Some twenty years ago the process of obtaining fire, in every house in
England, with few exceptions, was as rude, as laborious, and as
uncertain, as the effort of the Indian to produce a flame by the
friction of two dry sticks.
The nightlamp and the rushlight were for the comparatively luxurious. In
the bedrooms of the cottager, the artisan, and the small tradesman, the
infant at its mother’s side too often awoke, like Milton’s nightingale,
‘darkling,’—but that ‘nocturnal note’ was something different from
‘harmonious numbers.’ The mother was soon on her feet; the friendly
tinder-box was duly sought. Click, click, click; not a spark tells upon
the sullen blackness. More rapidly does the flint ply the sympathetic
steel. The room is bright with the radiant shower. But the child,
familiar enough with the operation, is impatient at its tediousness, and
shouts till the mother is frantic. At length one lucky spark does its
office—the tinder is alight. Now for the match. It will not burn. A
gentle breath is wafted into the murky box; the face that leans over the
tinder is in a glow. Another match, and another, and another. They are
all damp. The toil-worn father ‘swears a prayer or two’; the baby is
inexorable; and the misery is only ended when the goodman has gone to
the street door, and after long shivering has obtained a light from the
watchman.
In this, the beginning of our series of Illustrations of Cheapness, let
us trace this antique machinery through the various stages of its
production.
The tinder-box and the steel had nothing peculiar. The tinman made the
one as he made the saucepan, with hammer and shears; the other was
forged at the great metal factories of Sheffield and Birmingham; and
happy was it for the purchaser if it were something better than a rude
piece of iron, very uncomfortable to grasp. The nearest chalk quarry
supplied the flint. The domestic manufacture of the tinder was a serious
affair. At due seasons, and very often if the premises were damp, a
stifling smell rose from the kitchen, which, to those who were not
intimate with the process, suggested doubts whether the house were not
on fire. The best linen rag was periodically burnt, and its ashes
deposited in the tinman’s box, pressed down with a close fitting lid
upon which the flint and steel reposed. The match was chiefly an article
of itinerant traffic. The chandler’s shop was almost ashamed of it. The
mendicant was the universal match-seller. The girl who led the blind
beggar had invariably a basket of matches. In the day they were vendors
of matches—in the evening manufacturers. On the floor of the hovel sit
two or three squalid children, splitting deal with a common knife. The
matron is watching a pipkin upon a slow fire. The fumes which it gives
forth are blinding as the brimstone is liquifying. Little bundles of
split deal are ready to be dipped, three or four at a time. When the
pennyworth of brimstone is used up, when the capital is exhausted, the
night’s labour is over. In the summer, the manufacture is suspended, or
conducted upon fraudulent principles. Fire is then needless; so delusive
matches must be produced—wet splints dipped in powdered sulphur. They
will never burn, but they will do to sell to the unwary
maid-of-all-work.
About twenty years ago Chemistry discovered that the tinder-box might be
abolished. But Chemistry set about its function with especial reference
to the wants and the means of the rich few. In the same way the first
printed books were designed to have a great resemblance to manuscripts,
and those of the wealthy class were alone looked to as the purchasers of
the skilful imitations. The first chemical light-producer was a complex
and ornamental casket, sold at a guinea. In a year or so, there were
pretty portable cases of a phial and matches, which enthusiastic young
housekeepers regarded as the cheapest of all treasures at five
shillings. By-and-bye the light-box was sold as low as a shilling. The
fire revolution was slowly approaching. The old dynasty of the
tinder-box maintained its predominance for a short while in kitchen and
garret, in farmhouse and cottage. At length some bold adventurer saw
that the new chemical discovery might be employed for the production of
a large article of trade—that matches, in themselves the vehicles of
fire without aid of spark and tinder, might be manufactured upon the
factory system—that the humblest in the land might have a new and
indispensable comfort at the very lowest rate of cheapness. When
Chemistry saw that phosphorus, having an affinity for oxygen at the
lowest temperature, would ignite upon slight friction,—and so ignited
would ignite sulphur, which required a much higher temperature to become
inflammable, thus making the phosphorus do the work of the old tinder
with far greater certainty; or when Chemistry found that chlorate of
potash by slight friction might be exploded so as to produce combustion,
and might be safely used in the same combination—a blessing was bestowed
upon society that can scarcely be measured by those who have had no
former knowledge of the miseries and privations of the tinder-box. The
Penny Box of Lucifers, or Congreves, or by whatever name called, is a
real triumph of Science, and an advance in Civilisation.
