Knowledge is Power Part 6

The farmers of England have made what we may fairly call heroic efforts to meet foreign compet.i.tion; but their efforts would have been comparatively vain had science not come to the aid of production.

According to the Census of 1851, the total population of Great Britain is 20,959,477--in round numbers, twenty-one millions. In the 'Return of Occupations,' one-half of this entire population is found under the family designation--such as child at home, child at school, wife, daughter, sister, niece, with no particular occupation attributed to them. They are important members of the state; they are growing into future producers, or they preside over the household comforts, without which there is little systematic industry. But they are not direct producers. Of this half of the entire population, one-fifth belong to the cla.s.s of cultivators, viz.:--

Male. Female.

Holders of farms 275,676 28,044 Farmers' relatives, in-door 137,446 Out-door labourers 1,006,728 70,899 Farm-servants, in-door 235,943 128,251 Shepherds, out-door 19,075 Woodmen 9,832 Gardeners 78,462 2,484 Farm bailiffs 12,805 Graziers 3,036 ____________ __________ 1,779,003 229,678

This total (in which we omit the farmers' wives and daughters, amounting to about 240,000) shows that one-fifth of the working population provide food, with the exception of foreign produce, for themselves and families and the other four-fifths of the population. Such a result could not be accomplished without the appliances of scientific power which we have described in this chapter. In the early steps of British society a very small proportion of labour could be spared for other purposes than the cultivation of the soil. It has been held that a community is considerably advanced when it can spare one man in three from working upon the land. Only twenty-six per cent of our adult males are agricultural--that is, three men labour at some other employment, while one cultivates the land. During the last forty years the proportion of agricultural employment, in comparison with manufacturing and commercial, has been constantly decreasing; and is now about twenty per cent., whereas in 1811 it was thirty-five per cent. of all occupations.

[17] Cullum's 'History of Hawsted.'

[18] See various tables in Porter's 'Progress of the Nation.'

[19] See 'Journal of Royal Agricultural Society,' vol. xii. p. 595.

CHAPTER XII.

Production of a knife--Manufacture of iron--Raising coal--The hot-blast--Iron bridges--Rolling bar-iron--Making steel--Sheffield manufactures--Mining in Great Britain--Numbers engaged in mines and metal manufactures.

We have been speaking somewhat fully of agricultural instruments and agricultural labour, because they are at the root of all other profitable industry. Bread and beef make the bone and sinew of the workman. Ploughs and harrows and drills and thrashing-machines are combinations of wood and iron. Rude nations have wooden ploughs. Unless the English labourer made a plough out of two pieces of stick, and carried it upon his shoulder to the field, as the toil-worn and poor people of India do, he must have some iron about it. He cannot get iron without machinery. He cannot get even his knife, his tool of all-work, without machinery. From the first step to the last in the production of a knife, machinery and scientific appliances have done the chief work.

People that have no science and no machinery sharpen a stone, or bit of sh.e.l.l or bone, and cut or saw with it in the best way they can; and after they have become very clever, they fasten it to a wooden handle with a cord of bark. An Englishman examines two or three dozens of knives, selects which he thinks the best, and pays a shilling for it, the seller thanking him for his custom. The man who has nothing but the bone or the sh.e.l.l would gladly toil a month for that which does not cost an English labourer half a day's wages.

And how does the Englishman obtain his knife upon such easy terms? From the very same cause that he obtains all his other accommodations cheaper, in comparison with the ordinary wages of labour, than the inhabitant of most other countries--that is, from the operations of science, either in the making of the thing itself, or in procuring that without which it could not be made. We must always remember that, if we could not get the materials without scientific application, it would be impossible for us to get what is made of those materials--even if we had the power of fashioning those materials by the rudest labour.

Keeping this in mind, let us see how a knife could be obtained by a man who had nothing to depend upon but his hands.

Ready-made, without the labour of some other man, a knife does not exist; but the iron, of which the knife is made, is to be had. Very little iron has ever been found in a native state, or fit for the blacksmith. The little that has been found in that state has been found only very lately; and if human art had not been able to procure any in addition to that, gold would have been cheap as compared with iron.

Iron is, no doubt, very abundant in nature; but it is always mixed with some other substance that not only renders it unfit for use, but hides its qualities. It is found in the state of what is called _iron-stone_, or _iron-ore_. Sometimes it is mixed with clay, at other times with lime or with the earth of flint; and there are also cases in which it is mixed with sulphur. In short, in the state in which iron is frequently met with, it is a much more likely substance to be chosen for paving a road, or building a wall, than for making a knife.

But suppose that the man knows the particular ore or stone that contains the iron, how is he to get it out? Mere force will not do, for the iron and the clay, or other substance, are so nicely mixed, that, though the ore were ground to the finest powder, the grinder is no nearer the iron than when he had a lump of a ton weight.

