be given of progress in the useful arts, and they all emanate from the machine-tool shop.
At the threshold of the most important inquiry that ever occupied the mind of man stand the twenty-four students we have followed, with more or less regularity, through the various laboratories which constitute the preliminary steps in the manual training course. It is the most important inquiry that ever engaged the attention of man, because it touches modern civilization at more points than any other. It consists of an investigation into the subject of the diversity of the applications of iron in art, a study both of the minute and the ponderous in iron tools and machines, and it is by these tools and machines that the bulk of the great enterprises of the men of modern times are carried forward. These students are familiar with the details of the laboratories for founding and forging, but the manipulations of those branches of iron manufacture are coarse and heavy as compared with those of the Machine-tool Laboratory. In a word, the difference between the iron manipulations of the Machine-tool Laboratory and those of the founding and forging laboratories is the exact measure of the difference between the modern and the ancient systems of civilization.
The ancient civilizations culminated in that of Rome. The Romans possessed iron, but confined their manipulations of it to the foundery and the smithy. Under the Roman empire the enterprises of man—commercial, manufacturing, and industrial generally—reached the limit marked by the applications of iron to the useful arts. It is not important in this connection to inquire why inventions and discoveries ceased. It is enough that they ceased. There was a pause; man, risen to a giddy height, looked backward instead of forward and upward; the struggle to advance came to an end, ambition died out of life, and a saturnalia of bloody crime and savage brutality ensued. Exhaustion followed, then stagnation, moral and intellectual, and then the decay of all the arts. The world stood still, and in that state of quiescence remained until printing was invented and America discovered. Still it waited two hundred and fifty years before receiving the first hint of steam-driven machines and the machines and the machine tool-shop, and during all that time progress was painfully slow. Something was required to give to human ambition a grand impulse, and to open to human energy and industry a broad field. That something did not come until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it should never be forgotten that it came then through the humble men of the workshop. To their inventive genius mankind owes more than to all the philosophers, litterateurs, professors, and statesmen of all time. These men of the workshop—Huntsman, Cort, Roebuck, Watt, Fulton, Mushet, Hargreaves, Neilson, Whitney, Bramah, Maudslay, Clement, Murray, Roberts, the Stephensons, father and son, and Nasmyth—invented machines which seem to rival human intelligence, and in fact far excel human precision in the execution of their work. In endowing iron with the cunning of genius and the terrific power of the fabled cyclops, the modern mechanic has revolutionized the field of human effort, transferring it from the foundery and the smithy to the machine-tool shop. It is here, and here alone, that steam-driven machines can be made. They may be conceived in the mind of a Watt or a Stephenson, but they can be made only by the automatic tools of a Maudslay, a Clement, a Bramah, or a Nasmyth. Man was helpless without steam-driven machines, and he could not have steam-driven machines until machine-made tools had been devised with which to make them. The experience of Watt strikingly illustrates this point. When he had completed his invention of the steam-engine, he found it nearly impossible to realize his idea in a working machine, owing to the incompetency of the workmen of that time. In reply to the inquiry of Dr. Roebuck, “What is the principal hinderance in erecting engines?” he responds, “It is always the smith-work.” His first cylinder, made of hammered iron soldered together by a whitesmith, was a complete failure. But even such workmen were so scarce that upon the death of this “white-iron man” Watt was reduced almost to a state of despair. “His next cylinder was cast and bored at Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless. The piston could not be kept steam-tight, notwithstanding the various expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty, pasteboard, and old hats.” Smeaton, the best workman of the time, “expressed the opinion, when he saw the engine at work, that notwithstanding the excellence of the invention it could never be brought into general use because of the difficulty of getting its various parts manufactured with sufficient precision.” Watt constantly complained of “villanous bad workmanship.” “Machine-made tools were unknown, hence there were no good tools. Attempting to run an engine of the old regime, the foreman of the shop gave it up in despair, exclaiming, “I think we had better leave the cogs to settle their differences with one another; they will grind themselves right in time.” Contrast with this clumsy machine of the hand-tool era the Corliss engine of the present day, whose every movement possesses the noiseless grace of a woman and the conscious power of a giant; and this giant springs full-armed from the machine-tool shop as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jupiter. Mr. Smiles says, “When the powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior were put on board that ship, the parts, consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the different workshops of the Messrs. Penn & Sons, where they had been made by workmen who knew not the places they were to occupy, and fitted together with such precision that so soon as the steam was raised and let into the cylinders the immense machine began as if to breathe and move like a living creature, stretching its huge arms like a new-born giant; and then, after practising its strength a little, and proving its soundness in body and limb, it started off with the power of above a thousand horses, to try its strength in breasting the billows of the North Sea.”
