Knowledge is Power Part 12

Having thus noticed the leading processes of the manufacture of cotton, of wool, of silk, of linen, we may conclude this chapter with a brief mention of the art that gives to many of the fabrics produced their chief beauty--the art of printing cloth in colours. This art applies to the finest as well as the commonest productions of the loom; and the science of the British dyer, the beauty of his patterns, and the perfection of his machinery, have now given us an eminence in this department of industry which can only be preserved by constant efforts towards perfection of design and durable brilliancy of colour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Indigo-harvest in West Indies.]

There is a striking, although natural parallel, between printing a piece of cloth and printing a sheet of a book, or a newspaper. Block-printing is the impress of the pattern by hand; as block-books were made four centuries ago. We have no block-books now; for machinery has banished that tedious process. But block-printing is used for costly shawls and velvets, which require to have many colours produced by repeated impress from a large number of blocks, each carrying a different colour. Except for expensive fabrics, this mode is superseded by block-printing with a sort of press, in which several blocks are set in a frame. Here again is somewhat of a similarity to the operation of the book-press. Lastly, we have cylinder-printing, resembling the rapid working of the book-printing machine, each producing the same cheapness. As the pattern has to be obtained from several cylinders, each having its own colour, there is great nicety in the operation; and the most beautiful mechanism is necessary for feeding the cylinder with colour; moving the cloth to meet the revolving cylinder; and giving to the cylinder its power of impression. But those who witness the operation see little of the ultimate effect to be obtained in the subsequent processes of dyeing.

Fast colours are produced by the use in the pattern of substances called mordants; which may be colourless themselves but receive the colour of the dye-bath, which colour is only fixed in the parts touched by the mordant, and is washed out from the parts not touched. When what is called a substantive colour is at once impressed upon the white cloth, much of the beauty is also derived from subsequent processes. The chemist, the machinist, the designer, and the engraver--science and art--set the calico-printing works in activity; and the carrying on these complicated processes can only be profitably done upon a large scale. In the earlier days of our cotton manufacture there were small print-works in the neighbourhood of London, where the imperfect machinery was turned by water-power. The steam-engine of one Lancashire factory now produces more printed cottons and muslins than all the rivers of southern England in the last century. The calico-printers now number about twenty-seven thousand persons. But no direct enumeration can be made of the employments that are required merely to produce the dyes with which the calico-printer works. The mineral and vegetable kingdoms, and even the animal kingdom, combine their natural productions in the colours of a lady's dress. The sulphur-miner of Sicily, the salt-worker of Cheshire, the hewer of wood in the Brazils, the Negro in the indigo plantations of the East and West Indies, the cultivator of madder in France, and the gatherer of the cochineal insect in Mexico, are all labourers for the print-works of England and Scotland. The discoveries of science, in combination with the experience of practice, has set all this industry in motion, and has given a value to innumerable productions of nature which would otherwise be useless and unemployed. But these demands of manufactures do more--they create modes of cultivation which are important sources of national prosperity. Jean Althen, a Persian of great family, bred up in every luxury, became a slave in Anatolia, when Kouli-Khan overthrew the Persian empire. For fourteen years he worked in the cotton and madder-fields. He then escaped to France, carrying with him some madder-seeds. Long did he labour in vain to attract the attention of the government of Louis XV.

to his plans. At length, having spent all the fortune which he had acquired by marriage with a French heiress, he obtained the patronage of the Marquis de Caumont, in his attempts to introduce the cultivation of madder into the department of Vaucluse. His life was closing in comparative indigence when a new branch of industry was developed in his adopted country. The district in which he created a new industry has increased a hundred-fold in value. The debt of grat.i.tude was paid by a tablet to his memory, erected sixty years after he was insensible to human rewards. We starve our benefactors when they are living; and satisfy our consciences by votive monuments. Althen's daughter died as poor as her father. The tablet was erected at Avignon when the family was extinct.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Calico-printing by Cylinder.]

There is a process connected with the production of clothing which we must briefly refer to, as one of the signal examples of the axiom of our t.i.tle--'Knowledge is Power.'

