Chapter XVIII (2)

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 "Societe 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is dropped into the hole and is worked up and down until the detritus and water, if any, creep into it, when it is withdrawn and emptied.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 metres diameter. Then comes the larger trepan, with a width of 4.80 metres, 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 metre 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 Liege, 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'Ecole 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 Ecole Imperiale 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, systeme de Bojarsky.

Austria comes with no more striking exhibit than the malteries and breweries of Nobak Freres 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 kilometres, 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 Schoener, 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.

Sweden comes next, and the scene changes; for the weapon which suggested the remarks was only, as it were, one gun in a garden. Instead of wine and olives we find iron and furs. Except some Indian steels, there is no better metal than that of Sweden, and horse-shoe nails are made of it all over Europe and the United States. Iron in ore, pig, rails, bars, rods, wire; iron in tools, files, wheels, balls, shells, pans, boilers, stoves, springs; iron _ad lib_.

The agricultural machines of Sweden, like those of Denmark, are copies of the American and English, and the same is true to a large extent of the engines, saw-mills, water-wheels and wood-working machinery. The statement would not be true of the very elaborate exercising-machines (_la gymnastique medicale mecanique_) invented by Gustave Zander of Stockholm. They embrace every conceivable variety of effort, and also another class of applications which may be termed shampooing, as they consist of kneading and rubbing. Among the twenty machines are those designed for flexing, stretching and extending the limbs, for kneading the back and neck, for rubbing the body and limbs to induce circulation and simulate the effect of exercise in the cases of weak persons or those confined to their beds by casualties. Some of these were in Philadelphia in 1876.

Steering-apparatus and gun-harpoons for whaling testify to the maritime character of the people, as do the boats and ropes. The great exhibit of _pate de bois_ shows the anxiety of the people to turn their extensive forests to good account in the markets of the world. White pine seems to be the principal wood thus used. Norway and Sweden have been shipping timber for some centuries, and yet seem to need no laws to restrain the denudation of their hills; certainly not to encourage rainfall. Bergen has 88.13 inches per annum, which is just double that of Philadelphia, and four inches greater than that of Sitka, where the people say it is always raining. Of course these figures are small when compared to spots on the Himalayas, where Hooker observed a fall of 470 inches in seven months, and on one occasion 30 inches in four hours; the latter equal to the average annual rainfall of France.

The American machinery, which occupies a position between Norway and England, is creditable in kind and quality, but fails very far in giving a correct idea of the multiplicity of our industries. Almost the only evidence of our textile manufactures are two of Tilt's Jacquard silk-weaving looms. The telephones of Edison and Gray excite unremitting astonishment and admiration, and have both received the highest possible awards. Our wood-working is practically shown in a large variety by Fay & Co. of Cincinnati, and one or two other special machines by other makers. The Wheelock engine, which drives all the machinery in our section of the main building, has very properly been awarded a grand prize. It is all that can be desired in an engine, and has a singular simplicity of construction, with few working parts. It is the same which drove the machinery in the Agricultural Building at the Centennial. The steam is admitted and exhausted by a valve at each end of the cylinder placed directly below the port. The cut-off valve is behind the main valve: the mechanism for operating the valves is on the outside of the steam-chest, and easily accessible. The valves and seats are made tapering in their general diameter, and the pressure of steam comes on one side, also acting to keep the collar in contact with the sleeve.

The Waltham Watch Company is considered by some of the most influential European journals as the most important in the American section on account of the revolution it is making in that important industry. When the Swiss commissioner went home from the Centennial he published a letter fairly throwing up the sponge, and when the company's exhibit appeared for the first time in Europe at an international exposition it was regarded as carrying the war into Africa. The American system of making by machinery all the parts of an article--say, of a watch--of a given grade by means of gauges and templets, so that the parts may be "assembled," and of such singular exactitude in their making that any part may be replaced by the corresponding piece of any other watch of the same grade, has in this manufactory attained its highest results, greatest precision and most perfect illustration. The whole collection of watches was sold within a few weeks after the opening. The latest improvements in the balance to secure perfect isochronism under varying conditions of temperature would delight the soul of Harrison, who worked from 1728 to 1761 on the problem of a compensator for the changes of rate due to the expansion and contraction of the metal, and received the reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling offered by the Board of Longitude.

Tiffany's exhibit has been admired and patronized, but is not quite within my range of subjects. Darling, Brown & Sharpe have their machine-tools and gauges, Bliss & Williams their presses and dies. We have the Baxter, Snyder and Lovegrove portable engines, Taylor's and Aultman's agricultural engines. Our railroad exhibit is not very full: we have a Philadelphia and Reading coal-burning locomotive, a Pullman car, the Westinghouse brake, Stephenson's street-cars, car-wheels from Baldwin's and Lobdell's: the latter also sends calender-rolls of remarkable quality. As a sort of set-off to the Austrian car-wheels which have run for twenty-one years, as previously mentioned, Lobdell has a pair which have run 245,000 miles on the Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska Railway. The Fairbanks scales in great variety, both of size and purpose, and of a finish and an accuracy which have become proverbial; the Howe scales; the Goodyear boot- and shoe-machinery; Stow's flexible shaft; Lechner's coal-mining engine; Allen & Roeder's riveting-machine; and Delamater's punches and shears,--are a few more of the representative machines.

Sewing-machines are not in as great variety in the American section as they were in Philadelphia. There are, however, enough of American and European to foot up about eighty exhibitors. Wheeler & Wilson's have been awarded the grand prize, and there are various medals for others, both home and foreign--the American machine, Cole's and Wardwell's among the number. The various hardware exhibits, such as the Disston saws, Ames shovels, Collins axes, Batcheller forks, Russell & Erwin builders' hardware, as well as the Remington, Colt, Winchester, Sharpe and Owen Jones rifles and revolvers, and the Gatling and Gardner guns, are a little on one side of my present line of subjects.

The United States has preserved its ancient reputation in its agricultural machinery. We are especially strong in the class which we term "harvesters," the name including reapers, automatic binders, mowers, horse-rakes and hay-loaders. Our baling-presses also are in advance of competitors. A juryman may perhaps stand excused for supposing that more than an average amount of interest is felt in the machinery which happens to be in his class, but on Class 76--"agricultural implements in motion and in the field"--additional interest was conferred by a series of competitive trials extending from July 22 to August 12, and embracing reapers, mowers, steam and ordinary ploughs, hay-presses, threshing-machines especially, but also including all the other machines for working in the ground, gathering crops and the storage and preparation of feed for animals. In this series of competitive trials eight different countries entered the lists. The prizes were twelve _objets d'art_ placed at the disposal of Monsieur Tisseraud, the "director-general of agriculture and horticulture of France," and the jury selected to attend the trials. Eleven of them were accorded to machines of "exceptional merit," the idea of novelty being included in the definition of the term. These _objets d'art_ are Sevres vases worth one thousand francs each, and in view of their exceptional value, and the large share that America has in the award, a list of the names may very properly be appended.[5] Several hundred machines competed: for instance, twenty-six reapers, sixteen mowers, fifty-four ploughs, and so on of numerous kinds of agricultural implements and machines for working in the soil, gathering crops and for the work of the homestead and barn.

Last on the foreign side is the British machinery, and the collection is very much larger and more varied than any of the preceding. There are few lines of manufacture which are not represented here. Machines for working in iron and other metals, for sawing and fashioning wood, for the ginning, breaking or carding of cotton, flax, wool, jute and hemp, for working in stone, glass, leather and paper, are shown. Then, again, the finished productions; prime motors, such as stationary engines, locomotives and fire-engines; lifting-machines for solids or liquids, cranes, jacks, elevators, pumps, each in endless variety.

Prominent in the hall, and employed in driving the machinery, is the large double compound horizontal engine of Galloway of Manchester. This form of engine is coming to the front, as is evinced especially in the marine service. Maudslay & Sons of London exhibit a model of the four-cylinder marine compound engine as fitted on the "White Star line" vessels, the Germanic, Britannic, Oceanic, Baltic and Adriatic, and on the steamers of the "Compagnie Generale Transatlantique," the Ville de Havre, Europe, France, Amerique, Labrador, Canada. The vessels of the New York and Bremen line have the same class of engines, built in Greenock, Scotland.

Amid so large a mass of machinery one can but select the most prominent, and among these we may choose such as, while not necessarily imposing in size, are suggestive of ideas which we may find valuable for home introduction. Appleby & Sons lead the world in the completeness and capacity of their great cranes and lifts for docks and wharves, machine-shops, erection of buildings, and travelling cranes for railways or common roads. We must make one exception--the elevators for hotels and warehouses, in which America is in advance of all other countries. While we have many varieties of these, we must give credit where it is due, and the _ascenseur Edoux_ of Paris is the original of all those in which the cage is placed upon a plunger that descends into a vertical cylinder into which water is forced to elevate the plunger, and from which it is withdrawn to allow the plunger and cage to descend. Very fine specimens of this class of elevator are in the New York Post-office building. The gantry crane of Messrs. Appleby Bros. of London is the most complete engine of its kind in the world. It was originally constructed for the growing requirements of the docks of the North-eastern Railway Company of England at Middlesborough. The term "gantry" is applied to the movable scaffold or frame, which in this case rests upon a pair of rails twenty-three feet apart, one of them being close to the edge of the quay. The clear height is seventeen and a half feet, which allows the uninterrupted passage of locomotives and all kinds of rolling-stock on each of the two lines of rails which are spanned by the gantry. The crane is designed for a working load of five tons, with a maximum radius of twenty-one feet from the centre of the crane-post to the plumb-line of the lifting chain, with a capacity for altering the radius by steam to a minimum of fourteen feet. The crane has capacity to (1) lift and lower; (2) turn round completely in either direction simultaneously with the lifting and lowering; (3) alter the radius by raising or lowering the jib-head; (4) travel along the rails by its own steam-power. All these motions are easily worked by one man, who attends to the boiler. The travelling motion is transmitted from the crane-engines by suitable gear and shafts to the travelling wheels, and warping-drums or capstans are fitted on a countershaft on the inner side of each frame, which drums can be driven independently of the travelling wheels for moving trucks into position below the crane as they are required for loading and unloading. Smaller cranes may pass with their loads below the gantry, and a number of these large cranes may be assembled so as each to work at the different hatchways of a large screw steamer, or two may be associated together for any exceptionally heavy lift. The value of elevation of the crane is not only in allowing the loaded cars to be brought on tracks beneath it, but in giving it capacity to work over the sides of large vessels, which when light may rise twenty feet above the level of the quay, and to load or discharge from trucks on two lines of rails on the land-side of the gantry, overhead of the trucks on the two lines which run below the gantry.[6]

Blake's stone-breaker, though only represented by model in the United States section, where it belongs, is shown by two English firms; and though some Europeans profess to have improved upon its details, no efficient substitute has been found for it, but it remains the premium stone-crusher of the world, and has rendered services in the exploitation of gold quartz and silver ores, and in the crushing of stones for public works and for concretes, which can hardly be exaggerated. In testimony taken in the United States in 1872 it was put in evidence that five hundred and nine machines then in service effected a direct saving over hand-labor of five million five hundred thousand dollars per annum.

Steam-pumps are here in force--direct by Tangye and others, and rotary by both of the Gwynnes, whose name has been so long and is so intimately associated with this class of machines.

The emery-wheels of Thompson, Sterne & Co. of Glasgow have the same variety of form and application usual with us, but the firm claims that while it uses the true corundum emery of Naxos, the American article is only a refractory iron ore, which soon loses its sharpness and becomes inefficient. This is a question of efficiency or of veracity which we leave to the trade. The machine adapted as a tool-grinder has six emery-wheels for varying characters of work. Four are assorted for gauges of different radii, for moulding-irons, etc. One has a square face for plane-irons, chisels, etc. One is an emery hone to replace the water-of-Ayr stone.

In examining the English locomotives exhibited two things were apparent: one half of them have adopted the outside cylinders and wrist-pins on the drivers, three out of four have comfortable cabs for the engineers. These are, as we view them, sensible changes. Outside-cylinder engines are also coming into extensive use in France. The machine tools shown by Sharp, Stewart & Co. of Manchester are remarkably well made, and their locomotive in the same space is an evidence of the efficiency of the tools.

The exhibit of hydraulic-machine tools by Mr. R. H. Tweddell is a very admirable one, and shows a multitude of stationary and portable forms in which the idea is developed so as to reach the varying requirements. When work is more conveniently held to the machines, the latter are adapted to reach it whether presented vertically or horizontally, or with one arm inside of it, as with boilers and flue-pipes. When it is more convenient to handle the riveter, the latter is suspended from a crane and swung up to its work, and the peculiarity of the various sizes and shapes for different kinds of work is remarkable. The cut shows one of the latest for riveting girders.

The Ingram rotary perfecting press, on which the _Illustrated London News_ is worked off, prints from a web of paper of the usual length, and is claimed as the final triumph in the line of inventors, which is thus stated in England: Nicholson, Koenig, Applegarth and Cowper, Hoe and Walter. We should be disposed to add a few names to the list, among which would be Bullock and Campbell. A is the roll of paper, containing a length of, say, two miles; B B the type and impression cylinders for printing the inner form; C C calendering rollers to remove the indentation of the inner form type; D D the outer form type and impression cylinders; E E cylinders with a saw-tooth knife and an indentation respectively to perforate the sheet between the papers; F F rollers to hold the sheet while the snatching-rollers G G, which run at an increased speed, break the paper off where it has been indented by E E. The folder is in duplicate to give time to work, as each only takes half the papers. The vibrating arm H delivers the sheets alternately to K and J, which are carrying-tapes leading to two folding-machines. If the sheets are not required to be folded, the arm H is moved to its highest position, and there fixed, without stopping the machine: it then delivers the sheets to the roller L, and by means of a blast of air and a flyer they are laid on a table provided for them.

The rise of British factory-life and great energy in manufacturing began with the invention of the spinning-frame by Arkwright, the power-loom by Cartwright, the spinning-jenny by Hargreaves, and the mule by Crompton--all within a space of twenty years ending 1785. To these must be added the steam-engine by Watt, which made it possible to drive the machinery, and the gin by Eli Whitney, which made it possible to get cotton to spin. Much as iron has loomed up lately, the working of the various fibres--cotton, wool, flax, hemp and jute--constitutes the pet industry of her people, and very elaborate and beautiful are the machines at the Exposition, especially attractive and less commonly known being those for working long or combing wool, flax, hemp and jute. The United States is not doing as much as it ought in the working of these fibres, and the money which is paid for the purchase of foreign linens and fabrics made of other materials than cotton and wool might, some economists think, be employed at home in making them. The day will come probably, but does not seem to be hastening very fast, when we shall conclude to make our own linens, as we have within a comparatively few years past determined in regard to all the staple varieties of carpets.

One of the most important machines in the Exposition, from the American point of view, is the "double Macarthy roller-gin," exhibited by Platt Brothers & Co. of Oldham, England. It is a curious instance of how machines sometimes revert to their original types. The oldest machine for ginning cotton is undoubtedly the roller-gin, and it was known in India, China and Malaysia long before Vasco da Gama turned the Cape of Good Hope and opened the trade of the East to the Portuguese and their successors. The common roller-gin of Southern Asia was shown at the Centennial from Hindostan, Java and China, and is exhibited here from Java. It has a pair of rollers about the size of broomsticks, close together and turning in different directions, which pinch and draw the fibre through, while the seeds are prevented from passing by the closeness of the rollers. Whitney's invention of the saw-gin in 1794 revolutionized the business and changed the whole domestic aspect of our Southern States. In it the fibre is picked from the seed by means of saw-teeth projecting through slits in the side of the chamber in which the seed-cotton is placed. But the roller-gin has again come upon the stage, and with the late improvements is likely to become the gin of the future. When the close of our civil war put an end to the "cotton famine," as it was called, in Europe, and American cotton resumed its place in the market, the export of the East Indian and Egyptian cottons would have been immediately suppressed if they had not possessed the roller-gin in those countries. Ten thousand of the double Macarthy gin are used in India, and five thousand of the single roller-gin in Egypt. It is understood that the saw-gin is used in but a single district in India. While the saw-gin injures any variety of cotton by cutting, tearing, napping and tangling the fibres, its action upon the long and fine staple called "sea island" is ruinous, and the roller-gin alone is suitable for working it. The slow action of the single roller-gin, cleaning about one hundred and fifty pounds of lint per day, made its cultivation too expensive, but the double roller-gin will clean nine hundred pounds in ten hours, or one hundred and twenty pounds an hour of the common upland short-staple cotton. It is thought by Southern members of the United States commission that the introduction of the double roller-gin into our country would greatly increase the profitableness of the culture of cotton, and especially of the "sea island," which is at present much neglected, and in the growth of which we need fear no rivalry. Each roller is made of walrus leather, and rotates in contact with a fixed knife, dragging by its rough surface the fibres of cotton between itself and the knife. A grating holds the seed-cotton. Besides these parts there are moving knives to which are attached a grid or series of fingers. At each elevation of the moving knives, the grids attached thereto lift the cotton to the elevation of the fixed knife-edge and of the exposed surface of the rollers: on the descent of each moving knife the seeds which have become separated from the fibre are disentangled by the prongs of the moving grid passing between those of the lower or fixed grid about seven hundred and fifty times per minute, and are by this rapidity of action flirted out.

It would be scarcely fair to neglect altogether the English annex in which all the agricultural implements are exhibited, nor that which contains its carriages. So much commercial intercourse, so many journals published in the respective countries, have made each pretty well acquainted with the agricultural machines and methods of the other. The principal difference is in the splendid plant for steam-ploughing exhibited by Fowler & Son and by Aveling & Porter, and in the great number and variety of the machines and apparatus for preparing food for animals--chaff-cutters, oat- and bean-bruisers and crushers, oilcake-grinders, boilers and steamers for feed and mills for rough grinding of grain.

A shed by the annex contains two curious machines for working stone--one a dresser, belonging to Brunton & Triers, which has a large wheel and a number of planetary cutters whose disk edges as they revolve cut the stone against which they impinge. The other machine, by Weston & Co., is for planing stone mouldings. The stone-drills are in the same annex; also the Smith and the Hardy brakes, the former of which is the European rival of the Westinghouse, acting upon the vacuum principle, and already in possession of so many of the lines in Europe that it proves a serious competitor.

Perhaps nothing in the French Exposition excites more surprise in the minds of those who are conversant with technical matters than the immense advance of the French since 1867 in the matter of machinery. The simple statement of the names of the exhibitors, their residences and the subject-matter occupies a large volume, and the quality and variety are equal to the quantity.

Reference has been made to the web perfecting printing-machine in the English section, but quite a number are shown in the French department, three of them by Marinoni of Paris, one of which prints the journal _La France_, eighteen thousand an hour. It prints, cuts, counts, folds and piles the papers. Another by the same maker prints twenty thousand an hour of the _Weekly Dispatch_ (English paper), and counts and piles them in heaps of one hundred each. A third works on the _Petit Journal_, printing forty thousand per hour with two forms. Alauzet & Co. have also a web perfecting press, _a double touche_, for illustrated papers and book-printing. This wets, prints, cuts, counts and folds in octavo four thousand per hour of super-royal size. They also show a double railway topographic press, printing in two colors. Vauthier's roller-press is arranged to work on an endless roll of paper or on sheets fed in as usual, and prints in six colors. Electro shells are secured in position on the respective rollers, which are in horizontal series, and the paper is conducted by tapes to the rollers in succession. The French section shows a great variety of polychrome, lithographic and zincographic printing-machines, and also a great number of ordinary job and card presses, the most interest, however, centring in the large number and variety of the web perfecting presses for newspapers and for bill-work where long numbers are required.

France has a right to exemplify the Jacquard in its fulness, for it is hers. The original machine of Vaucanson and that of Jacquard are in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, as well as a long series of exemplifications of successive improvements. The Grand Maison de Blanc of Paris has a large one, making an immense linen cloth of damask figures, all in white, and representing what I took at first to be an allegorical picture of all the nations bringing their gifts to the Exposition. I found afterward that it was called _Fees du Dessert_. It is about three metres wide, and just as long as you please to make it, but the pattern is repeated every five metres. The design, on paper, is hung against the wall, and is twelve by eight metres, all laid off in squares of twelve millimetres, and these again into smaller ones exactly a square millimetre in size. The number of small squares on the sheet of paper is ninety-six million, which represents the number of the intersections of the warp and woof in the pattern. There are nine thousand and sixty-six perforated cards in the Jacquard arrangement for floating the threads which form the damask pattern, and the whole machine stands on a space of about twenty by twelve feet and is eighteen feet high. It is worked by one man, without steam-power, the shifting of the harness being done by two foot-levers and the shuttle thrown by a pull-cord.

We may here observe the looms that weave the marvellously fine silk gauzes realizing such fanciful Indian names as "morning mist," which poetically express the lightness of a web that when spread upon the grass is not visible unless one stoops down and examines closely. To even name the various looms here would be to make a list of ribbons, velvets, cloths and other tissues. The subsidiary machines for dressing the fabrics are here also--for napping, teasling, shearing, stretching and brushing, for measuring, folding and packing.

The other modes of making fabrics shown are a machine for making fishing-nets of great width, and a number of knitting-machines, from the stocking-frame of eighty years ago to the small domestic machine, and the larger one with nine hundred needles in the circumference and making a circular seamless fabric eighteen inches in diameter. The march of improvement is eminently shown here, where an old man is patiently knitting a flat web of ten inches with a series of five motions between the rows of stitches, while just by are the circular machines, whose motions are so rapid that the clicks of the needles merge into a whir, and a man is able to attend to six machines, making one hundred and thirty pounds of knitted goods per day.

Passing the large exhibit of machines for the working of fibres preliminary to the loom--the carding, roving, spinning, reeling and warping--and the allied but different machines which make wire-cloths of different meshes and size, we come to the ropemaking-machines for hemp and wire, which are shown principally in their products, the manufacture taking an amount of room and material which could hardly be expected to be efficiently shown in a crowded building where space is valuable.

The French plant for boring small shafts to find water or obtain sections of the strata, and the larger ones for sinking large ones for mines, are shown by several exhibitors. The annular drills remove cylindrical sections of the strata from ten to sixty centimetres in diameter: the large chisels resemble those described in the Belgian exhibit, having a diameter of four metres and a weight of twenty-five thousand kilos.

The department of mining has some excellent large models of mining districts, in which the face of the country is represented with the natural undulations, the villages, roads, fields and streams, and made in removal-sections which expose the underlying strata, the galleries, drifts and shafts of the subterranean world.

An attempt to describe the steam-engines, of such various size, shape, position and capacity, would exhaust all the space permissible in a magazine article.

The wood-working tools of France are excellent, and our manufacturers must look well to their laurels. We have as yet the advantage in compactness and simplicity, with adjustability and adaptation to varying classes of work. The band-saw is claimed as a French invention, and the crowds around the workman who saws a roomful of dolls' furniture out of a single block as large as one's fist are as great here as they were at Philadelphia. The Blanchard lathe for turning irregular forms is here in a variety of forms. This is an interesting object of study, as illustrating the usual course of invention, in which a master-hand grasps a subject which has been suggested in an incomplete and comparatively ineffective manner from time to time by others. De la Hire and Condamine during the last century described lathes adapted to turn irregular shapes, and the scoring-machine for ships' blocks invented by Brunel and made by Maudslay for Chatham dockyard in England, 1802-8, was as perfect an exemplification of the idea as the nature of the work to be done required. Blanchard, however, in 1819 gave the finishing stroke, and the lathe will bear his name for long years. Inventors of three nations attacked the problem, and each aided the result.

Brickmaking, diamond-cutting; machines for making paper bags, envelopes, cuffs and collars; distilleries, sugar-mills, with the successive apparatus of vacuum-pans, pumps and centrifugal filters; soap, stearine, paraffine, wax, candle, candy and chocolate machines and apparatus,--succeed each other, and we next find ourselves in a busy factory of cheap jewelry, Exposition souvenirs and medals, chains and charms. The leather machinery is deserving of a careful description, but it would be too technical perhaps, and there is no romance in the handling of wet hides, the scraping, currying, stretching and pommelling which even the thickness, prepare the surface and develop the pliability of the leather. Near this is the boot- and shoe-making, sewing and cable-screw wire machines, but none for pegging. Sewing-machines, copies of the various American forms, occupy the end of the hall.

Separate buildings around the grounds and on both banks of the Seine contain groups of machinery at which we can but glance. Two long pavilions have agricultural machines, and one each is appropriated to materials for railways, to civil engineering, pumps, gas-works, the forges of Terre Noire, the iron-works of Creusot, the ministry of public works, stoves, the government manufacture of tobacco, navigation, life-saving apparatus of floats and boats, fire-engines and ceramics. Add to these two annexes, each one thousand feet long, containing locomotives, cars, street-cars, telegraph-apparatus and many acres of the surplus machinery of all classes excluded from the large building for want of room, and a person may form some adequate idea of the immense extent and variety of this wonderful collection.

EDWARD H. KNIGHT.

THE COLONEL'S SENTENCE: AN ALGERIAN STORY.