Hosiery manufacture--The stocking-frame--The circular
hosiery-machine--Hats--Gloves--Boots and shoes--
Straw-plait--Artificial flowers--Fans--Lace--Bobbin-net
machine--Pins--Needles--Buttons--Toys--Lucifer-matches--
Envelopes.
Before the invention of the first stocking-machine, in the year 1589, by
William Lee, a clergyman, none but the very rich wore stockings, and
many of the most wealthy went without stockings at all, that part of
dress being sewn together by the tailor, or their legs being covered
with bandages of cloth. The covering for the leg was called a
"nether-stock," or lower stocking. Philip Stubbes, a tremendous
declaimer against every species of luxury, thus describes the expensive
stockings of his time, 1585:--
"Then have they nether-stocks to these hosen, not of cloth (though never
so fine), for that is thought too base, but of jarnsey, worsted,
crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest
yarn that can be got, and so curiously knit with open seam down the leg,
with quirks and clocks about the ancles, and sometime, haply, interlaced
with gold or silver threads, as is wonderful to behold. And to such
impudent insolency and shameful outrage it is now grown, that every one,
almost, though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of
wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these
silk nether-stocks, or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though
the price of them be a ryall, or twenty shillings, or more, as commonly
it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is
worth a noble or a ryall, and some much more? The time hath been when
one might have clothed his body well for less than a pair of these
nether-stocks will cost."
It is difficult to understand how those who had only forty shillings a
year wages could expend twenty shillings upon a pair of knit stockings.
It is quite clear they were for the rich only; and that very few persons
were employed in knitting and embroidering stockings.
William Lee struggled to make stockings cheap. He made a pair of
stockings by the frame, in the presence of King James I.; but such was
the prejudice of those times, that he could get no encouragement for his
invention. His invention was discountenanced, upon the plea that it
would deprive the industrious poor of their subsistence. He went to
France, where he met with no better success, and died at last of a
broken heart. The great then _could_ discountenance an invention,
because its application was limited to themselves. _They_ only wore
stockings: the poor who made them had none to wear. Stockings were not
cheap enough for the poor to wear, and therefore they went without. Of
the millions of people now in this country, how few are without
stockings! What a miserable exception to the comfort of the rest of the
English people does it appear when we see a beggar in the streets
without stockings! We consider such a person to be in the lowest stage
of want and suffering. Two centuries ago, not one person in a thousand
wore stockings;--one century ago, not one person in five hundred wore
them;--now, not one person in a thousand is without them. Who made this
great change in the condition of the people of England, and, indeed, of
the people of almost all civilized countries? William Lee--who died at
Paris of a broken heart. And why did he die of grief and penury? Because
the people of his own days were too ignorant to accept the blessings he
had prepared for them.
We ask with confidence, had the terror of the stocking-frame any real
foundation? Were any people thrown out of employment by the
stocking-frame?
"The knitters in the sun,
And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,"
as Shakspere describes the country lasses of his day, had to _change_
their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of
stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings.
The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides
those who work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases,
makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make
a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so
produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine
which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were
employed, in 1851, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom
thirty thousand were females.
Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of
James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day;
and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been
used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had
never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the
first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that
case, would have been without stockings.
But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all
have found substitutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the
progress of ingenuity would have been stopped. The inventive principle
would have been destroyed.
We have not reached the end of our career of improvement. Civilization
is not destined to run a backward race. William Lee's stocking-frame
worked well for two centuries and a half. One of the most beautiful
contrivances of our time has now greatly superseded it. The circular
hosiery machine--more properly called a machine for manufacturing
"looped fabrics"--works at such a rate that one girl attending upon the
revolutions of this wonderful instrument can produce in one day the
material for two hundred and forty pairs of stockings. She turns a
little handle, with the ease with which she would turn a barrel-organ;
and, as the machine revolves, hundreds of needles catch the thread and
loop it into the chain which forms the stocking-cloth, or it makes the
fashioned stocking. The new hosiery-machines have doubled the employment
of the stocking-makers, by enabling us to meet the competition of
foreign countries. The English were working upon the old slow
stocking-frame, while the French and Belgians were using the rapid
circular machine. The markets of the world would have been soon closed
to us if we had clung to the old machine, through the force of any
popular prejudice against a new machine. There is no portion of the
export trade of this country which has increased with such extraordinary
rapidity within the last six years as that of hosiery. The following
abstract of the declared value of stockings exported since 1848 will
sufficiently indicate the effects of improved machinery in cheapening
production:--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stockings exported. | 1848. 1850. 1852. 1853.