Let us now look somewhat closely and practically into the manufacture of
a Lucifer match.
The combustible materials used in the manufacture render the process an
unsafe one. It cannot be carried on in the heart of towns without being
regarded as a common nuisance. We must therefore go somewhere in the
suburbs of London to find such a trade. In the neighbourhood of Bethnal
Green there is a large open space called Wisker’s Gardens. This is not a
place of courts and alleys, but a considerable area, literally divided
into small gardens, where just now the crocus and the snowdrop are
telling hopefully of the springtime. Each garden has the smallest of
cottages—for the most part wooden—which have been converted from
summer-houses into dwellings. The whole place reminds one of numberless
passages in the old dramatists, in which the citizens’ wives are
described in their garden-houses of Finsbury, or Hogsden, sipping
syllabub and talking fine on summer holidays. In one of these
garden-houses, not far from the public road, is the little factory of
‘Henry Lester, Patentee of the Domestic Safety Match-box,’ as his label
proclaims. He is very ready to show his processes, which in many
respects are curious and interesting.
Adam Smith has instructed us that the business of making a pin is
divided into about eighteen distinct operations; and further, that ten
persons could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day with the
division of labour; while if they had all wrought independently and
separately, and without any of them having been educated to this
peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made
twenty. The Lucifer Match is a similar example of division of labour,
and the skill of long practice. At a separate factory, where there is a
steam engine, not the refuse of the carpenter’s shop, but the best
Norway deals are cut into splints by machinery, and are supplied to the
matchmaker. These little pieces, beautifully accurate in their minute
squareness, and in their precise length of five inches, are made up into
bundles, each of which contains eighteen hundred. They are daily brought
on a truck to the dipping-house, as it is called—the average number of
matches finished off daily requiring two hundred of these bundles. Up to
this point we have had several hands employed in the preparation of the
match, in connection with the machinery that cuts the wood. Let us
follow one of these bundles through the subsequent processes. Without
being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur.
When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur,
must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy sitting on the floor,
with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of a mallet on
the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. In the best
matches the process of sulphur-dipping and dusting is repeated. They
have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of
potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces
the pale, noiseless fire; the chlorate of potash the sharp cracking
illumination. After this application of the more inflammable substance,
the matches are separated, and dried in racks. Thoroughly dried, they
are gathered up again into bundles of the same quantity; and are taken
to the boys who cut them; for the reader will have observed that the
bundles have been dipped at each end. There are few things more
remarkable in manufactures than the extraordinary rapidity of this
cutting process, and that which is connected with it. The boy stands
before a bench, the bundle on his right hand, a pile of half opened
empty boxes on his left, which have been manufactured at another
division of this establishment. These boxes are formed of scale-board,
that is, thin slices of wood, planed or scaled off a plank. The box
itself is a marvel of neatness and cheapness. It consists of an inner
box, without a top, in which the matches are placed, and of an outer
case, open at each end, into which the first box slides. The matches,
then, are to be cut, and the empty boxes filled, by one boy. A bundle is
opened; he seizes a portion, knowing by long habit the required number
with sufficient exactness; puts them rapidly into a sort of frame,
knocks the ends evenly together, confines them with a strap which he
tightens with his foot, and cuts them in two parts with a knife on a
hinge, which he brings down with a strong leverage: the halves lie
projecting over each end of the frame; he grasps the left portion and
thrusts it into a half open box, which he instantly closes, and repeats
the process with the matches on his right hand. This series of movements
is performed with a rapidity almost unexampled; for in this way, two
hundred thousand matches are cut, and two thousand boxes filled in a
day, by one boy, at the wages of three half-pence per gross of boxes.
