The Romance of Industry and Invention Part 1

The Romance of Industry and Invention.

by Robert Cochrane.

PREFACE.

Our national industries lie at the root of national progress. The first Napoleon taunted us with being a nation of shopkeepers; that, however, is now less true than that we are a nation of manufacturers--coal, iron, and steel, and our textile industries, taken along with our enormous carrying-trade, forming the backbone of the wealth of the country.

A romantic interest belongs to the rise and progress of most of our industries. Very often this lies in the career of the inventor, who struggled towards the perfection and recognition of his invention against heavy difficulties and discouragements; or it may lie in the interesting processes of manufacture. Every fresh labourer in the field adds some link to the chain of progress, and brings it nearer perfection. Some of the small beginnings have increased in a marvellous way. Such are chronicled under Bessemer and Siemens, who have vastly increased the possibilities of the steel industry; in the sections devoted to Krupp, of Essen; Sir W.G. Armstrong, of the Elswick Works, where 18,000 men are now employed alone in the a.r.s.enal; Maxim, of Maxim Gun fame; the rise and progress of the cycle industry; that of the gold and diamond mining industry; and the carrying-trade of the world.

Many of the chapters in this book have been selected from a wealth of such material contributed from time to time to the pages of _Chambers's Journal_, but additions and fresh material have been added where necessary.

CHAPTER I.

IRON AND STEEL.

Pioneers of the Iron and Steel Industry--Sir Henry Bessemer--Sir William Siemens--Werner von Siemens--The Krupps of Essen.

Francis Horner, writing early in this century, said that 'Iron is not only the soul of every other manufacture, but the mainspring perhaps of civilised society.' Cobden has said that 'our wealth, commerce, and manufactures grew out of the skilled labour of men working in metals.'

According to Carlyle, the epic of the future is not to be Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man. We all know that iron was mined and smelted in considerable quant.i.ties in this island as far back as the time of the Romans; and we cherish a vague notion that iron must have been mined and smelted here ever since on a progressively increasing scale. We are so accustomed to think and speak of ourselves as first among all nations, at the smelting-furnace, in the smithy, and amid the t.i.tanic labours of the mechanical workshop, that we open large eyes when we are told what a recent conquest all this superiority is!

There was, indeed, some centuries later than the Roman occupation, a period coming down to quite modern times, during which English iron-mines were left almost unworked. In Edward III.'s reign, the pots, spits, and frying-pans of the royal kitchen were cla.s.sed among his majesty's jewels. For the planners of the Armada the greater abundance and excellence of Spanish iron compared with English was an important element in their calculations of success. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the home market looked to Spain and Germany for its supply both of iron and steel. After that, Sweden came prominently forward; and from her, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, no less than four-fifths of the iron used in this country was imported!

The reason of this marvellous neglect of what has since proved one of our main sources of wealth lay in the enormous consumption of timber which the old smelting processes entailed. The charcoal used in producing a single ton of pig-iron represented four loads of wood, and that required for a ton of bar-iron represented seven loads. Of course, the neighbourhood of a forest was an essential condition to the establishment of ironworks; but wherever such an establishment was effected, the forest disappeared with portentous rapidity. At Lamberhurst, on the borders of Kent and Suss.e.x, with so trifling a produce as five tons per week, the annual consumption of wood was two hundred thousand cords. The timber wealth of Kent, Surrey, and Suss.e.x--which counties were then the centres of our iron industry--seemed menaced with speedy annihilation. In the destruction of these great forests, that of our maritime power was supposed to be intimately involved; so that it is easy to understand how, in those days, the development of the iron manufacture came to be regarded in the light of a national calamity, and a fitting subject for restrictive legislation! Various Acts were pa.s.sed towards the end of the sixteenth century prohibiting smelting-furnaces within twenty-two miles of London, and many of the Suss.e.x masters found themselves compelled, in consequence, to break up their works. During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, a severe blow was given to the trade by the destruction of all furnaces belonging to royalists; and after the Restoration we find the crown itself demolishing its own works in the Forest of Dean, on the old plea that the supply of shipbuilding timber was thereby imperilled. Between 1720 and 1730 the ironworks of Worcestershire and the Forest of Dean consumed 17,350 tons of timber annually, or five tons for each furnace.

