A Manual of Shoemaking and Leather and Rubber Products

by William H. Dooley

The gloves of ladies and gentlemen in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and before and after, were most beautiful in hand workmanship and embellishments, but they were usually shapeless things, and in these days no one would wear them; they are not to be compared with the elegant style and artistic finish of the modern product.

When the social world was restricted, so to speak, in the numbers of its members who could afford some of life’s luxuries, the use of the glove was confined largely to royalty, nobility, and the well-to-do. And the trade not being extensive, prices were high—being added to by decorative elaboration in needlework in order that the manufacturer and his employees might extract as much money as possible from the ultimate buyer. While glove making is now one of the stabilities of modern manufacture, it is, nevertheless, constantly changing in styles, due to eagerness for novelties and new fashions.

Glove making of leather, in a rough, crude form, was carried on in this country to a very limited extent in New York State as early as 1760, by glove makers brought from Scotland to settle on the grants of Sir William Johnson, in Fulton county. But there was no general market for the home product until one was found in Albany in 1825. These early gloves, crude and clumsy, were cut with shears from leather by means of pasteboard patterns, and men did the cutting and women the sewing. Dies were later introduced, and this led to a great improvement in the character of the output.

But a still greater step forward was taken when the sewing machine was introduced in 1852. This abolished handwork entirely, but still the industry remained largely of a domestic nature, since it could be carried on at home with a machine as well as in a factory. Later steam power was installed in factories with which to run the machines. The cutting of gloves, and the stitching on the backs, was done before the gloves were sent out to be completed in workers’ homes.

As in everything wherein power can be substituted for hand labor in these days, the methods of glove manufacture have undergone a great transformation. The treating of skins in a great tub, three feet deep, whole dyeing and scouring, in rooms of high temperature, has been displaced by putting skins and colors into a cube-shaped box, which, revolving with an irregular motion, produces the same results more quickly than by the primitive way. But when color is to be applied to but one side the process is the same as of old,—hand use of a brush while the skin is stretched out on a slab.

When taken from the stock on hand to be made into gloves, the first thing done to skins by some glove makers is to “feed” them with eggs—not eggs of suspicious merits, but good enough for table use. And of these nothing is used but the yolk. One glove maker imports from China large quantities of the yolks of duck eggs for his work, and his yearly consumption of yolks amounts to seventeen thousand.

When the skins leave the dyehouse, they are rapidly dried in steam-heated lofts; and while stiff and rough they are, or were, worked into softness and smoothness over a wooden upright standard, called a stake, at the top of which is fitted a blunt semicircular knife. Over this the skin is drawn by hand, back and forth, until it becomes as pliable and delicate as silk. When this work was done manually it was most laborious. But now it has been mostly taken over by very ingenious machinery, which looks, in operation, as if it would tear a skin into fragments by the way it snaps and pulls at it, but which is adjustable to such nicety of action and power that the work is done exactly as it is wanted.

The next operation is to pare the skins to uniformity of thickness. This also was handwork for a long time, done with a peculiarly shaped knife, but now emery-coated wheels, with rounded edges, are used by the workers, who, with their aid, do just as good and much faster work in drawing and thinning the skins with absolute precision. This completes the treatment of the skin.

Now the function of the cutter begins, and he must be a workman of experience and good judgment, in that he must contend with the inconstant inelasticity of the skin, reducing it to uniform resistance. He must get so many pieces of glove size from each skin, and suit the pieces to particular features of the skin. When done with a skin he must have left, as useless, only trifling strips and shreds. The shapeliness of the glove which a woman draws over her hand, depends altogether upon the intelligence and skill of the cutter. In American factories the cutter is usually from some glove-making center in Europe and from a family whose occupation has been glove making for centuries.

A punch next cuts these glove pieces into shape, forming and dividing the fingers, slitting the buttonholes, providing side pieces for fingers and thumbs, and also the fragments used for strengthening the buttonholes. The sewing, formerly the handiwork of women, is now done on machines of capacity for exceptionally fine quality of intricate stitching. The number of glove sizes made is sufficient to meet every likely demand. When sewn, and the buttons or fastenings put on, they pass beneath the critical eye of an inspector for scrutiny as to faults. Then they are finally shaped on a hot metal hand, smoothed, banded, boxed, and sent to the salesroom for shipment.