Curiosities of Civilization

by Andrew Wynter

The effect of the sudden outbreak of the late war was, perhaps, more beneficially felt upon the laboratory department of the Arsenal than any other. Shells, of all the stores of war, were most deficient when the army left for Varna, and the want increased as soon as actual campaigning commenced. The authorities accordingly permitted Captain Boxer to erect a model manufactory of shells in the autumn of 1855. This he did with surprising rapidity, and proved to their satisfaction that these formidable missiles could be manufactured five pounds a ton cheaper than they could be procured from the contractors—an important saving on an article of which several hundred tons had to be supplied per day. The success of this experiment led to the erection of the splendid shell-foundry which is now attached to the Arsenal, and which is capable of turning out sufficient shells for all the armies of the world. Here may be seen the process by which the old scrap iron of the establishment is transformed into the finished shot and shell, and transferred by its own weight to the transport ready to convey it to the seat of war. The smelting process is carried on in a dozen enormous cupola furnaces, into which the iron and coal are heaped indiscriminately. The fierce heat generated by the blast rapidly melts the iron, which is then allowed to flow into the shell-moulds. From the moment the metal enters these moulds, the shell, in war time, never touches the ground till it is landed at its port of debarkation! The rough shells, after they have cooled a little, are forwarded by railway to the cleaning-room, where they are placed in a revolving iron barrel, seven feet long and seven feet in diameter. This machine circulates with rapidity, and the friction of the contained shells speedily cleanses them of all sand and dirt. From this point they roll through all the succeeding stages of their manufacture. A slightly-inclined plane receives them at the cleaning-drum, and conducts them one by one to the machinery fixed in the great room of the laboratory department. Upwards of ten thousand shells per day passed through this apartment during the late war, and were, on their passage, drilled and “bushed,” or fitted with the socket made to receive the fuse. This simple fact will alone serve to show how energetically the work was carried on to meet the wants of the great siege. The shells, having rolled through the labyrinth of successive machines which operate upon them, now move onward to the painting department, where they receive a coating of black varnish, which prevents oxidation. Hence they continue their journey right across the open ground of the Arsenal to the pier, under the platform of which they keep their course inside an iron tube which leads immediately into the barge alongside the transport in the river. From this barge, into which they sometimes shoot with a considerable impulse, they roll again, through the open port of the ship, to their appointed place in the hold.

The chief factory of the laboratory department is the great sight of the Arsenal, as here the visitor witnesses twenty or thirty most curious operations, the more important only of which he can stop to examine amid the whirlwind of machinery that everywhere meets his sight and vibrates on his ear. The manufacture of elongated bullets for the rifles affords perhaps the most startling novelty of all. The rifle itself is not a greater advance upon old Brown Bess than is the Minié bullet upon the old one-ounce ball. The apparatus now employed to produce it contrasts as forcibly with the simple bullet-mould formerly in use. Instead of heating the lead to a fluid state, it is simply warmed, in which condition it is subjected to hydraulic pressure in a large iron vessel, which has but one small aperture at the top, of the size of the intended elongated bullet. Out of this hole the metal is driven in the form of a continuous rod of lead, which, as it issues forth, rolls itself upon iron reels as though it were so much cotton! The reels are then attached to a machine which draws the metal between its teeth, bites it off to the required size, moulds the cone, depresses the cup, and condenses the mass at the same moment. These wonderful bullet-makers, when in full work, turn out five hundred elongated bullets a minute, or upwards of a quarter of a million daily. To complete the missile, the cup has to be filled with a boxwood plug to ensure its proper expansion whilst in the act of leaving the gun. Here again a partially self-acting apparatus is called into play, one lad being sufficient to feed several machines with square rods of wood, the ends of which are embraced by a circular hollow cutter, which instantly reduces them to the right conical form, and then cuts them off. These little plugs are produced at the same rate as the bullets.