The great and small tools, the automata of the machine-shop, are no less triumphs of mechanical genius than the “powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior.” The prime difficulty of the hand-worker was to make two things exactly alike, then followed the impossibility of making many things—the narrow limit of human capacity to produce. At that point the inventor appeared with a machine which would make a thousand things in the time the hand-worker required to make one, and each one of them the exact counterpart of every other.
A hundred years ago John Arnold, the inventor of the chronometer, accomplished a marvel of patience and ingenuity in the form of a watch the size of twopence and the weight of sixpence. The workmanship was so delicate that he was compelled not only to fashion every part with his own hand, but to design and make the tools employed in its construction. The watch was presented to George III., of England, who showed his appreciation of Arnold’s mechanical skill in a present of five hundred guineas. The Emperor of Russia offered Arnold $5000 for a duplicate of the wonderful little time-piece, which offer was, however, declined. It was so difficult for the expert watch-maker of a century ago to make two things exactly alike, that Arnold could not afford to undertake to make another miniature watch even for the exorbitant price of $5000. But for ten dollars the Elgin (Illinois) National Watch Company will supply the Emperor of Russia with a machine-made watch more nearly perfect than Arnold’s masterpiece, and on the same day turn out one thousand others exactly like it. Imagine yourself now in the watch factory of the Elgin Company; observe that artisan holding in his hand a coil of fine steel wire weighing a pound. He approaches a machine, places one end of the wire in its iron fingers, presses a lever, and in a few minutes the coil is converted into two hundred thousand minute screws, each and every one as perfect as the best that Arnold made for his George III. gem.
It is with the greatest effort of painstaking care that the expert sewing-woman draws two stitches closely resembling each other, yet while she is making the toilsome exertion of her utmost skill the sewing-machine sets hundreds of stitches so exactly alike that a microscopic examination would fail to detect the least dissimilarity.
The sewing-machine affords an admirable illustration of the interdependence of the practical arts. The sewing-woman was able to keep pace with the slow and toilsome processes of the distaff and loom, but upon the application of steam-power to spinning and weaving the demand for sewing was augmented a thousand-fold. If the sewing-machine has not emancipated woman from the drudgery so pathetically depicted by Tom Hood, it has multiplied the production of garments almost beyond the power of figures to express. Note this instance illustrative of the triumph of automatic machinery in its application to manufactures. “The Emperor of Austria was lately presented with a suit of clothes possessing this remarkable history: The wool from which the garments were made was clipped from the sheep only eleven hours before the suit was completed. At 6.08 in the morning the sheep were sheared; at 6.11 the wool was washed; at 6.37 dyed; at 6.50 picked; at 7.34 the final carding process was finished; at eight o’clock it was spun; at 8.15 spooled; at 8.37 the warp was in the loom; at 8.43 the shuttles were ready; at 11.10 seven and three-fourth ells of cloth were completed; at 12.03 the cloth was fulled; at 12.14 washed; at 12.17 sprinkled; at 12.31 dried; at 12.45 sheared; at 1.07 napped; at 1.10 brushed; and at 1.15 prepared and ready for the shears and needle. At five o’clock the suit, consisting of a hunting-jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, was finished.”
There is a sort of anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory with which the students are thoroughly familiar. It is called the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory, has twenty-four vises, a great assortment of cold-chisels and files, and is devoted to vise work. The course in the Chipping Filing and Fitting Laboratory consists of a score or more lessons involving various file and chisel manipulations, as, “filing to line,” “dovetailing,” “parallel fitting tongues and grooves,” “ring-work and free-hand filing,” “chipping bevels,” “ward-filing and key-fitting,” “screw-filing,” “scraping,” etc., each lesson being so devised as to insure the introduction of variously shaped tools, and their application to the forms of work for which they are designed.
This anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory is like most anterooms plain in its appointments, and it is also like the conventional anteroom, a place where the student does not desire to remain long. The witchery of the great laboratory beyond has already cast its spell over the boy at the vise. But there is excellent hand and eye training work in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.
THE CHIPPING, FILING, AND FITTING LABORATORY.
