Inventions in the Century

CHAPTER XXI.

WOOD-WORKING

In surveying the wonderful road along which have travelled the toiling inventors, until the splendid fields of the present century have been reached, the mind indulges in contrasts and reverts to the far gone period of man's deprivations, when man, the animal, was fighting for food and shelter.

When the implements of labour and the weapons of war were chiefly made of stone, or bronze, or iron, such periods became the "age" of stone, or bronze, or iron; and we sometimes hear of the ages of steam, steel and electricity. But the age of wood has always existed, wherever forests abounded. It was, doubtless, the earliest "age" in the industries of man, but is not likely to be the latest, as the class of inventions we are about to consider, although giving complete dominion to man over the forests, are hastening their destruction.

As in every other class of inventions, there had been inventions in the class of wood-working through the ages preceding this century, in tools, implements and machines; but not until near the close of the eighteenth century had there been much of a break in the universal toil by hand. The implements produced were, for the most part, the result of the slow growth of experience and mechanical skill, rather than the product of inventive genius.

True, the turning-lathe, the axe, the hammer, the chisel, the saw, the auger, the plane, the screw, and cutting and other wood-shaping instruments in simple forms existed in abundance. The Egyptians used their saws of bronze. The Greeks deified their supposed inventor of the saw, Talus, or Perdix, and they claimed Theodore of Lamos as the inventor of the turning-lathe; although the main idea of pivoting an object between two supports, so that it could be turned while the hands were free to apply a tool to its shaping, was old in the potter's wheel of the Egyptians, which was turned while the vessel resting upon it was shaped and ornamented by the hand and tools. It appears also to have been known by the Hindoos and the Africans.

Pliny refers to the curled chips raised by the plane, and Ansonius refers to mills driven by the waters of the Moselle for sawing marble into slabs. Early records mention saw-mills run by water-power in the thirteenth century in France, Germany and Norway; and Sweden had them in the next century. Holland had them one hundred years at least before they were introduced into England.

Fearful of the entire destruction of the forests by the wood used in the manufacture of iron, and incited by the opposition and jealousy of hand sawyers, England passed some rigid laws on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, although preserving the forests, gave for a long time the almost exclusive manufacture of iron and lumber to Germany and Holland. Even as late as 1768, a saw-mill, built at Limehouse, under the encouragement of the Society of Arts, by James Stansfield, was destroyed by a mob. Saw-mills designed to be run by water-power had been introduced into the American colonies by the Dutch more than a century before they made their appearance in England. William Penn found that they had long been at work on the Delaware when he reached its shores in 1682.

It was nothing indigenous to the climate or race that rendered the Americans inventors. The early colonists, drawn from the most civilised countries of Europe, carried to the new world knowledge of the latest and best appliances known to their respective countries in the various arts. With three thousand miles of water between them and the source of such appliances, and between them and the source of arbitrary power and laws to hamper efforts and enterprise, with stern necessity on every hand prompting them to avail themselves of every means to meet their daily wants, all known inventions were put to use, and brains were constantly exercised in devising new means to aid, or take the place of, manual labour, which was scarce. Surrounded, too, by vast forests, from which their houses, their churches and their schools must be constructed, these pioneers naturally turned their thoughts toward wood-working machinery. The attention to this art necessarily created interest in and developed other arts. Thus constant devotion to pursuits strenuously demanding labour-saving devices evolved a race of keen inventors and mechanics. So that when Watt had developed his wonderful application of steam to industrial purposes, America was ready to substitute steam for water-power in the running of saw-mills.

Steam saw-mills commenced to buzz with the opening of the century.

As to the relation of that humble machine, the saw-mill, to the progress of civilisation, it was once said: "The axe produces the log hut, but not until the saw-mill is introduced do framed dwellings and villages arise; it is civilisation's pioneer machine; the precursor of the carpenter, wheelwright and turner, the painter, the joiner, and legions of other professions. Progress is unknown where it is not. Its comparative absence in the Southern American continent was not the least cause of the trifling advancement made there during three centuries and a half. Surrounded by forests of the most valuable and variegated timber, with water-power in mountain streams, equally neglected, the masses of the people lived in shanties and mud hovels, not more commodious than those of the aborigines, nor more durable than the annual structures of birds. Wherever man has not fixed and comfortable homes, he is, as regards civilisation, stationary; improvement under such circumstances has never taken place, nor can it."

Miller, in England, in 1777, had described in his patent a circular saw, and Hatton, in 1776, had vaguely described a planing machine; but the inception of the marvellous growth in wood-working machinery in the nineteenth century occurred in England during the last decade of the eighteenth. It was due to the splendid efforts of General Samuel Bentham, and of Bramah and Branch, both as to metal-working and wood-working machinery.

