beneficially felt upon the laboratory department of the Arsenal than any
other. Shells, of all the stores of war, were most deficient when the army
left for Varna, and the want increased as soon as actual campaigning
commenced. The authorities accordingly permitted Captain Boxer to erect a
model manufactory of shells in the autumn of 1855. This he did with
surprising rapidity, and proved to their satisfaction that these
formidable missiles could be manufactured five pounds a ton cheaper than
they could be procured from the contractors--an important saving on an
article of which several hundred tons had to be supplied per day. The
success of this experiment led to the erection of the splendid
shell-foundry which is now attached to the Arsenal, and which is capable
of turning out sufficient shells for all the armies of the world. Here may
be seen the process by which the old scrap iron of the establishment is
transformed into the finished shot and shell, and transferred by its own
weight to the transport ready to convey it to the seat of war. The
smelting process is carried on in a dozen enormous cupola furnaces, into
which the iron and coal are heaped indiscriminately. The fierce heat
generated by the blast rapidly melts the iron, which is then allowed to
flow into the shell-moulds. From the moment the metal enters these moulds,
the shell, in war time, never touches the ground till it is landed at its
port of debarkation! The rough shells, after they have cooled a little,
are forwarded by railway to the cleaning-room, where they are placed in a
revolving iron barrel, seven feet long and seven feet in diameter. This
machine circulates with rapidity, and the friction of the contained shells
speedily cleanses them of all sand and dirt. From this point they roll
through all the succeeding stages of their manufacture. A
slightly-inclined plane receives them at the cleaning-drum, and conducts
them one by one to the machinery fixed in the great room of the laboratory
department. Upwards of ten thousand shells per day passed through this
apartment during the late war, and were, on their passage, drilled and
"bushed," or fitted with the socket made to receive the fuse. This simple
fact will alone serve to show how energetically the work was carried on to
meet the wants of the great siege. The shells, having rolled through the
labyrinth of successive machines which operate upon them, now move onward
to the painting department, where they receive a coating of black varnish,
which prevents oxidation. Hence they continue their journey right across
the open ground of the Arsenal to the pier, under the platform of which
they keep their course inside an iron tube which leads immediately into
the barge alongside the transport in the river. From this barge, into
which they sometimes shoot with a considerable impulse, they roll again,
through the open port of the ship, to their appointed place in the hold.
The chief factory of the laboratory department is the great sight of the
Arsenal, as here the visitor witnesses twenty or thirty most curious
operations, the more important only of which he can stop to examine amid
the whirlwind of machinery that everywhere meets his sight and vibrates on
his ear. The manufacture of elongated bullets for the rifles affords
perhaps the most startling novelty of all. The rifle itself is not a
greater advance upon old Brown Bess than is the Minié bullet upon the old
one-ounce ball. The apparatus now employed to produce it contrasts as
forcibly with the simple bullet-mould formerly in use. Instead of heating
the lead to a fluid state, it is simply warmed, in which condition it is
subjected to hydraulic pressure in a large iron vessel, which has but one
small aperture at the top, of the size of the intended elongated bullet.
Out of this hole the metal is driven in the form of a continuous rod of
lead, which, as it issues forth, rolls itself upon iron reels as though it
were so much cotton! The reels are then attached to a machine which draws
the metal between its teeth, bites it off to the required size, moulds the
cone, depresses the cup, and condenses the mass at the same moment. These
wonderful bullet-makers, when in full work, turn out five hundred
elongated bullets a minute, or upwards of a quarter of a million daily. To
complete the missile, the cup has to be filled with a boxwood plug to
ensure its proper expansion whilst in the act of leaving the gun. Here
again a partially self-acting apparatus is called into play, one lad being
sufficient to feed several machines with square rods of wood, the ends of
which are embraced by a circular hollow cutter, which instantly reduces
them to the right conical form, and then cuts them off. These little plugs
are produced at the same rate as the bullets.
