observer with astonishment; the oddest shapes, the most unlikely-looking
forms, proving admirably adapted for the purposes they are intended to
accomplish. Many of these work automatically--that is, they engage and
disengage themselves; setting to work only when they are fed with
material, and, when their rodent-like teeth have gnawed away as much metal
as is requisite, they stop of their own accord. The effect of this is so
extraordinary, that it almost seems as if those bright limbs of iron,
which stop and move on without human agency, must be directed by some sort
of metallic brain. The most common form of tool employed is what is termed
the circular cutter or milling-tool, which is constructed to fit every
class of work. These cutters will continue serviceable for months without
requiring to be sharpened, in consequence of each being restricted to its
own limited sphere. The amount of thought employed in the construction of
many of these machines must have been immense, and when they were
completed, two-thirds of the manufacturing difficulty was overcome, and
the musket more than half made. A most ingenious machine, the parent of a
numerous progeny, was, many years ago, invented by an Englishman, and
applied to copying the fine lines of statuary, and transferring them to
ivory and other materials. The applicability of this instrument to the
production of the irregular forms in the gun trade was first perceived by
our cousins across the Atlantic, and for many years they have employed it
for the rapid and true production of many parts of the musket, whilst our
own manufacturers in London and Birmingham have been content to execute
the same work, laboriously and expensively, by hand labour. The copying
machines now at Enfield have been imported direct from America. They are
principally employed in fashioning gun-stocks. They convert the rough
slabs of walnut-wood, just outlined in the proper form, which come from
France, Belgium and Italy, into the finished article, with all its
grooves, holes, and beddings for lock and barrel. This extraordinary
apparatus may be said to work with two hands: the one feeling the outline
of the pattern to be copied, the other directing a tool uniformly with it
and cutting the object to the required form. Let us, for example, take the
machine that hollows out the lock-bedding in the stock. Not only are the
outlines of the most irregular form, but they are sunk to three different
levels, and it would almost seem impossible that a machine should excavate
so complex a bedding with minute accuracy. Nevertheless, it is done in a
few minutes by an apparatus, which revolves and brings, one after the
other, some new tool into play according to the work to be done. Whilst
the operation is going on, a little blower clears out the chips as
cleverly as though the machine had human breath. The different portions of
the gun completed, they are, for the last time, gauged, and passed on to
the extreme end bench of the factory, near the west door, where the
"assembler," as he is termed, receives them in different bins, from which
he takes the part he requires and sets up the gun. As there is no
necessity for special fitting, this process is performed with remarkable
rapidity, seven minutes being sufficient to combine all the different
parts, which have never been near each other before--lock, stock, ramrod,
and bayonet--into the complete weapon. They now pass out of the western
door, packed in cases, and are taken to the proving-ground, where they are
tested with high charges and their range and accuracy duly examined; and
so perfect is the finish, that not one in a thousand fails to stand the
trying ordeal. They are now transferred by water to the Armoury at the
Tower, ready for service in the field.
