The girls are packing sliced bacon into glass jars, taking the slices
from a moving belt which passes in front of them. The rooms are light,
thoroughly ventilated, and cleaned at the end of each day. The girls’
hands are manicured at frequent intervals by manicurists employed by the
company.]
The next place is the lard department. Here great closed tanks cook the
fats, under high steam pressure, and make them into snow-white lard.
There are great open caldrons, steam jacketed, where an even and uniform
temperature is maintained. Only the pure leaf lard, which is supposed to
be the choicest fat of the hog, is cooked in these kettles. In the lard
packing room there is much automatic machinery, with which the various
sized packages of lard are weighed out. Machines hermetically seal the
tins, and men pack them in crates and carefully weigh them over two
scales.
The average person does not have even an idea of what the modern curing
cellar is like. The brines and curing mixtures are prepared by trained
men who do no other work but this. Everything goes exactly according to
formula, and the different ingredients are weighed out to the ounce. The
guide insisted that a bare ten per cent of all the hams or bacon sides
produced in the plant are finally allowed to bear the company’s
trade-mark. The men who finally select these goods are the oldest and
most trusted employees of the firm. They weigh out a certain amount of
this meat for each tierce, or vat, to be packed, and then an exact
number of gallons of pickle is put in with the meat so that each pound
of meat will have just a certain amount of pickle to cure it. This is
said to insure a uniform product so that one trade-marked ham is exactly
like another.
Even the length of time which these are left in cure must not vary a
day. In the great curing room thousands of vats and tierces are piled,
and the usual tierces hold about three hundred pounds of meat, while the
vats hold nearly fifteen hundred pounds.
In the dry-salt curing cellars are kept enormous stocks of the cheaper
kinds of meat. These, instead of being cured in brine, are rubbed in
salt and piled away. These piles are perhaps three or four feet high,
and are so neat and true that they appear to have been the work of a
master mason. A single one of these dry-salt curing rooms holds over
three million pounds.
Sliced bacon, fancy sausage and other specialties are usually packed in
a separate room, into attractive cartons for the retail trade.
The standard of cleanliness in the sausage kitchen has to be unusually
high. Wherever white tile is not possible, white paint is used in
profusion. The shining metal tables and trucks, on which the product is
handled, give a new confidence in sausage. The girls and men employed
all wear clean white aprons, jackets and caps, and no effort is spared
in keeping everything and everybody in the place in an ideal condition.
The meat is run through enormous automatic grinders and choppers, and
through mixers that approach a dairy churn in size. After it has been
properly mixed and thoroughly taken care of, it is put into automatic
machinery, run by air pressure, which stuffs it into the ham sacks and
casings, in which we see the sausage in the markets. The cooking is done
in great vats and in enormous electric ovens.
When we stop to think of the proportion of our food which is a
packing-house product, we can be glad indeed that conditions such as
those described above are becoming available more and more every day.
* * * * *
Why do We Call them “Dog-Days”?
When we talk about “dog-days” now, we mean the period of the year
between July 3d and August 11th, twenty days before and after the rising
of the “dog-star.”
The name was applied by the ancients to a period of about forty days,
the hottest season of the year, at the time of the rising of Sirius, the
dog-star.
The time of the rising is now, owing to the precession of the equinoxes,
different from what it was then (July 1st). It is now about July 23d.
[Illustration: ELECTRIC COINING PRESS, U. S. MINT, PHILADELPHIA
Woman feeding planchets to brass tubes, from the bottom of which they
are carried to the steel dies which form the coins.]
How is a Five Dollar Gold Piece Made?
The process of converting the precious metals into coins is an
interesting one.
The rolling machines through which the ingots are passed are adjustable,
the space between the rollers being governed by the operator. About two
hundred ingots are run through per hour on each pair of rollers.
When the rolling is completed the strip of metal is about six feet long.
As it is impossible to roll perfectly true, it is necessary to “draw”
these strips, after being softened by annealing. The drawing benches
resemble long tables, with a bench on either side, at one end of which
is an iron box secured to the table. In this are fastened two
perpendicular steel cylinders. These are at the same distance apart that
the thickness of the strip is required to be. It is drawn between the
cylinders, which reduces the whole to an equal thickness.
These strips are now taken to the cutting machines, each of which will
cut 225 planchets per minute. The press used consists of a vertical
steel punch. From a strip worth $1,100 about $800 of planchets will be
cut. These are then removed to the adjusting room, where they are
adjusted. After inspection they are weighed on very accurate scales. If
a planchet is too heavy, but near the weight, it is filed off at the
edges; if too heavy for filing, it is thrown aside with the light ones
to be remelted.
The planchets, after being adjusted, are taken to the coining and
milling rooms, and are passed through the milling machine. They are fed
to this machine through an upright tube, and as they descend are caught
upon the edge of a revolving wheel and carried about a quarter of a
revolution, during which the edge is compressed and forced up. By this
apparatus 560 nickels can be milled in a minute; for large pieces the
average is 120.
The massive but delicate coining presses coin from 80 to 100 pieces a
minute. These presses do their work in a perfect manner. After being
stamped the coins are taken to the coiner’s room. The light and heavy
coins are kept separate in coining, and when delivered to the treasurer
they are mixed in such proportions as to give him full weight in every
delivery. By law, the deviation from the standard weight, in delivering
to him, must not exceed three pennyweights in one thousand double
eagles.
The coinage of the United States mints since the organization of the
government has amounted to nearly 6,000,000,000 pieces, valued at over
$4,000,000,000.
How does a Bird Fly?
The wing of a bird is an elastic, flexible organ, with a thick anterior
and a thin posterior margin; hence the wing does not act like a solid
board, but is thrown into a succession of curves. When a bird rises from
the ground it leaps up with head stuck out and expanded tail, so that
the body is in the position of a boy’s kite when thrown up. The wings
are strongly flapped, striking forward and downward, and the bird
quickly ascends. It has been shown that the wing describes a figure 8 in
its action, the margin being brought down so that the tip of the wing
gives the last blow after the part next the trunk has ceased to strike;
hence, standing in front of a bird, the wing would be divided into two,
the upper surface of one-half and the lower surface of the other being
visible at the same time. These portions are reversed when the wing is
drawn back and towards the body, before beginning another stroke; but it
will be observed that during retraction the wing is still sloped, so
that the resemblance to a kite is maintained. There are many varieties
of flight among birds; of these the most remarkable is the sailing
motion, in which the wings are but slightly moved. Probably the original
impetus is maintained by the kite-like slope of the wing, and advantage
may be taken of currents by a rotation of the wing at the shoulder, a
movement invisible at any distance.