The file is a humble tool, but it is older than history, dating back to the Greek Mythological period. “From the smallest mouse-tail file used in the delicate operations of the watch and philosophical instrument maker, to the square file for the smith’s heaviest work, there is a multifarious diversity in shape, size, and gauge of cutting.” Some of the files made by the Swiss for the watch-maker “are of so fine a cut that the unaided eye cannot discern the ridges.”
In no department of the useful arts did the hand-worker attain to greater dexterity than in file-cutting. With a sharp-edged chisel the file-cutter made from one hundred and fifty to two hundred “burs” a minute, and they were so fine as to be traced by the sense of touch alone, but as straight as though ruled by a machine. The hand-working file-cutter held his ground until 1859, when a Frenchman, M. Bernot, invented a file-cutting machine which superseded the old method of manufacture, except in cases requiring delicacy of manipulation, reducing the cost of files to one-eighth of their former price.
The lessons in the Machine-tool Laboratory will not be described in detail as in the other laboratories. The processes are so delicate and so intricate, and the resulting products in machines so closely approach the marvellous, as to beggar description. The poverty of words as compared with things asserts itself with unexampled force in the presence of a great variety of tools, each of which seems to be endowed with the power of reflection, and each of which, instead of whispering a word in your ear, drops into your hand a thing of use to man.
The laboratory is silent, the tools are dumb, but how eloquently they proclaim the era of comfort and luxury! They have no tongue, but through their lips you shall speak across continents and under seas. They have no legs, but through their aid you shall, in a race round the world, outstrip Mercury. The machines they make shall bear all your burdens; with their brawny arms they lift a thousand tons, and with their fingers of fairy-like delicacy pick up a pin; with the augur of Hercules they bore a channel through the mountain of granite, and with a Liliputian gimlet tunnel one of the hairs of your head.
These ingenious tools are worthy of careful inspection both on account of the marvels they perform and the delicacy of their construction and adjustments. One of them, a screw-engine lathe, for example, is taken to pieces, and each piece described in order that the students may be made familiar with the construction of the tool, and so rendered capable of taking good care of it. During this inspection the instructor outlines the history of the tool. The main feature is the slide-rest, invented by Maudslay while in the employ of Bramah, the lock-maker. It is not too much to say that two things exactly alike, or near enough alike, practically, to serve the same purpose very well, were never produced on the old-fashioned turning lathe. This the instructor endeavors to make clear to the class. He also explains precisely how Maudslay’s improvement remedied the defects of the old-fashioned lathe. Still there remained something to be done to make it perfect, and putting the pieces together the instructor shows where Maudslay’s work ended and that of Clement began. Clement made two improvements in the slide-rest, one involving the principle of self-correction, for which he received the gold Isis medal of the Society of Arts in 1827, and the other consisting of the “self-adjusting double-driving centre check,” for which he was awarded the silver medal of the same society in 1828. Thus improved or perfected, the slide-lathe became the acknowledged king of machine-tools, the self-adjusting two-armed driver taking the strain from the centre and dividing it between the two arms, and so correcting all tendency to eccentricity in the work.
The Machine-tool Laboratory contains a great variety of tools, of which the chief are lathes, drills, and planers; but there are many auxiliary tools, and in the advanced stages of the course a single lesson often affords opportunity for the introduction of several of them. And, as in the other school laboratories, each tool, upon its first presentation to the class, forms the subject of a brief lecture—a practical lecture too, for the instructor uses the tool while he sketches its history and perhaps that of its inventor, shows what place it holds in the order of machine-tool development, and how admirably it is adapted to its particular work, and makes suggestions as to its care. Sometimes a lesson involves the use of a drawing made by the students a year before, and the piece of iron in which it is wrought is the product of a previous lesson in forging; and it may also have been manipulated with the file or the cold-chisel, or both, in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.
From the first lesson in the room devoted to drawing, to the last lesson in the Machine-tool Laboratory, the course of training is orderly, consecutive. Each step contains a hint of the nature of the next step, and each succeeding step consists of a further application of the principles and processes of the last preceding step. In a word, the students follow their drawings through all the laboratories till the designs “are brought out in a finished state either in cast or wrought iron.”