'From this time' (the Restoration), says Mr Smiles, 'the iron manufacture of Suss.e.x, as of England generally, rapidly declined. In 1740 there were only fifty-nine furnaces in all England, of which ten were in Suss.e.x; and in 1788 there were only two. A few years later, and the Suss.e.x iron-furnaces were blown out altogether. Farnhurst in Western, and Ashburnham in Eastern Suss.e.x, witnessed the total extinction of the manufacture. The din of the iron hammer was hushed, the glare of the furnace faded, the last blast of the bellows was blown, and the district returned to its original rural solitude. Some of the furnace-ponds were drained and planted with hops or willows; others formed beautiful lakes in retired pleasure-grounds; while the remainder were used to drive flour-mills, as the streams in North Kent, instead of driving fulling-mills, were employed to work paper-mills.' The plentifulness of timber in the Scottish Highlands explains the establishment of smelting-furnaces, in 1753, by an English company at Bunawe in Argyllshire, whither the iron was brought from Furness in Lancashire.

Few of our readers can be unacquainted with the fact that iron-smelting at the present day is performed not with wood but with coal. It will readily, then, be understood that the subst.i.tution of the one description of fuel for the other must have formed the turning-point in the history of the British iron manufacture. This subst.i.tution, however, was brought about very slowly. The prejudice against coal was for a long period extreme; its use for domestic purposes was p.r.o.nounced detrimental to health; and, even for purposes of manufacture, it was generally condemned. Nevertheless, as wood became scarcer and dearer, a closer examination into the capabilities of coal came naturally to be made; and here, as in almost every other industrial path, we find a foreigner acting as our pioneer. The Germans had long been experienced in mining and metallurgy; and it was a German, Simon Sturtevant, who first took out a patent for smelting iron with coal. But his process proved a failure, and the patent was cancelled. Other Germans, naturalised here, followed in Sturtevant's footsteps, but with no better results; until at last an Englishman, Dud Dudley (1599-1684), took up the idea, and gave it practical success. The town of Dudley was even then a centre of the iron manufacture, and Dud's n.o.ble father, Lord Dudley, owned several furnaces. But here, also, the forest-wealth of the district was fast melting away, and the trade already languished under the dread of impending dissolution. In the immediate neighbourhood, meanwhile, coal was abundant, with ironstone and limestone in close proximity to it.

Dud, who, as a child, had haunted and scrutinised his father's ironworks with wondering delight, was placed just at this juncture in charge of a furnace and a couple of forges, and immediately turned his energetic mind to the question of smelting with coal. Some careful experiments succeeded so well that he wrote to his father, requesting him to take out a patent for the process; and this patent, registered in Lord Dudley's name, and dated the 22d February 1620, properly inaugurated the great metallurgic revolution which had made the English iron trade what it now is. Andrew Yarranton was another pioneer in the iron and tin-plate industry, and wrote a remarkable work on _England's Improvement by Sea and Land_ (1677-81).

Nevertheless, even with this positive success on record, the inert insular mind long refused to follow the path cleared for it. Dud's discovery 'was neither appreciated by the iron-masters nor by the workmen;' and all schemes for smelting ore with any other fuel than wood-charcoal were regarded with incredulity. His secret seems to have been bequeathed to no one, and for many years after his death the old, much-abused, forest-devouring system went tottering on. Stern necessity, however, taught its hard lesson at last, and a period insensibly arrived when the employment of coal in smelting processes became the rule rather than the exception, and might be seen here and there on an unusually large scale--especially at the celebrated Coalbrookdale works, in the valley of the Severn, Shropshire.

The founder of the Coalbrookdale industries was a Quaker--Abraham Darby (1677-1717). A small furnace had existed on the spot ever since the days of the Tudors, and this small furnace formed the nucleus of that industrial activity which the visitor of Coalbrookdale surveys with such wonder at the present day.

In Darby's time, the princ.i.p.al cooking utensils of the poorer cla.s.ses were pots and kettles made of cast-iron. But even this primitive ware was beyond native skill, and most of the utensils in question were imported from Holland. Exercising an effort of judgment, which, moderate as it was, seems to have been hitherto unexampled, Darby resolved to pay that country a visit, and ascertain in person why it was that Dutch castings were so good and English so bad. The use of dry sand instead of clay for the moulds comprised, he found, the whole secret.

