CHAPTER XII.
Production of a knife—Manufacture of iron—Raising coal—The hot-blast—Iron bridges—Rolling bar-iron—Making steel—Sheffield manufactures—Mining in Great Britain—Numbers engaged in mines and metal manufactures.
We have been speaking somewhat fully of agricultural instruments and agricultural labour, because they are at the root of all other profitable industry. Bread and beef make the bone and sinew of the workman. Ploughs and harrows and drills and thrashing-machines are combinations of wood and iron. Rude nations have wooden ploughs. Unless the English labourer made a plough out of two pieces of stick, and carried it upon his shoulder to the field, as the toil-worn and poor people of India do, he must have some iron about it. He cannot get iron without machinery. He cannot get even his knife, his tool of all-work, without machinery. From the first step to the last in the production of a knife, machinery and scientific appliances have done the chief work. People that have no science and no machinery sharpen a stone, or bit of shell or bone, and cut or saw with it in the best way they can; and after they have become very clever, they fasten it to a wooden handle with a cord of bark. An Englishman examines two or three dozens of knives, selects which he thinks the best, and pays a shilling for it, the seller thanking him for his custom. The man who has nothing but the bone or the shell would gladly toil a month for that which does not cost an English labourer half a day's wages.
And how does the Englishman obtain his knife upon such easy terms? From the very same cause that he obtains all his other accommodations cheaper, in comparison with the ordinary wages of labour, than the inhabitant of most other countries—that is, from the operations of science, either in the making of the thing itself, or in procuring that without which it could not be made. We must always remember that, if we could not get the materials without scientific application, it would be impossible for us to get what is made of those materials—even if we had the power of fashioning those materials by the rudest labour.
Keeping this in mind, let us see how a knife could be obtained by a man who had nothing to depend upon but his hands.
Ready-made, without the labour of some other man, a knife does not exist; but the iron, of which the knife is made, is to be had. Very little iron has ever been found in a native state, or fit for the blacksmith. The little that has been found in that state has been found only very lately; and if human art had not been able to procure any in addition to that, gold would have been cheap as compared with iron.
Iron is, no doubt, very abundant in nature; but it is always mixed with some other substance that not only renders it unfit for use, but hides its qualities. It is found in the state of what is called iron-stone, or iron-ore. Sometimes it is mixed with clay, at other times with lime or with the earth of flint; and there are also cases in which it is mixed with sulphur. In short, in the state in which iron is frequently met with, it is a much more likely substance to be chosen for paving a road, or building a wall, than for making a knife.
But suppose that the man knows the particular ore or stone that contains the iron, how is he to get it out? Mere force will not do, for the iron and the clay, or other substance, are so nicely mixed, that, though the ore were ground to the finest powder, the grinder is no nearer the iron than when he had a lump of a ton weight.
A man who has a block of wood has a wooden bowl in the heart of it; and he can get it out too by labour. The knife will do it for him in time; and if he take it to the turner, the turner with his machinery, his lathe, and his gouge, will work it out for him in half an hour. The man who has a lump of iron-ore has just as certainly a knife in the heart of it; but no mere labour can work it out. Shape it as he may, it is not a knife, or steel, or even iron—it is iron-ore; and dress it as he will, it would not cut better than a brickbat—certainly not so well as the shell or bone of the savage.
There must be knowledge before anything can be done in this case. We must know what is mixed with the iron, and how to separate it. We cannot do it by mere labour, as we can chip away the wood and get out the bowl; and therefore we have recourse to fire.
In the ordinary mode of using it, fire would make matters worse. If we put the material into the fire as a stone, we should probably receive it back as slag or dross. We must, therefore, prepare our fuel. Our fire must be hot, very hot; but if our fuel be wood we must burn it into charcoal, or if it be coal into coke.
The charcoal, or coke, answers for one purpose; but we have still the clay or other earth mixed with our iron, and how are we to get rid of that? Pure clay, or pure lime, or pure earth of flint, remains stubborn in our hottest fires; but when they are mixed in a proper proportion, the one melts the other.
So charcoal or coke, and iron-stone or iron-ore, and limestone, are put into a furnace; the charcoal or coke is lighted at the bottom, and wind is blown into the furnace, at the bottom also. If that wind is not sent in by machinery, and very powerful machinery too, the effect will be little, and the work of the man great; but still it can be done.
In this furnace the lime and clay, or earth of flint, unite, and form a sort of glass, which floats upon the surface. At the same time the carbon, or pure charcoal, of the fuel, with the assistance of the limestone, mixes with the stone, or ore, and melts the iron, which, being heavier than the other matters, runs down to the bottom of the furnace, and remains there till the workman lets it out by a hole made at the bottom of the furnace for that purpose, and plugged with sand. When the workman knows there is enough melted, or when the appointed time arrives, he displaces the plug of sand with an iron rod, and the melted iron runs out like water, and is conveyed into furrows made in sand, where it cools, and the pieces formed in the principal furrows are called "sows," and those in the furrows branching from them "pigs."
We are now advanced a considerable way towards the production of a knife. We have the materials of a knife. We have the iron extracted out of the iron-ore. Before we trace the progress of a knife to its final polish, let us see what stupendous efforts of machinery have been required to produce the cast iron.
In every part of the operation of making iron—in smelting the iron out of the ore; in moulding cast iron into those articles for which it is best adapted; in working malleable iron, and in applying it to use after it is made; nothing can be done without fire, and the fuel that is used in almost every stage of the business is coal. The coal trade and the iron trade are thus so intimately connected, so very much dependent upon each other, that neither of them could be carried on to any extent without the other. The coal-mines supply fuel, and the iron-works give mining tools, pumps, railroads, wheels, and steam-engines, in return. A little coal might be got without the iron engines, and a little iron might be made without coals, by the charcoal of wood. But the quantity of both would be trifling in comparison. The wonderful amount of the production of iron in Great Britain, and the cheapness of iron, as compared with the extent of capital required for its manufacture, arises from the fact that the coal-beds and the beds of iron-ore lie in juxta-position. The iron-stones alternate with the beds of coal in almost all our coal-fields; and thus the same mining undertakings furnish the ore out of which iron is made and the fuel by which it is smelted. If the coal were in the north, and the fuel in the south, the carriage of the one to the other would double the cost.
There was a time when iron was made in this country with very little machinery. Iron was manufactured here in the time of the Romans; but it was made with great manual labour, and was consequently very dear. Hutton, in his 'History of Birmingham,' tells us that there is a large heap of cinders near that town which have been produced by an ancient iron-furnace; and that from the quantity of cinders, as compared with the mechanical powers possessed by our forefathers, the furnace must have been constantly at work from the time of Julius Cæsar. A furnace with a steam blast would produce as large a heap in a few years.
At present a cottager in the south of England, where there is no coal in the earth, may have a bushel of good coals delivered at the door of his cottage for eighteen pence; although that is far more than the price of coal at the pit's mouth. If he had even the means of transporting himself and his family to the coal district, he could not, without machinery, get a bushel of coals at the price of a year's work. Let us see how a resolute man would proceed in such an undertaking.
The machinery, we will say, is gone. The mines are filled up, which the greater part of them would be, with water, if the machinery were to stop a single week. Let us suppose that the adventurous labourer knows exactly the spot where the coal is to be found. This knowledge, in a country that has never been searched for coals before, is no easy matter, even to those who understand the subject best: it is the province of geology to give that knowledge. But we shall suppose that he gets over that difficulty too, for after it there is plenty of difficulty before him.
Well, he comes to the exact spot that he seeks, and places himself right over the seam of coal. That seam is only a hundred fathoms below the surface, which depth he will, of course, reach in good time. To work he goes; pares off the green sod with his shovel, loosens the earth with his pickaxe, and, in the course of a week, is twenty feet down into the loose earth and gravel, and clears the rock at the bottom. He rests during the Sunday, and comes refreshed to his work on Monday morning; when, behold, there are twelve feet of water in his pit.
Suppose he now calls in the aid of a bucket and rope, and that he bales away, till, as night closes, he has lowered the water three feet. Next morning it is up a foot and a half: but no matter; he has done something, and next day he redoubles his efforts, and brings the water down to only four feet. That is encouraging; but, from the depth, he now works his bucket with more difficulty, and it is again a week before his pit is dry. The weather changes; the rain comes down heavily; the surface on which it falls is spongy; the rock which he has reached is water-tight; and in twelve hours his pit is filled to the brim. It is in vain to go on.
The sinking of a pit, even to a less depth than a hundred fathoms, sometimes demands, notwithstanding all the improvements by machinery, a sum of not less than a hundred pounds a fathom, or ten thousand pounds for the whole pit; and therefore, supposing it possible for a single man to do it at the rate of eighteen pence a day, the time which he would require would be between four hundred and five hundred years.
Whence comes it that the labour of between four hundred and five hundred years is reduced to a single day? and that which, independently of the carriage, would have cost ten thousand pounds, is got for eighteen pence? It is because man joins with man, and machinery is employed to do the drudgery. Nations that have no machinery have no coal fires, and are ignorant that there is hidden under the earth a substance which contributes more, perhaps, to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of Britain than any other commodity which they enjoy.
No nations have worked coal to anything approaching the extent in which it has been worked by our countrymen. It has been calculated that France, Belgium, Spain, Prussia, Bohemia, and the United States of America, do not annually produce more than seventeen million tons of coal, which is about half of our annual produce.[20]
Steam-Boiler making.