General Bentham, a brother of the celebrated jurist, Jeremy Bentham, had his attention drawn to the slow, laborious, and crude methods of working in wood, while making a tour of Europe, and especially in Russia, and engaged in inspecting the art of ship-building in those countries, in behalf of the British Admiralty. On his return, 1791-1792, he converted his home into a shop for making wood-working machines. These included "Planing, moulding, rabbeting, grooving, mortising, and sawing, both in coarse and fine work, in curved, winding, and transverse directions, and shaping wood in complicated forms."

Of the amount of bills presented to and paid for by the Admiralty for these machines, General Bentham received about £20,000.

These machines were developed and in use just as the new century approached. Thus, with the exception of the saw-mill, it may be again said that prior to this century the means mankind had to aid them in their work in metals and in wood were confined to hand tools, and these were for the most part of a simple and crude description.

The ground-work now being laid, the century advanced into a region of invention in tools and machinery for wood-working of every description, far beyond the wildest dreams of all former carpenters and joiners. Not only were the machines themselves invented, but they gave rise in turn to a host of inventions in metal-working for making them.

In the same line of inventions there appeared in the first decade of the century one of the most ingenious of men, and a most fitting type of that great class of Yankee inventors who have carved their way to renown with all implements, from the jack-knife to the electrically-driven universal shaping machine.

Thomas Blanchard, born in Massachusetts in 1788, while a boy, was accustomed to astonish his companions by the miniature wind-wheels and water-wheels that he whittled out with his knife. While attending the parties of young people who gathered on winter evenings at different homes in the country to pare apples, the idea of a paring machine occurred to him, and when only thirteen years of age, he invented and made the first apple-paring machine, with which more apples could be pared in a given time than any twelve of his girl acquaintances could pare with a knife.

At eighteen, while working in a shop, driving the heads down on tacks, on an anvil, with a hammer, he invented the first tack-forming machine, which, when perfected by him, made five hundred tacks a minute, and which has never since been improved in principle. He improved the steam engine, and invented one of the first envelope machines. He made the first metal lathe for cutting out the butts of gun-barrels. But his greatest triumphs were in wood-working machinery.

Challenged to make a machine that would make a gun stock, always before that time regarded an impossible task, its every part being so irregular in form, he secluded himself in his workshop for six months, and after constant labour and experiments he at the end of that time had produced a machine that more than astonished the entire world, and which worked a revolution in the making of all irregular forms from wood. This was in 1819. This machine would not only make a perfect gun-stock, but shoe lasts, and ships' tackle-blocks, axe-handles, and a multitude of irregular-shaped blocks which before had always required the most expert hand operatives to produce. This machine became the subject of parliamentary inquiry on the part of England, and so great were the doubts concerning it, that successive commissions were appointed to examine and report upon it. Finally the English government ordered eight or ten of such machines for the making of gun-stocks for its army, and paid Blanchard about $40,000 for them. He was once jestingly asked at the navy department at Washington if he could turn a seventy-four? He at once replied, "Yes, if you will furnish me the block." Of course infringers appeared, but he maintained his rights and title as first and original inventor after the most searching trials in court.

The generic idea of Blanchard's lathe for turning irregular forms consists in the use of a pattern of the device which is to be shaped from the rough material, placing such pattern in a lathe, alongside of the rough block, and having a guide wheel which has an arm having cutters, and which guide follows all the lines of the pattern, and which cutters, extending to the rough material, chip it away to the depth and in the direction imparted by the pattern lines to the guide, thus producing from the rough block a perfect representation of the pattern.

In the midst of his studies in the construction of his inventions Blanchard's attention was drawn to the operations of a boring worm upon an old oak log. Closely examining and watching the same by the aid of a microscope, he gained valuable ideas from the work of his humble teacher, which he incorporated into his new cutting and boring machines.

His series of machines in gun-making were designed to make and shape automatically every part of the gun, whether of wood or metal. His machines, and subsequent improvements by others, for boring, mortising and turning, display wonderful ingenuity. A modern mortising machine, for instance, is adapted to quickly and accurately cut a square or oblong hole to any desired depth, width, and length by cutting blades; to automatically reciprocate the cutters both vertically and horizontally in order to cut the mortise, both as to length and depth, at one time, and to automatically withdraw the cutters when they have finished cutting the mortise. They are provided with simple means for setting and feeding the cutters to do this work, and while giving the cutters a positive action, ample clearance is provided for the removal of the chips as fast as they are cut.

From what such inventions will produce in the way of complicated and ornamental workmanship we may conclude that it is a law of invention that whatever can be made by hand may be made by a machine, and made better.

