OFFICE OF THE DAILY COMMERCIAL.
Take car-building, for an example, in which the reputation of this town is known to the initiated of all the States and many foreign countries. Travelers are at this moment spinning in Wilmington-made railway-carriages over the extremest parts of North and South America, admiring, through Wilmington-made windows, every possible variety of winter and tropical scenery, on which they comment in English, German, French, Spanish and all civilized languages. Such a migratory product as a rail-car is an active messenger of fame for the place of its fabrication. We examine, as a fair type, the Jackson and Sharp Company's works, claimed to be the largest in the New World, and only exceeded by a few British and Continental establishments. The buildings have frontage upon the Brandywine and Christine streams, as well as on the principal railroad. Here are a congeries of two-story buildings, which are together fifteen hundred feet in length by a width of seventy feet. Five miles of heating-pipes warm the rooms for a thousand workmen. There is something logical and consecutive in the arrangement here, which makes it the best spot on the face of the earth for an enthusiast who should wish to demonstrate, what all loyal Americans believe in, the vast superiority of our form of railway-carriage. The cars proceed, in perfectly regular order, from raw material to completion with the progressive march of a quadratic equation in algebra. They seem to be arranged to demonstrate a theory. First the visitor sees lumber in stock, a million feet of it; then, across one end of a long room, the mere sketch or transparent diagram of a car; then, a car broadly filled in; and so on, up to the last glorious result, upholstered with velvet and smelling of varnish. The cars are on rails, upon which they move, side on, as if by a principle of growth, the undeveloped ones perpetually pushing up their more forward predecessors, until the last perfect carriage is ejected from the fifteen-hundredth foot of the building's length. Each one, gathering material and ornament as it rolls steadily along in its crablike side-fashion, becomes at last a vehicle of perfect luxury; and then, with one final plunge into the open air, it leaves its diversely-destined neighbors, and changes for ever its sidelong motion for the forward roll which will carry it through a long existence. A very large proportion of this company's work is on "palace" cars of the Pullman type, those extravagances of luxury of which Europe is just now applying to Wilmington to learn the lesson. Narrow-gauge cars for the West, in supplying which they are the pioneers, gaudy cars for South America, and sturdy, solid ones for Canada, are all gently riding forward, side to side, in this inexorable chain of destiny, and diverging at the front door on their widely-different errands. Besides the manufacture of cars, the company builds every sort of coasters and steamers. The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing the æsthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon. Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.
The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty, turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other, like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that will behave rashly and heat their axles; wheels that will lie turned up in the air at the bottoms of viaducts; and wheels that in various ways will see astonishing adventures, because in railway-transit there are telescopings and wheels within wheels. The English and the foreign trade of the Lobdell Company is due to its manufacture of wheels in the material or process lately known as chilled iron. This manufacture has not yet penetrated the British intellect. Take the foreman of an English car-manufactory, tell him that you will supply him a wheel about as durable as a wheel with a steel tire at less than half the cost, and he will laugh at you for an impudent idiot. But they use our wheels. The "chilling" of iron, when poured into a mould partly iron-faced, is very singular: as the melted metal hardens against the metallic boundary, its granulation changes to a certain depth, and the outside becomes excessively strong: species of crystals seem to form, presenting their ends to the surface, and meeting the wear and tear there to be experienced. The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. This company employs the process both for car-wheels and for the large cylinders (or "rolls") used in paper-mills. It is not to be supposed that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is so fine. So true is the finish that a pair of these broad rolls, perhaps five feet across, may be approached so near each other that the light showing between them is decomposed: a blade of blue or violet light, inexpressibly thin and of the width of the cylinders, passes through the entire distance. As for the "chilling" of iron, it was applied first to wheels in Baltimore, in 1833, by Mr. Ross Winans; and then, during the same year, Mr. Bonney and his nephew, George G. Lobdell, established the business we see, which has gradually grown to its present capacity of three hundred wheels per day.
FOUNTAIN.
The use of such cylinders as we have just seen under the difficult process of polishing is only understood when we explore some large paper-mill, where they take the place of the old-fashioned frame of wire gauze which produced the hand-made paper. We may select the splendid works of Messrs. Jessup & Moore on the Brandywine. Our welcome is sure to be a cordial one, for among the largest customers of the firm are the publishers of Lippincott's Magazine. The process of paper-making by the Fourdrinier machine was so fully explained in our Number for last November that it is useless now to repeat the details. But it would never do to leave the Brandywine without a glance at least at one of its principal manufactures. The mill of Jessup & Moore uses the strength of the torrent as an auxiliary to its steam-power of seven hundred and fifty horses. The machinery is made by Pusey, Jones & Co., whose iron ships and machine-shops we have already examined: the rolls of admirable accuracy are from the shops of J. Morton Poole & Co. The paper-making process—the vast revolving boiler of twelve feet by twenty-six; the countless sacks of filthy rags, that have clothed peasants of the Black Forest, beggars on the steps of St. Peter's and Egyptian fellahs; their reduction to purity, and hardening from pulp to snowy continuities of endless, marginless paper,—all this is of rare interest in the watching, but has been told until the public is satiated. We leave the banks of the Brandywine and the wharves of Christine, and try to lose ourselves in the thickly-built heart of the city.
"IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF DELAWARE WHO FELL IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UNION."
Even here the implacable business spirit exhibits itself at every turn. In place of the placid millers and quaint refugees of the last century at their doors, we see the shops, the storehouses of manufacturers' supplies, the hotel and the theatre; and, pervading all, the vast throng of artisans, providing such problems of local government and education as the last century never dreamed of.