On returning to England, Darby took out a patent for the new process, and his castings soon acquired repute. The use of pit-coal in the Coalbrookdale furnaces is not supposed, however, to have become general until the worthy Abraham had been succeeded by his son; but when it once did become so, the impetus thereby given to the iron trade and to coal-mining was immense. It is the latter industry which may pre-eminently claim to have called the steam-engine into existence. The demand for pumping-power adequate to the drainage of deep mines set Newcomen's brain to work; and the engine rough-sketched by his ingenuity, and perfected by the genius of Watt, soon increased enormously the production of iron by rendering coal more accessible and the blast-furnace more efficient.

A son-in-law of Abraham Darby's, Richard Reynolds by name, made a great stride towards the modern railway by subst.i.tuting iron for wood on the tramways which connected the different works at Coalbrookdale; and it was a grandson of the same Abraham who designed and erected the first iron bridge.

England, we have seen, borrowed the idea of her smelting processes and iron-castings from Germany and Holland; but the discovery of that important material, cast-steel, belongs, at least, to one of her own sons. Yet even here the relationship is a merely conventional one, for Benjamin Huntsman (1704-1776) was the child of German parents who had settled in Lincolnshire.

Huntsman's original calling was that of a clock-maker; but his remarkable mechanical skill, his shrewdness, and his practical sense, soon gave him the repute of the 'wise man' of the district, and brought neighbours to consult him not only as to the repair of every ordinary sort of machinery, but also of the human frame--the most complex of all machines! It was his daily experience of the inferior quality of the tools at his command that led him to make experiments in the manufacture of steel. What his experiments were we have no record to show; but that they must have been conducted with Teutonic patience and thoroughness there can be no doubt, from the formidable nature of the difficulties overcome.

England, however, long refused to make use of Huntsman's precious material, although produced in her very midst. The Sheffield cutlers would have nothing to do with a substance so much harder than anything they were accustomed to, and Huntsman was actually compelled to look for his market abroad! All the cast-steel he could manufacture was sent over to France, and the merit of employing this material for general purposes belongs originally to that country. The inventions of Henry Cort (1740-1800) for refining and rolling iron (1785) were the mainspring of the malleable iron trade, and made Great Britain independent of Russia and Sweden for supplies of manufactured iron. One authority has stated that since 1790, when Cort's improvements were entirely established, the value of landed property in England had doubled. But he was unfortunate in business life, and in 1811 upwards of forty iron firms subscribed towards a fund for the a.s.sistance of his widow and nine orphan children.

David Mushet (1772-1847) did much for the expansion of the iron trade in Scotland by his preparation of steel from bar-iron by a direct process, combining the iron with carbon, and by his discovery of the effect of manganese on steel.

Steel is the material of which the instruments of labour are essentially made. Upon the quality of the material, that of the instrument naturally depends, and upon the quality of the instrument, that, in great measure, of the work. Watt's marvellous invention ran great risk, at one time, of being abandoned, for the simple reason that the mechanical capacities of the age were not 'up' to its embodiment.

Even after Watt had secured the aid of Boulton's best workmen, Smeaton gave it as his opinion that the steam-engine could never be brought into general use, because of the difficulty of getting its various parts made with the requisite precision.

The execution by machinery of work ordinarily executed by hand-tools has been a gigantic stride in the path of material civilisation. The earliest phase of the great modern movement in this direction is represented, probably, by the sawmill. A sawmill was erected near London as long ago as 1663--by a foreigner--but was shortly abandoned in consequence of the determined hostility of the sawyers; and more than a century elapsed before another mill was put up. But the sawmill is comparatively a rude structure, and the material it operates upon is easily treated, even by the hand. When we come to deal, however, with such substances as iron and steel, the benefit of machinery becomes incalculable. Without our recent machine-tools, indeed, the stupendous iron creations of the present day would have been impossible at any cost; for no amount of hand-labour could ever attain that perfect exact.i.tude of construction without which it would be idle to attempt fitting the component parts of these colossal structures together.

The first impulse, however, to the improvement of machine-tools for ironwork was given by a difficulty born not of ma.s.s but of minuteness.

