A hundred years ago John Arnold, the inventor of the chronometer, accomplished a marvel of patience and ingenuity in the form of a watch the size of twopence and the weight of sixpence. The workmanship was so delicate that he was compelled not only to fashion every part with his own hand, but to design and make the tools employed in its construction. The watch was presented to George III., of England, who showed his appreciation of Arnold’s mechanical skill in a present of five hundred guineas. The Emperor of Russia offered Arnold $5000 for a duplicate of the wonderful little time-piece, which offer was, however, declined. It was so difficult for the expert watch-maker of a century ago to make two things exactly alike, that Arnold could not afford to undertake to make another miniature watch even for the exorbitant price of $5000. But for ten dollars the Elgin (Illinois) National Watch Company will supply the Emperor of Russia with a machine-made watch more nearly perfect than Arnold’s masterpiece, and on the same day turn out one thousand others exactly like it. Imagine yourself now in the watch factory of the Elgin Company; observe that artisan holding in his hand a coil of fine steel wire weighing a pound. He approaches a machine, places one end of the wire in its iron fingers, presses a lever, and in a few minutes the coil is converted into two hundred thousand minute screws, each and every one as perfect as the best that Arnold made for his George III. gem.
It is with the greatest effort of painstaking care that the expert sewing-woman draws two stitches closely resembling each other, yet while she is making the toilsome exertion of her utmost skill the sewing-machine sets hundreds of stitches so exactly alike that a microscopic examination would fail to detect the least dissimilarity.
The sewing-machine affords an admirable illustration of the interdependence of the practical arts. The sewing-woman was able to keep pace with the slow and toilsome processes of the distaff and loom, but upon the application of steam-power to spinning and weaving the demand for sewing was augmented a thousand-fold. If the sewing-machine has not emancipated woman from the drudgery so pathetically depicted by Tom Hood, it has multiplied the production of garments almost beyond the power of figures to express. Note this instance illustrative of the triumph of automatic machinery in its application to manufactures. “The Emperor of Austria was lately presented with a suit of clothes possessing this remarkable history: The wool from which the garments were made was clipped from the sheep only eleven hours before the suit was completed. At 6.08 in the morning the sheep were sheared; at 6.11 the wool was washed; at 6.37 dyed; at 6.50 picked; at 7.34 the final carding process was finished; at eight o’clock it was spun; at 8.15 spooled; at 8.37 the warp was in the loom; at 8.43 the shuttles were ready; at 11.10 seven and three-fourth ells of cloth were completed; at 12.03 the cloth was fulled; at 12.14 washed; at 12.17 sprinkled; at 12.31 dried; at 12.45 sheared; at 1.07 napped; at 1.10 brushed; and at 1.15 prepared and ready for the shears and needle. At five o’clock the suit, consisting of a hunting-jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, was finished.”
There is a sort of anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory with which the students are thoroughly familiar. It is called the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory, has twenty-four vises, a great assortment of cold-chisels and files, and is devoted to vise work. The course in the Chipping Filing and Fitting Laboratory consists of a score or more lessons involving various file and chisel manipulations, as, “filing to line,” “dovetailing,” “parallel fitting tongues and grooves,” “ring-work and free-hand filing,” “chipping bevels,” “ward-filing and key-fitting,” “screw-filing,” “scraping,” etc., each lesson being so devised as to insure the introduction of variously shaped tools, and their application to the forms of work for which they are designed.
This anteroom to the Machine-tool Laboratory is like most anterooms plain in its appointments, and it is also like the conventional anteroom, a place where the student does not desire to remain long. The witchery of the great laboratory beyond has already cast its spell over the boy at the vise. But there is excellent hand and eye training work in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.
THE CHIPPING, FILING, AND FITTING LABORATORY.
The file is a humble tool, but it is older than history, dating back to the Greek Mythological period. “From the smallest mouse-tail file used in the delicate operations of the watch and philosophical instrument maker, to the square file for the smith’s heaviest work, there is a multifarious diversity in shape, size, and gauge of cutting.” Some of the files made by the Swiss for the watch-maker “are of so fine a cut that the unaided eye cannot discern the ridges.”
In no department of the useful arts did the hand-worker attain to greater dexterity than in file-cutting. With a sharp-edged chisel the file-cutter made from one hundred and fifty to two hundred “burs” a minute, and they were so fine as to be traced by the sense of touch alone, but as straight as though ruled by a machine. The hand-working file-cutter held his ground until 1859, when a Frenchman, M. Bernot, invented a file-cutting machine which superseded the old method of manufacture, except in cases requiring delicacy of manipulation, reducing the cost of files to one-eighth of their former price.