An equally interesting operation is the manufacture of percussion caps. The first process in this light and delicate work is the stamping of sheet-copper into pieces of the required form to make the caps. For this purpose the copper is placed beneath the punch of the machine, and immediately it is put in action, small crosses of metal are seen to fall from it into a box in a continual stream, whilst the sheet itself is transposed by the punching process into a kind of trellis-work. These crosses of equilateral arms are now transferred to another machine, which instantly doubles up the four arms, and at the same time so rounds them, that they form a tube just the size of the gun-nipple, and by a third operation of the same machine a kind of rim is given to the free end, which makes the cap take the form of a hat. This rim marks the difference between the military and the ordinary percussion cap—the soldier, in the hurry and confusion of battle, requiring this guide to enable him to apply the proper end to the nipple. The metal portion of the cap completed, it is transferred to a man who fills it with detonating powder. As this is a very dangerous process, the artisan upon whom the duty devolves sits apart from the boys, who perform all the other work, for fear of an accidental explosion. To fix the fine dust in the cap, a very pretty machine is employed, which gets through its work with extreme rapidity. The caps are placed in regular rows in a frame-work, to which is attached a lever, armed with as many fine points as there are caps in a single row. The motion given by the hand alternately dips these fine points into a tray of varnish, and then into each succeeding line of caps. When the varnish is dry, the powder is fixed and effectually protected from the effects of damp. The caps are now finished, and are ready for the boy who counts and packs them. Machinery is even employed to perform the part of cocker, and with one gentle shake does the brain-work of many minutes. A frame is constructed, into which fit a number of small trays, each tray being pierced with seventy-five holes. Upon this frame the boy heaps up a few handfuls of caps, and then gives the whole machine a few jerks, and when he sees that every hole is filled with a cap, he lifts out each separate tray and empties it into appropriate boxes. In this manner he is enabled, with extreme rapidity, to count out his parcels of seventy-five caps, the regulation number served to each soldier with sixty rounds of ball-cartridge—the excess of fifteen being allowed for loss in the flurry of action. The British soldier’s clumsy fingers are by no means well calculated for handling and adjusting such light articles.

Equally curious with the production of caps is the manufacture of cartridge-bags. The visitor, as he mounts the stairs to the upper floor of a large building close at hand, is made aware by the hum and collision of shrill young voices that he is approaching a hive of children, and as he rears his head above the banisters, he finds that he is in the midst of a little army of urchins, varying from eight to fourteen years of age, seated at long benches rolling up paper cartridge-bags. This process requires some little nicety, as each bag is made up of three distinct papers of different sizes and shapes, which have to be neatly adjusted round a roller one upon another. By long practice some of these little fellows complete the operation in a surprisingly short space of time—rolling, twisting in the end, tying, and drawing it from the rod almost as quickly as you can look at them, the swaying of the body during the operation giving to the entire mass of eight hundred children a most extraordinary aggregate movement as the room is surveyed from one end to the other. Some boys are infinitely more nimble-fingered than others, and the sharpest earn eight or nine shillings a-week at the work.

