Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

CHAPTER IX.
THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.

The Foundery and Smithy are Ancient, the Machine-tool Shop is Modern. — The Giant, Steam, reduced to Servitude. — The Iron Lines of Progress. — They converge in the Shop; its triumphs from the Watchspring to the Locomotive. — The Applications of Iron in Art is the Subject of Subjects. — The Story of Invention is the History of Civilization. — The Machine-maker and the Tool-maker are the best Friends of Man. — Watt’s Great Conception waited for Automatic Tools; their Accuracy. — The Hand-made and the Machine-made Watch. — The Elgin (Illinois) Watch Factory. — The Interdependence of the Arts. — The Making of a Suit of Clothes. — The Anteroom of the Machine-tool Laboratory. — Chipping and Filing. — The File-cutter. — The Poverty of Words as compared with Things. — The Graduating Project. — The Vision of the Instructor.

THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.

The transition from the laboratories for founding and forging to the Machine-tool Laboratory symbolizes a mighty revolution in the practical arts—a revolution so stupendous as to defy description, and so far-reaching as to appall the spirit of prophecy. The foundery and the smithy date back to the dawn of history; the machine-tool shop is a creation of yesterday. About the early manipulations of iron mythology wove a web of fancy: Vulcan forged Jove’s thunderbolts, the iron sword of the savage was a god, and even far down the course of time, late in the Middle Ages, Tancred, the crusader, paid an almost fabulous sum for King Arthur’s famous sword Excalibar—but the modern machine-tool shop is a huge iron automaton, without sentiment, and possessing no poetry except the rhythmic harmony of motion. In this shop steam is reduced to servitude, and compelled with giant hands to bore, mortise, plane, polish, fashion, and fit great masses of iron, and, anon, with delicate fingers to spin gossamer threads of burnished steel. With the hot steam coursing through its steel-ribbed veins the brain of this automaton thinks the thoughts foreordained by its inventor; its hands do his bidding, its arms fetch and carry for him, its feet come and go at his beck and nod. This automaton feeds on iron, steel, copper, and brass, and produces the watch-spring and the locomotive, the revolver and the Krupp gun, the surgeon’s lancet and the shaft of a steamship, the steel pen and the steam-hammer, the vault-lock and the pile-driver, the sewing-machine and the Corliss engine. The lever which wakens this automaton to life, which endows its brain with genius and its fingers with cunning, is the rod of empire. All the lines of modern development converge in the machine-tool shop, and they are all lines of iron, whether consisting of a fine wire strung on poles in mid-air or of huge bars resting on the solid earth. Iron is the king of metals but the slave of man. Its magnetic quality guides the mariner on the sea, and its tough fibre and density sustain the weight of the locomotive on the land. It constitutes the foundation of every useful art, from the plough of the husbandman to the Jacquard loom of the weaver. But it is only in the machine-tool shop that the great steam-driven machines of commerce and manufacture can be produced. The ancients possessed iron, which they cast in the foundery and forged in the smithy; they knew the power of steam, and the magicians of the time amused the populace with exhibitions of it, but they had no machine-tool shops in which steam could be harnessed for the journey across continents and seas. The thousand and one modern applications of iron to the needs of man have originated in the machine-tool shop. It is through these applications of iron, not through iron itself, that human pursuits have been so widely diversified, and human powers so richly developed and enlarged.

The contrasts presented by the development of the useful arts during the last hundred years are startling: The toilsome journey of a day reduced to an hour with the maximum of comfort; the few yards of fabric painfully woven by hand expanded into webs of cotton, linen, woollen, and silk cloths, rolling from thousands of steam-driven looms; the stocking once requiring hours to make, now dropping second by second from the iron fingers of the knitting-machine; the nails, screws, pins, and needles, forged one by one in the old village smithy, now flying from the hands of automatic machines by the thousand million; the numberless stitches of the sewing-machine as compared with the few of the olden time, which made the fingers and the hearts of women ache; the vast crop of cereals planted, cultivated, and gathered into barns with iron hands in contrast with the toilsome processes of even fifty years ago. These are only a few of the many illustrations that might be given of progress in the useful arts, and they all emanate from the machine-tool shop.

At the threshold of the most important inquiry that ever occupied the mind of man stand the twenty-four students we have followed, with more or less regularity, through the various laboratories which constitute the preliminary steps in the manual training course. It is the most important inquiry that ever engaged the attention of man, because it touches modern civilization at more points than any other. It consists of an investigation into the subject of the diversity of the applications of iron in art, a study both of the minute and the ponderous in iron tools and machines, and it is by these tools and machines that the bulk of the great enterprises of the men of modern times are carried forward. These students are familiar with the details of the laboratories for founding and forging, but the manipulations of those branches of iron manufacture are coarse and heavy as compared with those of the Machine-tool Laboratory. In a word, the difference between the iron manipulations of the Machine-tool Laboratory and those of the founding and forging laboratories is the exact measure of the difference between the modern and the ancient systems of civilization.