An equally interesting operation is the manufacture of percussion caps.
The first process in this light and delicate work is the stamping of
sheet-copper into pieces of the required form to make the caps. For this
purpose the copper is placed beneath the punch of the machine, and
immediately it is put in action, small crosses of metal are seen to fall
from it into a box in a continual stream, whilst the sheet itself is
transposed by the punching process into a kind of trellis-work. These
crosses of equilateral arms are now transferred to another machine, which
instantly doubles up the four arms, and at the same time so rounds them,
that they form a tube just the size of the gun-nipple, and by a third
operation of the same machine a kind of rim is given to the free end,
which makes the cap take the form of a hat. This rim marks the difference
between the military and the ordinary percussion cap--the soldier, in the
hurry and confusion of battle, requiring this guide to enable him to
apply the proper end to the nipple. The metal portion of the cap
completed, it is transferred to a man who fills it with detonating powder.
As this is a very dangerous process, the artisan upon whom the duty
devolves sits apart from the boys, who perform all the other work, for
fear of an accidental explosion. To fix the fine dust in the cap, a very
pretty machine is employed, which gets through its work with extreme
rapidity. The caps are placed in regular rows in a frame-work, to which is
attached a lever, armed with as many fine points as there are caps in a
single row. The motion given by the hand alternately dips these fine
points into a tray of varnish, and then into each succeeding line of caps.
When the varnish is dry, the powder is fixed and effectually protected
from the effects of damp. The caps are now finished, and are ready for the
boy who counts and packs them. Machinery is even employed to perform the
part of cocker, and with one gentle shake does the brain-work of many
minutes. A frame is constructed, into which fit a number of small trays,
each tray being pierced with seventy-five holes. Upon this frame the boy
heaps up a few handfuls of caps, and then gives the whole machine a few
jerks, and when he sees that every hole is filled with a cap, he lifts out
each separate tray and empties it into appropriate boxes. In this manner
he is enabled, with extreme rapidity, to count out his parcels of
seventy-five caps, the regulation number served to each soldier with sixty
rounds of ball-cartridge--the excess of fifteen being allowed for loss in
the flurry of action. The British soldier's clumsy fingers are by no means
well calculated for handling and adjusting such light articles.
Equally curious with the production of caps is the manufacture of
cartridge-bags. The visitor, as he mounts the stairs to the upper floor of
a large building close at hand, is made aware by the hum and collision of
shrill young voices that he is approaching a hive of children, and as he
rears his head above the banisters, he finds that he is in the midst of a
little army of urchins, varying from eight to fourteen years of age,
seated at long benches rolling up paper cartridge-bags. This process
requires some little nicety, as each bag is made up of three distinct
papers of different sizes and shapes, which have to be neatly adjusted
round a roller one upon another. By long practice some of these little
fellows complete the operation in a surprisingly short space of
time--rolling, twisting in the end, tying, and drawing it from the rod
almost as quickly as you can look at them, the swaying of the body during
the operation giving to the entire mass of eight hundred children a most
extraordinary aggregate movement as the room is surveyed from one end to
the other. Some boys are infinitely more nimble-fingered than others, and
the sharpest earn eight or nine shillings a-week at the work.
Nimble as their little fingers ply, however, the hands of machinery laugh
them to scorn. In the room below we note as we descend strange wheel-like
frames revolving horizontally, and others working up and down into tanks
of paper pulp. These are the new machines destined to supplant the little
children over-head, and to hush the ceaseless hum of their human labour.
