France and the Republic Part 14

a.s.sumed the name under which it is now known of 'The Company of Mirrors and Chemical Products of St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey.' In 1863 it bought up the works at s...o...b..rg near Aix-la-Chapelle in Rhenish Prussia, in 1868 a minor manufactory at Montlucon in the Department of the Allier, and finally during this current year 1889 it is establishing a manufactory at Pisa in Italy.

The operations of the company, as it now exists, extend to six manufactories of mirrors, six manufactories of chemicals, a mine of iron pyrites, a salt mine, many thousand hectares of forests in this department of the Aisne and in the province of Lorraine, and to a local railway connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate gla.s.s cast at St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain, besides the plate gla.s.s mirrors, gla.s.s is made for roofs, for floors, for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into s.p.a.ce and shoots for miles athwart the sky, to the inexpressible delight of the gaping crowds below, and I hope to the edification of the world of science.

Since 1870 the output of the company from its various manufactories has more than doubled. It now amounts, in round numbers, to 800,000 square metres a year of polished plate gla.s.s; to 500,000 square metres a year of rough gla.s.s; to a million kilogrammes a year of blocks and castings for floors and roofings, and to eighty thousand kilogrammes a year of optical gla.s.ses of all sorts.

In the time of Louis XIV. and before Lucas de Nehou had made his invention of plate gla.s.s, there was absolutely no public demand for what in those days were called 'large mirrors' made in the Venetian fashion, mirrors which to-day would not find a market in the most remote frontier towns of America or Australia. Colbert then wrote to the Comte d'Avaux apropos of the works of Lucas de Nehou in Normandy, that 'there was absolutely no market for large mirrors in the kingdom, the king being the only person who could possibly need them!'

This was in 1673.

In 1702, ten years after the invention of the process by which plate gla.s.s is made, a mirror with a surface area of one metre cost 165 francs. In 1889 such a mirror costs 30 f. 25 c. A mirror with four metres of surface area cost, in 1702, 2,750 francs. In 1889 it costs 136 francs.

When we come down to modern times and to the much larger mirrors produced of late years, the fall in prices is extraordinary. In 1873 a mirror with ten square metres of surface cost 1,200 francs. To-day such a mirror can be bought at St.-Gobain for 467 francs, showing a fall of nearly two-thirds in price within sixteen years!

To-day the total production of polished plate gla.s.s in the world is estimated as follows:--

square metres England (4 companies) 900,000 Belgium (6 companies) 600,000 Germany (4 companies) 150,000 United States (7 companies) 500,000 France (not including St.-Gobain) 130,000 St.-Gobain 800,000 --------- Total 3,080,000

From this it will be seen that nearly one quarter of the plate gla.s.s of a world in which plate gla.s.s, like champagne, is rapidly ceasing to be a luxury and becoming a necessity, is produced at this ancient establishment. With a keen perception of the tendencies of this age St.-Gobain, of late years, has been fitting its machinery to produce the very largest plates of gla.s.s possible to be made. Go where you like, from the Eden Theatre in Paris to the Casino of Monte Carlo, from the new monster hotel at the Gare St.-Lazare to the enormous edifice which an enterprising firm of tradesmen has planted in the centre of the Corso at Rome, and the vast glittering sheets of silvered gla.s.s turned out from the great forges everywhere confront you. At the French Exposition of 1878 St.-Gobain enabled the 'fly gobblers' of two hemispheres to admire themselves in the most gigantic mirror ever made down to that date. It measured six metres and a half in height, by four metres and eleven centimetres in width, which gave it a surface area of 26 metres 12 centimetres. Naturally M. Henrivaux determined to surpa.s.s this prodigy in 1889, and to match the Eiffel Tower with a mirror. The Belgian rivals of St.-Gobain suspected this, it seems, and sent forth subtle persons to spy out the plans of the great French manufactory.