The Enfield rifle was adopted for the public service in the year 1853, and
is at the present moment the best infantry musket in Europe. There is
still room, however, as Mr. Whitworth has shown, for improvement in the
barrel. His rifle propels a bullet both farther and with greater accuracy,
in consequence of the greater care he bestows upon the barrel, which,
instead of being welded, is bored, at a great cost, out of the solid
metal. Its diameter also being smaller, the bullet encounters a less
resistance in the air during its flight. There is no reason why the
smaller bore should not be substituted for that of the Enfield rifle,
when this arm would be perfect. The difficulty the ablest minds experience
in getting out of an old groove was exemplified by the late Duke of
Wellington with respect to this question of the size of bore. His Grace
was obstinately wedded to Brown Bess, whose crushing fire, so superior to
that of the enemy, he had witnessed in his Peninsular campaigns, and which
he erroneously ascribed to the excellent quality of the arm instead of to
the steadiness of the men--mistaking, in fact, a moral for a physical
excellence. The longer the Commander-in-Chief lived, the firmer his faith
in the large smooth bore, and the necessity for making a big hole in the
enemy. When the rifle-musket of 1851 replaced this old arm, the large bore
was still retained, and the consequence was, that the bullet, being
elongated, was heavier than when round, and the soldier had to carry a
missile of 696 grains weight, instead of 490 grains. The bore of the
Enfield rifle pattern of 1853 was very properly reduced, and the Prichett
expanding bullet, of 530 grains, now carries its deadly weight in its
length. Though the wound it gives is not so large as that inflicted by the
old ball, it makes up for deficiency by its power of penetration. An
officer who was at the taking of the rifle-pits in the quarry before
Sevastopol informs us that a brother-officer was shot through the side by
a Russian Minié bullet, which afterwards passed through an ass, and his
two panniers of water, and did not stop in its career till it had broken a
man's arm at some distance off! Its deadly aim at vast distances, which
made it the dread of the sepoys, who termed it "the gun that kills without
making any sound," contrasts strangely with the performances of Brown Bess
of old, which at any range beyond a hundred yards was so uncertain in its
aim that it has been calculated that the soldier shot away the weight in
lead of every man that he hit.
Before the breaking out of the war, our stores were hampered with
small-arms of all sizes and patterns. There were, at home and abroad, no
less than 109,725 flint-lock muskets, of fifteen different patterns, and
107,000 smooth-bore, percussion-lock muskets, of eight different patterns.
Very many of these were in service a few years ago; and as their bores
were all dissimilar, it often happened that the soldiers were provided
with cartridges that would not fit their guns. In peace little
difficulties of this kind are of no moment, but they are of the utmost
importance in the time of war. At the battle of Waterloo, the
Brunswickers, who held Hougoumont, were, for a short time, rendered
helpless, in consequence of cartridges having been sent to them that did
not fit their muskets. A battle, which, according to Professor Creasey,
ranks among the six decisive combats of the world, might thus have been
lost on account of the misfit of a cartridge. The necessity of preventing
the possible recurrence of such mischances induced the authorities, at the
breaking out of the Russian war, to make the bore of all muskets used by
the different branches of the service uniform with that of the Enfield
rifle. A thousand of these weapons can at present be completed in a
week--a number which appears large, but which is in reality far beneath
the real wants of the army. The private manufacturers of small-arms in
Birmingham denounced the establishment of this factory, on the plea that
Government were not warranted in fabricating goods which the private trade
of the country were capable of producing--an assertion which the Crimean
war totally disproved, as the authorities were so pressed for rifles that
they had to go to France,[26] Belgium, and the United States for supplies,
and at one time contemplated giving an order for 350,000 rifles at Liége.
The military rifle, like the shell, being a special article required only
by the army, the demand for it in large numbers is not constant, and hence
the low condition of the mechanical power brought to bear upon it by the
trade. The gunmakers of Birmingham have depended upon skilled labour for
the production of the different parts of a musket, and thus labour, in
times of pressure, becomes exorbitantly costly, to the embarrassment and
loss of the public service. It was this which led the Government to
introduce machinery into the manufacture--a thing the trade declared
impossible, but which they now see is not only possible but profitable,
since the same musket for which they charged 4_l._ 10_s._ is now made of a
superior quality by the Government for 3_l._ 15_s._ The experiment must be
of the greatest importance to the Birmingham gun trade, which, through its
own inherent vices, was fast yielding to the superior ingenuity of America
and Belgium, and which can only regain its old position by taking a lesson
from the organized mechanical resources of the Enfield Lock manufactory.
The private manufacturers need not fear that Enfield will monopolize even
Government work, the demands of the service being far beyond its
productive powers. As the Ordnance supplies rifles to our army in India,
as well as to the home and colonial force, no less than 400,000 are
required for the infantry and marines alone: a number which has to be
replaced every twelve years, even in times of peace. In active service the
destruction is immense; and now the cycle of war has returned, the annual
50,000 rifles turned out by the royal factory will prove but a small
instalment of the vast store of arms that England will require.