-------------------------------|----------------------------------------
| L L L L
Cotton | 77,095 104,434 243,994 461,494
Silk | 24,324 20,256 25,140 23,579
Worsted | 40,413 74,482 117,349 261,140
Silk mixed with other material | 39 3,327 4,705 10,464
|----------------------------------------
| 141,871 202,499 391,188 756,677
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The hosiery of Saxony was superseding, a few years ago, from its extreme
cheapness, the shipment to the United States of goods made at
Nottingham. The cheapness in Saxony was produced, not by the employment
of large capital and the application of the most expensive machinery,
but by the miserably low wages of labour. It is stated by Mr. Porter
that, in 1837, a man of Saxony, with his wife and three children,
working incessantly at the stocking-loom, could only earn 5_s._ 4d.
weekly. In the principal manufacturing districts of that country, the
food of the artisans is of the coarsest kind, and of the most limited
supply. The comparative ease and comfort of the workers in our hosiery
districts is one of the most satisfactory proofs that invention is as
great a benefit to the labourer as to the capitalist.
As the nether-stocks of our ancestors were for the great and wealthy, so
were their Hats. Old Stubbes writes, "Sometimes they use them sharp on
the crown, pearking up like the spear or shaft of a steeple, standing a
quarter of a yard above the crown of their heads, some more, some less,
as please the phantasies of their inconstant minds. Other some be flat
and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house. Another sort
have round crowns, sometimes with one kind of band, sometimes with
another, now black, now white, now russet, now red, now green, now
yellow, now this, now that, never content with one colour or fashion two
days to an end. And thus in vanity they spend the Lord his treasure,
consuming their golden years and silver days in wickedness and sin. And
as the fashions be rare and strange, so is the stuff whereof their hats
be made divers also; for some are of silk, some of velvet, some of
taffeta, some of sarsenet, some of wool, and, which is more curious,
some of a certain kind of fine hair; these they call beaver hats, of 20,
30, or 40 shillings price, fetched from beyond the seas, from whence a
great sort of other vanities do come besides." Here, then, we see that
the beaver hat was in those days an article of great price. The
commonalty had their "plain statute caps" of wool. In our time the
beaver hat was the common wear of the middle classes until the last few
years, when the cheaper silk hat became almost universal. We import from
France some plush for making hats; but much of this silk material is
also prepared in our own factories. Hats have therefore become
intimately associated with the material produced by the loom.
The manufacture of Gloves is connected, in a very large department, with
the hosiery manufactory. The use of thread gloves and cotton gloves has
had the effect, in some degree, of lessening the consumption of leather
gloves. The importation of leather gloves and mitts was prohibited until
1825. We now import three million pairs annually; and the home
manufacture, instead of being ruined as was predicted, was never more
prosperous. The French gloves, once so superior to our own, have
improved the English, by the natural force of competition; and the
manufacturers not only purchase better leather than formerly, but the
cottage-workwomen that labour in the glove districts have become neater
and more careful sewers. The consumption of gloves has ceased to be
exclusively for the rich. The perfumed and embroidered glove of the 16th
century is no longer required. The use of gloves has become universal
amongst both sexes of the middle classes. The female domestic would
think it unbecoming to go to church without her gloves; and the
well-dressed artisan holds it nothing effeminate to use a covering for
his hands, which his forefathers thought a distinguishing appurtenance
of the high-born and luxurious.
[Illustration: Gloves for the great.]
