PRINTED FOR
LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS,
PATERNOSTER-ROW.
1840.
London:
Printed by A. Spottiswoode,
New-Street-Square.
PREFACE.
It is the business of operative industry to produce, transform, and distribute all such material objects as are suited to satisfy the wants of mankind. The primary production of these objects is assigned to the husbandman, the fisherman, and the miner; their transformation to the manufacturer and artisan; and their distribution to the engineer, shipwright, and sailor.[1] The unworked or raw materials are derived,—1. from the organic processes of vegetables and animals, conducted either without or with the fostering care of man; 2. from the boundless stores of mineral and metallic wealth, arranged upon or within the surface of the earth by the benignant Parent of our being, in the fittest condition to exercise our physical and intellectual powers in turning them to the uses of life.
[1] For correct and copious information upon agricultural production, I have great pleasure in referring my readers to Mr. Loudon’s elaborate Encyclopedias of Agriculture, Gardening, and Plants; and for mercantile production and distribution, to Mr. M’Culloch’s excellent Dictionary of Commerce and Commercial Navigation.
The task which I have undertaken in the present work, is to describe and explain the transformations of these primary materials, by mechanical and chemical agencies, into general objects of exchangeable value; leaving, on the one hand, to the mechanical engineer, that of investigating the motive powers of transformation and transport; and, on the other hand, to the handicraftsman, that of tracing their modifications into objects of special or local demand. Contemplated in this view, an art or manufacture may be defined to be that species of industry which effects a certain change in a substance, to suit it for the general market, by combining its parts in a new order and form, through mechanical or chemical means. Iron will serve the purpose of illustrating the nature of the distinctions here laid down, between mechanical engineering; arts and manufactures; and handicraft trades. The engineer perforates the ground with a shaft, or a drift, to the level of the ore, erects the pumps for drainage, the ventilating, and hoisting apparatus, along with the requisite steam or water power; he constructs the roads, the bridges, canals, railways, harbours, docks, cranes, &c., subservient to the transport of the ore and metal; he mounts the steam or water power, and bellows for working the blast-furnaces, the forges, and the cupolas; his principal end and aim on all occasions being to overcome the forces of inertia, gravity, and cohesion. The ores extracted and sorted by the miner, and transported by the engineer to the smelting station, are there skilfully blended by the iron-master (manufacturer), who treats them in a furnace appropriately constructed, along with their due proportions of flux and fuel, whereby he reduces them to cast iron of certain quality, which he runs off at the right periods into rough pigs or regular moulds; he then transforms this crude metal, by mechanical and chemical agencies, into bar and plate iron of various sizes and shapes, fit for the general market; he finally converts the best of the bars into steel, by the cementation furnace, the forge, and the tilt-hammer; or the best of the plates into tin-plate. When farther worked by definite and nearly uniform processes into objects of very general demand in all civilized countries, these iron and steel bars still belong to the domain of manufactures; as, for example, when made into anchors, chain-cables, files, nails, needles, wire, &c.; but when the iron is fashioned, into ever varying and capricious forms, they belong either to the general business of the founder and cutler, or to the particular calling of some handicraft, as the locksmith, gratesmith, coachsmith, gunsmith, tinman, &c.
Such are the principles which have served to guide me in selecting articles for the present volume. By them, as a clue, I have endeavoured to hold a steady course through the vast and otherwise perplexing labyrinth of arts, manufactures, and mines; avoiding alike engineering and mechanical arts, which cause no change in the texture or constitution of matter,—and handicraft operations, which are multiform, capricious, and hardly susceptible of scientific investigation. In fact, had such topics been introduced into the volume, it would have presented a miscellaneous farrago of incongruous articles, too numerous to allow of their being expounded in a manner either interesting or instructive to the manufacturer and the metallurgist. I readily acknowledge, however, that I have not been able to adhere always so rigorously as I could have wished to the above rule of selection; having been constrained by intelligent and influential friends to introduce a few articles which I would gladly have left to the mechanical engineer. Of these Printing is one, which, having had no provision made for it in my original plan, was too hastily compiled to admit of my describing, with suitable figures, the flat-printing automatic machine of Mr. Spottiswoode, wherewith the pages of this volume were worked off; a mechanism which I regard as the most elegant, precise, and productive, hitherto employed to execute the best style of letter press.