The greater part of the coal now raised in Britain is produced by the employment of the most enormous mechanical power. There are in some places shallow and narrow pits, where coals may be raised to the surface by a windlass; and there are others where horse-power is employed. But the number of men that can work at a windlass, or the number of horses that can be yoked to a gin, is limited. The power of the steam-engine is limited only by the strength of the materials of which it is formed. The power of a hundred horses, or of five hundred men, may be very easily made by the steam-engine to act constantly, and on a single point; and thus there is scarcely anything in the way of mere force which the engine cannot be made to do. We have seen a pit in Staffordshire, which hardly gave coal enough to maintain a cottager and his family, for he worked the pit with imperfect machinery—with a half-starved ass applied to a windlass. A mile off was a steam-engine of 200-horse power, raising tons of coals and pumping out rivers of water with a force equal to at least a thousand men. This vast force acted upon a point; and therefore no advantage was gained over the machine by the opposing force of water, or the weight of the material to be raised. Before the steam-engine was invented, the produce of the coal-mines barely paid the expense of working and keeping them dry; and had it not been for the steam-engines and other machinery, the supply would long before now have dwindled into a very small quantity, and the price would have become ten or twenty times its present amount. The quantity of coal raised in Great Britain was estimated by Professor Ansted in 1851 at thirty-five million tons; and the value at nine millions sterling at the pit-mouth, and eighteen millions at the place of consumption. The capital engaged in the coal trade was then valued at ten millions. In 1847 the annual value of all the precious metals raised throughout the world was estimated at thirteen millions sterling. That value has been increased within a few years. But the coal of Great Britain, as estimated by the cost at the pit's mouth, is above two-thirds of this value of the precious metals seven years ago; and the mean annual value, at the furnace, of iron smelted by British coal being eight millions sterling, the value together of our iron and our coal exceeds the value of all the gold and silver of South America, and California, and Australia, however large that amount has now become.
How the value of our cast iron has been increased by modern science may be in some degree estimated by a consideration of what the hot-blast has accomplished. The hot-blast blows hot air into the iron-furnace instead of cold air. The notion seems simple, but the results are wonderful. The inventor, Mr. Neilson, has seen since 1827 the production of iron raised from less than seven hundred thousand tons to two million two hundred thousand tons. The iron is greatly cheaper than a quarter of a century ago, for only about one-half the coal formerly used is necessary for its production. That production is almost unlimited in amount. In 1788 we produced only sixty thousand tons, or one-thirty-sixth part of what we now produce. The beautiful iron bridge of Colebrook-dale, erected in 1779, consumed three hundred and seventy-eight tons of cast iron. The wonderful Britannia Bridge which has been carried over the Menai Strait, hung in mid air at the height of a hundred feet above the stream, has required ten thousand tons of iron for its completion. If chemistry and machinery had not been at work to produce more iron and cheaper iron, how would our great modern improvements have stopped short—our railroads, our water-pipes, our gas-pipes, our steam-ships! How should we have lacked the great material of every useful implement, from the gigantic anchor that holds the man-of-war firm in her moorings, and the mighty gun that, in the last resort, asserts a spirit without which all material improvement cannot avert a nation's decay,—to the steel pen with which thoughts are exchanged between friends at the opposite ends of the earth, and the needle by which the poor seamstress in her garret maintains her place amongst competing numbers.
The first iron bridge, Colebrook Dale.
Nearly all the people now engaged in iron-works are supported by the improvements that have been made in the manufacture, by machinery, since 1788. Yes, wholly by the machinery; for before then the quantity made by the charcoal of wood had fallen off one-fourth in forty-five years. The wood for charcoal was becoming exhausted, and nothing but the powerful blast of a machine will make iron with coke. Without the aid of machinery the trade would have become extinct. The iron and the coal employed in making it would have remained useless in the mines.
And now, having seen what is required to produce a "pig" of cast iron, let us return to the knife, whose course of manufacture we traced a little way.
The lump of cast iron as it leaves the furnace has many processes to go through before it becomes fit for making a knife. It cannot be worked by the hammer, or sharpened to a cutting edge; and so it must be made into malleable iron,—into a kind of iron which, instead of melting in the fire, will soften, and admit of being hammered into shape, or united by the process of welding.
The methods by which this is accomplished vary; but they in general consist in keeping the iron melted in a furnace, and stirring it with an iron rake, till the blast of air in the furnace burns the greater part of the carbon out of it. By this means it becomes tough; and, without cooling, is taken from the furnace and repeatedly beaten by large hammers, or squeezed through large rollers, until it becomes the bar-iron of which so much use is made in every art of life.
Rolling bar-iron.
About the close of the last century the great improvement in the manufacture of bar-iron was introduced by passing it through grooved rollers, instead of hammering it on the anvil; but in our own time the invention has become most important. The inventor, Mr. Coet, spent a fortune on the enterprise and died poor. His son, in 1812, petitioned Parliament to assign him some reward for the great gift that his father had bestowed upon the nation. He asked in vain. It is the common fate of the ingenious and the learned; and it is well that life has some other consolations for the man that has exercised his intellect more profitably for the world than for himself, than the pride of the mere capitalist, who thinks accumulation, and accumulation only, the chief business of existence. Rolling bar-iron is one of the great labour-saving principles that especially prevail in every branch of manufacture in metals. The unaided strength of all the men in Britain could not make all the iron which is at present made, though they did nothing else. Machinery is therefore resorted to; and water-wheels, steam-engines, and all sorts of powers are set to work in moving hammers, turning rollers, and drawing rods and wires through holes, till every workman can have the particular form which he wants. If it were not for the machinery that is employed in the manufacture, no man could obtain a spade for less than the price of a year's labour; the yokes of a horse would cost more than the horse himself; and the farmer would have to return to wooden plough-shares, and hoes made of sticks with crooked ends.
After all this, the iron is not yet fit for a knife, at least for such a knife as an Englishman may buy for a shilling. Many nations would, however, be thankful for a little bit of it, and nations too in whose countries there is no want of iron-ore. But they have no knowledge of the method of making iron, and have no furnaces or machinery. When our ships sail among the people of the eastern islands, those people do not ask for gold. "Iron, iron!" is the call; and he who can exchange his best commodity for a rusty nail or a bit of iron hoop is a fortunate individual.
We are not satisfied with that in the best form, which is a treasure to those people in the worst. We must have a knife, not of iron, but of steel,—a substance that will bear a keen edge without either breaking or bending. In order to get that, we must again change the nature of our material.
How is that to be done? The oftener that iron is heated and hammered, it becomes the softer and more ductile; and as the heating and hammering forced the carbon out of it, if we give it the carbon back again, we shall harden it; but it happens that we also give it other properties, by restoring its carbon, when the iron has once been in a ductile state.
For this purpose, bars or pieces of iron are buried in powdered charcoal, covered up in a vessel, and kept at a red heat for a greater or less number of hours, according to the object desired. There are niceties in the process, which it is not necessary to explain, that produce the peculiar quality of steel, as distinguished from cast iron. If the operation of heating the iron in charcoal is continued too long, or the heat is too great, the iron becomes cast steel, and cannot be welded; but if it is not melted in the operation, it can be worked with the hammer in the same manner as iron.
In each case, however, it has acquired the property upon which the keenness of the knife depends; and the chief difference between the cast steel, and the steel that can bear to be hammered is, that cast steel takes a keener edge, but is more easily broken.
Shear and Tilt Hammers: Steel-manufacture.
The property which it has acquired is that of bearing to be tempered. If it be made very hot, and plunged into cold water, and kept there till it is quite cooled, it is so hard that it will cut iron, but it is brittle. In this state the workman brightens the surface, and lays the steel upon a piece of hot iron, and holds it to the fire till it becomes of a colour which he knows from experience is a test of the proper state of the process. Then he plunges it again into water, and it has the degree of hardness that he wants.
The grinding a knife, and the polishing it, even when it has acquired the requisite properties of steel, if they were not done by machinery, would cost more than the whole price of a knife upon which machinery is used. A travelling knife-grinder, with his treadle and wheels, has a machine, but not a very perfect one. The Sheffield knife-maker grinds the knife at first upon wheels of immense size, turned by water or steam, and moving so quickly that they appear to stand still—the eye cannot follow the motion. With these aids the original grinding and polishing cost scarcely anything; while the travelling knife-grinder charges two pence for the labour of himself and his wheel in just sharpening it.
File-cutters.
The "Sheffield whittle" is as old as the time of Edward III., as we know from the poet Chaucer. Sheffield is still the metropolis of steel. It is in the change of iron into steel by a due admixture of carbon—by hammering, by casting, by melting—that the natural powers of Sheffield, her water and her coal, have become of such value. Wherever there is a stream with a fall, there is the grinding-wheel at work: and in hundreds of workshops the nicer labour of the artificer is fashioning the steel into every instrument which the art of man can devise, from the scythe of the mower to the lancet of the surgeon. The machinery that made the steel has called into action the skill that makes the file-cutter. No machine can make a file. The file-cutter with a small hammer can cut notch after notch in a piece of softened steel, without a guide or gauge,—even to the number of a hundred notches in aninch. It is one out of many things in which skilled labour triumphs over the uniformity of operation which belongs to a machine. The cutting of files alone in Great Britain gives employment to more than six thousand persons. This is one of the many instances in which it is evident that the application of machinery to the arts calls into action an almost infinite variety of handicrafts. An ordinary workman can obtain a knife for the price of a few hours' labour. The causes are easily seen. Every part of the labour that can be done by machinery is so done. One turn of a wheel, one stroke of a steam-engine, one pinch of a pair of rollers, or one blow of a die, will do more in a second than a man could do in a month. One man, also, has but one thing to do in connexion with the machinery; and when the work of the hand succeeds to the work of the wheel or the roller, the one man, like the file-cutter, has still but one thing to do. In course of time he comes to do twenty times as much as if he were constantly shifting from one thing to another. The value of the work that a man does is not to be measured in all cases by the time and trouble that it cost him individually, but by the market value of what he produces; which value is determined, as far as labour is concerned, by the price paid for doing it in the best and most expeditious mode.