Each dozen boxes is then papered up, and they are ready for the
retailer. The number of boxes daily filled at this factory is from fifty
to sixty gross.
The _wholesale_ price per dozen boxes of the best matches, is FOURPENCE,
of the second quality, THREEPENCE.
There are about ten Lucifer Match manufactories in London. There are
others in large provincial towns. The wholesale business is chiefly
confined to the supply of the metropolis and immediate neighbourhood by
the London makers; for the railroad carriers refuse to receive the
article, which is considered dangerous in transit. But we must not
therefore assume that the metropolitan population consume the
metropolitan matches. Taking the population at upwards of two millions,
and the inhabited houses at about three hundred thousand, let us
endeavour to estimate the distribution of these little articles of
domestic comfort.
At the manufactory at Wisker’s Gardens there are fifty gross, or seven
thousand two hundred boxes, turned out daily, made from two hundred
bundles, which will produce seven hundred and twenty thousand matches.
Taking three hundred working days in the year, this will give for one
factory, two hundred and sixteen millions of matches annually, or two
millions one hundred and sixty thousand boxes, being a box of one
hundred matches for every individual of the London population. But there
are ten other Lucifer manufactories, which are estimated to produce
about four or five times as many more. London certainly cannot absorb
ten millions of Lucifer boxes annually, which would be at the rate of
thirty three boxes to each inhabited house. London, perhaps, demands a
third of the supply for its own consumption; and at this rate the annual
retail cost for each house is eightpence, averaging those boxes sold at
a half-penny, and those at a penny. The manufacturer sells this article,
produced with such care as we have described, at one farthing and a
fraction per box.
And thus, for the retail expenditure of three farthings per month, every
house in London, from the highest to the lowest, may secure the
inestimable blessing of constant fire at all seasons, and at all hours.
London buys this for ten thousand pounds annually.
The excessive cheapness is produced by the extension of the demand,
enforcing the factory division of labour, and the most exact saving of
material. The scientific discovery was the foundation of the cheapness.
But connected with this general principle of cheapness, there are one or
two remarkable points, which deserve attention.
It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer
than in the winter. The old match maker, as we have mentioned, was idle
in the summer—without fire for heating the brimstone—or engaged in more
profitable field-work. A worthy woman who once kept a chandler’s shop in
a village, informs us, that in summer she could buy no matches for
retail, but was obliged to make them for her customers. The increased
summer demand for the Lucifer Matches shows that the great consumption
is amongst the masses—the labouring population—those who make up the
vast majority of the contributors to duties of customs and excise. In
the houses of the wealthy there is always fire; in the houses of the
poor, fire in summer is a needless hourly expense. Then comes the
Lucifer Match to supply the want; to light the candle to look in the
dark cupboard—to light the afternoon fire to boil the kettle. It is now
unnecessary to run to the neighbour for a light, or, as a desperate
resource, to work at the tinder-box. The Lucifer Matches sometimes fail,
but they cost little, and so they are freely used, even by the poorest.
And this involves another great principle. The demand for the Lucifer
Match is always continuous, for it is a perishable article. The demand
never ceases. Every match burnt demands a new match to supply its place.
This continuity of demand renders the supply always equal to the demand.
The peculiar nature of the commodity prevents any accumulation of stock;
its combustible character—requiring the simple agency of friction to
ignite it—renders it dangerous for large quantities of the article to be
kept in one place. Therefore no one makes for store, but all for
immediate sale. The average price, therefore, must always yield a
profit, or the production would altogether cease. But these essential
qualities limit the profit. The manufacturers cannot be rich without
secret processes or monopoly. The contest is to obtain the largest
profit by economical management. The amount of skill required in the
labourers, and the facility of habit, which makes fingers act with the
precision of machines, limit the number of labourers, and prevent their
impoverishment. Every condition of this cheapness is a natural and
beneficial result of the laws that govern production.