While at Launceston I spent an evening visiting the Smelting Works. The tin-ore which is treated at these works comes from Mount Bischoff, one of the largest and most famous tin mines in the world. The process of smelting is apparently very simple. The ore is mixed with about one-fifth its weight of powdered coal, and then put into a reverberatory furnace for about eight hours. To purify the tin after it is drawn off from this furnace it is kept liquid in a large iron caldron, fixed at the bottom of which there is a piece of green wood. The green wood, as it is charred in the bath of molten tin, gives off gas which rises in bubbles to the surface of the metal. This gas oxidizes the impurities, which float up as a scum that can be easily removed. After this the tin is cast into brick-like blocks, which are carefully stored until the price of tin has risen sufficiently high to yield a profit to those who own the works.
The manager of the works is a nice old gentleman with grey hair. To look at, you would think he was made of good-nature and solid facts. He has a lot of fun in him, however—not common fun, but deep fun. The jokes he made you had to crack for yourself—about a week afterwards. When he showed me the works I can honestly say that I saw nothing even with a veneer of fun upon it. I felt I was getting solid facts, and it was only about two months afterwards that I discovered that I had really been looking on and listening to something which was exceedingly funny. He showed me a chimney at the end of a furnace with a little hole at the bottom of it. ‘Draw out the plug, Jim,’ said he to a workman, ‘and let the gentleman look at the flames and feel the draught.’ One by one we peered into the little hole and looked at the dazzling white flame, and felt the inrush of the air. ‘Be careful, be careful,’ said the old gentleman; ‘that draught is something tremendous. Once a man put his hand to the hole and it was stuck fast like a sucker on a stone. Before we could get him loose we had to draw the charge and extinguish the fire. This made us very careful. When we first started smelting we had the chimney forty feet higher, and then there was a draught. My eye, how it roared! The first charge of ore we put in the furnace disappeared right up the chimney. The directors told us it wouldn’t do, and the shareholders said that letting all their ore fly up the chimney was bad management, so we cut it down twenty feet. After this the furnace worked all right, but the things that happened round about it were quite mysterious. Things took to disappearing. First a lot of coal was lost, next the workmen lost their tools, after that there were several complaints made to the office that clothes had been stolen. Finally, visitors to the works began to complain, and some of them sent in polite notes saying that they had accidentally left some of their belongings behind them, and asked us to be kind enough to send them back. One had lost his umbrella, another a dog, a third his watch-chain.
‘It was clear that robbery was going on, but how to catch the culprits was the difficulty. One suggestion was to mark a lot of things, and lay them about the works. The expense that followed the suggestion nearly broke us. First we marked a few bank-notes, but these went so quickly that we took to marking clothes. After that we marked walking sticks, and finally some pigs of iron. But the whole lot went, and where they went to nobody could tell.
‘The end of it all was that the directors called in the police to watch the place. Next morning, for it was only at night we run the furnace, you know, down came the police to the office, saying that if they stayed at our works they would soon be bankrupt; several of them had lost their truncheons, one his pocket-handkerchief, and another his coat-tails.’
‘And how did it all finish?’ I asked.
‘Well, it finished by a detective coming down.’
‘And did you lose the detective?’ I inquired.
‘No, we didn’t lose the detective; but if that hole’—and he pointed with his stick at the hole through which we had been peering—‘had been three inches bigger we might have had to have advertised for him. When we saw him stuck to that wall like a sucker to a stone, we knew where all the lost property had gone.’
‘Of course you had to draw the charge and extinguish the fire before you got him loose,’ I remarked.
‘Take a drink,’ said the narrator. ‘One fact that proves the truth of history is that it repeats itself. This story has repeated itself, and therefore it must be true also. D’ye see?’