And does not all this machinery, and this economy of labour, it may still be said, deprive many workmen of employment? No. By these means the iron trade gives bread to hundreds, where otherwise it would not have given bread to one. There are more hands employed at the iron-works than there would have been if there had been no machinery; because without machinery men could not produce iron cheap enough to be generally used.
The machinery that is now employed in the iron trade, not only enables the people to be supplied cheaply with all sorts of articles of iron, but it enables a great number of people to find employment, not in the iron trade only, but in all other trades, who otherwise could not have been employed; and it enables everybody to do more work with the same exertion by giving them better tools; while it makes all more comfortable by furnishing them with more commodious domestic utensils.
There are thousands of families on the face of the earth, that would be glad to exchange all they have for a tin kettle, or an iron pot, which can be bought anywhere in the three kingdoms for a shilling or two. And could the poor man in this country but once see how even the rich man in some other places must toil day after day before he can scrape or grind a stone so as to be able to boil a little water in it, or make it serve for a lamp, he would account himself a poor man no more. An English gipsy carries about with him more of the conveniences of life than are enjoyed by the chiefs or rulers in countries which naturally have much finer climates than that of England. But they have no machinery, and therefore they are wretched.
Great Britain is a country rich in other minerals than iron-stone and coal. Our earliest ancestors are recorded to have exchanged tin with maritime people who came to our shores. They had lead also, which was cast into oblong blocks during the Roman occupation of the island, and which bear the imperial stamp. At the beginning of the eighteenth century we worked tin into pewter, which, in the shape of plates, had superseded wooden trenchers. But we raised and smelted no copper, importing it unwrought. The valuable tin and copper mines of Cornwall were imperfectly worked in the middle of the last century, because the water which overflowed them was only removed by hydraulic engines, the best of which was introduced in 1700. When Watt had reconstructed the steam-engine, steam-power began to be employed in draining the Cornwall mines. In 1780, 24,443 tons of copper-ore were raised, producing 2932 tons of copper. In 1850, 155,025 tons of ore were obtained, producing 12,254 tons of copper. The tin-mines produced 1600 tons in 1750, and 10,719 tons in 1849. The produce of the lead-mines has not been accurately estimated.
Entrance to the Mine of Odin, an ancient Lead-mine in Derbyshire.
In all mining operations, conducted as they are in modern times, and in our own country, we must either go without the article produced, whether coal, or iron, or lead, or copper, if the machines were abolished,—or we must employ human labour, in works the most painful, at a price which would not only render existence unbearable, but destroy it altogether. The people, in that case, would be in the condition of the unhappy natives of South America, when the Spaniards resolved to get gold at any cost of human suffering. The Spaniards had no machines but pickaxes and spades to put in the hands of the poor Indians. They compelled them to labour incessantly with these, and half the people were destroyed. Without machinery, in places where people can obtain even valuable ore for nothing, the collection and preparation of metals is hardly worth the labour. Mungo [Park] describes the sad condition of the Africans who are always washing gold-dust;—and we have seen in Derbyshire a poor man separating small particles of lead from the limestone, or spar, of that country, and unable to earn a shilling a day by the process. A man of capital erects lead-works, and in a year or two obtains an adequate profit, and employs many labourers.
It may enable us, in addition to our slight notices of quantities produced, to form something like an accurate conception of the vast mineral industry of this country, if we give the aggregate of men employed as miners and metal-workers, according to the census of 1851. Of coal-miners there were 216,366; of iron-miners, 27,098; of copper-miners, 18,468; of tin-miners, 12,912; of lead-miners, 21,617. This is a total of 296,461. In the manufacture of various articles of iron and steel, in addition to the iron and coal miners, who cannot be accurately distinguished, there are employed 281,578 male workers, and 18,807 female; and in the manufacture of articles of brass and other mixed metals, 46,076; of which number 8370 are females. The workers in metal thus enumerated amount to 542,922. We may add, from the class of persons engaged in mechanic productions, in which we find 48,050 engine and machine makers, and 7429 gunsmiths, a number that will raise the aggregate of miners and workers in metals to 600,000 persons. The boldness of some of the operations which are conducted in this department of industry, the various skill of the labourers, and the vastness of the aggregate results, impress the mind with a sense of power that almost belongs to the sublime. The fables of mythology are tame when compared with these realities of science. Vulcan, with his anvils in Ætna, is a feeble instrument by the side of the steam-hammer that forges an anchor, or the hydraulic press that lifts a bridge. A knot of Cupids co-operating for the fabrication of their barbed arrows is the poetry of painting applied to the arts. But there is higher poetry in that triumph of knowledge, and skill, and union of forces, which fills a furnace with fifty thousand pounds of molten iron, and conducts the red-hot stream to the enormous mould which is to produce a cylinder without a flaw.
Cupids forging arrows. From Albani
Coal-Railway from South Hetton to Seaham Harbour, with the ascending and descending Trains.
[20] See a table by Professor Ansted in the Great Exhibition Catalogue, vol. i. p. 181.
CHAPTER XIII.
Conveyance and extended use of coal—Consumption at various periods—Condition of the roads in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Advantages of good roads—Want of roads in Australia—Turnpike-roads—Canals—Railway of 1680—Railway statistics.
We have seen how by machinery more than thirty-five million tons of coal—now become one of the very first necessaries of life—are obtained, which without machinery could not be obtained at all in the thousandth part of the quantity; and which, consequently, would be a thousand times the price—would, in fact, be precious stones, instead of common fuel.
Engines or machines, of some kind or other, not only keep the pits dry and raise the coals to the surface, but convey them to the ship upon railroads; the ship, itself a machine, carries them round all parts of the coast; barges and boats convey them along the rivers and canals; and, within these few years, railways have carried the coals of the north into remote places in the southern and other counties, where what was called "sea-coal," from its being carried coastwise, was scarcely known as an article of domestic use. The inhabitants of such places had no choice but to consume wood and turf for every domestic purpose.
Through the general consumption of wood instead of coal, a fire for domestic use in France is a great deal dearer than a fire in England; because, although the coal-pits are not to be found at every man's door, nor within many miles of the doors of some men, machinery at the pits, and ships and barges, and railways, which are also machinery, enable most men to enjoy the blessings of a coal fire at a much cheaper rate than a fire of wood, which is not limited in its growth to any particular district. Without the machinery to bring coals to his door, not one man out of fifty of the present population of England could have had the power of warming himself in winter; any more than without the machines and implements of farming he could obtain food, or without those of the arts he could procure clothing. The sufferings produced by a want of fuel cannot be estimated by those who have abundance. In Normandy, very recently, such was the scarcity of wood, that persons engaged in various works of hand, as lace-making by the pillow, absolutely sat up through the winter nights in the barns of the farmers, where cattle were littered down, that they might be kept warm by the animal heat around them. They slept in the day, and were warmed by being in the same outhouse with cows and horses at night;—and thus they worked under every disadvantage, because fuel was scarce and very dear.
Coals were consumed in London in the time of Queen Elizabeth; but their use was, no doubt, very limited. Shakspere, who always refers to the customs of his own time, makes Dame Quickly speak of "sitting in my Dolphin-chamber at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, on Wednesday in Whitsun week." But Mrs. Quickly was a luxurious person, who had plate and tapestry and gilt goblets. Harrison, in his 'Description of Britain,' at the same period, says, that coal is "used in the cities and towns that lie about the coast;" but he adds, "I marvel not a little that there is no trade of these into Sussex and Southamptonshire; for want thereof the smiths do work their iron with charcoal." He adds, with great truth, "I think that far carriage be the only cause."
The consumption of coal in London in the last year of Charles II. (1685) amounted to three hundred and fifty thousand tons. This was really a large consumption, however insignificant it may sound when compared with the modern demand of the metropolis. In 1801 there were imported into London about a million tons of coals. In 1850, three million six hundred thousand tons were brought to the London market. The average contract price in the ten years ending 1810 was 45s. 6d.; in the ten years ending 1850 it was 18s. 6d. But in 1824 the oppressive duty of 7s. 6d. per ton on seaborne coals was reduced to 4s.; and in 1831 the duty was wholly repealed. It is the boast of our present fiscal system that the chief materials of manufacture, and the great necessaries and conveniences of life, are no longer made dear by injudicious taxation.
The chief power which produces coal and iron cheap is that of machinery. It is the same power which distributes these bulky articles through the country, and equalizes the cost in a considerable degree to the man who lives in London and the man who lives in Durham or Staffordshire. The difference in cost is the price of transport; and machinery, applied in various improved ways, is every year lessening the cost of conveyance, and thus equalizing prices throughout the British Islands. The same applications of mechanical power enable a man to move from one place to another with equal ease, cheapness, and rapidity. Quick travelling has become cheaper than slow travelling. The time saved remains for profitable labour.
About a hundred and ninety years ago, when the first turnpike-road was formed in England, a mob broke the toll-gates, because they thought an unjust tax was being put upon them. They did not perceive that this small tax for the use of a road would confer upon them innumerable comforts, and double and treble the means of employment.
If there were no road, and no bridge, a man would take six months in finding his way from London to Edinburgh, if indeed he found it at all. He would have to keep the line of the hills, in order that he might come upon the rivers at particular spots, where he would be able to jump over them with ease, or wade through them without danger.
When a man has gone up the bank of a river for twelve miles in one direction, in order to be able to cross it, he may find that, before he proceeds one mile in the line of his journey, he has to go along the bank of another river for twelve miles in the opposite direction; and the courses of the rivers may be so crooked that he is really farther from his journey's end at night than he was in the morning.