A man who has a block of wood has a wooden bowl in the heart of it; and he can get it out too by labour. The knife will do it for him in time; and if he take it to the turner, the turner with his machinery, his lathe, and his gouge, will work it out for him in half an hour. The man who has a lump of iron-ore has just as certainly a knife in the heart of it; but no mere labour can work it out. Shape it as he may, it is not a knife, or steel, or even iron--it is iron-ore; and dress it as he will, it would not cut better than a brickbat--certainly not so well as the sh.e.l.l or bone of the savage.

There must be knowledge before anything can be done in this case. We must know what is mixed with the iron, and how to separate it. We cannot do it by mere labour, as we can chip away the wood and get out the bowl; and therefore we have recourse to fire.

In the ordinary mode of using it, fire would make matters worse. If we put the material into the fire as a stone, we should probably receive it back as slag or dross. We must, therefore, prepare our fuel. Our fire must be hot, very hot; but if our fuel be wood we must burn it into charcoal, or if it be coal into c.o.ke.

The charcoal, or c.o.ke, answers for one purpose; but we have still the clay or other earth mixed with our iron, and how are we to get rid of that? Pure clay, or pure lime, or pure earth of flint, remains stubborn in our hottest fires; but when they are mixed in a proper proportion, the one melts the other.

So charcoal or c.o.ke, and iron-stone or iron-ore, and limestone, are put into a furnace; the charcoal or c.o.ke is lighted at the bottom, and wind is blown into the furnace, at the bottom also. If that wind is not sent in by machinery, and very powerful machinery too, the effect will be little, and the work of the man great; but still it can be done.

In this furnace the lime and clay, or earth of flint, unite, and form a sort of gla.s.s, which floats upon the surface. At the same time the carbon, or pure charcoal, of the fuel, with the a.s.sistance of the limestone, mixes with the stone, or ore, and melts the iron, which, being heavier than the other matters, runs down to the bottom of the furnace, and remains there till the workman lets it out by a hole made at the bottom of the furnace for that purpose, and plugged with sand.

When the workman knows there is enough melted, or when the appointed time arrives, he displaces the plug of sand with an iron rod, and the melted iron runs out like water, and is conveyed into furrows made in sand, where it cools, and the pieces formed in the princ.i.p.al furrows are called "sows," and those in the furrows branching from them "pigs."

We are now advanced a considerable way towards the production of a knife. We have the materials of a knife. We have the iron extracted out of the iron-ore. Before we trace the progress of a knife to its final polish, let us see what stupendous efforts of machinery have been required to produce the cast iron.

In every part of the operation of making iron--in smelting the iron out of the ore; in moulding cast iron into those articles for which it is best adapted; in working malleable iron, and in applying it to use after it is made; nothing can be done without fire, and the fuel that is used in almost every stage of the business is coal. The coal trade and the iron trade are thus so intimately connected, so very much dependent upon each other, that neither of them could be carried on to any extent without the other. The coal-mines supply fuel, and the iron-works give mining tools, pumps, railroads, wheels, and steam-engines, in return. A little coal might be got without the iron engines, and a little iron might be made without coals, by the charcoal of wood. But the quant.i.ty of both would be trifling in comparison. The wonderful amount of the production of iron in Great Britain, and the cheapness of iron, as compared with the extent of capital required for its manufacture, arises from the fact that the coal-beds and the beds of iron-ore lie in juxta-position. The iron-stones alternate with the beds of coal in almost all our coal-fields; and thus the same mining undertakings furnish the ore out of which iron is made and the fuel by which it is smelted. If the coal were in the north, and the fuel in the south, the carriage of the one to the other would double the cost.

There was a time when iron was made in this country with very little machinery. Iron was manufactured here in the time of the Romans; but it was made with great manual labour, and was consequently very dear.

Hutton, in his 'History of Birmingham,' tells us that there is a large heap of cinders near that town which have been produced by an ancient iron-furnace; and that from the quant.i.ty of cinders, as compared with the mechanical powers possessed by our forefathers, the furnace must have been constantly at work from the time of Julius Caesar. A furnace with a steam blast would produce as large a heap in a few years.

At present a cottager in the south of England, where there is no coal in the earth, may have a bushel of good coals delivered at the door of his cottage for eighteen pence; although that is far more than the price of coal at the pit's mouth. If he had even the means of transporting himself and his family to the coal district, he could not, without machinery, get a bushel of coals at the price of a year's work. Let us see how a resolute man would proceed in such an undertaking.

The machinery, we will say, is gone. The mines are filled up, which the greater part of them would be, with water, if the machinery were to stop a single week. Let us suppose that the adventurous labourer knows exactly the spot where the coal is to be found. This knowledge, in a country that has never been searched for coals before, is no easy matter, even to those who understand the subject best: it is the province of geology to give that knowledge. But we shall suppose that he gets over that difficulty too, for after it there is plenty of difficulty before him.

