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.
“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
--_King Lear III, IV._
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.