Throughout the entire range of the Arsenal there is no sight more
interesting than is exhibited by these machines, the _modus operandi_ of
which is extremely simple. Circles of brass tubing have short upright
tubes inserted into them at regular distances. These upright tubes, or
fingers, are pierced with fine holes, and the whole apparatus is attached
to an exhausting-pump. Worsted mittens are fitted to the fingers, and when
all is ready, the Briarean hand is dipped into the bath of pulp, the air
in the tubes is withdrawn, the liquid necessarily rushes towards the
fingers, and the water passing through, leaves the pulp adherent to the
mitten. The process is instantaneous, hand after hand drops into the
trough, gloves its fingers with pulp, and rises with a thousand cartridges
in its grasp, quicker than one of the boys up stairs has finished a single
bag. The process is not complete, however, until they are dry. Each mitten
is removed from its metal finger, and placed on a similar one heated with
steam. In ten minutes the desiccating process is finished, and the
cartridge-bag is removed, a far more perfect instrument for its deadly
purpose than that which is made up stairs by hand. The hint for this
beautiful machine was taken from the apparatus employed for making
conical seamless sugar-bags without the intervention of the paper
maker--so diverse are the developments which may spring from the same
idea. Of these small-arm cartridge-bags, 400,000 can be manufactured in a
day of ten hours; but as each cartridge is composed of a double envelope,
one fitting within the other, in order to separate the conical ball from
the powder, the product furnishes 200,000 cartridges--an enormous
quantity, but scarcely equal to the demand of such campaigners as
Havelock, whose men, day by day, consumed their sixty rounds per head. At
first sight it seems strange to find the Government turned paper makers,
and the visitor may think that these bags could be obtained, as the
sugar-bags are by the grocers, from the private manufacturer, but it is
absolutely necessary that they should be produced side by side with their
deadly contents. They are far more delicate things to maintain in their
integrity than even wafer-biscuits, which they very much resemble, and
they are required in such enormous numbers, that any mechanical
impediment, such as crushing, interposed to the filling of them with
powder and ball, would add immensely to the expense. The pressure in
packing necessary to convey them to the Arsenal would flatten, and hence
destroy them.
But where, asks the visitor, is the small-arms factory for the
construction of those far-famed rifles which prevented a disaster at
Inkermann, and at once doubled the effective power of the steadiest
infantry of Europe? And well may he ask the question, for what more
natural place for this important manufacture than in connexion with
kindred Government establishments? When the War Office decided upon
erecting a factory to meet the sudden demands of the war, it was proposed
by the Inspector of Machinery to plant it within the walls of the Arsenal;
but the authorities, for some reason best known to themselves, decided
otherwise, and it was accordingly taken to Enfield Lock, which is twelve
miles from London on the Eastern Counties Railway, and where they had
before a small establishment for the repair and manufacture of a limited
number of muskets. The traveller who gets out at the factory station
finds himself at once in a road which leads him into a flat country laced
with streams, where Paul Potter might have found a study at every turn.
Here, amid flocks and herds peacefully grazing, or standing in the shadows
of the pollard willows, he espies the tall chimneys of the Enfield
factory, looking like a stray fragment of Manchester that had wandered out
of its way. In all England a more absurd spot for it could not have been
chosen.
The establishment, however, is so worthy of a minute inspection, that we
will proceed to give a general view of the whole. The threshold of the
manufacturing process is the smithery, where the foreman presides to
deliver out the raw material and receive in return the work done. To each
smith is issued the particular size of bar iron or steel required for the
article he works upon. Opening out of this shop is the smithery itself,
with its fifty-five forges, together with steam hammers, hoppers, rider
hammers, and other contrivances by which our modern Vulcan economises
labour. In this department all the iron and steel work of the lock and
stock are moulded, for the ordinary method of forging conveys a very
inadequate idea of the manner in which the material is here manipulated.