He may come to the side of a lake, and not know the end at which the river, too broad and deep for him to cross, runs out; and he may go twenty miles the wrong way, and thus lose forty.
Difficulties such as these are felt by every traveller in an uncivilized country. In reading books of travels, in Africa for instance, we sometimes wonder how it is that the adventurer proceeds a very few miles each day. We forget that he has no roads.
Two hundred years ago—even one hundred years ago—in some places fifty years ago—the roads of England were wholly unfit for general traffic and the conveyance of heavy goods. Pack-horses mostly carried on the communication in the manufacturing districts. The roads were as unfit for moving commodities of bulk, such as coal, wool, and corn, as the sandy roads of Poland were thirty years ago, and as many still are. Mr. Jacob, who went upon the continent to see what stores of wheat existed, found that in many parts the original price of wheat was doubled by the price of land conveyance for a very few miles.
In 1663 the first turnpike act, which was so offensive to some of the people, was carried through Parliament. It was for the repair of the "ancient highway and post-road leading from London to York," which was declared to be "very ruinous, and become almost impassable." This was, on many accounts, one of the most important lines of the country. Let us see in what state it was seventeen years after the passing of the act. In the 'Diary of Ralph Thoresby,' under the date of October, 1680, we have this entry:—"To Ware, twenty-miles from London, a most pleasant road in summer, and as bad in winter, because of the depth of the cart-ruts." Take another road a little later. In December, 1703, Charles III., King of Spain, slept at Petworth on his way from Portsmouth to Windsor, and Prince George of Denmark went to meet him there by desire of the Queen. The distance from Windsor to Petworth is about forty miles. In the relation of the journey given by one of the prince's attendants, he states,—"We set out at six in the morning, by torchlight, to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches (save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire) till we arrived at our journey's end. 'Twas a hard service for the Prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day without eating anything, and passing through the worst ways I over saw in my life. We were thrown but once indeed in going, but our coach, which was the leading one, and his Highness's body-coach, would have suffered very much, if the nimble poors of Sussex had not frequently poised it, or supported it with their shoulders, from Godalming almost to Petworth, and the nearer we approached the duke's house the more inaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost us six hours' time to conquer them." From Horsham, the county-town of Sussex, about the beginning of the reign of George III., the roads were never in such a condition as to allow sheep or cattle to be driven on them to the London market; and consequently, there not being sufficient demand at home to give a remunerating price, the beef and mutton were sold at a rate far below the average to the small population in the country, which was thus isolated from the common channels of demand and supply.
Telford.
In the Highlands of Scotland, at the beginning of the present century, the communication from one district to another was attended with such difficulty and danger, that some of the counties were excused from sending jurors to the circuit to assist in the administration of justice. The poor people inhabiting these districts were almost entirely cut off from intercourse with the rest of mankind. The Highlands were of less advantage to the British empire than the most distant colony. Parliament resolved to remedy the evil; and, accordingly, from 1802 to 1817, the sum of two hundred thousand pounds was laid out in making roads and bridges in these mountainous districts. Mark the important consequences to the people of the Highlands, as described by Mr. Telford, the engineer of the roads:—
"Since these roads were made accessible, wheelwrights and cartwrights have been established, the plough has been introduced, and improved tools and utensils are used. The plough was not previously used in general; in the interior and mountainous parts they frequently used crooked sticks with iron on them, drawn or pushed along. The moral habits of the great mass of the working classes are changed; they see that they may depend on their own exertions for support. This goes on silently, and is scarcely perceived until apparent by the results. I consider these improvements one of the greatest blessings ever conferred upon any country. About two hundred thousand pounds has been granted in fifteen years. It has been the means of advancing the country at least one hundred years."
There are many parts of Ireland which sustained the same miseries and inconveniences from the want of roads as the Highlands of Scotland did at the beginning of the present century. In 1823 Mr. Nimmo, the engineer, stated to parliament, that the fertile plains of Limerick, Cork, and Kerry, were separated from each other by a deserted country, presenting an impassable barrier between them. This region was the retreat of smugglers, robbers, and culprits of every description; for the tract was a wild, neglected, and deserted country, without roads, culture, or civilization. The government ordered roads to be made through this barren district. We will take one example of the immediate effect of this road-making, as described by a witness before Parliament:—"A hatter, at Castle-island, had a small field through which the new road passed; this part next the town was not opened until 1826. In making arrangements with him for his damages, he said that he ought to make me (the engineer) a present of all the land he had, for that the second year I was at the roads he sold more hats to the people of the mountains alone than he did for seven years before to the high and low lands together. Although he never worked a day on the roads, he got comfort and prosperity by them."
The hatter of Castle-island got comfort and prosperity by the roads, because the man who had to sell and the man who had to buy were brought closer to each other by means of the roads. When there were no roads, the hatter kept his goods upon the shelf, and the labourer in the mountains went without a hat. When the labourer and the hatter were brought together by the roads, the hatter soon sold off his stock, and the manufacturer of hats went to work to produce him a new stock; while the labourer, who found the advantage of having a hat, also went to work to earn more money, that he might pay for another when he should require it. It became a fashion to wear hats, and of course a fashion to work hard, and to save time, to be able to pay for them. Thus the road created industry on both sides,—on the side of the producer of hats and that of the consumer.
Instances such as these of the want of communication between one district and another are now very rare indeed in these islands. But if we look to countries intimately connected with our own, we shall find no lack of examples of a state of commercial intercourse attending a want of roads. The gold-fields of Australia have largely stimulated the export of manufactured goods from Great Britain. One of the colonists at Sydney writes thus to the chief organ of intelligence in England:—"The roads throughout the colony, bad as they were, are now worse than ever. The inland mails cannot run by night, and stick fast and upset in all directions by day. Communication with the interior towns is possible only at enormous cost. The price of conveying a ton of goods from Sydney to Bathurst, about 130 miles, is eight times the freight of the same quantity from London to Sydney. In cost of conveyance London and Liverpool are, in fact, only sixteen miles from Sydney by land, though the distance by sea is 16,000. We here see daily the most striking illustration of the truth that
'Seas but join the regions they divide.'
Cargoes are poured into the seaports with the greatest facility, and then the distribution is suddenly checked. Hence the enormous rents of stores, cessation of demand, and the necessity of forced sales, with the natural consequence—heavy losses to the exporters, who perhaps wonder how trade with Australia can be so unprofitable, scarcely suspecting one of the main causes of its uncertainty. English merchants might do worse than help to open up the internal communications of this continent."
The city of Sydney has a wharfage two miles in extent. The communication from the port to the interior is thus described:—"Imagine the Great Western Railroad, instead of terminating in a splendid station, with every means of conveying and removing goods to roads in every direction, ending suddenly in swamp, forest, and sand, through which, by dint of lashing, and swearing, and unloading, and reloading, a team of bullocks and a dray drag their Manchester goods ten miles per diem, at 50l. or 80l. per ton for the journey. The channel of trade is all that civilization, science, and capital can make it, from the threshold of the Manchester factory to the edge of the Sydney wharf. There it breaks suddenly, and beyond all is primitive, rude, and barbarous in the means of conveyance. The bale of goods last unloaded from the railway train is transferred to the bullock dray, to begin its 'crawl' up the country, costing all its freight from England for every twenty miles. It cannot be otherwise. There are no passable roads."
Modern Syrian Cart.
It is impossible to have a more vivid picture than this of the sudden impediment which the commercial enterprise of one country receives from the want of the commonest means of communication in another. The bullock-cart of Syria, and the Australian bullock-cart, would be useful instruments if they had roads to work in. But there must be general civilization before there are extensive roads. Carts and bullocks are of readier creation than roads. It has taken eighteen centuries to make our English roads, and the Romans, the kings of the world, were our great road-makers, whose works still remain:—
"labouring pioneers, A multitude with spades and axes arm'd, To lay hills plain, fell woods, or valleys fill, Or where plain was raise hill, or overlay With bridges rivers proud, as with a yoke."—Paradise Regained.
What the Romans were to England, the colonized English must be to Australia. But the discovery of great natural wealth, the vigour of the race, the intercourse with commercial nations of the old and new world, the free institutions which have been transplanted there without any arbitrary meddling or chilling patronage, will effect in a quarter of a century what the parent people, struggling with ignorant rulers and feeble resources, have been ages in accomplishing.
It is encouraging to all nations to see what we have accomplished in this direction.
In 1839 the turnpike-roads of England and Wales amounted to 21,962 miles, and in Scotland to 3666 miles; while in England and Wales the other highways amounted to 104,772 miles. The turnpike-roads were maintained at a cost of a million a year; and the parish highways at a cost of about twelve hundred thousand pounds. There were at that time nearly eight thousand toll-gates in England and Wales. There had been two thousand miles of turnpike-roads, and ten thousand miles of other highways, added to the number existing in 1814. But the improvements of all our roads during that period had been enormous. Science was brought to bear upon the turnpike lines. Common sense changed their form and re-organized their material. The most beautiful engineering was applied to raise valleys and lower hills. Mountains were crossed with ease; rivers were spanned over by massive piers, or by bridges which hung in the air like fairy platforms. The names of M'Adam and Telford became "household words;" and even parish surveyors, stimulated by example, took thought how to mend their ways.