The lathe is the fundamental machine-tool, but a completely equipped machine-tool laboratory includes a great variety of supplementary or auxiliary tools, a thorough knowledge of which is essential to a good mechanical education. It does not follow, because these tools are in a large degree automatic, that skill may be dispensed with in their use. Many of them are very complicated in design and construction, and they can no more be made to do efficient service under an unskilled hand than a locomotive can be made to accomplish a series of successful “runs” by an unskilled “driver.” Hence every tool in the laboratory is made the subject of an exhaustive study. The principle of mechanics involved in its construction is expounded, a practical illustration of its method of operation is given, its peculiar liability to injury is explained, and rules for its care are carefully formulated, and frequently repeated.
There is a prevalent theory that the wide application of so-called automatic tools to mechanical work largely decreases the legitimate demand for skilled mechanics, but it is fallacious. In the first place a thousand things are now made where one thing was made fifty years ago. In the second place the extensive use of steam and electricity greatly enlarges the sphere wherein accurate work becomes absolutely essential to human safety, and hence extends the field of operations of the inventive faculty. In the third place the cost of machine-tool made products having been greatly reduced, competition is proportionately intensified, thus narrowing the margin of profit, and so rendering any injury to machinery through want of skill in the operator relatively more disastrous. As a matter of fact a fine machine-tool is more liable than a watch to get out of order through careless handling, and it no more than a watch, can be properly repaired by a bungler. It follows that skill in the use of machine-tools is as essential to a successful mechanical career now, as skill in the use of hand-tools was formerly.
COURSE IN THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.
But another conclusion follows more irresistibly, namely—that the mechanical engineer who devotes his attention to the construction and management of massive machinery, such as pumps, hydraulic and lever presses, looms, and steam-engines, whether locomotive, marine, or other, must, in order to be master of his profession, be thoroughly familiar with every step of their construction; and such familiarity can only be acquired by a course of practical study in the machine-tool shop. It is the province of the mechanical engineer to utilize certain forces of nature in the service of man, and it is only through the machine-tool shop that such utilization can be effected. It hence follows that a practical acquaintance with the manipulations of the machine-tool shop is an essential prerequisite to a successful career in the field of higher mechanics. The man who aspires to construct any great mechanical engineering work, like the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, must know the exact mechanical power of every piece of machinery he employs, as also the exact mechanical value of every piece of iron that enters into the structure; and these things he cannot know unless he is familiar with the entire series of iron manipulations, from those of the foundery to those of the machine-tool shop.
The aspect of the Machine-tool Laboratory when in repose, so to speak, is dull and uninteresting, not to say repellant. There are twenty-four engine-lathes, as many adjustable vises, a milling machine, and a variety of auxiliary tools. The lathes are supported by dingy-looking cast-iron frames, and under each lathe there is a chest of drawers containing a set of tools. Overhead there is a wilderness of pulleys and shafting, which seems to the untrained eye to have very little relation to the machines below. The working parts of the lathes show burnished steel surfaces, which reflect coldly the glare of yellow sunlight flooding the room. If it were moonlight instead of sunlight one might summon the ghosts of those daring men who hundreds and thousands of years ago dreamed audaciously of the future of applied mechanics. Roger Bacon must have had a vision of the machine-tool shop when he said, “I will now mention some of the wonderful works of art and nature in which there is nothing of magic, and which magic could not perform. Instruments may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if they were full of sailors; chariots may be constructed that will move with incredible rapidity without the help of animals; a small instrument may be made to raise or depress the greatest weights; an instrument may be fabricated by which one man may draw a thousand men to him by force and against their will; as also machines which will enable men to walk at the bottom of seas or rivers without danger.”
When steam is “turned on” the aspect of the Machine-tool Laboratory is completely changed. Steam is, indeed, the arch-revolutionist; it breathes the breath of life into inanimate things—makes them think, speak, and act. The low hum of unused machinery first salutes the ear; then the students take their places. They are three years older than when we encountered them in the engine-room. They are from seventeen to twenty years of age. They are no longer boys; they are young men—robust, hearty-looking young men. Their bearing is very resolute—remarkably resolute; their attitude is erect. They are full-chested, muscular-armed, frank-faced young men. In the three years’ course now drawing to a close they have learned how to do many things, and hence they show a good degree of confidence. But the dominant expression on all the interesting young faces is, after all, one of modesty; so true is it that every acquisition of knowledge, and especially useful knowledge, not only stimulates desire to learn more, but enlightens perception as to the magnitude of the field of further inquiry. As the addition of a useful thing to the world’s stock of things creates a demand for a score more of useful things, so the addition of a fact to the student’s stock of facts not only creates a desire for more facts, but strengthens the mind for further investigation.
