ARKWRIGHT'S SPINNING FRAME.
Mr. Arkwright tells us, that he accidentally derived the first hint of this great invention from seeing a red-hot iron bar elongated by being made to pass between rollers; and, though there is no mechanical analogy between that operation and the process of spinning, it is not difficult to imagine that, by reflecting upon it, and placing the subject in different points of view, it might lead him to his invention.
SPINNING FEATS.
Among the wonders of this branch of manufacture, the following deserve mention:—In 1745, a woman at East Dereham, in Norfolk, spun a single pound of wool into a thread of 84,000 yards in length, wanting only 80 yards of forty-eight miles, which, at the above period, was considered a circumstance of sufficient curiosity to merit a place in the records of the Royal Society. Since that time, however, a young lady of Norwich has spun a pound of combed wool into a thread of 168,000 yards; and she actually produced from the same weight of cotton a thread of 203,000 yards, equal to upwards of 115 miles:—this last thread, if woven, would produce about twenty yards of yard-wide muslin.
MARVELS OF THE ALCHEMISTS.
The pretended secret of the Alchemists was the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, which they occasionally exhibited to keep the dupes who supplied them with money in good spirits. This they performed in various ways. Sometimes they made use of crucibles with a false bottom. At the real bottom, they put a quantity of gold or silver. This was covered by a portion of powdered crucible mixed with gum or wax, and hardened. The material being put into a crucible and the heat applied, the false bottom disappeared; and at the end of the process, the gold or silver was found at the bottom of the crucible. Sometimes, they made a hole in a piece of charcoal, filled it with oxide of gold or silver, and stopped up the hole with a little wax; or they soaked the charcoal in solutions of these metals; or they stirred the mixture in the crucible with hollow rods, containing oxide of gold or silver within, and the end closed with wax. By these means, the gold or silver wanted was introduced during the operation, and considered as a product.
Sometimes the cunning wights used solutions of silver in nitric acid, or of gold in aqua-regia, or an amalgam of gold or silver, which being adroitly introduced, furnished the requisite quantity of metal. A common exhibition was to dip nails into a liquid, and take them out, half converted into gold. The nails were one-half gold and the other half iron, neatly soldered together, and the gold was covered with something to conceal the colour, which the liquid was capable of removing.