TWEDDELL'S HYDRAULIC RIVETING-MACHINE.
The Waltham Watch Company is considered by some of the most influential European journals as the most important in the American section on account of the revolution it is making in that important industry. When the Swiss commissioner went home from the Centennial he published a letter fairly throwing up the sponge, and when the company's exhibit appeared for the first time in Europe at an international exposition it was regarded as carrying the war into Africa. The American system of making by machinery all the parts of an article—say, of a watch—of a given grade by means of gauges and templets, so that the parts may be "assembled," and of such singular exactitude in their making that any part may be replaced by the corresponding piece of any other watch of the same grade, has in this manufactory attained its highest results, greatest precision and most perfect illustration. The whole collection of watches was sold within a few weeks after the opening. The latest improvements in the balance to secure perfect isochronism under varying conditions of temperature would delight the soul of Harrison, who worked from 1728 to 1761 on the problem of a compensator for the changes of rate due to the expansion and contraction of the metal, and received the reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling offered by the Board of Longitude.
Tiffany's exhibit has been admired and patronized, but is not quite within my range of subjects. Darling, Brown & Sharpe have their machine-tools and gauges, Bliss & Williams their presses and dies. We have the Baxter, Snyder and Lovegrove portable engines, Taylor's and Aultman's agricultural engines. Our railroad exhibit is not very full: we have a Philadelphia and Reading coal-burning locomotive, a Pullman car, the Westinghouse brake, Stephenson's street-cars, car-wheels from Baldwin's and Lobdell's: the latter also sends calender-rolls of remarkable quality. As a sort of set-off to the Austrian car-wheels which have run for twenty-one years, as previously mentioned, Lobdell has a pair which have run 245,000 miles on the Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska Railway. The Fairbanks scales in great variety, both of size and purpose, and of a finish and an accuracy which have become proverbial; the Howe scales; the Goodyear boot- and shoe-machinery; Stow's flexible shaft; Lechner's coal-mining engine; Allen & Roeder's riveting-machine; and Delamater's punches and shears,—are a few more of the representative machines.
Sewing-machines are not in as great variety in the American section as they were in Philadelphia. There are, however, enough of American and European to foot up about eighty exhibitors. Wheeler & Wilson's have been awarded the grand prize, and there are various medals for others, both home and foreign—the American machine, Cole's and Wardwell's among the number. The various hardware exhibits, such as the Disston saws, Ames shovels, Collins axes, Batcheller forks, Russell & Erwin builders' hardware, as well as the Remington, Colt, Winchester, Sharpe and Owen Jones rifles and revolvers, and the Gatling and Gardner guns, are a little on one side of my present line of subjects.
The United States has preserved its ancient reputation in its agricultural machinery. We are especially strong in the class which we term "harvesters," the name including reapers, automatic binders, mowers, horse-rakes and hay-loaders. Our baling-presses also are in advance of competitors. A juryman may perhaps stand excused for supposing that more than an average amount of interest is felt in the machinery which happens to be in his class, but on Class 76—"agricultural implements in motion and in the field"—additional interest was conferred by a series of competitive trials extending from July 22 to August 12, and embracing reapers, mowers, steam and ordinary ploughs, hay-presses, threshing-machines especially, but also including all the other machines for working in the ground, gathering crops and the storage and preparation of feed for animals. In this series of competitive trials eight different countries entered the lists. The prizes were twelve objets d'art placed at the disposal of Monsieur Tisseraud, the "director-general of agriculture and horticulture of France," and the jury selected to attend the trials. Eleven of them were accorded to machines of "exceptional merit," the idea of novelty being included in the definition of the term. These objets d'art are Sèvres vases worth one thousand francs each, and in view of their exceptional value, and the large share that America has in the award, a list of the names may very properly be appended.[5] Several hundred machines competed: for instance, twenty-six reapers, sixteen mowers, fifty-four ploughs, and so on of numerous kinds of agricultural implements and machines for working in the soil, gathering crops and for the work of the homestead and barn.
