Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

IV.—MACHINERY

The machinery in the Paris Exposition covers a larger space than any other of the eight departments of material, machinery and products which occupy the buildings and annexes. The ninth department, Horticulture, is outdoors on the grounds or in greenhouses. Foreign machinery has about half the space, and French machinery the remainder. Few countries are without annexes, the space allotted to each, though supposed to be ample, being utterly insufficient to hold the multitude of objects presented.

In preference to taking the classes of machinery in turn, and visiting the various nations in search of exemplars of the classes in rotation, it will be more interesting to take the nations in order and arrive at an idea of the rate and direction of their relative progress, modified so largely by the respective natural productions of the countries and by the habits and degrees of civilization of their inhabitants. When put to a trial of its strength, each nation naturally brings forward the matters in which it particularly excels.

Prominent in the section of the Netherlands, the name so descriptive of the land where not less than two hundred and twenty-three thousand acres are below the level of the sea and kept constantly drained by artificial means, are the engineering and mechanical devices for the reclamation and preservation of land, the formation of outlet-canals for the centres of commerce, and the bridging of the rivers and estuaries which intersect the maritime portions of the country. Some of the models and relief-maps were shown in the Netherlands section in the Main Building at Philadelphia, but the exhibition is more perfect here, as much has been added in the two intervening years.

The works for the drainage of the Haarlemmer Meer illustrate the means employed for the last great drainage-work completed. This lake had an area of 45,230 acres, an average depth of seventeen feet below low water, and was drained between 1848 and 1853. Being diked to exclude the waters which naturally flowed into it, three large engines were built in different places around it, and the work of pumping out 800,000,000 tons of water commenced. The engines have cylinders of twelve feet diameter, and are capable of lifting 2,000,000 tons of water in twenty-four hours from the depth of seventeen feet to the level of the boezem, or catch-water basin, of the district. The boezem carries the water to the sea, into which it discharges by sluices at Katwyk on the North Sea and at Sparndam and Halfweg on the Y, or the southern end of the Zuyder Zee. The land reclaimed is now in excellent tillage, and one farm on the tract is referred to in agricultural journals as one of the three model farms of the world. The three engines are called the Leeghwater, the Cruquius and the Lynden, from three celebrated engineers who had at different times proposed plans for draining the Haarlemmer Meer. Proposals for its drainage were made by one of these engineers as far back as 1663. The next enterprise in hand is the drainage of the southern lobe of the Zuyder Zee, which is stated to have an average depth of thirteen feet, and it is intended to cut it off by a dike from the northern basin and erect sufficient engines around it to pump it out in thirteen years at the rate of a foot a year, working night and day.

Another engineering device, very necessary in a land where foundations are so frequently built under water, is the enclosed caisson with compressed air, as shown in detail in this exhibit. It was originally invented by M. Triger to keep the water expelled from the sheet-iron cylinders which he sunk through quick-sands in reaching the coal-measures in the vicinity of the river Loire in France. The seams of coal in this district lie under a stratum of quicksand from fifty-eight to sixty-six feet in thickness, and they had been inaccessible by all the ordinary modes of mining previously practised. The system has been much amplified and improved since, especially in sinking the foundations of the St. Louis and the New York East River bridges, and does not require specific description. An improved air-lock, by which access is given from the exterior to the working chamber at the part where the men work in an atmosphere sufficiently condensed to exclude water from the lower open end—like a tumbler inverted in water—is the principal addition which America has made to the device.

We need not go abroad to find long bridges, but the great bridge, with three immense iron trusses and eight smaller ones, over the Wahal near Bommell would be respectable anywhere. Our Louisville bridge is a parallel example for length, but the truss is different.

The dikes and jetties of the new embouchure of the Meuse embrace the same features of extending a river's banks into deep water, and by confining the stream making it scour out its own bed, as now so successfully practised by Captain Eads in one of the passes of the Mississippi River. Limbs and saplings made into gabions and staked together form mattresses, and by loading with stone are sunk in position. They soon become silted up, and are practically solid. Others are made and laid upon them ad libitum, and at last raise the crest above the level of the sea, the last course being laid with the advantage of high-water spring tides. This foundation supports courses of pitched masonry on its side, and these protect the stone or gravel embankment, which forms a roadbed. The river's water, instead of, as formerly, depositing its silt at the embouchure as its motion is arrested on reaching the open sea, carries its silt along and deposits it farther out: if a favorable shore-current occurs, it is swept away laterally, and so disposed of.