The ancient civilizations culminated in that of Rome. The Romans possessed iron, but confined their manipulations of it to the foundery and the smithy. Under the Roman empire the enterprises of man—commercial, manufacturing, and industrial generally—reached the limit marked by the applications of iron to the useful arts. It is not important in this connection to inquire why inventions and discoveries ceased. It is enough that they ceased. There was a pause; man, risen to a giddy height, looked backward instead of forward and upward; the struggle to advance came to an end, ambition died out of life, and a saturnalia of bloody crime and savage brutality ensued. Exhaustion followed, then stagnation, moral and intellectual, and then the decay of all the arts. The world stood still, and in that state of quiescence remained until printing was invented and America discovered. Still it waited two hundred and fifty years before receiving the first hint of steam-driven machines and the machines and the machine tool-shop, and during all that time progress was painfully slow. Something was required to give to human ambition a grand impulse, and to open to human energy and industry a broad field. That something did not come until the middle of the eighteenth century, and it should never be forgotten that it came then through the humble men of the workshop. To their inventive genius mankind owes more than to all the philosophers, litterateurs, professors, and statesmen of all time. These men of the workshop—Huntsman, Cort, Roebuck, Watt, Fulton, Mushet, Hargreaves, Neilson, Whitney, Bramah, Maudslay, Clement, Murray, Roberts, the Stephensons, father and son, and Nasmyth—invented machines which seem to rival human intelligence, and in fact far excel human precision in the execution of their work. In endowing iron with the cunning of genius and the terrific power of the fabled cyclops, the modern mechanic has revolutionized the field of human effort, transferring it from the foundery and the smithy to the machine-tool shop. It is here, and here alone, that steam-driven machines can be made. They may be conceived in the mind of a Watt or a Stephenson, but they can be made only by the automatic tools of a Maudslay, a Clement, a Bramah, or a Nasmyth. Man was helpless without steam-driven machines, and he could not have steam-driven machines until machine-made tools had been devised with which to make them. The experience of Watt strikingly illustrates this point. When he had completed his invention of the steam-engine, he found it nearly impossible to realize his idea in a working machine, owing to the incompetency of the workmen of that time. In reply to the inquiry of Dr. Roebuck, “What is the principal hinderance in erecting engines?” he responds, “It is always the smith-work.” His first cylinder, made of hammered iron soldered together by a whitesmith, was a complete failure. But even such workmen were so scarce that upon the death of this “white-iron man” Watt was reduced almost to a state of despair. “His next cylinder was cast and bored at Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless. The piston could not be kept steam-tight, notwithstanding the various expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty, pasteboard, and old hats.” Smeaton, the best workman of the time, “expressed the opinion, when he saw the engine at work, that notwithstanding the excellence of the invention it could never be brought into general use because of the difficulty of getting its various parts manufactured with sufficient precision.” Watt constantly complained of “villanous bad workmanship.” “Machine-made tools were unknown, hence there were no good tools. Attempting to run an engine of the old regime, the foreman of the shop gave it up in despair, exclaiming, “I think we had better leave the cogs to settle their differences with one another; they will grind themselves right in time.” Contrast with this clumsy machine of the hand-tool era the Corliss engine of the present day, whose every movement possesses the noiseless grace of a woman and the conscious power of a giant; and this giant springs full-armed from the machine-tool shop as Minerva sprang from the brain of Jupiter. Mr. Smiles says, “When the powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior were put on board that ship, the parts, consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the different workshops of the Messrs. Penn & Sons, where they had been made by workmen who knew not the places they were to occupy, and fitted together with such precision that so soon as the steam was raised and let into the cylinders the immense machine began as if to breathe and move like a living creature, stretching its huge arms like a new-born giant; and then, after practising its strength a little, and proving its soundness in body and limb, it started off with the power of above a thousand horses, to try its strength in breasting the billows of the North Sea.”

The great and small tools, the automata of the machine-shop, are no less triumphs of mechanical genius than the “powerful oscillating engines of the Warrior.” The prime difficulty of the hand-worker was to make two things exactly alike, then followed the impossibility of making many things—the narrow limit of human capacity to produce. At that point the inventor appeared with a machine which would make a thousand things in the time the hand-worker required to make one, and each one of them the exact counterpart of every other.