LEATHER.
It is interesting to speculate how prehistoric man came to use the skin
of the beasts of the field for warmth and shelter. Originally no doubt,
and for untold centuries, the use was confined to the hairy, undressed,
fresh, or dried skins, known as pelts. Then came the use of better
tools. The garments have perished, but the tools of stone and of bronze
survived, which, when compared with those employed among the earliest
historic tribes of men, were found to be adapted to cut and strip the
hairy covering from the bodies of animals, and clean, pound, scrape and
otherwise adapt them to use.
And ever since the story of man began to be preserved in lasting records
from farthest Oriental to the northernmost limits of Europe and America,
memorials of the early implements of labour in the preparation of hides
for human wear have been found. The aborigines knew how to sharpen bones
of the animals they killed to scrape, clean, soften or roughen their
skins. They knew how to sweat, dry, and smoke the skins, and this crude
seasoning process was the forerunner of modern tanning. But leather as
we know it now, that soft, flexible, insoluble combination of the
gelatine and fibrine of the skin with tannic acid, producing a durable
and imputrescible article, that will withstand decay from the joint
attack of moisture, warmth and air, was unknown to the earlier races of
men, for its production was due to thorough tanning, and thorough
tanning was a later art.
When men were skin-dressed animals they knew little or nothing of
tanning. Tannic acid is found in nearly every plant that grows, and its
combination with the fresh skins spread or thrown thereon, may have
given rise to the observation of the beneficial result and subsequent
practice. But whether discovered by chance, accident or experience, or
invented from necessity, the art of tanning should have rendered the
name of the discoverer immortal. The earliest records, however, describe
the art, but not the inventor.
From the time the Hebrews covered the altars of their tabernacles with
rams’ skins dyed red, as recorded in Exodus; when they and the Egyptians
worked their leather, currying and stretching it with their knives,
awls, stones, and other implements, making leather water buckets,
resembling very much those now made by machinery, covering their harps
and shields with leather, ornamental and embossed; from the days of the
early Africans, famous for their yellow, red and black morocco; from the
days of the old national dress of the Persians with their leather
trousers, aprons, helmets, belts and shirts; from the time that the
ancient Scythians utilised the skins of their enemies, and Herodotus
described the beauty and other good qualities of the human hide; from
the early days of that peculiar fine and agreeable leather of the
Russians, fragrant with the oil of the birch; from the days of the white
leather of the Hungarians, the olive-tanned leather of the Saracens;
from the time of the celebrated Cordovan leather of the Spaniards; from
the ancient cold periods of the Esquimaux and the Scandinavians, who,
clad in the warm skins of the Arctic bears, stretched tough-tanned
sealskin over the frame work of their boats; from the time of the
introduction of the art of the leather worker to the naked Briton, down
to almost the nineteenth century, substantially the same hand tools,
hard hand labour, and the old elbow lubricant were known and practised.
Hand tools have improved, of course, as other arts in wood and iron
making have developed, but the operations are about the same. There were
and must be fleshing knives to scrape from off the hide the adherent
flesh and lime,--for this the hide is placed over the convex edge of an
inclined beam and the work is called beaming; the curriers’ knife for
removing the hair; skiving, or the cutting off the rough edges and
fleshy parts on the border of the hide; shaving and flattening; the
cutting away of the inequalities left after skiving; _stoning_, the
rubbing of the leather by a scouring stone to render it smooth;
_slicking_, to remove the water and grease; or to smooth and polish, by
a rectangular sharpened stone, steel or glass tool; _whitening_, to
shave off thin strips of the flesh, leaving the leather thinner, whiter
and more pliable; _stuffing_, to soften the scraped and pounded hides
and make them porous; _graining_, the giving to the hair or grain side a
granular appearance by rubbing with a grooved or roughened piece of
wood; _bruising_ or boarding to make the leather supple and pliable by
bringing the two flesh sides together and rubbing with a graining board;
_scouring_, by aid of a stream of water to whiten the leather by rubbing
with a slicking stone or steel.
The inventions of the century consist in labour-saving machinery for
these purposes, new tanning and dressing processes, and innumerable
machines for making special articles of leather.
As before stated, the epoch of modern machinery commenced with the
practical application of water power to other than grinding mills, and
of steam in place of water, contemporaneously with the invention of
spinning and weaving machinery in the last half of the eighteenth
century. These got fairly to work at the beginning of the century, and
the uses of machinery spread to the treatment of leather. John Bull was
the appropriate name of the man who first patented a scraping machine in
England, about 1780, and Joseph Weeks the next one, some years later.
One of the earliest machines of the century was the hide mill, which,
after the hand tools had scraped and stoned, shaved and hardened the
hides, was used to rub and dub them, and soften and swell them for
tanning. Pegged rollers were the earliest form for this purpose, and
later corrugated rollers and power-worked hammers were employed.
Hundreds of hides could be softened daily by these means.