Well, he comes to the exact spot that he seeks, and places himself right over the seam of coal. That seam is only a hundred fathoms below the surface, which depth he will, of course, reach in good time. To work he goes; pares off the green sod with his shovel, loosens the earth with his pickaxe, and, in the course of a week, is twenty feet down into the loose earth and gravel, and clears the rock at the bottom. He rests during the Sunday, and comes refreshed to his work on Monday morning; when, behold, there are twelve feet of water in his pit.

Suppose he now calls in the aid of a bucket and rope, and that he bales away, till, as night closes, he has lowered the water three feet. Next morning it is up a foot and a half: but no matter; he has done something, and next day he redoubles his efforts, and brings the water down to only four feet. That is encouraging; but, from the depth, he now works his bucket with more difficulty, and it is again a week before his pit is dry. The weather changes; the rain comes down heavily; the surface on which it falls is spongy; the rock which he has reached is water-tight; and in twelve hours his pit is filled to the brim. It is in vain to go on.

The sinking of a pit, even to a less depth than a hundred fathoms, sometimes demands, notwithstanding all the improvements by machinery, a sum of not less than a hundred pounds a fathom, or ten thousand pounds for the whole pit; and therefore, supposing it possible for a single man to do it at the rate of eighteen pence a day, the time which he would require would be between four hundred and five hundred years.

Whence comes it that the labour of between four hundred and five hundred years is reduced to a single day? and that which, independently of the carriage, would have cost ten thousand pounds, is got for eighteen pence? It is because man joins with man, and machinery is employed to do the drudgery. Nations that have no machinery have no coal fires, and are ignorant that there is hidden under the earth a substance which contributes more, perhaps, to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of Britain than any other commodity which they enjoy.

No nations have worked coal to anything approaching the extent in which it has been worked by our countrymen. It has been calculated that France, Belgium, Spain, Prussia, Bohemia, and the United States of America, do not annually produce more than seventeen million tons of coal, which is about half of our annual produce.[20]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Steam-Boiler making.]

The greater part of the coal now raised in Britain is produced by the employment of the most enormous mechanical power. There are in some places shallow and narrow pits, where coals may be raised to the surface by a windla.s.s; and there are others where horse-power is employed. But the number of men that can work at a windla.s.s, or the number of horses that can be yoked to a gin, is limited. The power of the steam-engine is limited only by the strength of the materials of which it is formed. The power of a hundred horses, or of five hundred men, may be very easily made by the steam-engine to act constantly, and on a single point; and thus there is scarcely anything in the way of mere force which the engine cannot be made to do. We have seen a pit in Staffordshire, which hardly gave coal enough to maintain a cottager and his family, for he worked the pit with imperfect machinery--with a half-starved a.s.s applied to a windla.s.s. A mile off was a steam-engine of 200-horse power, raising tons of coals and pumping out rivers of water with a force equal to at least a thousand men. This vast force acted upon a point; and therefore no advantage was gained over the machine by the opposing force of water, or the weight of the material to be raised. Before the steam-engine was invented, the produce of the coal-mines barely paid the expense of working and keeping them dry; and had it not been for the steam-engines and other machinery, the supply would long before now have dwindled into a very small quant.i.ty, and the price would have become ten or twenty times its present amount. The quant.i.ty of coal raised in Great Britain was estimated by Professor Ansted in 1851 at thirty-five million tons; and the value at nine millions sterling at the pit-mouth, and eighteen millions at the place of consumption. The capital engaged in the coal trade was then valued at ten millions. In 1847 the annual value of all the precious metals raised throughout the world was estimated at thirteen millions sterling. That value has been increased within a few years. But the coal of Great Britain, as estimated by the cost at the pit's mouth, is above two-thirds of this value of the precious metals seven years ago; and the mean annual value, at the furnace, of iron smelted by British coal being eight millions sterling, the value together of our iron and our coal exceeds the value of all the gold and silver of South America, and California, and Australia, however large that amount has now become.