Our home-manufacture of Boots and Shoes has received an immense impulse
from foreign competition. The number of men's and women's boots and
shoes which we import is not much above two hundred thousand. But we
also import six hundred thousand boot-fronts from France, which our own
people work up. Although the boot and shoe manufacture can scarcely be
considered a factory process, it has now adapted itself to certain
localities, such as Northampton. The articles made in the provinces were
originally distinguished for their cheapness merely. They now unite the
characters of goodness and cheapness. This chiefly arises from the trade
being carried on, at Northampton especially, upon a large scale--upon a
principle the very reverse of the old familiar spectacle of the cobbler
in his stall.
[Illustration: Cobbler's stall, about 1760.]
The Straw-plat is a domestic manufacture, chiefly carried on in the
midland and eastern counties. It employs thirty-two thousand persons, of
whom twenty-eight thousand are females. The straw hat and bonnet makers
amount to twenty-two thousand, of whom more than twenty thousand are
females. The art of straw-platting has been greatly improved amongst us
of late years; but the Italian straw, being of a finer nature, is in
greater demand for the higher priced bonnets.
The beautiful production of Artificial Flowers has, in very recent
years, been much increased in England. France, with its superior taste,
long supplied us with these ornaments, which had the brilliancy of
natural flowers without their perishableness. But three thousand
females, and five hundred males, are now engaged with us in this branch.
The Fan-makers of England are only thirty in number. In France this is a
large branch of manufacture. In the Jury Report on the Exhibition of
Industry in 1851 there is a notice of the fan-trade of Paris, which is
curious as showing the joint influences upon cheapness, of machinery,
and of the multiplication of works of art by engraving. The fan-makers
of Paris in 1847 employed five hundred and seventy-five work-people--the
number of the sexes being pretty equally divided. "The men were for the
most part copper-plate engravers and printers, lithographic draughtsmen
and printers, painters, and colourers; the women were mounters,
illuminators, painters, colourers, and overlookers. In twenty years it
appears that the produce in fans had increased in value nearly
threefold, whilst the number of work-people had diminished one-half.
This change is attributed to the employment of machinery, especially of
the fly press, in stamping out and embossing the ribs, and the extensive
employment of chromo-lithography, an art not practised at the former
period. By these means the French have been enabled greatly to increase
their exports by the production of cheap fans, to compete with those
made by the Chinese."
Dekker, in his 'Gull's Hornbook,' printed in 1609, advises the gallant
of his day to exhibit a "wrought handkerchief." A "handkerchief, spotted
with strawberries," was Othello's first gift to Desdemona. It was an
embroidered handkerchief, such as is produced in the present day at
Cairo by the Egyptian ladies in their private apartments. The
embroidered shirts of the time of Elizabeth are thus noticed by
Stubbes:--
"These shirts (sometimes it happeneth) are wrought throughout with
needle-work of silk, and such like, and curiously stitched with open
seam, and many other knacks besides, more than I can describe; in so
much as I have heard of shirts that have cost some ten shillings, some
twenty, some forty, some five pound, some twenty nobles, and (which is
horrible to hear) some ten pound apiece."
[Illustration: Men'seg, or Egyptian embroidery-frame.]
The embroidery-frame was in time superseded by the lace-pillow, which is
stated to have been first used in Saxony in the sixteenth century. The
production of Lace extended to Belgium and France; and we are still
familiar with the names of Brussels, Mechlin, Lisle, Valenciennes, and
Alencon lace. Until the present century no lace was heard of but
pillow-lace,--a domestic manufacture, of which Honiton was the most
famous seat. A stocking-weaver of Nottingham adapted his stocking-frame
to the making of lace about 1770; and the bobbin-frame was invented in
1809. It was never extensively used till the expiration of the patent;
and the produce of this machine was kept at so high a price by the
patentees that it interfered little with the labour of the lace-makers
in the cottages of the midland counties.
[Illustration: Bobbin-net meshes.]
But a time was coming when as much bobbin-net as the patentees of the
first frame charged five pounds for would be sold for half-a-crown; and
when, as a necessary consequence of this cheapness, lace-making as a
domestic employment would wholly cease, or be confined to the production
of an expensive article, supposed to be superior to machine-made lace.