Let us suppose that chemistry had not discovered and organised the modes in which bleaching is performed; and that the thousands of millions of yards of calico and linen which we weave in this country had still to be bleached, as bleaching was accomplished in the last century. We knew nothing about the matter, and our linen was then sent over to Holland to go through this operation. The Dutch steeped the bundles of cloth in ley made by water poured upon wood ashes--then soaked them in b.u.t.termilk--and finally spread them upon the gra.s.s for several months.

These were all natural agencies which discharged the colouring matter without any chemical science. It was at length found out that sulphuric acid would do the same work in one day which the b.u.t.termilk did in six weeks; but the sun and the air had still to be the chief bleaching powers. A French chemist then found out that a new gas, chlorine, would supersede the necessity for spreading out the linen for several months; and so the acres of bleaching ground which we were using in England and Scotland--for we had left off sending the brown and yellow cloth to Holland--were free for cultivation. But the chlorine was poisonous to the workmen, and imparted a filthy odour to the cloth. Chemistry again went to work, and finally obtained the chloride of lime, which is the universal bleaching powder of modern manufactures. What used to be the work of eight months is now accomplished in an hour or two; and so a bag of dingy raw cotton may be in New York on the first day of the month, and be converted into the whitest calico before the month is at an end.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bleaching-ground at Glasgow.]

[23] Blount's 'Ancient Tenures,' ed. 1784, p. 183.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Hosiery manufacture--The stocking-frame--The circular hosiery-machine--Hats--Gloves--Boots and shoes-- Straw-plait--Artificial flowers--Fans--Lace--Bobbin-net machine--Pins--Needles--b.u.t.tons--Toys--Lucifer-matches-- Envelopes.

Before the invention of the first stocking-machine, in the year 1589, by William Lee, a clergyman, none but the very rich wore stockings, and many of the most wealthy went without stockings at all, that part of dress being sewn together by the tailor, or their legs being covered with bandages of cloth. The covering for the leg was called a "nether-stock," or lower stocking. Philip Stubbes, a tremendous declaimer against every species of luxury, thus describes the expensive stockings of his time, 1585:--

"Then have they nether-stocks to these hosen, not of cloth (though never so fine), for that is thought too base, but of jarnsey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got, and so curiously knit with open seam down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ancles, and sometime, haply, interlaced with gold or silver threads, as is wonderful to behold. And to such impudent insolency and shameful outrage it is now grown, that every one, almost, though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether-stocks, or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a ryall, or twenty shillings, or more, as commonly it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is worth a n.o.ble or a ryall, and some much more? The time hath been when one might have clothed his body well for less than a pair of these nether-stocks will cost."

It is difficult to understand how those who had only forty shillings a year wages could expend twenty shillings upon a pair of knit stockings.

It is quite clear they were for the rich only; and that very few persons were employed in knitting and embroidering stockings.

William Lee struggled to make stockings cheap. He made a pair of stockings by the frame, in the presence of King James I.; but such was the prejudice of those times, that he could get no encouragement for his invention. His invention was discountenanced, upon the plea that it would deprive the industrious poor of their subsistence. He went to France, where he met with no better success, and died at last of a broken heart. The great then _could_ discountenance an invention, because its application was limited to themselves. _They_ only wore stockings: the poor who made them had none to wear. Stockings were not cheap enough for the poor to wear, and therefore they went without. Of the millions of people now in this country, how few are without stockings! What a miserable exception to the comfort of the rest of the English people does it appear when we see a beggar in the streets without stockings! We consider such a person to be in the lowest stage of want and suffering. Two centuries ago, not one person in a thousand wore stockings;--one century ago, not one person in five hundred wore them;--now, not one person in a thousand is without them. Who made this great change in the condition of the people of England, and, indeed, of the people of almost all civilized countries? William Lee--who died at Paris of a broken heart. And why did he die of grief and penury? Because the people of his own days were too ignorant to accept the blessings he had prepared for them.

We ask with confidence, had the terror of the stocking-frame any real foundation? Were any people thrown out of employment by the stocking-frame?

