Part 9 (1/2)
The furniture of a house, some may say--the chairs, and tables, and bedsteads--is made nearly altogether by hand. True. But tools are machines; and further, we owe it to what men generally call machinery, that such furniture, even in the house of a very poor man, is more tasteful in its construction, and of finer material, than that possessed by a n.o.bleman a hundred years ago. How is this? Machinery (that is s.h.i.+ps) has brought us much finer woods than we grow ourselves; and other machinery (the sawing-mill) has taught us how to render that fine wood very cheap, by economising the use of it. At a veneering-mill, that is, a mill which cuts a mahogany log into thin plates, much more delicately and truly, and in infinitely less time, than they could be cut by the hand, two hundred and forty square feet of mahogany are cut by one circular saw in one hour. A veneer, or thin plate, is cut off a piece of mahogany, six feet six inches long, by twelve inches wide, in twenty-five seconds. What is the consequence of this? A mahogany table is made almost as cheap as a deal one; and thus the humblest family in England may have some article of mahogany, if it be only a tea-caddy.
And let it not be said that deal furniture would afford as much happiness; for a desire for comfort, and even for some degree of elegance, gives a refinement to the character, and, in a certain degree, raises our self-respect. Diogenes, who is said to have lived in a tub, was a great philosopher; but it is not necessary to live in a tub to be wise and virtuous. Nor is that the likeliest plan for becoming so. The probability is, that a man will be more wise and virtuous in proportion as he strives to surround himself with the comforts and decent ornaments of his station.
It is a circ.u.mstance worthy to be borne in mind by all who seek the improvement of the people, that whatever raises not only the standard of comfort, but of taste, has direct effects of utility which might not at first be perceived. We will take the case of paper-hangings. Their very name shows that they were a subst.i.tute for the arras, or hangings, of former times, which were suspended from the ceilings to cover the imperfections of the walls. This was the case in the houses of the rich.
The poor man in his hut had no such device, but must needs ”patch a hole to keep the wind away.” Till 1830, what, in the language of the excise, was called stained paper, was enormously dear, for a heavy tax greatly impeded its production. When it was dear, many walls were stencilled or daubed over with a rude pattern. The paper-hangings themselves were not only dear, but offensive to the eye, from their want of harmony in colour and of beauty in design. The old papers remained on walls for half a century; and it was not till paper-hangings became a penny a yard, or even a halfpenny, that the landlord or tenant of a small house thought of re-papering. The eye at length got offended by the dirty and ugly old paper. The walls were recovered with neat patterns. But what had offended the eye had been prejudicial to the health. The old papers, that were saturated with damp from without and bad air from within, were recipients and holders of fever. When the bed-room became neat it also became healthful. The duty on paper was 1-3/4_d._ per yard, when the paper-hanger used to paste together yard after yard, made by hand at the paper-mill, and stamped by block. The paper-machine which gave long rolls of paper enabled hangings to be printed by cylinder, as calico is printed. The absence of tax, and the improvement of the manufacture by machinery, have enabled every man to repaper his filthy and noxious room for almost as little as its whitewas.h.i.+ng or colouring will cost him.
Look, again, at the carpet. Contrast it in all its varieties, from the gorgeous Persian to the neat Kidderminster, with the rushes of our forefathers, amidst which the dogs hunted for the bones that had been thrown upon the floor. The clean rushes were a rare luxury, never thought of but upon some festive occasion. The carpet manufacture was little known in England at the beginning of the last century; as we may judge from our still calling one of the most commonly-woven English carpets by the name of ”Brussels.” There are twelve thousand persons now employed in the manufacture of carpets in Great Britain. The Scotch carpet is the cheapest of the produce of the carpet-loom; and it may be sufficient to show the connection of machinery with the commonest as well as the finest of these productions by an engraving of the loom. One of the most beautiful inventions of man, the Jacquard apparatus (so called from the name of its inventor), is extensively used in every branch of the carpet manufacture.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Scotch carpet-loom.]
Let us see what mechanical ingenuity can effect in producing the most useful and ornamental articles of domestic life from the common earth which may be had for digging. Without chemical and mechanical skill we should neither have Gla.s.s nor Pottery; and without these articles, how much lowered beneath his present station, in point of comfort and convenience, would be the humblest peasant in the land!