Up to the end of the last century, the locks in common use among us were of the rudest description, and afforded scarcely any security against thieves. To meet this universal want, Joseph Bramah set his remarkable inventive faculties to work, and speedily contrived a lock so perfect, that it held its ground for many a day. But Bramah's locks are machines of the most delicate kind, depending for their efficiency upon the precision with which their component parts are finished; and, at that time, the attainment of this precision, at such a price as to render the lock an article of extensive commerce, seemed an insuperable difficulty. In his dilemma, Bramah's attention was directed to a youngster in the Woolwich a.r.s.enal smithy, named Henry Maudsley, whose reputation for ingenuity was already great among his fellows. Bramah was at first almost ashamed to take such a mere lad into his counsels; but a preliminary conversation convinced him that his confidence would not be misplaced. He persuaded Maudsley to enter his employment, and the result was the invention, between them, of the planing-machine, applicable either to wood or metal, as also of certain improvements in the old lathe, more particularly of that known as the 'slide-rest.'

In the old-fashioned lathe, the workman guided his cutting-tool by sheer muscular strength, and the slightest variation in the pressure necessarily led to an irregularity of surface. The rest for the hand is in this case fixed, and the tool held by the workman travels along it.

Now, the principle of the slide-rest is the opposite of this. The rest itself holds the tool firmly fixed in it, and slides along the bench in a direction parallel with the axis of the work. All that the workman has to do, therefore, is to turn a screw-handle, by means of which the cutter is carried along with the smallest possible expenditure of strength; and even this trifling labour has been since got rid of, by making the rest self-acting.

Simple and obvious as this improvement seems, its importance cannot be overrated. The accuracy it insured was precisely the desideratum of the day! By means of the slide-rest, the most delicate as well as the most ponderous pieces of machinery can be turned with mathematical precision; and from this invention must date that extraordinary development of mechanical power and production which is a characteristic of the age we live in. 'Without the aid of the vast accession to our power of producing perfect mechanism which it at once supplied,' says a first-cla.s.s judge in matters of the kind, 'we could never have worked out into practical and profitable forms the conceptions of those master-minds who, during the past half-century, have so successfully pioneered the way for mankind. The steam-engine itself, which supplies us with such unbounded power, owes its present perfection to this most admirable means of giving to metallic objects the most precise and perfect geometrical forms. How could we, for instance, have good steam-engines if we had not the means of boring out a true cylinder, or turning a true piston-rod, or planing a valve-face?'

It would perhaps be impossible to cite any more authoritative estimate of Maudsley's invention than the above. The words placed between inverted commas are the words of James Nasmyth, the inventor of that wonderful steam-hammer which Professor Tomlinson characterises as 'one of the most perfect of artificial machines and n.o.blest triumphs of mind over matter that modern English engineers have yet developed.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: Nasmyth's Steam-hammer.]

This machine enlarged at one bound the whole scale of working in iron, and permitted Maudsley's lathe to develop its entire range of capacity.

The old 'tilt-hammer' was so constructed that the more voluminous the material submitted to it, the _less_ was the power attainable; so that as soon as certain dimensions had been exceeded, the hammer became utterly useless. When the _Great Western_ steamship was in course of construction, tenders were invited from the leading mechanical firms for the supply of the enormous paddle-shaft required for her engines. But a forging of the size in question had never been executed, and no firm in England would undertake the contract. In this dilemma, Mr Nasmyth was applied to, and the result of his study of the problem was this marvellous steam-hammer--so powerful that it will forge an Armstrong hundred-pounder as easily as a farrier forges a horse-shoe, and so delicately manageable that it will crack a nut without bruising its kernel!

BESSEMER STEEL.

In 1722, Reaumur produced steel by melting three parts of cast-iron with one part of wrought iron (probably in a crucible) in a common forge; he, however, failed to produce steel in this manner on a working scale. This process has many points in common with the Indian Wootz-steel manufacture.

As we have seen, to Benjamin Huntsman, a Doncaster artisan, belongs the credit of first producing cast-steel upon a working scale, as he was the first to accomplish the entire fusion of converted bar-iron (that is, blister-steel) of the required degree of hardness, in crucibles or clay pots, placed among the c.o.ke of an air-furnace. This process is still carried on at Sheffield and elsewhere, and is what is generally known as the crucible or pot-steel process. It was mainly supplementary to the cementation process, as formerly blister-steel was alone melted in the crucibles; but latterly, and at the present time, the crucible mode of manufacture embraces the fusion of other varieties and combinations of metal, producing accordingly different cla.s.ses and qualities of steel.