Every sportsman knows that the lock of a gun is made up of many small
pieces of irregular form. To forge these with the hammer alone would be
far too expensive a process, as it would require highly-skilled labour,
nor even then would it be possible to produce the different pieces of
exactly the same size, so that any one may fit into any other with perfect
accuracy when the gun is ultimately put together. To accomplish this end,
the essential principle of the manufacture, each smith with his helper
takes in hand a particular piece of work. One man, for instance, makes
hammers, or cocks, as sportsmen call them. The irregular form of this part
of the lock would seem to preclude the possibility of its being made by
the hundred-thousand, each one being the counterpart of its brother to the
thousandth of an inch. Yet this is done, and with an ease that appears
astonishing to the beholder. Let us watch the brawny smith before us. He
draws a rod from the fire at white heat, lays it upon an indented part of
his anvil, and, together with his mate, deals alternate blows in half a
dozen different directions, and produces in a few seconds an irregular
mass, which we see bears a resemblance to the indentation in the anvil,
which, on closer inspection, we find to be a rude matrix of a guncock.
This is the first process, called swaging. These two men go on from one
year's end to another, giving alternate light and heavy blows and taps on
all sides of the metal. These blows, though sometimes delivered through a
swinging circle of eight or ten feet, fall upon exactly the same spot, for
practice so nicely co-ordinates the muscles as to produce a motion as
exact as that which draws from the bow of a Paganini the same delicate
note for any number of times in succession. The cock thus swaged, the
smith stamps his initials upon it, and transfers it to another smith, who
works with a steam-hammer, on which is a steel die of the exact form it is
required to take. A single blow of this instrument gives it its final
form, leaving the superfluous metal in the shape of a thin film, where it
has been squeezed into the opening between the dies, which is cut off by a
subsequent stamping process. By this method of swaging and stamping, the
lock-plate, bridle, cock, sear, trigger, sightleaf, breech-screw, and
swivel are formed so perfectly, that the tool is scarcely required to
touch them afterwards.
Those parts of the lock made of steel, such as the mainspring, searspring
and tumbler, are simply swaged, the stamping process being omitted on
account of the sudden blow tending to break the grain and thus destroy the
elasticity of the metal.
A curious operation of the smithery is the bayonet forging. The bars for
bayonet-work are never forged of such uniform width as to allow the smith
to cut off to a nicety the length he requires. In order to rectify this
difficulty, and enable him to tell how much will serve his purpose, he is
provided with a water-gauge, or tube filled with a given quantity of
water; into this the rod is plunged, and withdrawn when the fluid reaches
the top of the gauge. By this expedient the iron, however irregular in
form, is measured accurately by the displacement of the water. When the
bar is withdrawn, the smith cuts it off at the watermark, and his mate
thrusts it into the forge fire. Whilst this is going on, the visitor
becomes conscious of a strange machine close at hand, which perpetually
gnashes together a mouthful of hardened steel teeth; this is that useful
instrument called the rider hammer. These teeth bear upon their upper and
under surfaces grooves of the form the iron bar is required to take. The
short white-heated bit of bar is thrust in, and by a series of nabs is
instantly lengthened a couple of inches; the next tooth still further
attenuates it, the third forces it into the triangular form, and a fourth
and fifth reduce it to the graduated length required: thus the blade of
this terrible weapon is rough-drawn. The ring by which it is attached to
the barrel of the musket is forged separately, and welded to the shank at
right angles. These are the first of at least seventy-six distinct
operations before the weapon is fitted to fulfil its appointed design,
that of making the ugliest and most irreparable wound possible in the
human corpus. The work done, it is returned to the foreman, whose first
duty is to see that the material with which the man has been debited has
wrought into the requisite number of pieces; if it falls short the waste
is charged to him. The next scrutiny is into the quality of the work, and
the last and not the least important inquiry is, does it gauge? Unless the
work passes all these ordeals it is rejected, and the person in fault is
known by the distinguishing mark of the smith who prepared it. In some
cases, as in the making of the bands which bind the barrel to the stock,
this mark is ground off in passing through one of the presses; but is
immediately restored, that the work may be traced to the artisan who
constructed it. The effect of thus fixing the responsibility of every
single thing manufactured upon the maker is immense, and induces habits of
carefulness such as are seldom seen in ordinary workmen. The foreman now
issues the different pieces to the finishers, who convey them to the
annealing room, where they are rendered soft for working by heat, and
cleaned of their scale or oxide, which would otherwise injure the tool, by
means of dilute sulphuric acid.