It may be that there are vain statesmen, philosophers, priests, and kings, but we should as little expect to find a vain mechanic as a vain scientist.
These twenty-four students may go out into the world to-morrow to make their way. Some of them will enter upon the stage of active life, others will continue their studies in higher schools of literature, science, and art; but whether they go or stay, if they have made the most of their opportunities in the Manual Training School they will have learned the lesson of modesty, and learned to respect labor, not only as a means of earning one’s daily bread, but as the most powerful and the most healthful mental and moral stimulant.
Steam is on, and the students standing at the lathes are impatient to begin. It is not a lesson in the ordinary sense. Each student works independently of special direction, for each is engaged in making a machine—the graduating project. The instructor is at hand, not to dictate but to advise, if requested. From his fund of experience as the elder scholar he will answer questions propounded by his younger fellow-students. In front of the students, parts of the working drawings may be seen. It is plain that there is to be variety in the exhibit of “projects.” There are several steam-engines, differing in model; there is a steam-pump, a punching machine, a lathe, an electric machine, and a steam-hammer.
At a sign work commences—a dozen varieties of work, emitting a dozen tones of buzzing and whizzing. The instructor’s face lights up with a pleased expression as he notes the progress of the work. There is no sign of hesitation in the class; no questions are asked; the students seem to be driving straight to the mark. The instructor’s heart swells with pride; he can trust “his boys!” He has been regarding them with an expression of affection, but now his eyes wander—they have a far-away look. He no longer sees the students, he is looking beyond them. He drops into a reclining attitude, sighs, falls into a reverie, and dreams. In his dream he sees naked savages, emerging from caves, armed with clubs, pursuing animals. These are succeeded by men bearing rude stone implements—axes and hammers—and these in turn by men armed with bows and arrows, but half-clothed with skins of beasts, and crouching and shivering beneath the shelter of the branches of a tree pulled downward and secured by clods of earth. This picture disappears, and is replaced by a pastoral scene—a vast plain covered with flocks and herds. In the foreground stands the shepherd, and in the distance his tent, consisting of skins of beasts stretched on poles, and in the tent door a woman sits pounding a fleece into felt. The shepherd, his flocks and herds, his tent, and the woman in the tent door, vanish like the mists of morning, and where the shepherd was, the husbandman is seen harvesting the golden grain; and in the shadow of the cottage which has replaced the tent a woman is grinding corn. The scene again changes—the plain has become the site of a great city. The city is protected by thick, high walls, surmounted with frowning battlements. Sentinels pace back and forth along the parapet. Huge helmets protect their heads, and their bodies are clothed in armor. Quivers full of bronze-tipped arrows depend from their shoulders; in their hands they carry long bows, and the clank, clank of their broad, two-edged, bronze swords breaks the dull, monotonous routine of their march. A brazen gate swings back noiselessly on brazen hinges, and, bowing to the sentinel, the dreamer as noiselessly glides into the city. Suddenly he feels the hot breath of the foundery furnace-fire, and is blinded by a glare of red light. Shading his eyes he sees dusky forms hurrying to and fro with ladles full of molten metal. Turning away he hears the heavy stroke of the sledge, and looking, beholds a dusty, smoky smithy. The stalwart smith drops the sledge at his side, rests one foot on the anvil-block, and wipes the sweat from his brow; the helper thrusts the cooling metal into the coals, bends to the bellows, and the forge-fire sings. At the sound of a bell the dreamer starts, the old Assyrian city falls into ruins, the ruins crumble into dust, and on this dust another city rises, flourishes, falls, and piles the dust of its ruins. Over a waste of years—twenty centuries—the dreamer’s thought flashes, and he stands in the presence of the Alexandrian mechanic-philosopher. He sees Hero in the public street, gazing abstractedly at his condensed-air fountain, and follows him into his shop or laboratory, and observes him curiously as he toys with the model of a queer little steam-engine. “This is the Iron Age, but in its infancy,” he exclaims under his breath, as his eyes wander from a fine Damascus blade hanging against the wall to some poor hand-tools lying on the working-bench. “I will speak to this old man,” he continues, “and ask him to step into my Machine-tool Laboratory, and see my boys make steam-engines; it will be a revelation to him. Come, old friend—there—look!” And the dreamer looks. Does he see double? The laboratory is unchanged; steam is still on; the whir of machinery and the buzzing sound of steam-driven tools salute the ear, and the students are all busy at their benches finishing parts of “projects” and adjusting them in their places, But there are twenty-four