These colossal plates of gla.s.s are cast upon immense 'tables' of metal, and by ascertaining the dimensions of the tables ordered for St.-Gobain the ingenious Belgians hoped to get the measure of the effort it would be necessary for them to outdo. In antic.i.p.ation of this subtlety the director of St.-Gobain ordered two immense tables, and when these were sent to the manufactory, had them skilfully thrown into one. Upon the gigantic table thus prepared the grand mirror of the Exposition of 1889 was cast at the eleventh hour. This mirror was the special delight of the Shah of Persia during his visit of this year to Paris; and as I suppose the seven plate-gla.s.s manufactories which have grown up in my own beloved country under the benediction of the Protective Tariff, since a prohibitive duty was originally clapped on plate gla.s.s to encourage the one solitary establishment of the sort then existing in America, will give themselves up to producing something more stupendous still for the New York Exposition of 1892, I here set down its dimensions. It measures in height 7 metres 63 centimetres, and in width 4 metres 10 centimetres, giving it a superficial area of 34 metres 24 centimetres. It is 12 millimetres thick, and weighs 940 kilogrammes.

This enormous gla.s.s was cast from a single crucible, containing 1,600 kilogrammes of vitreous matter. To have seen this operation would have been worth a very much longer journey than that from New York to St.-Gobain, for the colour and glow of such a ma.s.s of vitreous matter in fusion can only be matched by the evanescent hues of a crimson aurora on a fine night in the North, or by the intense lights which play over the surface of a stream of molten lava.

At every stage in the operation the utmost skill and delicacy of handling are required to convert what might easily pa.s.s for a heap of rubbish swept together from a macadamised roadway into the smooth, glittering, l.u.s.trous plate which the French so picturesquely call a _glace_, and which indeed most nearly resembles the evenly frozen surface of a crystal lakelet. These sands, silicates, chalks, and carbonates--rough contributions from Oken's 'silent realm of the minerals'--are first crushed and mingled together by machines--one of the best of them, I was glad to hear, of American invention--then pa.s.sed on into the great rectangular hall, in which they are shot into the crucibles of the melting furnaces and fused, mainly by gas, on a system invented and perfected by the late Dr. Siemens, I believe, who made such a stir a decade ago at Glasgow by his discourse on the storage of force before the British a.s.sociation. The furnaces which, according to their varying capacity, now require from eight to ten tons of coal a day, consumed, before the development of the Siemens system, from sixteen to twenty tons. Twenty-four hours now suffice for the fusion and the casting of the gla.s.s, and if the casting were now to be conducted as ceremoniously as in the time of that fine old martinet M. Deslandes, M.

Henrivaux would pa.s.s his life in a c.o.c.ked hat, knee-breeches, peruke, embroidered coat, and sword, for the casting now takes place every day and at a fixed hour. None the less, rather the more, it is a work still of extreme nicety, one to be done by experts, who must be as cool as soldiers under fire. In a certain way and measure it is like ladling out the molten lava of Vesuvius and pressing it into slabs for a lady's toilette-table. The plates, once cast, must be smoothed and made even.

This is a very pretty process, and used to be performed by machines which bore the very pretty names of _valseuses_. That paviour's rammers should be called _demoiselles_ has always seemed to me an outrage and an impertinence, though I may suppose it finds its excuse in the short-waisted costumes of our grandmothers. But the movement of the gla.s.s-smoothing _valseuses_ was really a sort of waltz movement. The plates of gla.s.s were fixed with plaster on a solid rectangular table.

Granite-dust was scattered upon the plates, and then a wooden plateau, armed on the under side with bands of cast iron or steel, was set to waltzing over it backwards and forwards with a semi-rotatory motion, the granite-dust supplied becoming finer and finer as the waltzing went on.

Instead of these _valseuses_ two great plates of gla.s.s are now fixed side by side with plaster on huge tables, and two large ashlars are set turning by steam on their own axes while they describe a great orbit over the plates of gla.s.s. A stream of water constantly plays upon the plates, which are also constantly powdered with fine sand. The ashlars turn on their axes thirty or forty times a minute, and the plates of gla.s.s are usually smoothed and 'evened' on both faces now by these machines in from eight to nine hours, including the time spent in taking them out of the plaster after one face has been smoothed, and fixing them anew in the plaster, that the other face may fare as well. Here again a considerable economy of time has been made. And, after all, when one looks into the practical production of any of these great marvels of human industry, it is in this economy of time that the real advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist.