The cost of gla.s.s is almost wholly the wages of labour, as the materials are very abundant, and may be said to cost almost nothing; and gla.s.s is much more easily worked than any other substance.
Hard and brittle as it is, it has only to be heated, and any form that the workman pleases may be given to it. It melts; but when so hot as to be more susceptible of form than wax or clay, or anything else that we are acquainted with, it still, retains a degree of toughness and capability of extension superior to that of many solids, and of every liquid; when it has become red-hot all its brittleness is gone, and a man may do with it as he pleases. He may press it into a mould; he may take a lump of it upon the end of an iron tube, and, by blowing into the tube with his mouth (keeping the gla.s.s hot all the time), he may swell it out into a hollow ball. He may mould that ball into a bottle; he may draw it out lengthways into a pipe; he may cut it open into a cup; he may open it with shears, whirl it round with the edge in the fire, and thus make it into a circular plate. He may also roll it out into sheets, and spin it into threads as fine as a cobweb. In short, so that he keeps it hot, and away from substances by which it may be destroyed, he can do with it just as he pleases. All this, too, may be done, and is done with large quant.i.ties every day, in less time than any one would take to give an account of it. In the time that the readiest speaker and clearest describer were telling how one quart bottle is made, an ordinary set of workmen would make some dozens of bottles.
But though the materials of gla.s.s are among the cheapest of all materials, and the substance the most obedient to the hand of the workman, there is a great deal of knowledge necessary before gla.s.s can be made. It can be made profitably only at large manufactories, and those manufactories must be kept constantly at work night and day.
Gla.s.s does not exist in a natural form in many places. The sight of native crystal, probably, led men to think originally of producing a similar substance by art. The fabrication of gla.s.s is of high antiquity.
The historians of China, j.a.pan, and Tartary speak of gla.s.s manufactories existing there more than two thousand years ago. An Egyptian mummy two or three thousand years old, which was exhibited in London, was ornamented with little fragments of coloured gla.s.s. The writings of Seneca, a Roman author who lived about the time of our Saviour, and of St. Jerome, who lived five hundred years afterwards, speak of gla.s.s being used in windows. It is recorded that the Prior of the convent of Weymouth, in Dorsets.h.i.+re, in the year 674, sent for French workmen to glaze the windows of his chapel. In the twelfth century the art of making gla.s.s was known in this country. Yet it is very doubtful whether gla.s.s was employed in windows, excepting those of churches and the houses of the very rich, for several centuries afterwards; and it is quite certain that the period is comparatively recent, as we have shown,[21] when gla.s.s windows were used for excluding cold and admitting light in the houses of the great body of the people, or that gla.s.s vessels were to be found amongst their ordinary conveniences. The manufacture of gla.s.s in England now employs twelve thousand people, because the article, being cheap, is of universal use. The government has wisely taken off the duty on gla.s.s; and as the article becomes still cheaper, so will the people employed in its manufacture become more numerous.
Machinery, as we commonly understand the term, is not much employed in the manufacture of gla.s.s; but chemistry, which saves as much labour as machinery, and performs work which no machinery could accomplish, is very largely employed. The materials of which gla.s.s is made are sand, or earth, and vegetable matter, such as kelp or burnt seaweed, which yield alkali. For the finest gla.s.s, sand is brought from great distances, even from Australia. These materials are put in a state of fusion by the heat of an immense furnace. It requires a red heat of sixty hours to prepare the material of a common bottle. Nearly all gla.s.s, except gla.s.s for mirrors, is what is called blown. The machinery is very simple, consisting only of an iron pipe and the lungs of the workman; and the process is perfected in all its stages by great subdivision of labour, producing extreme neatness and quickness in all persons employed in it. For instance, a wine-gla.s.s is made thus:--One man (the blower) takes up the proper quant.i.ty of gla.s.s on his pipe, and blows it to the size wanted for the bowl; then he whirls it round on a reel, and draws out the stalk. Another man (the footer) blows a smaller and thicker ball, sticks it to the end of the stalk of the blower's gla.s.s, and breaks his pipe from it. The blower opens that ball, and whirls the whole round till the foot is formed. Then a boy dips a small rod in the gla.s.s-pot, and sticks it to the very centre of the foot. The blower, still turning the gla.s.s round, takes a bit of iron, wets it in his mouth, and touches the ball at the place where he wishes the mouth of the gla.s.s to be. The gla.s.s separates, and the boy takes it to the finisher, who turns the mouth of it; and, by a peculiar swing that he gives it round his head, makes it perfectly circular, at the same time that it is so hardened as to be easily snapped from the rod. Lastly, the boy takes it on a forked iron to the annealing furnace, where it is cooled gradually.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Gla.s.s-cutting.]