That the old hand-labour could compete with the machine was an
impossibility. Lace of an ordinary figured pattern used to be made on
the pillow at the rate of about three meshes per minute. A bobbin-net
machine will produce similar lace at the rate of twenty-four thousand
meshes per minute, one person only being required to wait upon the
machine. Those who have watched the cottage lace-maker, working with her
bobbins and pins, were unable, without long observation, to understand
the principle upon which she intertwined the threads. But to explain the
more rapid working of the bobbin-net machine would require such a minute
acquaintance with all its parts as belongs to the business of the
practical machinist, and which words are inadequate to exhibit. The
accompanying engraving offers the best notion we can furnish.
[Illustration: Essential parts of the bobbin-net machine.
The warp, ascending from the beam A, passes through small holes in a
guide-bar B, and thence to the point C, where the bobbins in their
respective combs, driven by the ledges on the two bars beneath, traverse
the warp to and fro, and interlace the threads as shown at D; the points
E assisting to maintain the forms of the meshes.]
Instead of England being now supplied with lace from France and Belgium,
we are now an exporting lace-country. In 1848 we exported cotton lace
and net to the amount of 363,255_l._; in 1853 to the amount of
596,578_l._
According to the census of 1851, the number of persons employed in the
lace manufacture was 63,660; of whom 54,080 were females. The same
returns give the number of 4658 embroiderers.
There is an article employed in dress which is at once so necessary and
so beautiful that the highest lady in the land uses it, and yet so cheap
that the poorest peasant's wife is enabled to procure it. The quality of
the article is as perfect as art can make it; and yet, from the enormous
quantities consumed by the great mass of the people, it is made so cheap
that the poor can purchase the best kind, as well as the rich. It is an
article of universal use. United with machinery, many hundreds, and even
thousands, are employed in making it. But if the machinery were to stop,
and the article were made by human hands alone, it would become so dear
that the richest only could afford to use it; and it would become at the
same time so rough in its appearance, that those very rich would be
ashamed of using it. The article we mean is a Pin.
It is not necessary for us to describe the machinery used in pin-making,
to make the reader comprehend its effects. A pin is made of brass. We
have seen how metal is obtained from ore by machinery; and therefore we
will not go over that ground. But suppose the most skilful workman has a
lump of brass ready by his side, to make it into pins with common
tools,--with a hammer and with a file. He heats it upon an anvil, till
it becomes nearly thin enough for his purpose. A very fine hammer, and a
very fine touch, must he have to produce a pin of any sort,--even a
large corking-pin! But the pin made by machinery is a perfect cylinder.
To make a metal, or even a wooden cylinder, of a considerable size, with
files and polishing, is an operation so difficult that it is never
attempted; but with a lathe and a sliding rest it is done every hour by
a great many workmen. How much more difficult would it be to make a
perfect cylinder the size of a pin? A pin hammered out by hand would
present a number of rough edges that would tear the clothes, as well as
hold them together. It would not be much more useful or ornamental than
the skewer of bone with which the woman of the Sandwich Islands fastens
her mats. But the wire of which pins are made acquires a perfectly
cylindrical form by the simplest machinery. It is forcibly drawn through
the circular holes of a steel plate; and the hole being smaller and
smaller each time it is drawn through, it is at length reduced to the
size required.
The head of a pin is a more difficult thing to make even than the body.
It is formed of a small piece of wire twisted round so as to fit upon
the other wire. It is said that by a machine fifty thousand heads can be
made in an hour. We should think that a man would be very skilful to
make fifty in an hour by hand, in the roughest manner; if so, the
machine does the work of a thousand men. The machine, however, does not
do all the work. The head is attached to the body of a pin by the
fingers of a child, while another machine rivets it on. The operations
of cutting and pointing the pins are also done by machinery; and they
are polished by a chemical process.
It is by these processes,--by these combinations of human labour with
mechanical power,--that it occurs that fifty pins can be bought for one
halfpenny, and that therefore four or five thousand pins may be consumed
in a year by the most economical housewife, at a much less price than
fifty pins of a rude make cost two or three centuries ago. A woman's
allowance was formerly called her _pin-money_,--a proof that the pins
were a sufficiently dear article to make a large item in her expenses.