"The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,"

as Shakspere describes the country la.s.ses of his day, had to _change_ their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings.

The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides those who work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases, makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were employed, in 1851, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom thirty thousand were females.

Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day; and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that case, would have been without stockings.

But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all have found subst.i.tutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the progress of ingenuity would have been stopped. The inventive principle would have been destroyed.

We have not reached the end of our career of improvement. Civilization is not destined to run a backward race. William Lee's stocking-frame worked well for two centuries and a half. One of the most beautiful contrivances of our time has now greatly superseded it. The circular hosiery machine--more properly called a machine for manufacturing "looped fabrics"--works at such a rate that one girl attending upon the revolutions of this wonderful instrument can produce in one day the material for two hundred and forty pairs of stockings. She turns a little handle, with the ease with which she would turn a barrel-organ; and, as the machine revolves, hundreds of needles catch the thread and loop it into the chain which forms the stocking-cloth, or it makes the fashioned stocking. The new hosiery-machines have doubled the employment of the stocking-makers, by enabling us to meet the compet.i.tion of foreign countries. The English were working upon the old slow stocking-frame, while the French and Belgians were using the rapid circular machine. The markets of the world would have been soon closed to us if we had clung to the old machine, through the force of any popular prejudice against a new machine. There is no portion of the export trade of this country which has increased with such extraordinary rapidity within the last six years as that of hosiery. The following abstract of the declared value of stockings exported since 1848 will sufficiently indicate the effects of improved machinery in cheapening production:--

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stockings exported. 1848. 1850. 1852. 1853.

------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- Cotton 77,095 104,434 243,994 461,494 Silk 24,324 20,256 25,140 23,579 Worsted 40,413 74,482 117,349 261,140 Silk mixed with other material 39 3,327 4,705 10,464 ---------------------------------------- 141,871 202,499 391,188 756,677 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The hosiery of Saxony was superseding, a few years ago, from its extreme cheapness, the shipment to the United States of goods made at Nottingham. The cheapness in Saxony was produced, not by the employment of large capital and the application of the most expensive machinery, but by the miserably low wages of labour. It is stated by Mr. Porter that, in 1837, a man of Saxony, with his wife and three children, working incessantly at the stocking-loom, could only earn 5_s._ 4d.

weekly. In the princ.i.p.al manufacturing districts of that country, the food of the artisans is of the coa.r.s.est kind, and of the most limited supply. The comparative ease and comfort of the workers in our hosiery districts is one of the most satisfactory proofs that invention is as great a benefit to the labourer as to the capitalist.

As the nether-stocks of our ancestors were for the great and wealthy, so were their Hats. Old Stubbes writes, "Sometimes they use them sharp on the crown, pearking up like the spear or shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of a yard above the crown of their heads, some more, some less, as please the phantasies of their inconstant minds. Other some be flat and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house. Another sort have round crowns, sometimes with one kind of band, sometimes with another, now black, now white, now russet, now red, now green, now yellow, now this, now that, never content with one colour or fashion two days to an end. And thus in vanity they spend the Lord his treasure, consuming their golden years and silver days in wickedness and sin. And as the fashions be rare and strange, so is the stuff whereof their hats be made divers also; for some are of silk, some of velvet, some of taffeta, some of sa.r.s.enet, some of wool, and, which is more curious, some of a certain kind of fine hair; these they call beaver hats, of 20, 30, or 40 shillings price, fetched from beyond the seas, from whence a great sort of other vanities do come besides." Here, then, we see that the beaver hat was in those days an article of great price. The commonalty had their "plain statute caps" of wool. In our time the beaver hat was the common wear of the middle cla.s.ses until the last few years, when the cheaper silk hat became almost universal. We import from France some plush for making hats; but much of this silk material is also prepared in our own factories. Hats have therefore become intimately a.s.sociated with the material produced by the loom.