Then came ingenious machines to take the place of the previous
operations of the hand tools,--the fleshing machine, in one form of
which the hides are placed on a curved bed, and the fleshy parts scraped
off or removed by revolving glass blades, or by curved teeth of steel
and wood in a roller under which a table is given a to-and-fro movement;
tanning apparatus of a great variety, by which hides, after they are
thoroughly washed and softened, and the pores opened by swelling, are
subjected to movements in the tanning liquor vats, such as rocking or
oscillating, rotary, or vertical; or treated by an air exhaust, known as
the vacuum process; in all of which the object is to thoroughly
impregnate in the shortest time all the interstices and pores of the
skin with the tannic acid, by which the fibrous and gelatinous matter is
made to combine to form leather, and by which process, also, the hide is
greatly increased in weight.
Reel machines are then employed to transfer the hides from one vat to
another, thus subjecting them to liquors of increasing strength. Soaking
in vats formerly occupied twelve or eighteen months, but under the new
methods the time has been greatly reduced. And now since 1880, the
chemists are pushing aside the vegetable processes, and substituting
mineral processes, by which tanning is still further shortened and
cheapened. The new processes depend chiefly on the use of chromium
compounds.
Then came scouring machines, in which a rapidly revolving stiff brush is
used to scour the grain or hair side, removing the superfluous colouring
matter, called the bloom, and softening and cleansing the hide; the
slicking or polishing machines to clean, stretch and smooth the leather
by glass, stone, or copper blades on a rapidly-moving belt carried over
pulleys; whitening, buffing, skiving, fleshing and shaving machines, all
for cutting off certain portions and inequalities of the leather, and
reducing its thickness.
In one form of this class of machines an oscillating pendulum lever is
employed, carrying at its end a revolving cylinder having thirty or more
spiral blades. The pendulum swings to and fro at the rate of ninety
movements a minute, while the cylinder rolls over the leather at the
rate of 2780 revolutions per minute. Scarfing, skiving, chamfering,
bevelling, feather-edging, appear to be synonymous terms for a variety
of machines for cutting the edges of leather obliquely, for the purpose
chiefly of making lap seams, scarf-joints, and reducing the thickness
and stiffness of leather at those and certain other points.
Then there are leather-splitting machines, consisting of one or more
rollers and a pressure bar, which draw and press the leather against a
horizontally arranged and adjustable knife, which nicely splits the
leather in two parts, and thus doubles the quantity. This thin split
leather is much used in making a cheap quality of boots and shoes and
other articles.
There are also corrugating, creasing, fluting, pebbling, piercing and
punching machines; machines for grinding the bark and also for grinding
the leather; machines for gluing sections of leather together, and
machines for sewing them; machines for rounding flat strips of leather,
for the making of whips and tubes; machines for scalloping the edges;
and a very ingenious machine for assorting leather strips or strings
according to their size or thickness.
The most important improvements of the century in leather working relate
to the manufacture of boots and shoes. It could well be said of boots
and shoes, especially those made for the great mass of humanity, before
the modern improvements in means and processes had been invented: “Their
feet through faithless leather met the dirt.”
It is true that in the eighteenth century, both in Europe and America,
the art of leather and boot and shoe making had so far advanced that
good durable foot wear was produced by long and tedious processes of
tanning, and by careful making up of the leather into boots and shoes by
hand; the knife, the awl, the waxed thread, the nails and hammer and
other hand tools of the character above referred to being employed. But
the process was a tedious and costly one and the articles produced were
beyond the limits of the poor man’s purse. Hence the wooden shoes, and
those made of coarse hide and dressed and undressed skins, and of coarse
cloth, mixed or unmixed with leather.
In 1809, David Mead Randolph of England patented machinery for riveting
soles and heels to the uppers instead of sewing them together.
The celebrated civil engineer, Isambard M. Brunel, shortly thereafter
added several machines of his own invention to Randolph’s method, and he
established a large manufactory for the making chiefly of army shoes.
The various separate processes performed by his machines involved the
cutting out of the leather, hardening it by rolling, securing the welt
on to the inner sole by small nails, and studding the outer sole with
larger nails. Divisions of men were employed to work each separate step,
and the shoes were passed from one process to another until complete.
Large quantities of shoes were made at reduced prices, but complaints
were made as to the nails penetrating into the shoe and hurting the
feet. The demand for army shoes fell off, and the system was abandoned;
but it had incited invention in the direction of machine-made shoes and
the day of exclusive hand labour was doomed.
About 1818 Joseph Walker of Hopkinston, Massachusetts invented the
wooden peg. Making and applying pegs by hand was too slow work, and
machines were at once contrived for making them. As one invention
necessitates and begets others, so special forms of machines for sawing
and working up wood into pegs were devised.
Such machinery was for first sawing the selected log of wood into slices
across the grain a little thicker than the length of a peg and cutting
out knots in the wood; then planing the head of the block smooth;
grooving the block with a V-shaped cutting tool; splitting the pegs
apart, and then bleaching, drying, polishing and winnowing them.
It took forty or fifty years to perfect these and kindred machines, but
at the end of that time there was a factory at Burlington, Vermont,
which from four cords of wood, made every day four hundred bushels of
shoe pegs.