Nimble as their little fingers ply, however, the hands of machinery laugh them to scorn. In the room below we note as we descend strange wheel-like frames revolving horizontally, and others working up and down into tanks of paper pulp. These are the new machines destined to supplant the little children over-head, and to hush the ceaseless hum of their human labour. Throughout the entire range of the Arsenal there is no sight more interesting than is exhibited by these machines, the modus operandi of which is extremely simple. Circles of brass tubing have short upright tubes inserted into them at regular distances. These upright tubes, or fingers, are pierced with fine holes, and the whole apparatus is attached to an exhausting-pump. Worsted mittens are fitted to the fingers, and when all is ready, the Briarean hand is dipped into the bath of pulp, the air in the tubes is withdrawn, the liquid necessarily rushes towards the fingers, and the water passing through, leaves the pulp adherent to the mitten. The process is instantaneous, hand after hand drops into the trough, gloves its fingers with pulp, and rises with a thousand cartridges in its grasp, quicker than one of the boys up stairs has finished a single bag. The process is not complete, however, until they are dry. Each mitten is removed from its metal finger, and placed on a similar one heated with steam. In ten minutes the desiccating process is finished, and the cartridge-bag is removed, a far more perfect instrument for its deadly purpose than that which is made up stairs by hand. The hint for this beautiful machine was taken from the apparatus employed for making conical seamless sugar-bags without the intervention of the paper maker—so diverse are the developments which may spring from the same idea. Of these small-arm cartridge-bags, 400,000 can be manufactured in a day of ten hours; but as each cartridge is composed of a double envelope, one fitting within the other, in order to separate the conical ball from the powder, the product furnishes 200,000 cartridges—an enormous quantity, but scarcely equal to the demand of such campaigners as Havelock, whose men, day by day, consumed their sixty rounds per head. At first sight it seems strange to find the Government turned paper makers, and the visitor may think that these bags could be obtained, as the sugar-bags are by the grocers, from the private manufacturer, but it is absolutely necessary that they should be produced side by side with their deadly contents. They are far more delicate things to maintain in their integrity than even wafer-biscuits, which they very much resemble, and they are required in such enormous numbers, that any mechanical impediment, such as crushing, interposed to the filling of them with powder and ball, would add immensely to the expense. The pressure in packing necessary to convey them to the Arsenal would flatten, and hence destroy them.

But where, asks the visitor, is the small-arms factory for the construction of those far-famed rifles which prevented a disaster at Inkermann, and at once doubled the effective power of the steadiest infantry of Europe? And well may he ask the question, for what more natural place for this important manufacture than in connexion with kindred Government establishments? When the War Office decided upon erecting a factory to meet the sudden demands of the war, it was proposed by the Inspector of Machinery to plant it within the walls of the Arsenal; but the authorities, for some reason best known to themselves, decided otherwise, and it was accordingly taken to Enfield Lock, which is twelve miles from London on the Eastern Counties Railway, and where they had before a small establishment for the repair and manufacture of a limited number of muskets. The traveller who gets out at the factory station finds himself at once in a road which leads him into a flat country laced with streams, where Paul Potter might have found a study at every turn. Here, amid flocks and herds peacefully grazing, or standing in the shadows of the pollard willows, he espies the tall chimneys of the Enfield factory, looking like a stray fragment of Manchester that had wandered out of its way. In all England a more absurd spot for it could not have been chosen.

The establishment, however, is so worthy of a minute inspection, that we will proceed to give a general view of the whole. The threshold of the manufacturing process is the smithery, where the foreman presides to deliver out the raw material and receive in return the work done. To each smith is issued the particular size of bar iron or steel required for the article he works upon. Opening out of this shop is the smithery itself, with its fifty-five forges, together with steam hammers, hoppers, rider hammers, and other contrivances by which our modern Vulcan economises labour. In this department all the iron and steel work of the lock and stock are moulded, for the ordinary method of forging conveys a very inadequate idea of the manner in which the material is here manipulated. Every sportsman knows that the lock of a gun is made up of many small pieces of irregular form. To forge these with the hammer alone would be far too expensive a process, as it would require highly-skilled labour, nor even then would it be possible to produce the different pieces of exactly the same size, so that any one may fit into any other with perfect accuracy when the gun is ultimately put together. To accomplish this end, the essential principle of the manufacture, each smith with his helper takes in hand a particular piece of work. One man, for instance, makes hammers, or cocks, as sportsmen call them. The irregular form of this part of the lock would seem to preclude the possibility of its being made by the hundred-thousand, each one being the counterpart of its brother to the thousandth of an inch. Yet this is done, and with an ease that appears astonishing to the beholder. Let us watch the brawny smith before us. He draws a rod from the fire at white heat, lays it upon an indented part of his anvil, and, together with his mate, deals alternate blows in half a dozen different directions, and produces in a few seconds an irregular mass, which we see bears a resemblance to the indentation in the anvil, which, on closer inspection, we find to be a rude matrix of a guncock. This is the first process, called swaging. These two men go on from one year’s end to another, giving alternate light and heavy blows and taps on all sides of the metal. These blows, though sometimes delivered through a swinging circle of eight or ten feet, fall upon exactly the same spot, for practice so nicely co-ordinates the muscles as to produce a motion as exact as that which draws from the bow of a Paganini the same delicate note for any number of times in succession. The cock thus swaged, the smith stamps his initials upon it, and transfers it to another smith, who works with a steam-hammer, on which is a steel die of the exact form it is required to take. A single blow of this instrument gives it its final form, leaving the superfluous metal in the shape of a thin film, where it has been squeezed into the opening between the dies, which is cut off by a subsequent stamping process. By this method of swaging and stamping, the lock-plate, bridle, cock, sear, trigger, sightleaf, breech-screw, and swivel are formed so perfectly, that the tool is scarcely required to touch them afterwards.