The manufacture of Gloves is connected, in a very large department, with the hosiery manufactory. The use of thread gloves and cotton gloves has had the effect, in some degree, of lessening the consumption of leather gloves. The importation of leather gloves and mitts was prohibited until 1825. We now import three million pairs annually; and the home manufacture, instead of being ruined as was predicted, was never more prosperous. The French gloves, once so superior to our own, have improved the English, by the natural force of compet.i.tion; and the manufacturers not only purchase better leather than formerly, but the cottage-workwomen that labour in the glove districts have become neater and more careful sewers. The consumption of gloves has ceased to be exclusively for the rich. The perfumed and embroidered glove of the 16th century is no longer required. The use of gloves has become universal amongst both s.e.xes of the middle cla.s.ses. The female domestic would think it unbecoming to go to church without her gloves; and the well-dressed artisan holds it nothing effeminate to use a covering for his hands, which his forefathers thought a distinguishing appurtenance of the high-born and luxurious.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Gloves for the great.]

Our home-manufacture of Boots and Shoes has received an immense impulse from foreign compet.i.tion. The number of men's and women's boots and shoes which we import is not much above two hundred thousand. But we also import six hundred thousand boot-fronts from France, which our own people work up. Although the boot and shoe manufacture can scarcely be considered a factory process, it has now adapted itself to certain localities, such as Northampton. The articles made in the provinces were originally distinguished for their cheapness merely. They now unite the characters of goodness and cheapness. This chiefly arises from the trade being carried on, at Northampton especially, upon a large scale--upon a principle the very reverse of the old familiar spectacle of the cobbler in his stall.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cobbler's stall, about 1760.]

The Straw-plat is a domestic manufacture, chiefly carried on in the midland and eastern counties. It employs thirty-two thousand persons, of whom twenty-eight thousand are females. The straw hat and bonnet makers amount to twenty-two thousand, of whom more than twenty thousand are females. The art of straw-platting has been greatly improved amongst us of late years; but the Italian straw, being of a finer nature, is in greater demand for the higher priced bonnets.

The beautiful production of Artificial Flowers has, in very recent years, been much increased in England. France, with its superior taste, long supplied us with these ornaments, which had the brilliancy of natural flowers without their perishableness. But three thousand females, and five hundred males, are now engaged with us in this branch.

The Fan-makers of England are only thirty in number. In France this is a large branch of manufacture. In the Jury Report on the Exhibition of Industry in 1851 there is a notice of the fan-trade of Paris, which is curious as showing the joint influences upon cheapness, of machinery, and of the multiplication of works of art by engraving. The fan-makers of Paris in 1847 employed five hundred and seventy-five work-people--the number of the s.e.xes being pretty equally divided. "The men were for the most part copper-plate engravers and printers, lithographic draughtsmen and printers, painters, and colourers; the women were mounters, illuminators, painters, colourers, and overlookers. In twenty years it appears that the produce in fans had increased in value nearly threefold, whilst the number of work-people had diminished one-half.

This change is attributed to the employment of machinery, especially of the fly press, in stamping out and embossing the ribs, and the extensive employment of chromo-lithography, an art not practised at the former period. By these means the French have been enabled greatly to increase their exports by the production of cheap fans, to compete with those made by the Chinese."

Dekker, in his 'Gull's Hornbook,' printed in 1609, advises the gallant of his day to exhibit a "wrought handkerchief." A "handkerchief, spotted with strawberries," was Oth.e.l.lo's first gift to Desdemona. It was an embroidered handkerchief, such as is produced in the present day at Cairo by the Egyptian ladies in their private apartments. The embroidered shirts of the time of Elizabeth are thus noticed by Stubbes:--

"These shirts (sometimes it happeneth) are wrought throughout with needle-work of silk, and such like, and curiously st.i.tched with open seam, and many other knacks besides, more than I can describe; in so much as I have heard of shirts that have cost some ten shillings, some twenty, some forty, some five pound, some twenty n.o.bles, and (which is horrible to hear) some ten pound apiece."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Men'seg, or Egyptian embroidery-frame.]