Carving Machines made their appearance early in the century. In 1800 a Mr. Watt of London produced one, on which he carved medallions and figures in ivory and ebony. Also subsequently, John Hawkins of the same city, and a Mr. Cheverton, invented machines for the same purpose. Another Englishman, Braithwaite, in 1840, invented a most attractive carving process in which, instead of cutting tools, he employed burning as his agent. Heated casts of previously carved models were pressed into or on to wet wood, and the charcoal surfaces then brushed off with hard brushes.

After Blanchard's turning-lathes and boring apparatus, appeared machines in which a series of cutters were employed, guided by a tracing lever attached to a carved model, and actuating the cutter to reproduce on material placed upon an adjusting table a copy of the model.

Machines have been invented which consist of hard iron or steel rollers on the surface of which are cut beautiful patterns, and between which wood previously softened by steam is passed, and designs thus impressed thereon. A similar process of embossing, was devised in Paris and called Xyloplasty, by which steam-softened wood is compressed in carved moulds, which give it bas-relief impressions.

But in the carving of wood by hand, a beautiful art, which has been revived within the past generation, there are touches of sentiment, taste and human toil, which, like the touches of the painter and the master of music, appeal to cultivated minds in a higher than mechanical sense. The mills of the modern gods, the inventors, grind with exceeding and exact fineness, but the work of a human hand upon a manufactured article still appeals to human sympathy.

The bending of wood when heated by fire or steam had been known and practised to a limited extent, but Blanchard invented a clamping machine, to which improvements have been added, and by which ship timbers, furniture, ploughs, piano frames, carriage bows, stair and house banisters and balusters, wheel rims, staves, etc., etc., are bent to the desired forms, and without breaking. Bending to a certain extent does not weaken wood, but stretching the same has been found to impair and destroy its strength.

The principal problems which the inventors of the century have solved in the class of wood-working have been the adaptation to rapid-working machinery of the saw and other blades, to sever; the plane to smooth, the auger, the bit and the gimlet to bore, the hammer to drive, and a combination of all or a part of these to shape and finish the completed article.

It was a great step from the reciprocating hand saw, worked painfully by one or two men, to the band saw, invented by a London mechanic, William Newbury, in 1808. This was an endless steel belt serrated on one edge, mounted on pulleys, and driven continuously by the power of steam through the hardest and the heaviest work. Pliable, to conform to the faces of the wheels over which it is carried, it will bend with all the sinuosities of long timber, no time is lost in its operation, and no labour of human hands is necessary to guide it or the object on which it works.

At the Vienna Exposition in 1873, the first mammoth saw of this description was exhibited. The saw itself was made by the celebrated firm of Perin & Co., of Paris, upon machinery the drawings of which were made by Mr. Van Pelt of New York, and constructed by Richards, Loudon and Kelly of Philadelphia. The saw was fifty-five feet long, and sawed planks from a pine log three feet thick, at the rate of sixty superficial feet per minute. The difficulty of securing a perfectly reliable weld in the endless steel band was overcome by M. Perin, who received at the Paris Exhibition in 1867 the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Now gangs of such saws may be found in America and elsewhere, and circular saws have also been added. Saws that both cut, form, and plane the boards at the same time are now known.

Boring tools, both for hand and machinery, demanded improvement. Formerly augers and similar boring tools had merely a curved sharpened end and a concavity to hold the chips, and the whole tool had to be withdrawn to empty the chips. It was known as a pod auger. In 1809, L'Hommedieu, a Frenchman, invented an auger with two pods and cutting lips, a central screw and a twisted shank. About the same time Lilley of Connecticut made a twisted auger, and these screw-form, twisted, cutting tools of various kinds, with their cutting lips, and by which the shavings or chips were withdrawn continuously from the hole as the cutting proceeded, became so improved in the United States that they were known as the American augers and bits. The planing machines of General Bentham were improved by Bramah, and he and Maudsley also greatly improved other wood-working machines and tools in England – 1802-1810.

We have before, in the chapter on metal-working, shown the importance of the slide-rest, planer and lathe, when combined, and which also are extensively adapted to wood-working. In Bramah's machine, a vertical spindle carried at its lower extremity a horizontal wheel having twenty-eight cutter blades, followed by a plane also attached to a wheel. A board was by these means perfectly trimmed and smoothed from end to end, as it was carried against the cutters by suitable moving means. William Woodworth of New York, in 1828, patented a celebrated planing machine which became so popular and its use was regarded so necessary in the wood-working trades, that the patent was looked upon as an odious monopoly. It consisted of a combination of rollers armed with cutters, attached to a horizontal shaft revolving at a great speed, and of means for feeding the boards to the cutters. With Bentham's, Bramah's, Blanchard's, and Woodworth's ideas for a basis, those innumerable improvements have been made in machinery, by which wood is converted with almost lightning rapidity into all the forms in which we see it, whether ornamental or useful, in modern homes and other structures.