At Waltham Abbey, not half an hour's walk from Enfield Lock, is situated
the only establishment for the manufacture of powder which the Government
possesses. Here dispersion, instead of concentration, is the order of the
day. The necessity for complete isolation causes the factories to be
distributed over a very large space of ground, and the visitor has to walk
from workshop to workshop through groves and avenues of willow and alder,
as though he were visiting dispersed farm-buildings rather than the
different departments of the same manufacturing process. There are not
perhaps more than a dozen detached buildings in the whole establishment,
yet these are scattered over upwards of fifty acres of ground. To such an
extent do meadows and woods and meandering canals predominate, that the
idea of being in a powder-mill is entirely lost in the impression that you
are walking in a Dutch landscape. The visitor who enters the great gates
of the mill, impressed with a belief in the dangerous nature of the ground
he is treading, is somewhat startled on finding a steam-engine at work on
the very threshold of the factory, and a tall chimney smoking its pipe in
what he supposed to be the vicinity of hundreds of barrels of gunpowder;
but in reality these boilers and furnaces are placed many hundred feet
from the mixing-houses. The English Government powder is composed of
seventy-five parts of saltpetre, fifteen parts of charcoal, and ten of
sulphur. The ingredients, being thoroughly powdered, prepared, and
purified, are submitted to the action of a machine, which completely mixes
them. The product is then conveyed by a covered boat, very much like an
aldermanic gondola in mourning, some hundred yards along the canal to the
incorporating houses, where the most important process of the manufacture
is carried on, and where the danger of an explosion first commences. The
incorporating machine is nothing more than a couple of runners or huge
wheels, weighing four and a half tons each, which revolve one after
another on their edges in a bed of metal supplied with a deep wooden rim,
which gives it much the appearance of a huge kitchen candlestick. Into
this dish the black powder is placed, together with a little water, which
varies in quantity, from four pints in winter, when the atmosphere is
charged with moisture, to ten in the summer, when the desiccating quality
of the air is very great. For four hours this pasty mass is crushed,
ground, and mixed by the action of the runners. The precautions taken
against explosion teach the visitor the dangerous nature of the ground he
is treading. Before he puts his feet across the threshold he must encase
them in leathern boots huge enough to fit Polyphemus, and guiltless of
iron in any form whatever; even his umbrella or stick is snatched from
him, lest the ferrule should strike fire, or accidentally drop among any
part of the machinery whilst at work. The machinery is even protected
against itself. In order to avoid the possibility of the linch-pins which
confine the cylinders to their axles falling down, and by the action of
"skidding" the runner, producing so much friction as to cause an
explosion, receptacles are formed to catch them in their fall. As small
pieces of grit, the natural enemy of the powder-maker, might prove
dangerous if mixed with any of the "charges," the axle sockets of nearly
all the wheels are constructed to expand, so as to allow any hard foreign
body to pass through just in the same manner in which the fine jaws of the
larger serpents are loosely hinged, to enable them to get over at one gulp
such a bulky morsel as a full-grown rabbit.