In 1839, Josiah Marshall Heath patented the important application of carburet of manganese to steel in the crucible, which application imparted to the resulting product the properties of varying temper and increased forgeability. He subsequently found out that a separate operation was not necessary to form the carburet--which is produced by heating peroxide of manganese and carbon to a high temperature--but that the same result could be attained by simply in the first instance adding the carbon and oxide of manganese direct to the metal in the crucible.

He unsuspectingly communicated this after-discovery to his agent--by name Unwin--who took advantage of the fact that it was not incorporated in the wording of the patent, and so was unprotected, to make use of it for his own advantage. The result was one of the most remarkable patent trials on record, extending over twelve years, and terminating in 1855 against the patentee--a remarkable instance of the triumph of legal technicalities over the moral sense of right.

A very important development of the manufacture of steel followed the introduction of the 'Bessemer process,' by means of which a low carbon or mild cast-steel can be produced at about one-tenth of the cost of crucible steel. It is used for rails, for the tires of the wheels of railway carriages, for ship-plates, boiler-plates, for shafting, and a mult.i.tude of constructional and other purposes to which only wrought iron was formerly applied, besides many for which no metal at all was used.

Sir Henry Bessemer's process for making steel, which is now so largely practised in England, on the continent of Europe, and in America, was patented in 1856. It was first applied to the making of malleable iron, but this has never been successfully made by the Bessemer method. For the manufacture of a cheap but highly serviceable steel, however, its success has been so splendid that no other metallurgical process has given its inventor so great a renown. Although the apparatus actually used is somewhat costly and elaborate, yet the principle of the operation is very simple. A large converting vessel, with openings called tuyeres in its bottom, is partially filled up with from 5 to 10 tons of molten pig-iron, and a blast of air, at a pressure of from 18 to 20 lb. per square inch, is forced through this metal by a blowing engine. Pig-iron contains from 3 to 5 per cent. of carbon, and, if it has been smelted with charcoal from a pure ore, as is the case with Swedish iron, the blast is continued till only from .25 to 1 per cent.

of the carbon is left in the metal, that is to say, steel is produced.

Sometimes, however, the minimum quant.i.ty of carbon is even less than .25 per cent. In England, where a less pure but still expensive cast-iron--viz. haemat.i.te pig--is used for the production of steel in the ordinary Bessemer converter, the process differs slightly. In this case the whole of the carbon is oxidised by the blast of air, and the requisite quant.i.ty of this element is afterwards restored to the metal by pouring into the converter a small quant.i.ty of a peculiar kind of cast-iron, called _spiegeleisen_, which contains a known quant.i.ty of carbon. But small quant.i.ties of manganese and silicon are also present in Bessemer steel. The 'blow' lasts from 20 to 30 minutes. Steel made from whatever kind of pig-iron, either by this or by the 'basic'

process, is not sufficiently dense, at least for most purposes, and it is accordingly manipulated under the steam-hammer and rolled into a variety of forms. Bessemer steel is employed, as we have said, for heavy objects, as rails, tires, rollers, boiler-plates, ship-plates, and for many other purposes for which malleable iron was formerly used.

Basic steel is now largely made from inferior pig-iron, such as the Cleveland, by the Thomas-Gilchrist process patented in 1878. It is, however, only a modification of the Bessemer process to the extent of subst.i.tuting for the siliceous or 'acid' lining generally used, a lime or 'basic' lining for the converter. Limestone, preferably a magnesian limestone in some form, is commonly employed for the lining. By the use of a basic lining, phosphorus is eliminated towards the end of the 'blow.' Phosphorus is a very deleterious substance in steel, and is present, sometimes to the extent of 2 per cent., in pig-iron smelted from impure ore.

The four inventions of this century which have given the greatest impetus to the manufacture of iron and steel were--the introduction of the hot blast into the blast-furnace for the production of crude iron, made by J. B. Neilson, of the Glasgow Gas-works, in 1827; the application of the cold blast in the Bessemer converter which we have just described; the production of steel direct from the ore, by Siemens, in the open hearth; and the discovery of a basic lining by which phosphorus is eliminated and all kinds of iron converted into steel.

This last was the discovery of G. J. Snelus, of London, and it was made a practical success by the Thomas & Gilchrist process just described. In 1883, Mr Snelus was awarded the Bessemer gold medal of the Iron and Steel Inst.i.tute 'as the first man who made pure steel from impure iron in a Bessemer converter lined with basic materials.'

SIR HENRY BESSEMER.