MECHANICAL POWER.
Mr. Robert Owen calculates that two hundred arms, with machines, now manufacture as much cotton as twenty millions of arms were able to manufacture without machines forty years ago; and that the cotton now manufactured in the course of one year, in Great Britain, would require, without machines, sixteen millions of workmen with simple wheels. He calculates further, that the quantity of manufactures of all sorts produced by British workmen with the aid of machines is so great, that it would require, without the assistance of machinery, the labour of four hundred millions of workmen.
In the wool manufacture, machines possess an eminent advantage over common wheels. The yarn on thirty or thirty-six spindles is all equally twisted and drawn to the same degree of fineness. The most dexterous spinners cannot twist so equally and so gently twenty slips of yarn from wool of the same quality, as a machine can do twenty thousand.
At one of the cotton mills in Manchester yarn has been spun so fine, as to require 350 hanks to weigh one pound avoirdupois. The perimeter of the common reel being one yard and a half, 80 threads or revolutions would measure 120 yards; and one hank seven times as much, or 840 yards, which multiplied by 350, gives 294,000 yards, or 167 miles and a fraction.
A steam-engine of the ordinary pressure and construction, with a cylinder of thirty inches in diameter, will perform the work of forty horses; and, as it may be made to act without intermission, while horses will not work more than eight hours in the day, it will do the work of one hundred and twenty horses; and as the work of a horse is equal to that of five men, it will perform as much as six hundred men can; while its whole expense is only equal to about half the number of horses for which it is substituted.
The only purpose to which steam-engines were first applied was the raising of water from coal-pits, mines, &c.; but they are now used for many different purposes in which great power is required. Mr. Bolton applied the steam-engine to his apparatus for coining; and, by the help of four boys only, it was capable of striking thirty thousand pieces of money in an hour; the machine itself was made to keep an accurate account of the number struck off.
MANUFACTURING CELERITY.
In 1811 a gentleman made a bet of one thousand guineas, that he would have a coat made in the course of a single day, from the first process of shearing the sheep till its completion by the tailor. The wager was decided at Newbury, on the 25th of June in that year, by Mr. John Coxeter, of Greenham Mills, near that town. At five o’clock that morning, sir John Throckmorton, bart. presented two Southdown wedder sheep to Mr. Coxeter, and the sheep were shorn, the wool spun, the yarn spooled, warped, loomed, and wove; and the cloth burred, milled, rowed, dried, sheared, and pressed, and put into the hands of the tailors by four o’clock that afternoon: and at twenty minutes past six the coat, entirely finished, was presented by Mr. Coxeter to sir John Throckmorton, who appeared with it before upwards of five thousand spectators, who rent the air with acclamations at this remarkable instance of despatch.