other men—shades of men—in the laboratory. Most of them are old; some are in working clothes, others in full dress, wearing ribbons and orders of merit. Over each student one of these shades bends with an air of absorbing attention. The dreamer recognizes Papin, Fulton, Watt, and Stephenson shadowing the students engaged in the construction of engines. They beckon Hero, and he joins the group, threading his way timidly between the lines of lathes, and looking askance at the rapidly revolving wheels and flying belts. Over the shoulders of other students are seen the faces of Maudslay, Bramah, Clement, Roberts, Whitney, Nasmyth, Huntsman, Cort, Murray, Dudley, Yarranton, Roebuck, and Whitworth, besides several unfamiliar faces. Suddenly they all gather about a nearly completed project—a stationary engine. They witness the forcing home of the last screw; they see the miniature machine made fast to the bench. Steam is let into the cylinders. The student’s flushed face is in sharp contrast with the colorless faces of the group of old men by whom he is surrounded. The piston-rod moves languidly—the machine trembles as if awaking from slumber, the shaft oscillates slowly, then faster, then regularly, like a strong pulse-beat. The project is a success—the first one completed! The student’s face turns pale—as pale as the white faces of the old men at his side. They open their lips as if to cheer him, but no sound escapes them. He breathes quick—almost gasps; his heart beats loudly; he tries to shout but cannot utter a word. At last he claps his hands! The instructor starts from his chair, rubs his eyes, and stares round the laboratory. All the students are there, gathered in a group about the finished “project,” but the ghostly shades of the old inventors have vanished like the unsubstantial fabric of a vision.
The “projects” are not all finished on the same day. Some of them are far more complicated than others, and some students are more skilled than others. All are very busy. It is not improper to ask questions relating to work on the graduating projects; the instructor is at hand to answer such questions. But it is a point of honor not to ask a question if the difficulty can possibly be otherwise overcome. Hence very few questions are asked.
The last week of the term is a very trying one to all concerned. The students are reticent and unusually silent; all are anxious, some are timid—the nervous tension is extreme. The instructor becomes taciturn under a painful sense of compulsory isolation from his class, towards all the members of which he has, for three years, sustained fraternal rather than dictatorial relations. But as the projects are, one by one, completed, the atmosphere clears. When the student realizes that his project is certain to be a success, his face brightens and he is pleased to discuss its “points” with the instructor. The instructor is delighted to resume his former relations with the class, the feeling of constraint is dispelled, and the graduation-day exercises are contemplated with confidence.
CHAPTER X.
MANUAL AND MENTAL TRAINING COMBINED.
The new Education is all-sided — its Effect. — A Harmonious Development of the Whole Being. — Examination for Admission to the Chicago School. — List of Questions in Arithmetic, Geography, and Language. — The Curriculum. — The Alternation of Manual and Mental Exercises. — The Demand for Scientific Education — its Effect. — Ambition to be useful.
We have now passed in review all the school laboratories, from the engine-room, or laboratory where power is generated, to the Machine-tool Laboratory where power is utilized, or harnessed, and compelled to do the work of man. We have observed the student, in his first effort over the drawing-board, struggling laboriously to make a straight line, and in the Laboratory of Carpentry, trying with varying success to make a tenon fit the mortise, and we have stood by his side in the Machine-tool Laboratory in the moment of his triumph exhibiting his graduating “project”—a miniature engine throbbing under the pressure of steam, and doing its work with admirable precision. But we have seen only the manual side of the curriculum. The mental side is still to be shown. The claim made in behalf of the new education is that it is better balanced than the old, that it is all-sided, that it produces a harmonious development of the whole being, that it makes of the student a man fully furnished for the battle of life, mentally, morally, and physically. Accordingly the curriculum of the Manual Training School combines with the laboratory exercises a variety of mental exercises of quite a comprehensive character; and first, certain mental requirements are necessary to admission, as witness the following from the first catalogue of the Chicago Manual Training School:
“Candidates for admission to the Junior year must be at least fourteen years of age, and must present sufficient evidence of good moral character. They must pass a satisfactory examination in reading, spelling, writing, geography, English composition, and the fundamental operations of arithmetic as applied to integers, common and decimal fractions, and denominate numbers. Ability to use the English language correctly is especially desired.”
The following questions were used at the first examination for admission to the Chicago school.