Those parts of the lock made of steel, such as the mainspring, searspring and tumbler, are simply swaged, the stamping process being omitted on account of the sudden blow tending to break the grain and thus destroy the elasticity of the metal.

A curious operation of the smithery is the bayonet forging. The bars for bayonet-work are never forged of such uniform width as to allow the smith to cut off to a nicety the length he requires. In order to rectify this difficulty, and enable him to tell how much will serve his purpose, he is provided with a water-gauge, or tube filled with a given quantity of water; into this the rod is plunged, and withdrawn when the fluid reaches the top of the gauge. By this expedient the iron, however irregular in form, is measured accurately by the displacement of the water. When the bar is withdrawn, the smith cuts it off at the watermark, and his mate thrusts it into the forge fire. Whilst this is going on, the visitor becomes conscious of a strange machine close at hand, which perpetually gnashes together a mouthful of hardened steel teeth; this is that useful instrument called the rider hammer. These teeth bear upon their upper and under surfaces grooves of the form the iron bar is required to take. The short white-heated bit of bar is thrust in, and by a series of nabs is instantly lengthened a couple of inches; the next tooth still further attenuates it, the third forces it into the triangular form, and a fourth and fifth reduce it to the graduated length required: thus the blade of this terrible weapon is rough-drawn. The ring by which it is attached to the barrel of the musket is forged separately, and welded to the shank at right angles. These are the first of at least seventy-six distinct operations before the weapon is fitted to fulfil its appointed design, that of making the ugliest and most irreparable wound possible in the human corpus. The work done, it is returned to the foreman, whose first duty is to see that the material with which the man has been debited has wrought into the requisite number of pieces; if it falls short the waste is charged to him. The next scrutiny is into the quality of the work, and the last and not the least important inquiry is, does it gauge? Unless the work passes all these ordeals it is rejected, and the person in fault is known by the distinguishing mark of the smith who prepared it. In some cases, as in the making of the bands which bind the barrel to the stock, this mark is ground off in passing through one of the presses; but is immediately restored, that the work may be traced to the artisan who constructed it. The effect of thus fixing the responsibility of every single thing manufactured upon the maker is immense, and induces habits of carefulness such as are seldom seen in ordinary workmen. The foreman now issues the different pieces to the finishers, who convey them to the annealing room, where they are rendered soft for working by heat, and cleaned of their scale or oxide, which would otherwise injure the tool, by means of dilute sulphuric acid.

The barrel is welded and finished in a separate factory. The piece of metal out of which the gradually tapering tube is ultimately fashioned seems to bear no relation to such a form. You see the smith take a small plate of quarter-inch iron, about a foot long by a few inches wide, heat it to a welding heat, and then place it between the lips of a rolling mill, with grooved instead of flat rollers, and in an instant it comes out a tube. It has next to be drawn out to the requisite length and tapered, which is done by passing it through a series of mills, each succeeding one being grooved smaller than the preceding. The bore is kept hollow during the operation by a central iron rod. The breech piece is welded on by a single blow of a steam-hammer, and the process of turning the bore begins. Four barrels are acted upon by one lathe, and the first operation is performed in fifteen minutes. Only a slight cutting is made each time, and the barrel has to be submitted to the action of many different boring instruments until the exact size, ·577 of an inch, is attained. The outside is now turned, the tool taking off the superfluous metal in one continuous ringlet of iron.