The maritime canal of Amsterdam is another late success of this remarkable people, which leads the world in dikes and drainage of low lands, as the Italian does in the art and area of irrigation. The present canal may satisfy the great and still rising commerce of Amsterdam, the previous ship-canal, fifty-one miles in length, built in 1819-25 at a cost of $4,250,000, and deep and wide enough to float two passing frigates, having proved insufficient.

Belgium is happily situated, and well provided by Nature and art to enter into any competitive trial. With admirable skill, great provision of iron and coal and a people of economical habits that permit them to work at low wages without being impoverished, she is, besides working up her own abundant material, rolling the iron of England into rails, and making it into locomotives for Great Britain, whose own people lack the work thus done abroad. The "Société Cockerill-Seraing" has an enormous space devoted to the machinery for the exploitation of iron. Compressed forgings in car-wheels and other shapes are piled on the floor, and a whole railway rail-rolling mill train is shown in motion. Two of the rolls are stated to have rolled 10,500 tons of steel rails, and are in apparent good order yet.

The Belgium system of sinking shafts for mines and wells, invented by Kind and Chaudron, exhibited here as in Philadelphia, attracts great attention from its gigantic proportions. Imagine an immense boring-chisel (trepan), weighing 26,000 pounds and with a breadth of over six feet, worked up and down by machinery, the steel studs on its face stamping the rocks into dust, so that they can be removed with a bucket with bottom valves which is dropped into the hole and is worked up and down until the detritus and water, if any, creep into it, when it is withdrawn and emptied. The repetition of these processes makes the shaft of two mètres diameter. Then comes the larger trepan, with a width of 4.80 mètres, and repeats the process on a larger scale. This enormous chisel weighs 44,000 pounds. The system is much in favor, and forty-five shafts have been thus sunk between 1854 and 1877 in Belgium, France, England and Germany. Cast-iron lining is lowered in sections as the shaft deepens, the sections being added at the top and bolted together.

The Belgian exhibit contains also one of those immense paper-machines invented by the brothers Fourdrinier about fifty years ago, and now used almost universally for the best class of machine-made papers. They are used by Wilcox at Glen Falls, Delaware county, Penn., in making the government note and bond paper, and are a marvel of art. The Frenchmen who invented the machine brought it into use in England, but they were much hampered and discouraged by difficulties, and it was never a pecuniary success to them. It was a legacy to the future, and they have joined the army of martyrs to mechanical science. The machine in the Belgian section is one hundred and thirty feet long, and the Swiss machine, near by, is nearly as large. The French, with their customary ingenuity, have reduced the proportions very considerably. The Swiss machine makes paper one mètre and a half wide.

The remainder of the Belgian exhibit of machinery may be summarized: rock drills on the principle of those used at Mont Cenis; the gas-engines of Otto; machine tools, lathes, drills and planers; a very curious machine for cutting bevel or straight gears, built by a firm at Liège, and worthy of attention by Mr. Sellers or Mr. Corliss, whose ingenious machines for the same purpose were at Philadelphia; the woollen machinery of Celestine Martin of Verviers, which I recollect to have seen in Philadelphia also; multitubular boilers, rudder propeller, and hand fire-engines Then we see a number of locomotives and tramway engines, rail and street cars, winding, mining, crane and portable engines, and a full set of vacuum-pans for sugar, with engines, centrifugal filters and hydraulic presses. A glance at Guibal's great mine-ventilator fan, fifty feet in diameter and with ten wooden vanes, and we may quit the section of Belgium, which is the next largest after England of all the foreign departments here.

The exhibition of Denmark is principally agricultural machinery, its iron ploughs being copies of the English, and its reapers of the American, while the dairy machines and apparatus are its own, and very excellent.

