A shed by the annex contains two curious machines for working stone—one a dresser, belonging to Brunton & Triers, which has a large wheel and a number of planetary cutters whose disk edges as they revolve cut the stone against which they impinge. The other machine, by Weston & Co., is for planing stone mouldings. The stone-drills are in the same annex; also the Smith and the Hardy brakes, the former of which is the European rival of the Westinghouse, acting upon the vacuum principle, and already in possession of so many of the lines in Europe that it proves a serious competitor.
Perhaps nothing in the French Exposition excites more surprise in the minds of those who are conversant with technical matters than the immense advance of the French since 1867 in the matter of machinery. The simple statement of the names of the exhibitors, their residences and the subject-matter occupies a large volume, and the quality and variety are equal to the quantity.
Reference has been made to the web perfecting printing-machine in the English section, but quite a number are shown in the French department, three of them by Marinoni of Paris, one of which prints the journal La France, eighteen thousand an hour. It prints, cuts, counts, folds and piles the papers. Another by the same maker prints twenty thousand an hour of the Weekly Dispatch (English paper), and counts and piles them in heaps of one hundred each. A third works on the Petit Journal, printing forty thousand per hour with two forms. Alauzet & Co. have also a web perfecting press, à double touche, for illustrated papers and book-printing. This wets, prints, cuts, counts and folds in octavo four thousand per hour of super-royal size. They also show a double railway topographic press, printing in two colors. Vauthier's roller-press is arranged to work on an endless roll of paper or on sheets fed in as usual, and prints in six colors. Electro shells are secured in position on the respective rollers, which are in horizontal series, and the paper is conducted by tapes to the rollers in succession. The French section shows a great variety of polychrome, lithographic and zincographic printing-machines, and also a great number of ordinary job and card presses, the most interest, however, centring in the large number and variety of the web perfecting presses for newspapers and for bill-work where long numbers are required.
France has a right to exemplify the Jacquard in its fulness, for it is hers. The original machine of Vaucanson and that of Jacquard are in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiérs, as well as a long series of exemplifications of successive improvements. The Grand Maison de Blanc of Paris has a large one, making an immense linen cloth of damask figures, all in white, and representing what I took at first to be an allegorical picture of all the nations bringing their gifts to the Exposition. I found afterward that it was called Fées du Dessert. It is about three mètres wide, and just as long as you please to make it, but the pattern is repeated every five mètres. The design, on paper, is hung against the wall, and is twelve by eight mètres, all laid off in squares of twelve millimètres, and these again into smaller ones exactly a square millimètre in size. The number of small squares on the sheet of paper is ninety-six million, which represents the number of the intersections of the warp and woof in the pattern. There are nine thousand and sixty-six perforated cards in the Jacquard arrangement for floating the threads which form the damask pattern, and the whole machine stands on a space of about twenty by twelve feet and is eighteen feet high. It is worked by one man, without steam-power, the shifting of the harness being done by two foot-levers and the shuttle thrown by a pull-cord.
We may here observe the looms that weave the marvellously fine silk gauzes realizing such fanciful Indian names as "morning mist," which poetically express the lightness of a web that when spread upon the grass is not visible unless one stoops down and examines closely. To even name the various looms here would be to make a list of ribbons, velvets, cloths and other tissues. The subsidiary machines for dressing the fabrics are here also—for napping, teasling, shearing, stretching and brushing, for measuring, folding and packing.
The other modes of making fabrics shown are a machine for making fishing-nets of great width, and a number of knitting-machines, from the stocking-frame of eighty years ago to the small domestic machine, and the larger one with nine hundred needles in the circumference and making a circular seamless fabric eighteen inches in diameter. The march of improvement is eminently shown here, where an old man is patiently knitting a flat web of ten inches with a series of five motions between the rows of stitches, while just by are the circular machines, whose motions are so rapid that the clicks of the needles merge into a whir, and a man is able to attend to six machines, making one hundred and thirty pounds of knitted goods per day.
Passing the large exhibit of machines for the working of fibres preliminary to the loom—the carding, roving, spinning, reeling and warping—and the allied but different machines which make wire-cloths of different meshes and size, we come to the ropemaking-machines for hemp and wire, which are shown principally in their products, the manufacture taking an amount of room and material which could hardly be expected to be efficiently shown in a crowded building where space is valuable.
The French plant for boring small shafts to find water or obtain sections of the strata, and the larger ones for sinking large ones for mines, are shown by several exhibitors. The annular drills remove cylindrical sections of the strata from ten to sixty centimètres in diameter: the large chisels resemble those described in the Belgian exhibit, having a diameter of four mètres and a weight of twenty-five thousand kilos.
The department of mining has some excellent large models of mining districts, in which the face of the country is represented with the natural undulations, the villages, roads, fields and streams, and made in removal-sections which expose the underlying strata, the galleries, drifts and shafts of the subterranean world.
An attempt to describe the steam-engines, of such various size, shape, position and capacity, would exhaust all the space permissible in a magazine article.