The barrel is welded and finished in a separate factory. The piece of
metal out of which the gradually tapering tube is ultimately fashioned
seems to bear no relation to such a form. You see the smith take a small
plate of quarter-inch iron, about a foot long by a few inches wide, heat
it to a welding heat, and then place it between the lips of a rolling
mill, with grooved instead of flat rollers, and in an instant it comes out
a tube. It has next to be drawn out to the requisite length and tapered,
which is done by passing it through a series of mills, each succeeding one
being grooved smaller than the preceding. The bore is kept hollow during
the operation by a central iron rod. The breech piece is welded on by a
single blow of a steam-hammer, and the process of turning the bore begins.
Four barrels are acted upon by one lathe, and the first operation is
performed in fifteen minutes. Only a slight cutting is made each time, and
the barrel has to be submitted to the action of many different boring
instruments until the exact size, ·577 of an inch, is attained. The
outside is now turned, the tool taking off the superfluous metal in one
continuous ringlet of iron.
It now undergoes the most delicate process of all, that of being "viewed."
The viewer, who is a highly-skilled workman, with an exceedingly accurate
eye, puts himself opposite a gas-lamp, about thirty feet distance, and
which has a dark shade on its upper side. Towards this object he directs
the barrel so as to bring the dark edge half-way across his sight as he
looks through the bore. By this device he is enabled to direct a ray of
light with a defined edge down the tube, and by turning the barrel round,
instantly detects the slightest deviation from the straight line. As the
smoothest-looking sea is discovered to be a mass of dimpling ripples--(the
Greek poet's "infinite laughings of the sea")--when the setting sun throws
a golden shaft across its bosom, so the mathematically straight lines of
light gauge the inequalities of the rifle bore in a more exact manner than
any instrument that has yet been invented. When any irregularities are
discovered, the viewer taps the barrel with a fine hammer on a small
anvil, and repeats the operation until the tube is perfectly true. Upon
this depends the correct shooting of the gun, inasmuch as the least crook
near the end of the bore would send a bullet far on one side of the mark
long before it had attained the full range of 800 yards, to which the
Enfield rifle is sighted. The rifling of the barrel in three groves is
performed by fixing it in a lathe, and driving the cutter through it in a
spiral direction.
In entering the finishing room, a noble apartment, 200 feet square, the
visitor cannot fail to be struck with astonishment at the scene this vast
workshop presents. He looks through a mass of wheels, levers, cranks, and
shafts, which fill the space from wall to wall, every foot alive with iron
and human limbs, and the whole superficies seeming to writhe and wrestle
like a cluster of worms. Although confusion looks triumphant to the casual
eye, the utmost order prevails. On one side of the room, at regular
intervals, small inclosed offices, with glazed fronts, are placed against
the wall, a little above the level of the floor. These are devoted to the
foremen of the different divisions into which the work is separated. Each
of these functionaries from his eyrie rakes the long avenues or streets of
machines, with their attendant workmen, which run in parallel lines across
the room. The first avenue is devoted to bayonets; then come in the
following order the divisions allocated to furniture, screw, sight, lock,
and stock. The work is so managed that all the different parts keep pace
together, and are finished in the required proportions; or in other words,
those pieces which are but slowly produced have allotted to them a greater
number of machines. By this arrangement all the requisite items are
brought at the same moment to the workmen who put them together in the
finished article. The fifty-six pieces of which the rifle is composed work
their way up one street of machinery and down another, constantly
following on from right to left on their way towards the top of the room.
Many of these pieces are passed through upwards of twenty different
machines, each one performing some simple and definite action, by which
means an accuracy is obtained that the most skilful gunmaker could never
equal by hand.