The embroidering-machine of Hurtu & Hautin is shown working in the Swiss section, and is a great success. The web or cloth to be embroidered is stretched between horizontal rollers in a vertical frame which hangs suspended in the machine from the shorter end of a lever above. On each side of this floating frame is a track on which a carriage alternately approaches and recedes. Each carriage carries as many nippers in a row as equals the number of needles, which in this case is two hundred and twelve. The needles have an eye in the middle and are pointed at each end. The carriage advances, the nippers holding the threaded needles, and pushes them through the cloth: the nippers on the other side are waiting to receive them and shut upon them, those which have just thrust them into the cloth opening automatically; the second carriage retreats and draws the silk through the cloth with the requisite tightness, and then comes forward, thrusting the other end of the needles through the cloth to be grasped by the nippers on the first carriage, and so on. The frame holding the cloth is moved by an arrangement of levers under the control of the operator, who conducts a tracer point on the long end of the lever over the design, which is suspended before him. The frame moves in obedience to the action of the tracer, but in a minified degree, and each needle repeats on a scale of one-twentieth the design over which the tracer is moved step by step between each stitch. Thus two hundred and twelve embroideries according to a prescribed pattern are made by each needle; and, in fact, though it was not stated, to avoid complicating the description, a second row of a similar number of needles is carried by the same carriages and operates upon a second web stretched between another pair of rollers in the same floating frame. The object of the rollers is to reel off new cloth as the embroidery progresses and to reel on the work done. A similar machine is shown in the French section, in the Salle de l'École Militaire.

The Jacquard loom is shown in many sections—Swiss, French, United States, English and others—principally upon silk handkerchiefs and motto-ribbons. The exhibit of carpet-weaving is far inferior to the Philadelphian. The Swiss exhibit of machinery for making paper of wood pulp is very large and ample, but the Belgian annex shows the finest and largest varieties of paper so made to be found in the Exposition. The paper, white and of various colors, made from about forty trees and twenty different straws, grasses and forage-plants, is shown in large rolls.

Of Russia there is not much to say except as regards the work of the École Impériale Technique de Moscou. This is a remarkable exemplification of tools, methods of work, parts of engines and machines, all finished with extreme care and fitted with great nicety. It is fuller than it was in Philadelphia, but many of the portions are readily recognizable. The machine tools, hydraulic presses, stationary engines and hand fire-engines are closely associated with the military and naval objects, cannons, ambulances, field-forges and an excellent lifeboat, système de Bojarsky.

Austria comes with no more striking exhibit than the malteries and breweries of Nobak Frères and Fritze. The immense extent of the magazines for barley and hops; the size and height of the malteries, where by continuous processes the grain is damped, sprouted and dried and the malt ground; the number and capacity of the various vessels in which the infusions of malt and hops are made and mixed; and the apparently interminable series of engines, pumps and pipes by which the steam and liquids are conducted,—are confusing until some study evolves order out of the apparent confusion. The wort is cooled artificially, time being a great object as well as the saving of aroma, and the yet innocent liquid is poured in a torrent into the fermentation-vats, where Nature will have her own way and eliminate the ingredients which convert the mawkish wort into the sparkling and refreshing beer. Four hundred and fifty of these establishments have been erected by this firm in Europe; which must be some comfort to those, not vignerons, who think the prospects of the vine are materially clouded by the Phylloxera.

But Austria is not beery alone. She has fine exhibits in horology, electric and pneumatic telegraphy, and in tools, grain-mills, gang-saw mills, and machines for making paper bags. More important, as some might say, are the admirable locomotives and stationary engines, cars, fire-engines, and her collection of iron-work, in which are exhibited cast-iron car-wheels, made by Ganz & Co. of Buda-Pesth, which have been in use twenty-one years and have run without apparent severe injury a distance of 549,108 kilomètres, or nearly 280,700 miles.

The beet-root sugar interest is becoming very important in Austria, but the evidences of the Exhibition indicate that the diffusion-process holds better credit there than in France, where it is not approved of. The rotative apparatus shown is an immense affair, with a series of eight tall tanks arranged on a circular carriage and rotating on a vertical axis, so as to bring each in turn to the charging and discharging positions. Each tank has its own system of pumps. Beet-root is difficult to exploit for various reasons, chemical and other. Like the vine, it is particular in its nutriment, requires great skill to remove extraneous substances, and can hardly be handled by the French system without a set of machinery costing about eighty thousand dollars.