With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain--for the most part, uncertain and forgotten--men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an absurdity. The 'invention' was the engine, an invention as old as Egypt or China. The discovery that steam could be made to work the engine is the more modest modern achievement. In this industry of gla.s.s-making the amazing thing is that it should have come into the mind of a man so to apply the heat of burning wood to sands and silicates enclosed in an earthen vessel as to convert them into an entirely new substance possessing qualities not perceivable by any human sense in the sands, the silicates, or the earth.

What our modern progress in chemistry and in mechanics has enabled the makers of gla.s.s to do, is greatly to reduce the trouble and cost of producing this entirely new substance, greatly to improve the quality of the substance produced, and to extend the range of the uses to which it can be applied.

What would the Egyptians, who paid their tribute in gla.s.s to Rome, have thought of a serious order to pave the Via Sacra with blocks of purple gla.s.s? Yet such an order could be executed now at St.-Gobain, and when one sees the great flags weighing nine kilogrammes made here and used to let light into the cellarage below the carriage-ways, for example, of the huge Hotel Continental, at Paris, it comes easily within the probabilities that the whole underworld of our great cities in time may thus come to be made available for divers uses, as so much of the underworld of Broadway now is in New York.

The great 'pavement question' is an open question still, in spite of asphalte and of wood, and there would seem to be nothing in the nature of things to prevent its being eventually solved by the gla.s.sworkers.

The roofing question clearly belongs to them. The casting of gla.s.s for roofs began, I believe, with England, in the time of Sir Joseph Paxton, but it has been immensely developed at St.-Gobain. Over a hundred thousand square metres of gla.s.s roofing made here were required for the building of the Exposition of this year at Paris. All the most important railway stations in France, from Nantes to Strasburg (unless the Germans have changed this), and from Calais to Ma.r.s.eilles, are thus roofed. In great warehouses, markets, public museums, street galleries--like those of Victor Emmanuel at Milan--factories, workshops all over France and the Continent, this conversion of the roof into a colossal window has revolutionised matters within the last twenty years. The light is making its way even into Turkey, where the great bazaar at Salonica has been roofed in gla.s.s by St.-Gobain, and as the Chinese, who, despite their early invention of gla.s.s, never got beyond using it for beads and little bottles, have condescended to admit great French mirrors into the Imperial Palace at Pekin, the gla.s.s roof may, ere long, make its way even into China.

In the form of tiles, such as are now made here, gla.s.s must inevitably, sooner or later, displace slates and shingles and terra-cotta for the roofs, even of private houses, it being quite certain that these gla.s.s tiles can be so used as to give a much better light in the garrets of private houses than can possibly be got through the windows. When that comes to pa.s.s the burglar's occupation of clambering stealthily from roof to roof will be seriously interfered with. What with gla.s.s roofs and gla.s.s floors and electricity, indeed, the city of the future is likely to be much more easily 'policed' and patrolled, as well as incomparably more cheery and habitable, than the city of to-day.

Perhaps, too, when we all come to living in gla.s.s houses, the cause of peace and good neighbourhood may gain, and even Mrs. Grundy may grow more careful about looking into the affairs of her friends and acquaintances.

If that much maligned potentate the Emperor Nero had any real notion of the capabilities of gla.s.s when he established the first gla.s.sworks at Rome, the lamentation with which he took farewell of the world, '_qualis artifex pereo_,' may have been inspired by regret at his not being allowed time enough to develop them. Certainly such gigantic mirrors as those which St.-Gobain has this year sent to the Exposition would have shown to better advantage in his colossal 'Golden House' than in any of our petty modern palaces. In what palace in England or in France to-day could a mirror measuring 7 metres x 63 centimetres in height by 4 metres x 12 centimetres in width, and thus displaying a surface of more than 30 square metres, be placed, without dwarfing everything about it? These immense and magnificent mirrors must go hereafter to decorate palaces of public resort--'palaces of the people,' not palaces of princes. What was a royal luxury when Colbert wrote to D'Avaux in 1673 has become a popular attraction. The smallest restaurant in Paris would think itself discredited to-day were it decorated with one of the _grandes glaces_ for which Colbert in 1693 thought St.-Gobain would find no purchaser save the king; but the Grand Cafe and the Hotel Terminus of the Gare St.-Lazare order mirrors in 1889 which no king of our times would very well know what to do with.

