Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

The lessons in the Machine-tool Laboratory will not be described in detail as in the other laboratories. The processes are so delicate and so intricate, and the resulting products in machines so closely approach the marvellous, as to beggar description. The poverty of words as compared with things asserts itself with unexampled force in the presence of a great variety of tools, each of which seems to be endowed with the power of reflection, and each of which, instead of whispering a word in your ear, drops into your hand a thing of use to man.

The laboratory is silent, the tools are dumb, but how eloquently they proclaim the era of comfort and luxury! They have no tongue, but through their lips you shall speak across continents and under seas. They have no legs, but through their aid you shall, in a race round the world, outstrip Mercury. The machines they make shall bear all your burdens; with their brawny arms they lift a thousand tons, and with their fingers of fairy-like delicacy pick up a pin; with the augur of Hercules they bore a channel through the mountain of granite, and with a Liliputian gimlet tunnel one of the hairs of your head.

These ingenious tools are worthy of careful inspection both on account of the marvels they perform and the delicacy of their construction and adjustments. One of them, a screw-engine lathe, for example, is taken to pieces, and each piece described in order that the students may be made familiar with the construction of the tool, and so rendered capable of taking good care of it. During this inspection the instructor outlines the history of the tool. The main feature is the slide-rest, invented by Maudslay while in the employ of Bramah, the lock-maker. It is not too much to say that two things exactly alike, or near enough alike, practically, to serve the same purpose very well, were never produced on the old-fashioned turning lathe. This the instructor endeavors to make clear to the class. He also explains precisely how Maudslay’s improvement remedied the defects of the old-fashioned lathe. Still there remained something to be done to make it perfect, and putting the pieces together the instructor shows where Maudslay’s work ended and that of Clement began. Clement made two improvements in the slide-rest, one involving the principle of self-correction, for which he received the gold Isis medal of the Society of Arts in 1827, and the other consisting of the “self-adjusting double-driving centre check,” for which he was awarded the silver medal of the same society in 1828. Thus improved or perfected, the slide-lathe became the acknowledged king of machine-tools, the self-adjusting two-armed driver taking the strain from the centre and dividing it between the two arms, and so correcting all tendency to eccentricity in the work.

The Machine-tool Laboratory contains a great variety of tools, of which the chief are lathes, drills, and planers; but there are many auxiliary tools, and in the advanced stages of the course a single lesson often affords opportunity for the introduction of several of them. And, as in the other school laboratories, each tool, upon its first presentation to the class, forms the subject of a brief lecture—a practical lecture too, for the instructor uses the tool while he sketches its history and perhaps that of its inventor, shows what place it holds in the order of machine-tool development, and how admirably it is adapted to its particular work, and makes suggestions as to its care. Sometimes a lesson involves the use of a drawing made by the students a year before, and the piece of iron in which it is wrought is the product of a previous lesson in forging; and it may also have been manipulated with the file or the cold-chisel, or both, in the Chipping, Filing, and Fitting Laboratory.

From the first lesson in the room devoted to drawing, to the last lesson in the Machine-tool Laboratory, the course of training is orderly, consecutive. Each step contains a hint of the nature of the next step, and each succeeding step consists of a further application of the principles and processes of the last preceding step. In a word, the students follow their drawings through all the laboratories till the designs “are brought out in a finished state either in cast or wrought iron.”

The lathe is the fundamental machine-tool, but a completely equipped machine-tool laboratory includes a great variety of supplementary or auxiliary tools, a thorough knowledge of which is essential to a good mechanical education. It does not follow, because these tools are in a large degree automatic, that skill may be dispensed with in their use. Many of them are very complicated in design and construction, and they can no more be made to do efficient service under an unskilled hand than a locomotive can be made to accomplish a series of successful “runs” by an unskilled “driver.” Hence every tool in the laboratory is made the subject of an exhaustive study. The principle of mechanics involved in its construction is expounded, a practical illustration of its method of operation is given, its peculiar liability to injury is explained, and rules for its care are carefully formulated, and frequently repeated.

There is a prevalent theory that the wide application of so-called automatic tools to mechanical work largely decreases the legitimate demand for skilled mechanics, but it is fallacious. In the first place a thousand things are now made where one thing was made fifty years ago. In the second place the extensive use of steam and electricity greatly enlarges the sphere wherein accurate work becomes absolutely essential to human safety, and hence extends the field of operations of the inventive faculty. In the third place the cost of machine-tool made products having been greatly reduced, competition is proportionately intensified, thus narrowing the margin of profit, and so rendering any injury to machinery through want of skill in the operator relatively more disastrous. As a matter of fact a fine machine-tool is more liable than a watch to get out of order through careless handling, and it no more than a watch, can be properly repaired by a bungler. It follows that skill in the use of machine-tools is as essential to a successful mechanical career now, as skill in the use of hand-tools was formerly.

COURSE IN THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY.