Forecasting the Weather.
The weather has found men a subject for discussion and given them opportunities of speaking a pleasant word of comradeship when meeting in the country or in town. To comment upon its fickleness has become as common a mode of salutation as passing the time of day. The topic is an ancient one and the interest in it has been sustained, for to gauge the coming changes has taken the attention of men from the earliest times. To study the fleeting cloud, to note the coming storm by the direction of the wind, or to notice the damp in the air as the mist rises and is wafted over the fields, has always been a favourite occupation. It was so before the day of barometers and scientific instruments, and it is equally so by those who prefer the pronouncement of the weather prophet rather than the barometer gauge. Galileo is said to have invented the thermometer, but it was his pupil Torricelli, who discovered the barometer. His townsmen in Faenza, in the north of Italy, some years ago erected a monument to his memory, putting up the biggest barometer known. In common with other scientific instruments the barometer has afforded opportunities to the worker in metal and to the art designer, for like the clock case it has been made a thing of beauty as well as one of use. The very remarkable barometer illustrated in Fig. 86 is an elaborate work of the brassfounder and exceedingly ornate. It is a very exceptional piece, but there are other barometers of considerable beauty in the hands of collectors of old bronze and metal-work.
Some of the old scientific instruments are very clumsy looking when compared with modern workmanship. About them it is true there is a quaint beauty and a silent tribute to the skill and ingenuity of early inventors, those who were but groping, perhaps blindly, in the initial stages of an undeveloped science. Scientists always take a delight in the instruments which their predecessors have used, and when they realize by comparison the difficulties the early pioneers had to contend with on account of the inefficient instruments in their possession they wonder at the advance that particular science made in their day.
In Fig. 84 we illustrate a curious old microscope and case, made about the year 1780. It is on a mahogany stand, in which is a drawer containing four magnifying powers. It formerly belonged to a Mr. Charles Sherborne and is now in the Hull Museum, where, as the connecting link between the older type and the modern, there is another interesting microscope made some fifty or sixty years ago. The engineer, mechanic, and scientist find much pleasure in the curios which were associated with their professions in former days, and delight in the possession of "old brass" which seems to bring them nearer to the great men who years ago laid the foundations on which present-day advance has been built.
FIG. 86.—A HANDSOME BRONZE BAROMETER.
Engineers have been very skilful in creating models of engines and machinery with which they have been familiar, and in reproducing in miniature replicas of noted engines which have been used for practical purposes. These little models, some of which were made more than a hundred years ago, in days when steam power was but in its infancy, have been very valuable to engineers to-day, in that they provide them with actual models of old-time engines, the details of construction of which might otherwise have been lost. In one of the museums at South Kensington there are many of these scientific and mechanical models in brass, some of them working on the penny-in-the-slot principle, so that visitors can by the expenditure of a few coppers set in motion any machine they are interested in, and so judge of the actual effects of old-time inventions as illustrated by models which have been made to scale.
In addition to working models of large objects there are some remarkably small models which are stored and treasured by collectors. Some are so small and minute, although perfect in every detail, that it is difficult to understand how the worker in brass even if he had been a jeweller and accustomed to fashion the settings of small stones could so accurately have produced such tiny machines. It is said that the smallest engine in the world, a beautiful piece of metal-work, owned by an American collector, stands on a ten-cent piece! Yet remarkable as it may seem, when connected with an electric power cable of very small calibre the engine starts off as if it were a full-size horizontal engine. The chief materials used in the construction are copper and brass, although the band of the fly-wheel is of solid gold. So small is this little engine that its measurements are all taken in sixty-fourths of an inch. Thus the diameter of the fly-wheel, practically the largest piece of mechanism in the construction of the engine, is 28/64 in., and the fly-wheel band only 7/64 in. The valve rod is only 1/64 in., and the outside diameter of the cylinder 12/64 in.; completed, standing on the small coin referred to, the engine weighs 3 dwt., a truly remarkable work of metallic art.
XVIII
ENAMELS
ON
COPPER
CHAPTER XVIII
ENAMELS ON COPPER
Processes of enamelling—Chinese and Japanese enamels—British enamels.
Copper has been used frequently as the most suitable metal to coat over with enamels, to be afterwards fired or fixed. Even the ancients discovered the art of colouring the metal-work they had wrought by the aid of different enamels more or less translucent. Such substances were used in varied forms, often as paste, filling up incised designs, the workmen in some cases rubbing them down smooth when fixed, in others firing them by heat or simply heating until they ran smoothly over the surface of the metal to which they adhered. The enamels which are to be obtained vary in substance, the beauty of their workmanship, and in their rarity and curio values. They cover the entire period of known art and although such enamels are widely distributed, the art of enamelling having been practised in almost all countries where art has flourished, some have won greater fame than others, many of these rare types being easily distinguished by characteristic forms, colours, or designs.
Among the earlier exponents of enamelling were the Egyptians, the early Greeks, and to some extent the Romans. It would appear that enamelling was understood, too, in England, and was early practised as a British art, but it soon died out, to be restored again in this country under more favourable circumstances in the greater renaissance of mediæval art.
The enamels which have attained such great fame, and which are so keenly appreciated by connoisseurs, are those made at Limoges in Southern France, and again to a lesser extent in Italy and the Rhenish Provinces. Two beautiful examples of twelfth-century pricket candlesticks, now in the British Museum, are of that early form which, except for ecclesiastical purposes, soon gave way to the socket candlestick, a more convenient form for domestic use.