The Canals of England date only for a hundred years back. The first Act of Parliament for the construction of a canal was passed in 1755. The Duke of Bridgewater obtained his first Act of Parliament in 1759, for the construction of those noble works which will connect his memory with those who have been the greatest benefactors of their country. The great manufacturing prosperity of England dates from this period; and it will be for ever associated with the names of Watt, the improver and almost the inventor of the steam-engine,—of Arkwright, the presiding genius of cotton-spinning,—and of Brindley, the great engineer of canals. In the conception of the vast works which Brindley undertook for the Duke of Bridgewater, there was an originality and boldness which may have been carried further in recent engineering, but which a century ago were the creators of works which were looked upon as marvels. To cut tunnels through hills—to carry mounds across valleys—to build aqueducts over navigable rivers—were regarded then as wild and impracticable conceptions. Another engineer, at Brindley's desire, was called in to give an opinion as to a proposed aqueduct over the river Irwell. He looked at the spot where the aqueduct was to be built, and exclaimed, "I have often heard of castles in the air, but never before was shown the place where any of them were to be erected." Brindley's castle in the air still stands firm; and his example, and that of his truly illustrious employer, have covered our land with many such fabrics, which owe their origin not to the government but to the people.
Brindley's Aqueduct over the Irwell.
The navigable canals of England are more than two thousand miles in length. For the slow transport of heavy goods they hold their place against the competition of railroads, and continue to be important instruments of internal commerce. When railways were first projected it is said that an engineer, being asked what would become of the canals if the new mode of transit were adopted, answered that they would be drained and become the beds of railways. Like many other predictions connected with the last great medium of internal communication, the engineer was wholly mistaken in his prophecy.
The great principle of exchange between one part of this empire and another part, which has ceased to be an affair of restrictions and jealousies, has covered the island with good roads, with canals, and finally with railways. The railway and the steam-carriage have carried the principle of diminishing the price of conveyance, and therefore of commodities, by machinery, to an extent which makes all other illustrations almost unnecessary. A road with a waggon moving on it is a mechanical combination; a canal, with its locks, and towing-paths, and boats gliding along almost without effort, is a higher mechanical combination; a railway, with its locomotive engine, and carriage after carriage dragged along at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour, is the highest of such mechanical combinations. The force applied upon a level turnpike-road, which is required to move 1800 lbs., if applied to drag a canal-boat will move 55,500 lbs., both at the rate of 2-1/2 miles per hour. But we want economy in time as well as economy in the application of motive power. It has been attempted to apply speed to canal travelling. Up to four miles an hour the canal can convey an equal weight more economically than a railroad; but after a certain velocity is exceeded, that is 13-1/2 miles an hour, the horse on the turnpike-road can drag as much as the canal-team. Then comes in the great advantage of the railroad. The same force that is required to draw 1900 lbs. upon a canal, at a rate above 13-1/2 miles an hour, will draw 14,400 lbs. upon a railway, at the rate of 13-1/2 miles an hour. The producers and consumers are thus brought together, not only at the least cost of transit, but at the least expenditure of time. The road, the canal, and the railway have each their distinctive advantages; and it is worthy of note how they work together. From every railway station there must be a road to the adjacent towns and villages, and a better road than was once thought necessary. Horses are required as much as ever, although mails and post-chaises are no longer the glories of the road; and the post finds its way into every hamlet by the united agency of the road and the railway.
Roger North described a Newcastle railway in 1680:—"Another thing that is remarkable is their way-leaves; for when men have pieces of ground between the colliery and the river, they sell leave to lead coals over their ground; and so dear that the owner of a rood of ground will expect 20l. per annum for this leave. The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber, from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails; whereby the carriage is so easy that the horse will draw down four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal-merchant." Who would have thought that this contrivance would have led to no large results till a hundred and fifty years had passed away? Who could have believed that "the rails of timber, exactly straight and parallel," and the "bulky carts with four rowlets exactly fitting the rails," would have changed the face, and to a great degree the destinies, of the world?
If we add to the road, the canal, and the railway, the steam-boat traffic of our own coasts, we cannot hesitate to believe that the whole territory of Great Britain and Ireland is more compact, more closely united, more accessible, than was a single county two centuries ago. It may be said, without exaggeration, that it would now be impossible for a traveller in England to set himself down in any accessible situation where the post from London would not reach him in twelve hours. When the first edition of the 'Results of Machinery' was published in 1831, we said that the post from London would reach any part of England in three days; and that, "fifty years before, such a quickness of communication would have been considered beyond the compass of human means." In twenty-four years we have so diminished the practical amount of distance between one part of Great Britain and another, that the post from London to Aberdeen is carried five hundred and forty miles in little more than twenty hours. It is this wonderful rapidity of communication, in connection with the cheapness of postage, which has multiplied letters five-fold since 1839, when the penny rate was introduced. In that year the number of chargeable and franked letters distributed in the United Kingdom was eighty-two millions; in 1853 it was four hundred and ten millions.
Locomotive-Engine Factory.
The annual returns of our railways furnish some of the most astounding figures of modern statistics. On the 1st of January 1854 there were open in England 5811 miles of railway; in Scotland, 995 miles; in Ireland, 834 miles. In 1853 there were one hundred and two million passengers conveyed, who travelled one billion five hundred million miles, being an average of nearly fifteen miles to each passenger. In England considerably less than one-half of the passengers were by penny-a-mile and other third-class trains; in Ireland one-half; and in Scotland two-thirds. The receipts from goods traffic exceed those of the passenger traffic in England and Scotland, but are less in Ireland. These are indeed wonderful results from a system which was wholly experimental twenty-five years ago.
Railway Locomotive.
When William Hutton, in the middle of last century, started from Nottingham (where he earned a scanty living as a bookbinder) and walked to London and back for the purpose of buying tools, he was nine days from home, six of which were spent in going and returning. He travelled on foot, dreading robbers, and still more dreading the cost of food and lodging at public-houses. His whole expenses during this toilsome expedition were only ten shillings and eight pence; but he contented himself with the barest necessaries, keeping the money for his tools sewed up in his shirt-collar. If William Hutton had lived in these days, he would, upon sheer principles of economy, have gone to London by the Nottingham train at a cost of twenty shillings for his transit, in one forenoon, and returned in another. The twenty shillings would have been sacrificed for his conveyance, but he would have had a week's labour free to go to work with his new tools; he need not have sewed his money in his shirt-collar for fear of thieves; and his shoes would not have been worn out and his feet blistered in his toilsome march of two hundred and fifty miles.
A very few years ago it was not uncommon to hear men say that this wonderful communication, the greatest triumph of modern skill, was not a blessing;—for the machinery had put somebody out of employ. Baron Humboldt, a traveller in South America, tells us that, upon a road being made over a part of the great chain of mountains called the Andes, the government was petitioned against the road by a body of men who for centuries had gained a living by carrying travellers in baskets strapped upon their backs over the fearful rocks, which only these guides could cross. Which was the better course—to make the road, and create the thousand employments belonging to freedom of intercourse, for these very carriers of travellers, and for all other men; or to leave the mountains without a road, that the poor guides might gain a premium for risking their lives in an unnecessary peril? But, looking at their direct results, we have no doubt that railroads have greatly multiplied the employments connected with the conveyance of goods and passengers. In 1853 there were eighty thousand persons employed upon the railroads of the United Kingdom in various capacities. We do not include those employed in working upon lines that are not open for traffic, which class in England amounted to twenty-five thousand persons in 1853. But the indirect occupations called into activity by railroads are so numerous as to defy all attempts at calculating the numbers engaged in them. No doubt many occupations were changed by railroads;—there were fewer coachmen, guards, postboys, waggoners, and others, on such a post-road as that from London to York. But it is equally certain that throughout the kingdom there are far more persons employed in conducting the internal communication of the country, effecting that great addition to its productive powers, without which all other production would languish and decay. The census returns of 1851 give the number of three hundred and eighty-six thousand males so employed, including those engaged on our rivers, canals, and coast traffic.
Reindeer.
The vast extension, and the new channels, of our foreign commerce have been greatly affected by the prodigious facilities of our internal communication. They have created, in a measure, special departments of industry, which can be most advantageously pursued in particular localities; but which railways and steam-vessels have united with the whole kingdom, with its colonies, with the habitable globe. The reindeer connects the Laplander with the markets of Sweden, and draws his sledge over the frozen wilds at a speed and power of continuance only rivalled by the locomotive. The same beneficent Providence which has given this animal to the inhabitant of the polar regions,—not only for food, for clothing, but for transport to associate him with some civilization,—has bestowed upon us the mighty power of steam, to connect us with the entire world, from which we were once held to be wholly separated.
Beaver.
CHAPTER XIV.
Houses—The pyramids—Mechanical power—Carpenters' tools—American machinery for building—Bricks—Slate—Household fittings and furniture—Paper-hangings—Carpets—Glass—Pottery—Improvements effected through the reduction or repeal of duties on domestic requirements.
The beaver builds his huts with the tools which nature has given him. He gnaws pieces of wood in two with his sharp teeth, so sharp that the teeth of a similar animal, the agouti, form the only cutting-tool which some rude nations possess. When the beavers desire to move a large piece of wood, they join in a body to drag it along.
Man has not teeth that will cut wood: but he has reason, which directs him to the choice of much more perfect tools.