Yet, once more, how the cost of these mirrors has fallen! In 1702 a plate-gla.s.s mirror showing two square metres only by surface, cost, at St.-Gobain, 540 francs. In 1889 such a mirror, showing four square metres of surface, costs, at St.-Gobain, 136 francs. A mirror showing ten square metres of surface, which could not have been made in 1702 at any price, can now be had for 467 francs!

In 1802, under Napoleon, a mirror showing four square metres of surface cost 3,644 francs, or very nearly three times the present cost of a mirror, not tinned like the mirrors of 1802, but silvered, of twice and a half that size. While new markets are constantly opening to this great industry all over the world, the progress of chemical science and of mechanics is as constantly suggesting new economies and new improvements in the manufacture of gla.s.s, and St.-Gobain, though one of the most thoroughly French of all French 'inst.i.tutions,' shows no Chauvinism in its incessant study and prompt appropriation of these economies and these improvements. During the invasion of 1814 the workmen of St.-Gobain marched off to Chauny to resist the advance of the Prussians, and the manufactory had to pay a heavy fine for its patriotism. But it avails itself as readily of German as of French science to-day, and I found M. Henrivaux entirely and minutely familiar with the very latest phenomena of the great change which is coming over the gla.s.sworks, as well as all the other industries, of Pittsburg, through the use there of natural gas instead of coal gas and coal. All the most recently invented furnaces--English, German, American--have been tried and tested here as soon as they were made; and the latest American 'crushers' and 'regulators' get to St.-Gobain as soon as they do to Pittsburg. The materials which go to the making of a plate-gla.s.s mirror pa.s.s through seven processes before the original heap of pebbles, dust, and ashes is transformed into a sheet of splendour and light.

A hundred years ago more than ten days were required to complete these seven processes, from the crushing and mixing and putting into the furnace of the soda and the silicious sand and the charcoal and the lime and the broken gla.s.s, called here _calcin_, through the fusion, and the moulding, and the squaring, and the smoothing, and the washing, and the polishing. Now this is all done in half the time--127 hours instead of 246.

With all this the condition of the workmen employed at St.-Gobain has also steadily improved. It seems always to have been good, relatively to the general conditions of workmen in other industries and other establishments in France. Under the original statutes, and in the time of the excellent M. Deslandes, the nominee of Madame Geoffrin, who ruled St.-Gobain with great success from 1759 down to the Revolution, the workmen of St.-Gobain, as I have shown, were looked after, as well as kept to their duty, on strictly patriarchal principles, not likely to find favour in modern eyes. That they did not themselves dislike the system may be inferred from the fact that no such thing as a strike has ever been known at St.-Gobain, and that a considerable proportion of the workmen employed here now are the direct descendants of workmen employed here in the last century. There are even workers by inheritance, as men may be soldiers and sailors or magistrates by inheritance. Of course with the great extension in our own time of the operation of the company, great numbers of workmen other than gla.s.sworkers have come into its employment. But in the gla.s.s manufactures alone there are now employed: at St.-Gobain 375 workmen, at Chauny 583, at Cirey-sur-Vezouze 628, at Montlucon 473, at s...o...b..rg, in Rhenish Prussia, 842, at Waldhof, in Baden-Baden, 518; making, in all, 3,419.

The wages of the workmen are paid by the day, by the month, or by the piece, according to the special work which they do, but in all cases (and this, I believe, has been the rule here from the beginning) the workman is interested in his work by one premium on the amount, and by another on the quality of the work done. Furthermore (and this also dates from the beginning) the company look after the primary education of the children of the workmen. At St.-Gobain, at Chauny, at Cirey, at Montlucon, and I believe, also, at Waldhof, it maintains schools for both s.e.xes at its own expense, together with asylums and training schools for the children. In these there are now more than 1,400 children. When the company owns no such school it pays a subvention to the nearest school for the benefit of the children of its workmen.

Here at St.-Gobain the company owns a number of houses, each house having a garden and dependencies, which it lets to the workmen at an average rental of eight francs a month. I saw not long ago, at one of the stations on a line newly opened by the Great Eastern Railway Company of England, very neat and even handsome cottages well built of brick and thoroughly comfortable, which are leased to servants of the company at 2s. 6_d_. a week, or ten shillings a month. The houses I saw at St.-Gobain let at less than seven shillings a month, were quite as large as those of the Great Eastern Company, and the gardens were much larger.