Last on the foreign side is the British machinery, and the collection is very much larger and more varied than any of the preceding. There are few lines of manufacture which are not represented here. Machines for working in iron and other metals, for sawing and fashioning wood, for the ginning, breaking or carding of cotton, flax, wool, jute and hemp, for working in stone, glass, leather and paper, are shown. Then, again, the finished productions; prime motors, such as stationary engines, locomotives and fire-engines; lifting-machines for solids or liquids, cranes, jacks, elevators, pumps, each in endless variety.
Prominent in the hall, and employed in driving the machinery, is the large double compound horizontal engine of Galloway of Manchester. This form of engine is coming to the front, as is evinced especially in the marine service. Maudslay & Sons of London exhibit a model of the four-cylinder marine compound engine as fitted on the "White Star line" vessels, the Germanic, Britannic, Oceanic, Baltic and Adriatic, and on the steamers of the "Compagnie Générale Transatlantique," the Ville de Havre, Europe, France, Amérique, Labrador, Canada. The vessels of the New York and Bremen line have the same class of engines, built in Greenock, Scotland.
Amid so large a mass of machinery one can but select the most prominent, and among these we may choose such as, while not necessarily imposing in size, are suggestive of ideas which we may find valuable for home introduction. Appleby & Sons lead the world in the completeness and capacity of their great cranes and lifts for docks and wharves, machine-shops, erection of buildings, and travelling cranes for railways or common roads. We must make one exception—the elevators for hotels and warehouses, in which America is in advance of all other countries. While we have many varieties of these, we must give credit where it is due, and the ascenseur Edoux of Paris is the original of all those in which the cage is placed upon a plunger that descends into a vertical cylinder into which water is forced to elevate the plunger, and from which it is withdrawn to allow the plunger and cage to descend. Very fine specimens of this class of elevator are in the New York Post-office building. The gantry crane of Messrs. Appleby Bros. of London is the most complete engine of its kind in the world. It was originally constructed for the growing requirements of the docks of the North-eastern Railway Company of England at Middlesborough. The term "gantry" is applied to the movable scaffold or frame, which in this case rests upon a pair of rails twenty-three feet apart, one of them being close to the edge of the quay. The clear height is seventeen and a half feet, which allows the uninterrupted passage of locomotives and all kinds of rolling-stock on each of the two lines of rails which are spanned by the gantry. The crane is designed for a working load of five tons, with a maximum radius of twenty-one feet from the centre of the crane-post to the plumb-line of the lifting chain, with a capacity for altering the radius by steam to a minimum of fourteen feet. The crane has capacity to (1) lift and lower; (2) turn round completely in either direction simultaneously with the lifting and lowering; (3) alter the radius by raising or lowering the jib-head; (4) travel along the rails by its own steam-power. All these motions are easily worked by one man, who attends to the boiler. The travelling motion is transmitted from the crane-engines by suitable gear and shafts to the travelling wheels, and warping-drums or capstans are fitted on a countershaft on the inner side of each frame, which drums can be driven independently of the travelling wheels for moving trucks into position below the crane as they are required for loading and unloading. Smaller cranes may pass with their loads below the gantry, and a number of these large cranes may be assembled so as each to work at the different hatchways of a large screw steamer, or two may be associated together for any exceptionally heavy lift. The value of elevation of the crane is not only in allowing the loaded cars to be brought on tracks beneath it, but in giving it capacity to work over the sides of large vessels, which when light may rise twenty feet above the level of the quay, and to load or discharge from trucks on two lines of rails on the land-side of the gantry, overhead of the trucks on the two lines which run below the gantry.[6]
Blake's stone-breaker, though only represented by model in the United States section, where it belongs, is shown by two English firms; and though some Europeans profess to have improved upon its details, no efficient substitute has been found for it, but it remains the premium stone-crusher of the world, and has rendered services in the exploitation of gold quartz and silver ores, and in the crushing of stones for public works and for concretes, which can hardly be exaggerated. In testimony taken in the United States in 1872 it was put in evidence that five hundred and nine machines then in service effected a direct saving over hand-labor of five million five hundred thousand dollars per annum.