Pyramid and sphinx
Some of the great monuments of antiquity, such as the pyramids of Egypt, are constructed of enormous blocks of stone brought from distant quarries. We have no means of estimating, with any accuracy, the mechanical knowledge possessed by the people engaged in these works. It was, probably, very small, and, consequently, the human labour employed in such edifices was not only enormous in quantity, but exceedingly painful to the workmen. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, a Greek writer who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, hated the memory of the kings who built the pyramids. He tells us that the great pyramid occupied a hundred thousand men for twenty years in its erection, without counting the workmen who were employed in hewing the stones, and in conveying them to the spot where the pyramid was built. Herodotus speaks of this work as a torment to the people; and doubtless the labour engaged in raising huge masses of stone, that was extensive enough to employ a hundred thousand men for twenty years, which is equal to two millions of men for one year, must have been fearfully tormenting without machinery, or with very imperfect machinery. It has been calculated that about half the steam-engines of England, worked by thirty-six thousand men, would raise the same quantity of stones from the quarry, and elevate them to the same height as the great pyramid, in the short time of eighteen hours. The people of Egypt groaned for twenty years under this enormous work. The labourers groaned because they were sorely taxed; and the rest of the people groaned because they had to pay the labourers. The labourers lived, it is true, upon the wages of their labour, that is, they were paid in food—kept like horses—as the reward of their work. Herodotus says that it was recorded on the pyramid that the onions, radishes, and garlic which the labourers consumed, cost sixteen hundred talents of silver: an immense sum, equivalent to several million pounds. But the onions, radishes, and garlic, the bread, and clothes of the labourer, were wrung out of the profitable labour of the rest of the people. The building of the pyramid was an unprofitable labour. There was no immediate or future source of produce in the pyramid; it produced neither food, nor fuel, nor clothes, nor any other necessary. The labour of a hundred thousand men for twenty years, stupidly employed upon this monument, without an object beyond that of gratifying the pride of the tyrant who raised it, was a direct tax upon the profitable labour of the rest of the people.
"Instead of useful works, like nature great, Enormous cruel wonders crush'd the land."
But admitting that it is sometimes desirable for nations and governments to erect monuments which are not of direct utility,—which may have an indirect utility in recording the memory of great exploits, or in producing feelings of reverence or devotion,—it is clearly an advantage that these works, as well as all other works, should be performed in the cheapest manner; that is, that human labour should derive every possible assistance from mechanical aid. We will give an illustration of the differences of the application of mechanical aid in one of the first operations of building, the moving a block of stone. The following statements are the result of actual experiment upon a stone weighing ten hundred and eighty pounds.
Portland Quarry.
To drag this stone along the smoothed floor of the quarry required a force equal to seven hundred and fifty-eight pounds. The same stone dragged over a floor of planks required six hundred and fifty-two pounds. The same stone placed on a platform of wood, and dragged over the same floor of planks, required six hundred and six pounds. When the two surfaces of wood were soaped as they slid over each other, the force required to drag the stone was reduced to one hundred and eighty-two pounds. When the same stone was placed upon rollers three inches in diameter, it required, to put it in motion along the floor of the quarry, a force only of thirty-four pounds; and by the same rollers upon a wooden floor, a force only of twenty-eight pounds. Without any mechanical aid, it would require the force of four or five men to set that stone in motion. With the mechanical aid of two surfaces of wood soaped, the same weight might be moved by one man. With the more perfect mechanical aid of rollers, the same weight might be moved by a very little child.
From these statements it must be evident that the cost of a block of stone very much depends upon the quantity of labour necessary to move it from the quarry to the place where it is wanted to be used. We have seen that with the simplest mechanical aid labour may be reduced sixty-fold. With more perfect mechanical aid, such as that of water-carriage, the labour may be reduced infinitely lower. Thus, the streets of London are paved with granite from Scotland at a moderate expense.
The cost of timber, which enters so largely into the cost of a house, is in a great degree the cost of transport. In countries where there are great forests, timber-trees are worth nothing where they grow, except there are ready means of transport. In many parts of North America, the great difficulty which the people find is in clearing the land of the timber. The finest trees are not only worthless, but are a positive incumbrance, except when they are growing upon the banks of a great river; in which case the logs are thrown into the water, or formed into rafts, being floated several hundred miles at scarcely any expense. The same stream which carries them to a seaport turns a mill to saw the logs into planks; and when sawn into planks the timber is put on shipboard, and carried to distant countries where timber is wanted. Thus mechanical aid alone gives a value to the timber, and by so doing employs human labour. The stream that floats the tree, the sawing-mill that cuts it, the ship that carries it across the sea, enable men profitably to employ themselves in working it. Without the stream, the mill, and the ship, those men would have no labour, because none could afford to bring the timber to their own doors.
Timber Rafts of the Tyrol.
What an infinite variety of machines, in combination with the human hand, is found in a carpenter's chest of tools! The skilful hand of the workman is the power which sets these machines in motion; just as the wind or the water is the power of a mill, or the elastic force of vapour the power of a steam-engine. When Mr. Boulton, the partner of the great James Watt, waited upon George III. to explain one of the improvements of the steam-engine which they had effected, the king said to him, "What do you sell, Mr. Boulton?" and the honest engineer answered, "What kings, sire, are all fond of—power." There are people at Birmingham who let out power, that is, there are people who have steam-engines who will lend the use of them, by the day or the hour, to persons who require that saving of labour in their various trades; so that a person who wants the strength of a horse, or half a horse, to turn a wheel for grinding, or for setting a lathe in motion, hires a room, or part of a room, in a mill, and has just as much as he requires. The power of a carpenter is in his hand, and the machines moved by that power are in his chest of tools. Every tool which he possesses has for its object to reduce labour, to save material, and to ensure accuracy—the objects of all machines. What a quantity of waste both of time and stuff is saved by his foot-rule! and when he chalks a bit of string and stretches it from one end of a plank to the other, to jerk off the chalk from the string, and thus produce an unerring line upon the face of the plank, he makes a little machine which saves him great labour. Every one of his hundreds of tools, capable of application to a vast variety of purposes, is an invention to save labour. Without some tool the carpenter's work could not be done at all by the human hand. A knife would do very laboriously what is done very quickly by a hatchet. The labour of using a hatchet, and the material which it wastes, are saved twenty times over by the saw. But when the more delicate operations of carpentry are required—when the workman uses his planes, his rabbet-planes, his fillisters, his bevels, and his centre-bits—what an infinitely greater quantity of labour is economized, and how beautifully that work is performed, which, without them, would be rough and imperfect! Every boy of mechanical ingenuity has tried with his knife to make a boat; and with a knife only it is the work of weeks. Give him a chisel, and a gouge, and a vice to hold his wood, and the little boat is the work of a day. Let a boy try to make a round wooden box, with a lid, having only his knife, and he must be expert indeed to produce anything that will be neat and serviceable. Give him a lathe and chisels, and he will learn to make a tidy box in half an hour. Nothing but absolute necessity can render it expedient to use an imperfect tool instead of a perfect. We sometimes see exhibitions of carving, "all done with the common penknife." Professor Willis has truly said, with reference to such weak boasting, "So far from admiring, we should pity the vanity and folly of such a display; and the more, if the work should show a natural aptitude in the workman: for it is certain that, if he has made good work with a bad tool, he would make better with a good one."
Boulton.
The Emperor Maximilian, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, ordered a woodcut to be engraved that should represent the carpentry operations of his time and country. This prince was, no doubt, proud of the advance of Germany in the useful arts. If the President of the United States were thus to record the advance of the republic of which he is the chief, he would show us his saw-mills and his planing-mills. The German carpenters, as we see, are reducing a great slab of wood into shape by the saw and the adze. The Americans have planing-mills, with cutters that make 4000 revolutions, and which plane boards eighteen feet long at the rate of fifty feet, per minute; and while the face of the board is planed, it is tongued and grooved at the same time—that is, one board is made to fit closely into another. But the Americans carry machinery much farther into the business of carpentry. Mr. Whitworth tells us that "many works in various towns are occupied exclusively in making doors, window-frames, or staircases, by means of self-acting machinery, such as planing, tenoning, morticing, and jointing machines. They are able to supply builders with various parts of the wood-work required in building at a much cheaper rate than they can produce them in their own workshops without the aid of such machinery."
Carpenters and their tools. (From an old German woodcut.)
By the use of those machines we are told that twenty men can make panelled doors at the rate of a hundred a day—that is, one man can make five doors. A panelled door is a very expensive part of an English house; and so are window-frames and staircases. If doors and windows and staircases can be made cheaper, more houses and better houses will be built; and thus more carpenters will be employed in building than if those parts of a house were made by hand. The same principle applies to machines as to tools. If carpenters had not tools to make houses, there would be few houses made; and those that were made would be as rough as the hut of the savage who has no tools. The people would go without houses, and the carpenter would go without work,—to say nothing of the people, who would also go without work, that now make tools for the carpenter.
We build in this country more of brick than of stone, because brick-earth is found almost everywhere, and stone fit for building is found only in particular districts. Bricks used to pay the state a duty of five shillings and ten pence a thousand; and yet at the kilns they were to be bought under forty shillings a thousand, which is less than a halfpenny apiece. The government wisely resolved, in 1850, to repeal the excise-duty on bricks. In 1845 the duty on glass was repealed. In 1847 the timber-duties were reduced; and in 1848 they were further reduced. The ever-present necessities of the people—the absolute want of house-accommodation for a population increasing so rapidly—rendered it a paramount duty of the government no longer to let tax interfere with the cheap building of houses. Every invention that adds to cheapness acts in the same direction; for although the direct taxes cease to press upon the various trades of building, the constant demand keeps bricks and timber at a price almost as high as before the removal or mitigation of the tax. But bricks, regarded as the production of a vast amount of labour, are intrinsically cheap. And why? Because they are made by what is truly machinery; as they were made three thousand years ago by the Egyptians.
The clay is ground in a horse-mill; the wooden mould, in which every brick is made singly, is a copying machine. One brick is exactly like another brick. Every brick is of the form of the mould in which it is made. Without the mould the workman could not make the brick of uniform dimensions; and without this uniformity the after labour of putting bricks together would be greatly increased. Without the mould the workman could not form the bricks quickly;—his own labour would be increased ten-fold. The simple machine of the mould not only gives employment to a great many brickmakers who would not be employed at all, but also to a great many bricklayers who would also want employment if the original cost of production were so enormously increased.