From Austria to Spain is but a step, but it is not productive of much information in the matter we have in hand. A beaming-machine for cotton warps, red, white and yellow, stands solitary in its section, and next to it is a model of a cirque de taureau, composed of nineteen thousand pieces of tin laboriously put together without solder, as if that were a merit, and stated to be the work of two years. In the arena the wooden bull regards with indifference two mounted cavaliers and seven footmen in various provoking attitudes. Near by are various machines and presses for the treatment of grapes and olives, grinders and presses in variety, a sugar-cane press and a turbine. Barcelona would seem to be the most enterprising of Spanish cities. Several exemplifications of the excellent iron of Catalonia and Biscay suggest the direction in which Spain has taken its most important industrial start of late years. An admirable model of the quay of the copper-mining company of the Rio Tinto is another evidence in the same line which the maps, plans and ores amply corroborate.

Two steps, in violation of all preconceived geographical notions, but in obedience to the Exposition authorities, land us in China, where we find things mechanical in much the same state of progress as Marco Polo viewed them some centuries since. The silk tissues brought from the far East were famous in the days of the Roman magnificence, and here is the loom. The marvel is how such a web can be made on such a rough machine. A blue silk warp of delicate threads is in the loom, which has nine heddles, and the partly-finished fabric shows a woof consisting of a narrow gilded strip of paper. The sheen of the figured goods is something remarkable. It is a parallel case to that of the shawls of Kashmir, where the natives, trained for generations, succeed in producing by great care and unlimited expenditure of time fabrics with which the utmost elaboration of our machinery scarcely enables us to compete.

The machine for the whitening of rice by the removal of the brown coating from the pure white grain is similar to that shown from Siam at the Centennial, but, unlike the latter, the faces of the two round horizontal wooden blocks which act as mill-stones are serrated, whereas the Siamese rubbers were made of sun-dried clay, the serrations consisting of bamboo strips inserted in the clay while yet plastic. The motion is similar, not being continuously revolving, but reciprocatory, and the method is customary in all the rice-eating regions except India, and is well known in parts of the latter, though not universal. The grain of Eastern Asia, including India and Malaysia, is almost universally rice, of which two, and even three, crops a year are raised in some regions, and the processes of cooking are simple among these vegetarians, the variation consisting principally in the choice of condiments or of certain additional esculents or fruits in their season. The grinding of grain is, however, universally known, though meal forms but a small proportion of the daily food. The mortar and pestle in the Chinese section show the more usual method, and there, as in some parts of India, the pestle is placed on the end of a poised horizontal beam which is worked by the foot of the operator at the end opposite to the pestle.

We meet in the Chinese section with the original of our fanning-mill or winnowing-machine for grain. Though China has had the same machines for centuries, we have not knowingly copied many of them. The fanning-mill, porcelain and the cheng may be fairly credited to her. The last is the original of all our free-reed musical instruments. It is shown here, and was also at the Centennial, and it was the carrying of one overland to Russia, where it fell into the hands of Kratzenstein, the organ-builder to Queen Catharine II., which initiated the free reed in Europe, and led to the accordions, concertinas, harmoniums and parlor organs which perhaps afford the cheapest and loudest music for a given expenditure of muscle and wind of anything we have.

The spinning and winding machinery of China is simple enough, but so much like that of our great-grandmothers that it does not arrest particular attention. It is otherwise with the irrigating-machine, which in its various modifications produces, by the fruitfulness induced, the food of scores of millions in China, India, Syria and Egypt—the cogged wheel on a vertical axis, with an ox travelling beneath it, and a horizontal shaft moved thereby and carrying an endless chain of pots or buckets, either hanging from the cord or moving in an inclined chute.

The ploughs, harrows, rakes, flails, spades, hoes and forks are of the usual clumsy description, not to be apprehended by the reader without cuts, and many of them only reasonably effective even in the mellow soil repeatedly stirred and occasionally flooded with water. The seed-drill for planting one row, with a share on each side to turn soil on to the grain, is an anticipation of some later inventions nearer home. The thresher is a square frame drawn over the grain—which is spread upon the bare ground—and is furnished on its under side with steel blades which not only shell the grain out of the ear, but also reduce the straw into chaff, which is desirable, as storing for feed more conveniently. Southern nations have but little conception of our use of hay. Grain for the man and straw for the beast is the usual division. The ancient Roman tribulum and the modern Syrian morej, were or are similar, and the "sharp" threshing instrument of Isaiah may be seen to-day in the Tunis exhibit, being a frame of boards with sharp flint spalls inserted into its under surface.

We might linger with profit over the elaborate models of Chinese manufactures—sugar, rice, tobacco, paper, etc., showing the stages of cultivation, manufacture, and packing for transportation and market—but perhaps it will be as well to slip across the alley and visit the ancient island of Zipango.