Accidents will happen, however, in the best-regulated mills, and provision
is made for rendering an explosion when it occurs as innocuous as
possible. The new incorporating mills are constructed with three sides of
solid brickwork three feet thick, and the fourth side and roof of
corrugated iron and glass lightly adjusted. As they are placed in a row
contiguous to each other, the alternate ones only face the same way, so
that the line of fire, or the direction the explosion would take through
the weakest end, would not be likely to involve in destruction the
neighbouring mill. It does occasionally happen, however, that the
precautions are not sufficient to prevent danger spreading. In the great
explosion which took place in 1842 a second house was fired at a couple of
hundred yards distance from the spot where the original explosion took
place. There is now a further security against the houses going one after
another, like houses of cards. Over each mill a copper tank, containing
about forty gallons of water, is so suspended that on the lifting of a
lever it instantly discharges its contents and floods the mill. This
shower or douche bath is made self-acting, inasmuch as the explosion
itself pulls the string, the force of the expanding gas lifting up a
hinged shutter which acts like a trigger to let down the water. "But," it
may be said, "as the water does not fall until the explosion has taken
place, this contrivance is very like locking the stable door when the
steed is stolen!" And this is the case with respect to the mill where the
original mischief took place; but the lever first acted upon discharges
the shower-bath over the heads of all the others also, and by this means
the evil is limited to the place where it originated. From the
incorporating mills the kneading powder, or "mill cake," as it is termed,
is taken by another funeral-looking gondola to small expense-magazines,
where it is allowed to remain for twelve hours before being taken to the
breaking-down house. Here the hard lumps of mill cake are ground into fine
powder by the action of fine-toothed rollers made of gun-metal, which
revolve towards each other and crush the cake which falls between them to
dust. The broken-down mill cake once more travels between pleasant meadows
fringed with willow until it reaches the press house, where the meal is
subjected to hydraulic pressure between plates of gun-metal, and is
thereby reduced to dense plates about half an inch thick. These plates are
allowed to remain intact for a couple of days, by which time they become
as hard as a piece of fine pottery. Very many advantages are gained by
this pressure. The density of the powder is increased, which enables it to
be conveyed without working into fine dust; its keeping qualities are
improved, as it absorbs less moisture than if it were more porous; and
lastly, a greater volume of inflammable gas is produced from a given bulk.
The pressed cake is now transferred to the maw of one of the most
extraordinary machines we have yet witnessed. The granulating house, where
the important process of dividing the powder into fine grains takes place,
is removed very far away from the other buildings. The danger of the
operation carried on within is implied by the strong traverse fifteen feet
thick at the bottom, which is intended to act as a shield to the workmen
in case of an accident. It was here an explosion took place in 1843, by
which eight workmen lost their lives--in what manner no one knows, as all
the evidence was swept away. To render the recurrence of such lamentable
accidents as rare as possible, the machine is made self-acting. At
certain times of the day it is supplied with food in the shape of fifteen
hundredweight of "pressed cake." This is stuffed into a large hopper or
pouch, and the moment the monster is ready, the men retire beyond the
strong traverse and allow it slowly to masticate its meal, which it does
with a deliberation worthy of its ponderosity and strength, emptying its
pouch by degrees, and by a triturating process performed by two or three
sets of fine rollers, dividing it into different-sized grains. These
grains it passes through a series of wire sieves, separating the larger
ones fitted for cannon powder from the finer kind required for rifles, and
depositing them in their appropriate boxes, which, when full, it removes
from its own dangerous proximity, and takes up empty ones in their place.
All the larger undigested pieces it returns again, like a ruminating
animal, to its masticating process until its supply is exhausted. Then,
and not till then, like Mademoiselle Jack, the famous elephant, it rings a
bell for some fresh "cake." The workmen allow it about five minutes' grace
to thoroughly assimilate the supply already in its maw, when the machine
stops, and they enter with another meal. The floors of all the different
houses are covered with leather neatly fastened down with copper nails,
and the brush is never out of the hands of the workman: even while you are
talking to him, he sweeps away in the gravest manner in order to remove
any particles of powder or grit that maybe on the floor; this he does
mechanically, when not a particle of anything is to be seen, just as a
sailor in a crack ship always holystones the deck, clean or dirty, the
moment he has any spare time.
The powder thus separated into grains is still damp and full of dust. To
get rid of this it is taken by water to the dusting-house, where it is
bolted in a reel like so much flour. It has now to be glazed, a very
important operation, performed by placing it in large barrels, which
revolve with their load thirty-two times a minute for three hours
together. By the mere friction of the grains against each other and the
sides of the barrel, a fine polish is imparted to the surface of the
grain, which enables it to withstand the action of the atmosphere much
better than when it is left unglazed. It is now stoved for sixteen hours
in a drying-room heated by steam pipes to a heat of 130° Fahrenheit, and
is then finally dusted and proved. There are many methods of proving, but
the simplest and most efficacious is to fire the powder from the weapon it
is intended to serve. Thus cannon powder is proved by firing a 68-pound
solid shot with a charge of two ounces of powder--a charge which should
give a range of from 270 to 300 feet. If the powder passes the test, which
it generally does, it is packed in barrels holding 100 lbs. each, marked
L. G. (Large Grain), and F. G. (Fine Grain), as the case may be, and
carried to the provisional magazine. When 500 barrels have accumulated
they are despatched in a barge to the Government magazine at Purfleet,
near the mouth of the Thames, the Lea forming the connecting link of water
between the canals of the works and that river.