Egyptian labour in the brick-field.
There is another material for building which was little used at the beginning of the century. The consumption of slate in London alone was, in 1851, from thirty thousand to forty thousand tons per annum. The quarries of Wales principally supply this immense quantity; but some slates are shipped from Lancashire and Westmorland, and from Scotland and Ireland. In the production of this one material, eight thousand quarriers are employed in Great Britain. Slates are not only used for roofing houses, but in slabs for cisterns and chimney-pieces. The great increase of the supply of water to houses by machinery led to a demand for a safer and cheaper material than lead for cisterns; and slate supplied the want.
How great a variety of things are contained in an ironmonger's shop! Half his store consists of tools of one sort or another to save labour; and the other half consists of articles of convenience or elegance most perfectly adapted to every possible want of the builder or the maker of furniture. The uncivilized man is delighted when he obtains a nail,—any nail. A carpenter and joiner, who supply the wants of a highly civilized community, are not satisfied unless they have a choice of nails, from the finest brad to the largest clasp-nail. A savage thinks a nail will hold two pieces of wood together more completely than anything else in the world. It is seldom, however, that he can afford to put it to such a use. If it is large enough, he makes it into a chisel. An English joiner knows that screws will do the work more perfectly in some cases than any nail; and therefore we have as great a variety of screws as of nails. The commonest house built in England has hinges, and locks, and bolts. A great number are finished with ornamented knobs to door-handles, with bells and bell-pulls, and a thousand other things that have grown up into necessities, because they save domestic labour, and add to domestic comfort. And many of these things really are necessities. M. Say, a French writer, gives us an example of this; and as his story is an amusing one, besides having a moral, we may as well copy it:—
"Being in the country," says he, "I had an example of one of those small losses which a family is exposed to through negligence. For the want of a latchet of small value, the wicket of a barn-yard leading to the fields was often left open. Every one who went through drew the door to: but as there was nothing to fasten the door with, it was always left flapping; sometimes open, and sometimes shut. So the cocks and hens, and the chickens, got out, and were lost. One day a fine pig got out, and ran off into the woods; and after the pig ran all the people about the place,—the gardener, and the cook, and the dairymaid. The gardener first caught sight of the runaway, and, hastening after it, sprained his ankle; in consequence of which the poor man was not able to get out of the house again for a fortnight. The cook found, when she came back from pursuing the pig, that the linen she had left by the fire had fallen down and was burning; and the dairymaid having, in her haste, neglected to tie up the legs of one of her cows, the cow had kicked a colt, which was in the same stable, and broken its leg. The gardener's lost time was worth twenty crowns, to say nothing of the pain he suffered. The linen which was burned, and the colt which was spoiled, were worth as much more. Here, then, was caused a loss of forty crowns, as well as much trouble, plague, and vexation, for the want of a latch which would not have cost three-pence." M. Say's story is one of the many examples of the truth of the old proverb—"for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the man was lost."
Nearly all the great variety of articles in an ironmonger's shop are made by machinery. Without machinery they could not be made at all, or they would be sold at a price which would prevent them being commonly used. Some of the finer articles, such as a Bramah lock, or a Chubb's lock, could not be made at all, unless machinery had been called in to produce that wonderful accuracy, through which no one of a hundred thousand locks and keys shall be exactly like another lock and key. With machinery, the manufacture of ironmongery employs large numbers of artisans who would be otherwise unemployed. There are hundreds of ingenious men at Birmingham who go into business with a capital acquired by their savings as workmen, for the purpose of manufacturing some one single article used in finishing a house, such as the knob of a lock. All the heavy work of their trade is done by machinery. The cheapness of the article creates workmen; and the savings of the workmen accumulate capital to be expended in larger works, and to employ more workmen.
The furniture of a house, some may say—the chairs, and tables, and bedsteads—is made nearly altogether by hand. True. But tools are machines; and further, we owe it to what men generally call machinery, that such furniture, even in the house of a very poor man, is more tasteful in its construction, and of finer material, than that possessed by a nobleman a hundred years ago. How is this? Machinery (that is ships) has brought us much finer woods than we grow ourselves; and other machinery (the sawing-mill) has taught us how to render that fine wood very cheap, by economising the use of it. At a veneering-mill, that is, a mill which cuts a mahogany log into thin plates, much more delicately and truly, and in infinitely less time, than they could be cut by the hand, two hundred and forty square feet of mahogany are cut by one circular saw in one hour. A veneer, or thin plate, is cut off a piece of mahogany, six feet six inches long, by twelve inches wide, in twenty-five seconds. What is the consequence of this? A mahogany table is made almost as cheap as a deal one; and thus the humblest family in England may have some article of mahogany, if it be only a tea-caddy. And let it not be said that deal furniture would afford as much happiness; for a desire for comfort, and even for some degree of elegance, gives a refinement to the character, and, in a certain degree, raises our self-respect. Diogenes, who is said to have lived in a tub, was a great philosopher; but it is not necessary to live in a tub to be wise and virtuous. Nor is that the likeliest plan for becoming so. The probability is, that a man will be more wise and virtuous in proportion as he strives to surround himself with the comforts and decent ornaments of his station.
It is a circumstance worthy to be borne in mind by all who seek the improvement of the people, that whatever raises not only the standard of comfort, but of taste, has direct effects of utility which might not at first be perceived. We will take the case of paper-hangings. Their very name shows that they were a substitute for the arras, or hangings, of former times, which were suspended from the ceilings to cover the imperfections of the walls. This was the case in the houses of the rich. The poor man in his hut had no such device, but must needs "patch a hole to keep the wind away." Till 1830, what, in the language of the excise, was called stained paper, was enormously dear, for a heavy tax greatly impeded its production. When it was dear, many walls were stencilled or daubed over with a rude pattern. The paper-hangings themselves were not only dear, but offensive to the eye, from their want of harmony in colour and of beauty in design. The old papers remained on walls for half a century; and it was not till paper-hangings became a penny a yard, or even a halfpenny, that the landlord or tenant of a small house thought of re-papering. The eye at length got offended by the dirty and ugly old paper. The walls were recovered with neat patterns. But what had offended the eye had been prejudicial to the health. The old papers, that were saturated with damp from without and bad air from within, were recipients and holders of fever. When the bed-room became neat it also became healthful. The duty on paper was 1-3/4d. per yard, when the paper-hanger used to paste together yard after yard, made by hand at the paper-mill, and stamped by block. The paper-machine which gave long rolls of paper enabled hangings to be printed by cylinder, as calico is printed. The absence of tax, and the improvement of the manufacture by machinery, have enabled every man to repaper his filthy and noxious room for almost as little as its whitewashing or colouring will cost him.
Look, again, at the carpet. Contrast it in all its varieties, from the gorgeous Persian to the neat Kidderminster, with the rushes of our forefathers, amidst which the dogs hunted for the bones that had been thrown upon the floor. The clean rushes were a rare luxury, never thought of but upon some festive occasion. The carpet manufacture was little known in England at the beginning of the last century; as we may judge from our still calling one of the most commonly-woven English carpets by the name of "Brussels." There are twelve thousand persons now employed in the manufacture of carpets in Great Britain. The Scotch carpet is the cheapest of the produce of the carpet-loom; and it may be sufficient to show the connection of machinery with the commonest as well as the finest of these productions by an engraving of the loom. One of the most beautiful inventions of man, the Jacquard apparatus (so called from the name of its inventor), is extensively used in every branch of the carpet manufacture.
Scotch carpet-loom.
Let us see what mechanical ingenuity can effect in producing the most useful and ornamental articles of domestic life from the common earth which may be had for digging. Without chemical and mechanical skill we should neither have Glass nor Pottery; and without these articles, how much lowered beneath his present station, in point of comfort and convenience, would be the humblest peasant in the land!
The cost of glass is almost wholly the wages of labour, as the materials are very abundant, and may be said to cost almost nothing; and glass is much more easily worked than any other substance.
Hard and brittle as it is, it has only to be heated, and any form that the workman pleases may be given to it. It melts; but when so hot as to be more susceptible of form than wax or clay, or anything else that we are acquainted with, it still, retains a degree of toughness and capability of extension superior to that of many solids, and of every liquid; when it has become red-hot all its brittleness is gone, and a man may do with it as he pleases. He may press it into a mould; he may take a lump of it upon the end of an iron tube, and, by blowing into the tube with his mouth (keeping the glass hot all the time), he may swell it out into a hollow ball. He may mould that ball into a bottle; he may draw it out lengthways into a pipe; he may cut it open into a cup; he may open it with shears, whirl it round with the edge in the fire, and thus make it into a circular plate. He may also roll it out into sheets, and spin it into threads as fine as a cobweb. In short, so that he keeps it hot, and away from substances by which it may be destroyed, he can do with it just as he pleases. All this, too, may be done, and is done with large quantities every day, in less time than any one would take to give an account of it. In the time that the readiest speaker and clearest describer were telling how one quart bottle is made, an ordinary set of workmen would make some dozens of bottles.
But though the materials of glass are among the cheapest of all materials, and the substance the most obedient to the hand of the workman, there is a great deal of knowledge necessary before glass can be made. It can be made profitably only at large manufactories, and those manufactories must be kept constantly at work night and day.
Glass does not exist in a natural form in many places. The sight of native crystal, probably, led men to think originally of producing a similar substance by art. The fabrication of glass is of high antiquity. The historians of China, Japan, and Tartary speak of glass manufactories existing there more than two thousand years ago. An Egyptian mummy two or three thousand years old, which was exhibited in London, was ornamented with little fragments of coloured glass. The writings of Seneca, a Roman author who lived about the time of our Saviour, and of St. Jerome, who lived five hundred years afterwards, speak of glass being used in windows. It is recorded that the Prior of the convent of Weymouth, in Dorsetshire, in the year 674, sent for French workmen to glaze the windows of his chapel. In the twelfth century the art of making glass was known in this country. Yet it is very doubtful whether glass was employed in windows, excepting those of churches and the houses of the very rich, for several centuries afterwards; and it is quite certain that the period is comparatively recent, as we have shown,[21] when glass windows were used for excluding cold and admitting light in the houses of the great body of the people, or that glass vessels were to be found amongst their ordinary conveniences. The manufacture of glass in England now employs twelve thousand people, because the article, being cheap, is of universal use. The government has wisely taken off the duty on glass; and as the article becomes still cheaper, so will the people employed in its manufacture become more numerous.
Machinery, as we commonly understand the term, is not much employed in the manufacture of glass; but chemistry, which saves as much labour as machinery, and performs work which no machinery could accomplish, is very largely employed. The materials of which glass is made are sand, or earth, and vegetable matter, such as kelp or burnt seaweed, which yield alkali. For the finest glass, sand is brought from great distances, even from Australia. These materials are put in a state of fusion by the heat of an immense furnace. It requires a red heat of sixty hours to prepare the material of a common bottle. Nearly all glass, except glass for mirrors, is what is called blown. The machinery is very simple, consisting only of an iron pipe and the lungs of the workman; and the process is perfected in all its stages by great subdivision of labour, producing extreme neatness and quickness in all persons employed in it. For instance, a wine-glass is made thus:—One man (the blower) takes up the proper quantity of glass on his pipe, and blows it to the size wanted for the bowl; then he whirls it round on a reel, and draws out the stalk. Another man (the footer) blows a smaller and thicker ball, sticks it to the end of the stalk of the blower's glass, and breaks his pipe from it. The blower opens that ball, and whirls the whole round till the foot is formed. Then a boy dips a small rod in the glass-pot, and sticks it to the very centre of the foot. The blower, still turning the glass round, takes a bit of iron, wets it in his mouth, and touches the ball at the place where he wishes the mouth of the glass to be. The glass separates, and the boy takes it to the finisher, who turns the mouth of it; and, by a peculiar swing that he gives it round his head, makes it perfectly circular, at the same time that it is so hardened as to be easily snapped from the rod. Lastly, the boy takes it on a forked iron to the annealing furnace, where it is cooled gradually.
Glass-cutting.
All these operations require the greatest nicety in the workmen; and would take a long time in the performance, and not be very neatly done after all, if they were all done by one man. But the quickness with which they are done by the division of labour is perfectly wonderful.
The cheapness of glass for common use, which cheapness is produced by chemical knowledge and the division of labour, has set the ingenuity of man to work to give greater beauty to glass as an article of luxury. The employment of sharp-grinding wheels, put in motion by a treadle, and used in conjunction with a very nice hand, produces cut glass. Cut glass is now comparatively so cheap, that scarcely a family of the middle ranks is without some beautiful article of this manufacture.
Sheet-glass making.
But the repeal of the duty on glass, and of the tax upon windows, has had the effect of improving the architecture of our houses to a degree which no one would have thought possible who had not studied how the operation of a tax impedes production. We have now plate-glass of the largest dimensions, giving light and beauty to our shops; and sheet-glass, nearly as effective as plate, adorning our private dwellings. Sheet-glass, in the making of which an amount of ingenuity is exercised which would have been thought impossible in the early stages of glass-making, is doing for the ordinary purposes of building what plate-glass did formerly for the rich. A portion of melted glass, weighing twelve or fourteen pounds, is, by the exercise of this skill, converted into a ball, and then into a cylinder, and then into a flat plate; and thus two crystal palaces have been built, which have consumed as much glass, weight by weight, as was required for all the houses in one-fourth of the area of Great Britain in the beginning of the century.
Plate-glass Factory.
There are two kinds of pottery—common potters' ware, and porcelain. The first is a pure kind of brick; and the second a mixture of very fine brick and glass. Almost all nations have some knowledge of pottery; and those of the very hot countries are sometimes satisfied with dishes formed by their fingers without any tool, and dried by the heat of the sun. In England pottery of every sort, and in all countries good pottery, must be baked or burnt in a kiln of some kind or other.
Vessels for holding meat and drink are almost as indispensable as the meat and drink themselves; and the two qualities in them that are most valuable are, that they shall be cheap, and easily cleaned. Pottery, as it is now produced in England, possesses both of these qualities in the very highest degree. A white basin, having all the useful properties of the most costly vessels, may be purchased for twopence at the door of any cottage in England. There are very few substances used in human food that have any effect upon these vessels; and it is only rinsing them in hot water, and wiping them with a cloth, and they are clean.
The making of an earthen bowl would be to a man who made a first attempt no easy matter. Let us see how it is done so that it can be carried two or three hundred miles and sold for twopence, leaving a profit to the maker, and the wholesale and retail dealer.
The common pottery is made of pure clay and pure flint. The flint is found only in the chalk counties, and the fine clays in Devonshire and Dorsetshire; so that, with the exception of some clay for coarse ware, the materials out of which the pottery is made have to be carried from the South of England to Staffordshire, where the potteries are situated.
The great advantage that Staffordshire possesses is abundance of coal to burn the ware and supply the engines that grind the materials.
The clay is worked in water by various machinery till it contains no single piece large enough to be visible to the eye. It is like cream in consistence. The flints are burned. They are first ground in a mill, and then worked in water in the same manner as the clay, the large pieces being returned a second time to the mill.
When both are fine enough, one part of flint is mixed with five or six of clay; the whole is worked to a paste, after which it is kneaded either by the hands or a machine; and when the kneading is completed, it is ready for the potter.
He has a little wheel which lies horizontally. He lays a portion of clay on the centre of the wheel, puts one hand, or finger if the vessel is to be a small one, in the middle, and his other hand on the outside, and, as the wheel turns rapidly round, draws up a hollow vessel in an instant. With his hands, or with very simple tools, he brings it to the shape he wishes, cuts it from the wheel with a wire, and a boy carries it off. The potter makes vessel after vessel, as fast as they can be carried away.
The English Potter.
The potter's wheel is an instrument of the highest antiquity. In the book of Ecclesiasticus we read—"So doth the potter, sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number: he fashioneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet; he applieth himself to lead it over, and is diligent to make clean the furnace."—(c. xxxix., v. 29, 30.) At the present day the oriental potter stands in a pit, in which the lower machinery of his wheel is placed. He works as the potter of the ancient Hebrews.
As the potter produces the vessels they are partially dried; after which they are turned on a lathe and smoothed with a wet sponge when necessary. Only round vessels can be made on the wheel; those of other shapes are made in moulds of plaster. Handles and other solid parts are pressed in moulds, and stuck on while they and the vessels are still wet.
Potter's wheel of modern Egypt.
The vessels thus formed are first dried in a stove, and, when dry, burnt in a kiln. They are in this state called biscuit. If they are finished white, they are glazed by another process. If they are figured, the patterns are engraved on copper, and printed on coarse paper rubbed with soft soap. The ink is made of some colour that will stand the fire, ground with earthy matter. These patterns are moistened and applied to the porous biscuit, which absorbs the colour, and the paper is washed off, leaving the pattern on the biscuit.
Moulds for porcelain, and casts.
The employment of machinery to do all the heavy part of the work, the division of labour, by which each workman acquires wonderful dexterity in his department, and the conducting of the whole upon a large scale, give bread to a vast number of people, make the pottery cheap, and enable it to be sold at a profit in almost every market in the world. It is not ninety years since the first pottery of a good quality was extensively made in England; and before that time what was used was imported,—the common ware from [Delft], in Holland (from which it acquired its name), and the porcelain from China.
Mill-room, where the Ingredients for Pottery are mixed.
The history of the manufacture of porcelain affords us two examples of persevering ingenuity—of intense devotion to one object—which have few parallels in what some may consider the higher walks of art. Palissy and Wedgwood are names that ought to be venerated by every artisan. The one bestowed upon France her manufacture of porcelain, so long the almost exclusive admiration of the wealthy and the tasteful. The other gave to England her more extensive production of earthenware, combining with great cheapness the imitation of the most beautiful forms of ancient art. The potteries of Staffordshire may be almost said to have been created by Josiah Wedgwood. In his workshops we may trace the commencement of a system of improved design which made his ware so superior to any other that had been produced in Europe for common uses. In other branches of manufacture this system found few imitators; and we were too long contented, in our textile fabrics especially, with patterns that were unequalled for ugliness—miserable imitations of foreign goods, or combinations of form and colour outraging every principle of art. We have seen higher things attempted in the present day; but for the greater part of a century the wares of the Staffordshire potter were the only attempts to show that taste was as valuable a quality in association with the various articles which are required for domestic use, as good materials and clean workmanship. It was long before we discovered that taste had an appreciable commercial value.
Wedgwood.
We think that, with regard to buildings and the furniture of buildings, it will be admitted that machinery, in the largest sense of the word, has increased the means of every man to procure a shelter from the elements, and to give him a multitude of conveniences within that shelter. Most will agree that a greater number of persons are profitably employed in affording this shelter and these conveniences, with tools and machines, than if they possessed no such mechanical aids to their industry. In 1851 there were a hundred and eighty-two thousand carpenters and joiners; thirty-one thousand brickmakers; sixty-eight thousand bricklayers; sixty-two thousand painters, plumbers, and glaziers; eighteen thousand plasterers; a hundred thousand masons (some of whom were paviours); forty-two thousand glass and earthenware makers; besides an almost innumerable variety of subordinate trades—engaged in the production of houses, their fittings, and their utensils.
[21] Chapter viii. pp. 85 and 87.