I gathered from the remarks made to me at St.-Gobain by people who seemed to be both well-informed and well-disposed, that of late years the liberality of the company in regard to these houses has, in not a few cases, worked mischief rather than good. They are not confined to St.-Gobain, and the company owns and leases no fewer than 1,256 of them. A good many allotments of land around the factories are also made at nominal rates to the workmen, who cultivate them a.s.siduously. The gla.s.s-founders are particularly favoured in making these leases and allotments. Besides these houses meant for families, the company provides lodgings near the factories for unmarried workmen, or for workmen whose homes are at a considerable distance from their work.

Within the buildings of the manufactory itself at St.-Gobain, M.

Henrivaux showed me some such lodgings, as well as several bath-rooms which the workmen are allowed to use on the payment of a very slight fee. It is his experience that the workmen prefer to consider the bath as a luxury, and to pay for it.

All the relations between the company and its workmen, indeed, seem to me to be governed by a sensible avoidance on the part of the company of everything like fussy paternalism; and to this, in some measure, I have no doubt, must be attributed the remarkably smooth and easy working of these relations through so long a course of years. The workmen are treated, not like children, but like reasonable beings, who may be expected to avail themselves of advantages which are offered them with an eye at once to their own interests and to the interests of the company.

The co-operative societies at St.-Gobain and at Chauny, for example, were founded in 1866, not by the company, but by the employees of the company under statutes carefully drawn up by M. Cochin, and the company simply undertook to a.s.sist them; in the first place by leasing them, at a low rent, the buildings necessary for the business, and in the next place by taking charge gratuitously of their financial operations. The goods supplied are sold only to members of the societies, as in the co-operative stores in England. The transactions amount to about 1,500,000 francs a year, the goods are sold at prices below those charged in the local shops, and the members divide an average annual profit of from eight to ten per cent. The management is entirely in the hands of the members.

The company has founded at St.-Gobain a kind of savings-bank in which the workman may make deposits of from one franc to 400 francs, drawing interest at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum, until the maximum is reached, when the money is either paid back to the depositor or, if he prefers, invested for him, without charge by the company, in the public funds or in railway securities. In this way many of the workmen are coming to be small capitalists. If they wish also to become house-owners the company advances, at the lowest possible rate of interest, the necessary funds for the purchase, and workmen in good standing with the company find no difficulty in getting gratuitous advances of money repayable in small fixed amounts, upon showing good reasons for the advance. And in all the establishments of the company, except at Montlucon, where there is a special fund to give a.s.sistance in cases of accident or disease, the workmen and their families are ent.i.tled to medical advice and medicines at the expense of the company.

In addition to all these arrangements for promoting a real community of interests between the company and its employees, there is a pension fund out of which retiring pensions, varying from one-fifth to one-fourth of the wages earned by the pensioner, are granted to employees who have served the company for a certain number of years, or who find themselves disabled from further service by age or by disease. A certain proportion, determinable by the circ.u.mstances of each case, of these pensions is settled upon the widows and young children of the pensioners; and in order to encourage habits of thrift and forecast among the workmen, the company undertakes to manage without charge the investment of a certain proportion of his wages by any workman in the 'pension fund' of the national government.

The total outlay of the company upon these various methods of promoting a community of interests between itself and its employees amounted in 1888 to 438,033 francs, thus divided:--

francs Pensions 241,657 Medical Service 100,055 Schools and Religious Services 57,788 Recreations 17,667 Gifts and a.s.sistance 19,758

The outlay upon 'recreation' is made in the form of subventions and prizes granted to a.s.sociations of the workmen, such as shooting and gymnastic clubs and musical societies. The manufactory, for example, boasts a philharmonic society of its own, and there is a Choral Society of St.-Gobain. Both of these have scored successes in various public exhibitions. There is a rifle club, founded in 1861, and reconst.i.tuted in 1874, with an eye to the possible military necessities of the country.

