Stamping, pressing, and punching buttons.—Elliott's factory.
The application of machinery, or of peculiar scientific modes of working, to such apparently trifling articles as pins, needles, buttons, and trinkets, may appear of little importance. But let it be remembered, that the manufacture of such articles furnishes employment to many thousands of our fellow-countrymen; and, enabling us to supply other nations with these products, affords us the means of receiving articles of more intrinsic value in exchange. In 1853 our exports of hardware and cutlery amounted to more than three millions and a half sterling. No article ofready attainment, and therefore of general consumption, whether it be a labourer's spade or a child's marble, is unimportant in a commercial point of view. The wooden figures of horses and sheep that may be bought for twopence in the toy-shops furnish employment to cut them, during the long winter nights, to a large portion of the peasantry of the Tyrol. The Swiss peasant cuts a piece of white wood into a boy or a cottage, as he is tending his herd on the side of a mountain. These become considerable articles of export. In the town of Sonneberg, near the forest of Thuringia, four thousand inhabitants are principally employed in the toy-trade, and also find employment for the neighbouring villagers. Mr. Osler, of Birmingham, some years ago, addressing a Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject of his beads and trinkets, said,—"On my first journey to London, a respectable-looking man in the City asked me if I could supply him with dolls' eyes; and I was foolish enough to feel half offended. I thought it derogatory to my new dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls' eyes. He took me into a room quite as wide and perhaps twice the length of this (one of the large rooms for Committees in the House of Commons), and we had just room to walk between stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of dolls. He said, 'These are only the legs and arms—the trunks are below.' But I saw enough to convince me that he wanted a great many eyes; and as the article appeared quite in my own line of business, I said I would take an order by way of experiment; and he showed me several specimens. I copied the order. He ordered various quantities and of various sizes and qualities. On returning to the Tavistock Hotel, I found that the order amounted to upwards of five hundred pounds."
Mr. Osler tells this story to show the importance of trifles. The making of dolls' eyes afforded subsistence to many ingenious workmen in glass toys; and in the same way the most minute and apparently insignificant article of general use, when rendered cheap by chemical science or machinery, produces a return of many thousand pounds, and sets in motion labour and labourers. Without the science and the machinery, which render the article cheap, the labourers would have had no employ, for the article would not have been consumed. What a pretty article is a common tobacco-pipe, of which millions are used! It is made cheap and beautiful in a mould—a machine for copying pipes. If the pipe were made without the mould, and other contrivances, it would cost at least a shilling instead of a halfpenny:—the tobacco-smoker would go without his pipe, and the pipe-maker without his employment.
Amongst articles of great demand that have become of importance, though apparently insignificant, in our own day, there is nothing more worthy of notice than the Lucifer-Match. About twenty years ago chemistry abolished the tinder-box; and the burnt rag that made the tinder went to make paper. Slowly did the invention spread. The use of the lucifer-match is now so established that machines are invented to prepare the splints. In London one saw-mill annually cuts up four hundred large timber-trees for matches. The English matches are generally square, and thus thirty thousand splints are cut in a minute. The American matches are round; and the process of shaping being more elaborate, four thousand five hundred splints are cut in a minute. We will follow a bundle of eighteen hundred of the square splints, each four inches long, through its conversion into three thousand six hundred lucifer-matches.
Without being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur. When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur, must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy, sitting on the floor with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. They have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces the pale, noiseless fire; the chlorate of potash, the sharp cracking illumination. After this application of the more inflammable substance, the matches are separated, and dried in racks. Thoroughly dried, they are gathered up again into bundles of the same quantity, and are taken to the boys who cut them; for the reader will have observed that the bundles have been dipped at each end. There are few things more remarkable in manufactures than the extraordinary rapidity of this cutting-process and that which is connected with it. The boy stands before a bench, the bundle on his right hand, a pile of half-opened empty boxes on his left. The matches are to be cut, and the empty boxes filled, by this boy. A bundle is opened; he seizes a portion, knowing by long habit the required number with sufficient exactness; puts them rapidly into a sort of frame, knocks the ends evenly together, confines them with a strap which he tightens with his foot, and cuts them in two parts with a knife on a hinge, which he brings down with a strong leverage. The halves lie projecting over each end of the frame; he grasps the left portion and thrusts it into a half-open box, which slides into an outer case; and he repeats the process with the matches on his right hand. This series of movements is performed with a rapidity almost unexampled; for in this way, two hundred thousand matches are cut, and two thousand boxes filled, in a day, by one boy.
It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer than in the winter. The increased summer demand for the lucifer-matches shows that the great consumption is among the masses—the labouring population—those who make up the vast majority of the contributors to duties of customs and excise. In the houses of the wealthy there is always fire; in the houses of the poor, fire in summer is a needless hourly expense. Then comes the lucifer-match to supply the want—to light the candle to look in the dark cupboard—to light the afternoon fire to boil the kettle. It is now unnecessary to run to the neighbour for a light, or, as a desperate resource, to work at the tinder-box. The lucifer-matches sometimes fail, but they cost little, and so they are freely used, even by the poorest. Their value was sufficiently shown when an officer in camp at Balaclava wrote home that no want was greater than that of the ready means of procuring fire and light, and that he should hold a box of lucifer-matches cheap at half-a-crown.