About 1858 B. F. Sturtevant of Massachusetts made a great improvement in
this line. He was a very poor man, getting a living by pegging on the
soles of a few pair of shoes each day. He devised a pegging machine, and
out of his scanty earnings and at odd hours, with much pain and labour,
and by borrowing money, he finally completed it. The machine made what
was called “peg wood,” a long ribbon strip of seasoned wood, sharpened
on one edge and designed to be fed into the machine for pegging shoes.
The shoes were punctured by awls driven by machinery, and then as the
peg strip was carried to it the machine severed the strip into
chisel-edged pegs, and peg-driving mechanism drove them into the holes.
Nine hundred pegs a minute were driven. It soon almost supplanted all
other peg-driving machines, and after the machines were quite generally
introduced, there were made in one year alone in New England fifty-five
million pairs of boots and shoes pegged by the Sturtevant machines.
Other forms of pegs followed, such as the metal screw pegs, and machines
to cut them off from a continuous spiral wire from which they were made.
Lasts on which the shoes were made had been manufactured by the hundred
thousand on the wood-turning lathes invented by Blanchard, described in
the chapter on Wood-Working.
In 1858 also, about the same time the Sturtevant pegging machine was
introduced, the shoe-sewing machine was developed. The McKay Shoe-Sewing
Machine Co. of Massachusetts after an expenditure of $130,000, and three
years’ time in experiments, were enabled to put their machines in
practical operation. The pegging machines and sewing machines worked a
revolution in shoemaking.
A revolution in the art of shoemaking thus started was followed up by
wondrous machines invented to meet every part of the manufacture.
Lasting machines for drawing and fitting the leather over lasts, in
which the outer edges of the leather are drawn over the bottom of the
last and tacked thereto by the hands and fingers of the machine instead
of those of the human hand, were invented.
_Indenting machines_:--The welt is known as that strip of leather around
the shoe between the upper and the sole, and machines were invented for
cutting and placing this, indenting it for the purpose of rendering it
flexible and separating the stitches, all a work until recently entirely
done by hand. Machines for twining the seams in the uppers, and forming
the scallops; machines especially adapted to the making of the heel, as
heel trimming and compressing, rounding and polishing, and for nailing
the finished heel to the boot or shoe; machines for treating the sole in
every way, rolling it, in place of the good old way of pounding it on a
lap stone; trimming, rounding, smoothing, and polishing it; machines for
cutting out gores; machines for marking the uppers so that at one
operation every shoe will be stamped by its size, number, name of
manufacture, number of case, and any other convenient symbols; machines
for setting the buttons and eyelets; all these are simply members in the
long line of inventions in this art.
The old style of boot has given way to the modern shoe and gaiter, but
for the benefit of those who still wear them, special machines for
shaping the leg, called boot trees, have been contrived.
So far had the art advanced that twenty years ago one workingman with
much of this improved machinery combined in one machine called the
“bootmaker,” could make three hundred pairs of boots or shoes a day.
Upward of three thousand such machines were then at work throughout the
world; and one hundred and fifty million pairs of boots were then being
made annually thereon. Now the number of machines and pairs of boots and
shoes has been quadrupled.
And the world is having its feet clothed far more extensively, better
and at less cost than was ever possible by the hand system. The number
of workers in the art, both men and women, has vastly increased instead
of being diminished, while their wages have greatly advanced over the
old rates.
As an illustration of how rapidly modern enterprise and invention
proceeds in Yankeeland, it has been related that some years ago in
Massachusetts, after many of these shoe-making machines had got into
use, a factory which was turning out 2400 pairs of shoes every day was
completely destroyed by fire on a Wednesday night. On Thursday the
manufacturer hired a neighbouring building and set carpenters at work
fitting it up. On Friday he ordered a new and complete outfit of
machinery from Boston; on Saturday the machinery arrived and the men set
it up; on Monday work was started, and on Tuesday the manufacturer was
filling his orders to the full number of 2400 pairs a day.
There are very many people in the world who still prefer the hand-made
shoe, and there is nothing to prevent the world generally from going
back to that system if they choose; but St. Crispin’s gentle art has
blossomed into a vaster field of blessings for mankind under the
fruitful impetus of invention than if left to vegetate under the simple
processes of primitive man.
Horses, no less than man, have shared in the improvement in leather
manufacture. The harnesses of the farmer’s and labouring man’s horses a
century ago, when they were fortunate enough to own horses, were of the
crudest description. Ropes, cords, coarse bands of leather were the
common provisions. Now the strength and cheapness of harnesses enable
the poor man to equip his horse with a working suit impossible to have
been produced a hundred years ago.
To the beautiful effects produced by the use of modern embossing
machines on paper and wood have been added many charming patterns in
_embossed_ leather. Books and leather cases, saddlery and household
ornamentation of various descriptions have been either moulded into
forms of beauty, or stamped or rolled by cameo and intaglio designs cut
into the surface of fast-moving cylinders.
The leather manufactures have become so vastly important and valuable in
some countries, especially in the United States--second, almost to
agricultural products--that it would be very interesting to extend the
description to many processes and machines, and to facts displaying the
enormous traffic in leather, now necessarily omitted for want of space.