Some machines are known as "Universal Wood Workers." In these a single machine is provided with various tools, and adapted to perform a great variety of work by shifting the position of the material and the tools. The following operations can be performed on such a machine: – Planing, bevelling, tapering, tenoning, tongueing and grooving (grooves straight, circular or angular), making of joints, twisting and a number of other operations.

The later invention by Stow of Philadelphia of a flexible shaft, made up of a series of coils of steel wire, given a leather covering, and to which can be attached augers, bits, or metal drills, the tool applied to its work from any direction, and its direction varied while at work, has excited great attention.

Shingles are as old in the art as the framework of buildings. Rome was roofed with shingles for centuries, made of oak or pine.

Tiles, plain and fancy, and slates, have to a certain extent superseded wood shingling, but the wood will always be used where it can be found in plenty, as machines will now turn them out complete faster than they can be hauled away. A shingle is a thin piece of wood, thicker at one end than at the other, having parallel sides, about three times as long as it is wide, having generally smooth surfaces and edges. All these features are now given to the shingle by modern machines.

A great log is rolled into a mill at one end and soon comes out at the other in bundles of shingles; the logs sawed into blocks, the blocks split or sawed again into shingle sizes, tapered, planed in the direction of the grain of the wood, the complete shingles collected and bound in bundles, each operation by a special machine, or by a series of mechanisms.

Veneering, that art of covering cheap or ordinary wood with a thin covering of more ornamental and valuable wood, known from the days of the Egyptians, has been vastly extended by modern machinery. The practice, however, so emphatically denounced centuries ago by Pliny, as "the monstrous invention of paint and dyes applied to the woods or veneers, to imitate other woods," has yet its practitioners and admirers.

T. M. Brunel, in 1805-1808, devised a set of circular saws run by a steam engine, which cut sheets of rosewood and mahogany, one-fourteenth of an inch thick, with great speed and accuracy. Since that day the veneer planing machine, for delicately smoothing the sheets, the straightening machine, for straightening scrolls that have been cut from logs, the polishing machines for giving the sheets their bright and glossy appearance, the pressing machine for applying them to the surfaces to which they are to be attached, the hammering machine for forcing out superfluous glue from between a veneer and the piece to which it is applied; all of these and numerous modifications of the same have been invented, and resulted in placing in the homes everywhere many beautiful ornamental articles of furniture, which before the very rich only could afford to have.

Special forms of machinery for making various articles of wood are about as numerous as the articles themselves.

We appear before the house and know before entering that its doors and sills, clapboards and window frames, its sashes and blinds, its cornices, its embrasures and pillars, and shingles, each or all have had a special machine invented for its manufacture. We enter the house and find it is so with objects within – the flooring may be adorned with the beautiful art of marquetry and parquetry, wood mosaic work, the wainscoting and the frescoes and ceilings, the stairs and staircases, its carved and ornamental supporting frames and balusters, the charming mantel frames around the hospitable fireplaces, and every article of furniture we see in which wood is a part. So, too, it is with every useful wooden implement and article within and without the house, – the trays, the buckets, the barrels, the tubs, the clothes-pins, the broom-handles, the mops, the ironing and bread boards; and outside the house, the fences, railings and posts – many of these objects entirely unknown to the poor of former generations, uncommon with the rich, and the machinery for making them unknown to all.

It was a noble array of woodwork and machinery with which the nations surprised and greeted the world, at each of its notable international Expositions during the century. Each occasion surpassed its predecessor in the beauty of construction of the machines displayed and efficiency of their work. The names of the members of this array were hard and uncouth, such as the axe, the adze, and the bit, the auger, bark-cutting and grinding machines, blind-slat boring, and tenoning, dovetail, mortising, matching and planing, wood splitting, turning, wheeling and planing, wood-bending, rim-boring dowelling, felly-jointing, etc., etc. These names and the clamour of the machines were painful to the ear, but to the thoughtful, they were converted into sweeter music, when reflection brought to mind the hard toil of human hands they had saved, the before unknown comforts and blessings of civilisation they had brought and were bringing to the human race, and the enduring forms of beauty they had produced.

To the invention of wood-working machinery we are also indebted for the awakening of interest in the qualities of wood for a vast number of artistic purposes. It was a revelation, at the great Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, to behold the specimens of different woods from all the forests of the earth, selected and assembled to display their wonderful grain and other qualities, and showing how well nature was storing up for us in its silent shades those growths which were waiting the genius of invention to convert into forms of use and beauty for every home.

CHAPTER XXII.

FURNITURE

So far as machinery is concerned for converting wood into furniture, the same has been anticipated in the previous chapter, but much remains to be said about the articles of furniture themselves.

Although from ancient days the most ancient countries provided by hand elaborate and beautiful articles of furniture of many descriptions, yet it has been left for modern advances in machinery and kindred arts to yield that universal supply of convenient and ornamental furniture which now prevails.