The produce of this establishment, which had fallen so low as 4,500
barrels per annum in 1843, is now so increased by improved machinery that
20,000 barrels a year can be manufactured, and of the very best quality.
Even this supply is far below the consumption during a time of war, and
contractors have, and always will have, to furnish a portion of the
required supplies; but it seems that a model mill is useful for the double
purpose of keeping up a due standard of quality,[27] and of keeping down
price. On the uniform strength of the powder depends the accuracy of
artillery fire: hence the necessity of having some known standard of
quality from which contractors should not be allowed to depart. The
improvements which have taken place in the manufacture are very marked.
About the year 1790, when powder was supplied to Government wholly by
contract, the regulation weight of charge for a cannon was half the weight
of the ball; it is now less than one-third: therefore two barrels are now
used instead of three, a reduction of bulk which economizes stowage on
board ship as well as in the field. Formerly powder had a range of 190
feet only; the range is now increased to 268 feet! This vast improvement
is simply the consequence of the care with which the powder is worked, and
the attention bestowed on every detail of the mills since their direction
fell into the hands of Colonel Tulloh, Colonel Dickson, and Colonel
Askwith, the present Superintendent.
There is a department at the Woolwich Arsenal to which we must now return,
of which the establishments at Enfield and Waltham Abbey may be considered
but outlying offshoots. Beyond the canal, at the extreme end of the
ground, lie the establishments devoted to the more dangerous portions of
pyrotechnic manufacture, such as the filling of rockets, of
friction-tubes, the driving of fuses, &c. These ticklish operations used
to be conducted in ill-built sheds in the laboratory square, where a sad
explosion took place during the war, and Captain Boxer, determining to
reduce the risk of accidents, transferred the whole of them in 1854 to
this open space, far away from the neighbourhood of fire. The sixteen
houses used for fuse-driving and friction-tube-making are isolated from
each other much in the same manner as the incorporating mills at Waltham
Abbey: we need not therefore describe them. The rocket manufactory is also
so carefully arranged that accidents can rarely happen. The method of
driving the composition into these frightfully destructive implements of
war was, until lately, not only barbarous but dangerous in the extreme,
being forced in by a "monkey," or small pile-driver, worked by eight men.
The pressure of water now does the work silently, effectually, and safely.
The rocket is so fixed while it is being filled, that in case of an
accident the discharge will fly through the roof; grit and iron are as
carefully excluded as in the powder mills; open spaces around the
buildings are covered with turf and planted with shrubs, and a raised
causeway of wood keeps the communications between the different magazines
free from all substances likely to produce friction. The visitor may no
more enter one of these carefully-guarded buildings with his shoes on than
he could walk into the mosque of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, similarly
shod. With equal care the process of greasing the bullet end of the
small-arm cartridges is carried on in this portion of the Arsenal. For a
long time no lubricating material could be found that remained unaffected
in all climates--a very important desideratum, considering the manner in
which our stores of war are moved about from the depths of arctic waters
to the burning summers of the torrid zone. Captain Boxer, however, in a
happy moment, thought of the little busy insect that builds a store-house
warranted to keep in all temperatures, and adopted bees' wax, which, added
to a little fat, makes a compound which answers the purpose perfectly. The
cartridges are dipped about an inch deep into a receptacle of this liquid
kept fluid by the heat of gas. As we watched the process going on, we
could not avoid reflecting from what insignificant causes great events
arise, and that a rebellion which well-nigh snatched India from our grasp
sprung from this very cauldron seething with "hell-broth thick and slab."