How the value of our cast iron has been increased by modern science may be in some degree estimated by a consideration of what the hot-blast has accomplished. The hot-blast blows hot air into the iron-furnace instead of cold air. The notion seems simple, but the results are wonderful. The inventor, Mr. Neilson, has seen since 1827 the production of iron raised from less than seven hundred thousand tons to two million two hundred thousand tons. The iron is greatly cheaper than a quarter of a century ago, for only about one-half the coal formerly used is necessary for its production. That production is almost unlimited in amount. In 1788 we produced only sixty thousand tons, or one-thirty-sixth part of what we now produce. The beautiful iron bridge of Colebrook-dale, erected in 1779, consumed three hundred and seventy-eight tons of cast iron. The wonderful Britannia Bridge which has been carried over the Menai Strait, hung in mid air at the height of a hundred feet above the stream, has required ten thousand tons of iron for its completion. If chemistry and machinery had not been at work to produce more iron and cheaper iron, how would our great modern improvements have stopped short--our railroads, our water-pipes, our gas-pipes, our steam-ships! How should we have lacked the great material of every useful implement, from the gigantic anchor that holds the man-of-war firm in her moorings, and the mighty gun that, in the last resort, a.s.serts a spirit without which all material improvement cannot avert a nation's decay,--to the steel pen with which thoughts are exchanged between friends at the opposite ends of the earth, and the needle by which the poor seamstress in her garret maintains her place amongst competing numbers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The first iron bridge, Colebrook Dale.]

Nearly all the people now engaged in iron-works are supported by the improvements that have been made in the manufacture, _by machinery_, since 1788. Yes, wholly by the machinery; for before then the quant.i.ty made by the charcoal of wood had fallen off one-fourth in forty-five years. The wood for charcoal was becoming exhausted, and nothing but the powerful blast of a machine will make iron with c.o.ke. Without the aid of machinery the trade would have become extinct. The iron and the coal employed in making it would have remained useless in the mines.

And now, having seen what is required to produce a "pig" of cast iron, let us return to the knife, whose course of manufacture we traced a little way.

The lump of cast iron as it leaves the furnace has many processes to go through before it becomes fit for making a knife. It cannot be worked by the hammer, or sharpened to a cutting edge; and so it must be made into malleable iron,--into a kind of iron which, instead of melting in the fire, will soften, and admit of being hammered into shape, or united by the process of welding.

The methods by which this is accomplished vary; but they in general consist in keeping the iron melted in a furnace, and stirring it with an iron rake, till the blast of air in the furnace burns the greater part of the carbon out of it. By this means it becomes tough; and, without cooling, is taken from the furnace and repeatedly beaten by large hammers, or squeezed through large rollers, until it becomes the bar-iron of which so much use is made in every art of life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rolling bar-iron.]

About the close of the last century the great improvement in the manufacture of bar-iron was introduced by pa.s.sing it through grooved rollers, instead of hammering it on the anvil; but in our own time the invention has become most important. The inventor, Mr. Coet, spent a fortune on the enterprise and died poor. His son, in 1812, pet.i.tioned Parliament to a.s.sign him some reward for the great gift that his father had bestowed upon the nation. He asked in vain. It is the common fate of the ingenious and the learned; and it is well that life has some other consolations for the man that has exercised his intellect more profitably for the world than for himself, than the pride of the mere capitalist, who thinks acc.u.mulation, and acc.u.mulation only, the chief business of existence. Rolling bar-iron is one of the great labour-saving principles that especially prevail in every branch of manufacture in metals. The unaided strength of all the men in Britain could not make all the iron which is at present made, though they did nothing else. Machinery is therefore resorted to; and water-wheels, steam-engines, and all sorts of powers are set to work in moving hammers, turning rollers, and drawing rods and wires through holes, till every workman can have the particular form which he wants. If it were not for the machinery that is employed in the manufacture, no man could obtain a spade for less than the price of a year's labour; the yokes of a horse would cost more than the horse himself; and the farmer would have to return to wooden plough-shares, and hoes made of sticks with crooked ends.

After all this, the iron is not yet fit for a knife, at least for such a knife as an Englishman may buy for a shilling. Many nations would, however, be thankful for a little bit of it, and nations too in whose countries there is no want of iron-ore. But they have no knowledge of the method of making iron, and have no furnaces or machinery. When our ships sail among the people of the eastern islands, those people do not ask for gold. "Iron, iron!" is the call; and he who can exchange his best commodity for a rusty nail or a bit of iron hoop is a fortunate individual.

We are not satisfied with that in the best form, which is a treasure to those people in the worst. We must have a knife, not of iron, but of _steel_,--a substance that will bear a keen edge without either breaking or bending. In order to get that, we must again change the nature of our material.

How is that to be done? The oftener that iron is heated and hammered, it becomes the softer and more ductile; and as the heating and hammering forced the carbon out of it, if we give it the carbon back again, we shall harden it; but it happens that we also give it other properties, by restoring its carbon, when the iron has once been in a ductile state.

For this purpose, bars or pieces of iron are buried in powdered charcoal, covered up in a vessel, and kept at a red heat for a greater or less number of hours, according to the object desired. There are niceties in the process, which it is not necessary to explain, that produce the peculiar quality of steel, as distinguished from cast iron.

If the operation of heating the iron in charcoal is continued too long, or the heat is too great, the iron becomes cast steel, and cannot be welded; but if it is not melted in the operation, it can be worked with the hammer in the same manner as iron.