Zipango, Nipon, Japon, have one consistent syllabic element, and the rulers of the country are so desirous that it should take its place among the civilized nations of the world that they have not shown to any liberal extent the native machinery, except in the form of models which attract but little attention, a few machines for winding and measuring silk, some curious articles of bamboo and ratan, fishpots and baskets, and cutlery of native shapes.

The exclusiveness which had marked the policy of Japan from time immemorial, and which was somewhat roughly intruded upon by Captain Perry, and subsequently by other explorers and diplomatists, has given place to a change which amounts to a revolution. Japan, under the name of Zipango, took its place on the map of the world some time before Columbus discovered, unwittingly to himself, that a continent intervened between Western Europe and Eastern Asia. When Columbus made his voyage in search of Asia, assisted by those very estimable persons Ferdinand and Isabella, it was on the part of the latter intended as a flank movement against the Portuguese, who, consequent upon the discovery of the passage of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama, had obtained a patent from the pope for the eastern route to India. The globe of Martin Behaim at that time depicted Zipango as off the coast of Asia and near the longitude actually occupied by the Carolinas and Florida, the eastward extension of Asia being fearfully exaggerated. The globe of John Schöner, of 1520, fourteen years after the death of Columbus, had Zipango in the same place, and Cuba alongside of it, ranging north and south. So loath were geographers to give up preconceived ideas. Columbus died supposing he had discovered "fourteen hundred islands and three hundred and thirty-three leagues of the coast of Asia," and hence our group are called the West Indies, and our aborigines Indians. Such are one's reflections as one wanders in the Japanese section, dreaming among the objects of a land which has just awaked from what may be called the sleep of centuries.

Italy has much that is valuable as well as beautiful in other classes, but her attempts in agricultural machinery are but rude. Here, for example, is a plough. Well, perhaps it is not exactly that which made the trench over which Remus leaped, to be slain by his twin wolf-nursling, but it is the plough of Bocchi Gaetano of Parma, is twelve feet long and weighs something under half a ton. Another, hard by, is two feet longer and has but one handle. Efforts are evident, however, to assimilate the country to the portions of Europe more advanced in mechanical matters. When we reflect upon how much we owe to Italy, we can but wish her well, but we cannot delay long with her in a search for objects of mechanical interest except to examine her models of tunnels, manner of scaffolding, boring and blasting. The Mont Cenis tunnel must stand as the grandest work of its kind until that of Saint Gothard is finished. An exemplification by a model constructed to a scale of the electric ballista of Spezzia for testing the hundred-ton gun lately made in England for Italy attracts a great many visitors, and the large photographs which give the condition of the butt after each impact of the projectiles brings up again the double problem as it is stated: How to construct a gun and projectile which shall be able to pierce the heaviest armor; and how to construct armor which shall be proof against the heaviest shot. Many saw with interest in the Machinery Building at the Centennial the eight-inch armor-plating made by Cammell of Sheffield, tested in one case by nine spherical shots overlapping, making an indentation of 3.12 inches with balls from a seven-inch gun driven by thirty pounds of powder at a range of seventy feet. They are here again, and so is the nine-inch armor with a much deeper indentation from a chilled Palisser bolt. Here is also a new-comer, John Brown, whose armor of four and a half inches of steel welded on to the same thickness of iron resists the Palisser bolt, which only penetrates the thickness of the steel. What might happen to it with a pointed steel bolt from a sixty- or one-hundred-ton gun is another matter. To set our minds at rest as to what would occur in the event supposed comes Sir Joseph Whitworth, who exhibits his gun with polygonal rifling, the bore being a hexagon with rounded corners. The projectiles are moulded of the same shape, and are fired as they are cast, without planing. One of these bolts, six diameters long and weighing twenty-nine and a half pounds, was fired from a twelve-pounder gun through a four and a half inch armor-plate. The exhibit also shows a flat-fronted Whitworth fluid-pressed steel shell, three diameters long, weighing eight hundred and eight pounds, which was fired at Gavre, France, without a bursting charge, from a Whitworth twelve-inch, thirty-five-ton gun, and penetrated iron sixteen inches thick and twelve inches of oak backing. The shell remained entire and was only slightly distorted. The question seems to be answered, unless the plates are made twenty inches thick, and that is impossible on a vessel to be manoeuvred.