The relations between the company and its employees under this system, the germs of which were planted here two centuries ago, have a.s.sumed such a character that the workmen habitually speak not of the manufactory but of the 'maison.' They are and feel themselves to be members of a great economic family. Of 2,650 persons now actively employed in St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey, 432, or 16.3 per cent., have been employed for more than thirty years; 411, or 15.5 per cent., for more than twenty and less than thirty years; 553, or 20.9 per cent., for more than ten and less than twenty years; and only 1,254, or 47.3 per cent., for less than ten years.

It would be instructive to compare this record with the records of the most important industrial establishments in England and America during the past thirty years, and I should be glad to see this done by some of the people who talk so glibly in England and America of the inherent fickleness and instability of the French character, as offering an adequate explanation of the political catastrophes which have so often recurred in France during the past century.

One of the most curious features of the establishment at St.-Gobain is a subterranean lake. The fine forests around St.-Gobain and La Fere--forests of oak, beech, elm, ash, birch, maple, yoke-elm, aspen, wild cherry, linden, elder, and willow--flourish upon a tertiary formation. The surface of clay keeps the soil marshy and damp, but this checks the infiltration of the rainwater and therefore favours the growth of the trees. In the calcareous rock the early inhabitants hollowed out for themselves caverns, in which they took refuge from their enemies and from the beasts of the forest; and these caverns, called by the people _creuttes_--an obvious corruption of the name of _crypts_, given them by the Roman conquerors of Gaul, just as the early French trappers gave the name of 'caches' to the Indian hiding-places of the Far West--are to be found all about Soissons and Laon. The more modern lords of St.-Gobain, its monks and its barons, dug out of the calcareous rock the stones which they used to build their chateaux and their churches, and they created great _creuttes_ beneath St.-Gobain. It seems to have occurred to M. Deslandes, during his long and skilful supervision of the works here, that these caverns might be put to the very practical use of securing an adequate water-supply. The idea has been thoroughly carried out, and the subterranean reservoir of St.-Gobain is much more impressive as a spectacle than the crypts of the Cisterns at Constantinople. It is kept filled to an average depth of one metre by the infiltration of the surface waters and by the overflow of a pond, La Marette, on the plateau of St.-Gobain, and it covers an area of some 1,200 square metres.

After two or three hours spent in visiting the various departments of the gla.s.sworks overhead, M. Henrivaux led me through winding pa.s.sages, which reminded me of the dismal vomitories at Baiae, down into this strange underworld. Walls and pillars, partly of the natural rock, left in the working of the quarries, partly of masonry built up to strengthen the reservoir, give this weird water, when you reach it, the aspect rather of a stream than of a lake. A workman, who had preceded and guided us with a swinging lantern, put out a long boathook, and drew slowly around to the landing-place a long, shallow boat, into which he invited us to step. M. Henrivaux had kindly sent orders in the morning to have the reservoir illuminated with Venetian and Chinese lanterns of various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague, indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, one seemed really to stand

Where Alp, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless by man, Down to a sh.o.r.eless sea.

Seating ourselves carefully in the boat, our silent boatman, like a spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine ca.n.a.ls of this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them waterways to the Hall of Eblis.

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE AISNE--_continued_

LAON

The lively little city of Chauny, standing in the heart of the rich and lovely valley of the Oise, the 'golden vale' of this part of France, has a history of its own of which I shall presently have something to say, and which throws some interesting light upon the general history of France.

But Chauny owes its actual prosperity mainly to its connection with the Company of St.-Gobain. From a very early period in the annals of the company, the plate-gla.s.s made at St.-Gobain was sent across the country to Chauny, and thence by water to Paris, where it was polished and 'tinned' at the company's works in the Rue de Reuilly.

When the first machines were invented for saving much of the manual labour spent upon these processes, it occurred to the managers of the company that these machines might be advantageously worked with the water-power of the Oise at Chauny. This was in the beginning of the present century. About the same time, thanks to the foreign wars provoked by the Girondists to promote the Revolution, it became very difficult to obtain the supplies of natural soda necessary for the manufacture of plate-gla.s.s, these supplies having been drawn, down to that time, almost exclusively from Alicante in Spain; and the chemist Leblanc hit upon a process for extracting soda on a great scale from sea-salt. Of this invention the managers of St.-Gobain promptly availed themselves; and, after a brief and unsatisfactory experiment at a place called Charlesfontaine, they established at Chauny some soda-works, which have since been developed into the most extensive chemical works in France.