[CHAPTER XXIV.]
MINERALS—WELLS.
Dost thou hear the hammer of Thor,
Wielded in his gloves of iron?
As with leather, so with stone, the hand tools and hard labour have not changed in principle since the ancient days. The hammer for breaking, the lever for lifting, the saw for cutting, rubbing-stones and irons for smoothing and polishing, sand and water for the same purpose, the mallet and chisel, and other implements for ornamenting, the square, the level, and the plumb for their respective purposes, all are as old as the art of building.
And as for buildings and sculpture of stone and marble made by hand tools, we have yet to excel the pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens, which “Earth proudly wears as the best gem upon her zone,” the palaces, coliseums, and aqueducts of Rome, the grand and polished tombs of India, the exquisite halls of the Alhambra, and the Gothic cathedrals.
But the time came when human blood and toil became too dear to be the possession solely of the rulers and the wealthy, and to be used alone to perpetuate and commemorate riches, power and glory.
Close on the expansion of men’s minds came the expansion of steam and the development of modern inventions. The first application of the steam engine in fields of human labour was the drawing of water from the coal mines of England; then in drawing the coal itself.
It was only a step for the steam engine into a new field of labour when General Bentham introduced his system of wood-sawing machinery in 1800; and from sawing wood to sawing stone was only one more step. We find that taken in 1803 in Pennsylvania, when Oliver Evans of Philadelphia drove with a high-pressure steam engine, “twelve saws in heavy frames, sawing at the rate of one hundred feet of marble in twelve hours.” How long would it have taken hand sawyers of marble at ancient Paros and Naxos to have done the same?
Stone-cutting machines of other forms than sawing then followed.
It was desired to divide large blocks generally at the quarries to facilitate transportation. Machines for this purpose are called stone-channelling machines. They consist of a gang of chisels bound together and set on a framework which travels on a track adjacent to the stone to be cut, and so arranged that the cutters may be set to the stone at desired angles, moved automatically forward and back in the grooves they are cutting, be fed in or out, raised or lowered, detached, and otherwise manipulated in the operation.