All these operations require the greatest nicety in the workmen; and would take a long time in the performance, and not be very neatly done after all, if they were all done by one man. But the quickness with which they are done by the division of labour is perfectly wonderful.
The cheapness of gla.s.s for common use, which cheapness is produced by chemical knowledge and the division of labour, has set the ingenuity of man to work to give greater beauty to gla.s.s as an article of luxury. The employment of sharp-grinding wheels, put in motion by a treadle, and used in conjunction with a very nice hand, produces _cut_ gla.s.s. Cut gla.s.s is now comparatively so cheap, that scarcely a family of the middle ranks is without some beautiful article of this manufacture.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sheet-gla.s.s making.]
But the repeal of the duty on gla.s.s, and of the tax upon windows, has had the effect of improving the architecture of our houses to a degree which no one would have thought possible who had not studied how the operation of a tax impedes production. We have now plate-gla.s.s of the largest dimensions, giving light and beauty to our shops; and sheet-gla.s.s, nearly as effective as plate, adorning our private dwellings. Sheet-gla.s.s, in the making of which an amount of ingenuity is exercised which would have been thought impossible in the early stages of gla.s.s-making, is doing for the ordinary purposes of building what plate-gla.s.s did formerly for the rich. A portion of melted gla.s.s, weighing twelve or fourteen pounds, is, by the exercise of this skill, converted into a ball, and then into a cylinder, and then into a flat plate; and thus two crystal palaces have been built, which have consumed as much gla.s.s, weight by weight, as was required for all the houses in one-fourth of the area of Great Britain in the beginning of the century.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate-gla.s.s Factory.]
There are two kinds of pottery--common potters' ware, and porcelain. The first is a pure kind of brick; and the second a mixture of very fine brick and gla.s.s. Almost all nations have some knowledge of pottery; and those of the very hot countries are sometimes satisfied with dishes formed by their fingers without any tool, and dried by the heat of the sun. In England pottery of every sort, and in all countries good pottery, must be baked or burnt in a kiln of some kind or other.
Vessels for holding meat and drink are almost as indispensable as the meat and drink themselves; and the two qualities in them that are most valuable are, that they shall be cheap, and easily cleaned. Pottery, as it is now produced in England, possesses both of these qualities in the very highest degree. A white basin, having all the useful properties of the most costly vessels, may be purchased for twopence at the door of any cottage in England. There are very few substances used in human food that have any effect upon these vessels; and it is only rinsing them in hot water, and wiping them with a cloth, and they are clean.
The making of an earthen bowl would be to a man who made a first attempt no easy matter. Let us see how it is done so that it can be carried two or three hundred miles and sold for twopence, leaving a profit to the maker, and the wholesale and retail dealer.
The common pottery is made of pure clay and pure flint. The flint is found only in the chalk counties, and the fine clays in Devons.h.i.+re and Dorsets.h.i.+re; so that, with the exception of some clay for coa.r.s.e ware, the materials out of which the pottery is made have to be carried from the South of England to Staffords.h.i.+re, where the potteries are situated.
The great advantage that Staffords.h.i.+re possesses is abundance of coal to burn the ware and supply the engines that grind the materials.
The clay is worked in water by various machinery till it contains no single piece large enough to be visible to the eye. It is like cream in consistence. The flints are burned. They are first ground in a mill, and then worked in water in the same manner as the clay, the large pieces being returned a second time to the mill.
When both are fine enough, one part of flint is mixed with five or six of clay; the whole is worked to a paste, after which it is kneaded either by the hands or a machine; and when the kneading is completed, it is ready for the potter.