The embroidery-frame was in time superseded by the lace-pillow, which is stated to have been first used in Saxony in the sixteenth century. The production of Lace extended to Belgium and France; and we are still familiar with the names of Brussels, Mechlin, Lisle, Valenciennes, and Alencon lace. Until the present century no lace was heard of but pillow-lace,--a domestic manufacture, of which Honiton was the most famous seat. A stocking-weaver of Nottingham adapted his stocking-frame to the making of lace about 1770; and the bobbin-frame was invented in 1809. It was never extensively used till the expiration of the patent; and the produce of this machine was kept at so high a price by the patentees that it interfered little with the labour of the lace-makers in the cottages of the midland counties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Bobbin-net meshes.]

But a time was coming when as much bobbin-net as the patentees of the first frame charged five pounds for would be sold for half-a-crown; and when, as a necessary consequence of this cheapness, lace-making as a domestic employment would wholly cease, or be confined to the production of an expensive article, supposed to be superior to machine-made lace.

That the old hand-labour could compete with the machine was an impossibility. Lace of an ordinary figured pattern used to be made on the pillow at the rate of about three meshes per minute. A bobbin-net machine will produce similar lace at the rate of twenty-four thousand meshes per minute, one person only being required to wait upon the machine. Those who have watched the cottage lace-maker, working with her bobbins and pins, were unable, without long observation, to understand the principle upon which she intertwined the threads. But to explain the more rapid working of the bobbin-net machine would require such a minute acquaintance with all its parts as belongs to the business of the practical machinist, and which words are inadequate to exhibit. The accompanying engraving offers the best notion we can furnish.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Essential parts of the bobbin-net machine.

The warp, ascending from the beam A, pa.s.ses through small holes in a guide-bar B, and thence to the point C, where the bobbins in their respective combs, driven by the ledges on the two bars beneath, traverse the warp to and fro, and interlace the threads as shown at D; the points E a.s.sisting to maintain the forms of the meshes.]

Instead of England being now supplied with lace from France and Belgium, we are now an exporting lace-country. In 1848 we exported cotton lace and net to the amount of 363,255_l._; in 1853 to the amount of 596,578_l._

According to the census of 1851, the number of persons employed in the lace manufacture was 63,660; of whom 54,080 were females. The same returns give the number of 4658 embroiderers.

There is an article employed in dress which is at once so necessary and so beautiful that the highest lady in the land uses it, and yet so cheap that the poorest peasant's wife is enabled to procure it. The quality of the article is as perfect as art can make it; and yet, from the enormous quant.i.ties consumed by the great ma.s.s of the people, it is made so cheap that the poor can purchase the best kind, as well as the rich. It is an article of universal use. United with machinery, many hundreds, and even thousands, are employed in making it. But if the machinery were to stop, and the article were made by human hands alone, it would become so dear that the richest only could afford to use it; and it would become at the same time so rough in its appearance, that those very rich would be ashamed of using it. The article we mean is a Pin.

It is not necessary for us to describe the machinery used in pin-making, to make the reader comprehend its effects. A pin is made of bra.s.s. We have seen how metal is obtained from ore by machinery; and therefore we will not go over that ground. But suppose the most skilful workman has a lump of bra.s.s ready by his side, to make it into pins with common tools,--with a hammer and with a file. He heats it upon an anvil, till it becomes nearly thin enough for his purpose. A very fine hammer, and a very fine touch, must he have to produce a pin of any sort,--even a large corking-pin! But the pin made by machinery is a perfect cylinder.

To make a metal, or even a wooden cylinder, of a considerable size, with files and polishing, is an operation so difficult that it is never attempted; but with a lathe and a sliding rest it is done every hour by a great many workmen. How much more difficult would it be to make a perfect cylinder the size of a pin? A pin hammered out by hand would present a number of rough edges that would tear the clothes, as well as hold them together. It would not be much more useful or ornamental than the skewer of bone with which the woman of the Sandwich Islands fastens her mats. But the wire of which pins are made acquires a perfectly cylindrical form by the simplest machinery. It is forcibly drawn through the circular holes of a steel plate; and the hole being smaller and smaller each time it is drawn through, it is at length reduced to the size required.