If pins now were to cost a halfpenny apiece instead of being fifty for a
halfpenny, the greater number of females would adopt other modes of
fastening their dress, which would probably be less neat and convenient
than pins. No such circumstance could happen while the machinery of
pin-making was in use.
Needles are not so cheap as pins, because the material of which they are
made is more expensive, and the processes cannot be executed so fully by
machinery. But without machinery how could that most beautiful article,
a _fine_ needle, be sold at the rate of six for a penny?
As in the case of pins, machinery is at work at the first formation of
the material. Without the tilt-hammer, which beats out the bar of steel,
first at the rate of ten strokes a minute, and lastly at that of five
hundred, how could that bar be prepared for needle-making at anything
like a reasonable price? In all the processes of needle-making, labour
is saved by contrivance and machinery. What human touch, without a
machine, would be accurate enough to make the eye of the finest needle,
through which the most delicate silk is with difficulty passed? There
are two needles to be formed out of one piece of wire; in the previous
preparation of which the eyes are marked. The workman, holding in his
hand several wires, drops one at a time on the bed-iron of the machine,
adjusts it to the die, brings down the upper die upon it by the action
of the foot, and allows it to fall into a little dish when done. This he
does with such rapidity that one stamper can stamp four thousand wires,
equivalent to eight thousand needles, in an hour.
[Illustration: Stamping the eye of a needle.]
Needles are made in such large quantities, that it is even important to
save the time of the child who lays them all one way when they are
completed. Mr. Babbage, who is equally distinguished for his profound
science and his mechanical ingenuity, has described this process as an
example of one of the simplest contrivances which can come under the
denomination of a tool. "It is necessary to separate the needles into
two parcels, in order that their points may be all in one direction.
This is usually done by women and children. The needles are placed
sideways in a heap, on a table, in front of each operator. From five to
ten are rolled towards this person by the forefinger of the left hand;
this separates them a very small space from each other, and each in its
turn is pushed lengthways to the right or to the left, according as its
eye is on the right or the left hand. This is the usual process, and in
it every needle passes individually under the finger of the operator. A
small alteration expedites the process considerably; the child puts on
the forefinger of its right hand a small cloth cap or finger-stall, and,
rolling from the heap from six to twelve needles, it keeps them down by
the forefinger of the left hand; whilst it presses the forefinger of the
right hand gently against the ends of the needles, those which have
their points towards the right hand stick into the finger-stall; and the
child, removing the finger of the left hand, allows the needles sticking
into the cloth to be slightly raised, and then pushes them towards the
left side. Those needles which had their eyes on the right hand do not
stick into the finger-cover, and are pushed to the heap on the right
side previous to the repetition of the process. By means of this simple
contrivance, each movement of the finger, from one side to the other,
carries five or six needles to their proper heap; whereas, in the former
method, frequently only one was moved, and rarely more than two or three
were transported at one movement to their place."
A large number of people are employed, at Birmingham chiefly, in the
manufacture of buttons. The census return gives about seven thousand. In
the manufacture of a single button there is great division of labour
amongst piercers, cutters, stampers, gilders, and burnishers. The
engraving exhibits the operations of stamping, pressing, and punching,
as carried on in a great factory. The shank of a button is made by very
complicated machinery as a distinct class of manufacture, and the
button-makers buy the shanks. It has been stated that three firms in
Birmingham annually make six hundred million of button-shanks.
[Illustration: Stamping, pressing, and punching buttons.--Elliott's
factory.]
The application of machinery, or of peculiar scientific modes of
working, to such apparently trifling articles as pins, needles, buttons,
and trinkets, may appear of little importance. But let it be remembered,
that the manufacture of such articles furnishes employment to many
thousands of our fellow-countrymen; and, enabling us to supply other
nations with these products, affords us the means of receiving articles
of more intrinsic value in exchange. In 1853 our exports of hardware and
cutlery amounted to more than three millions and a half sterling. No
article of ready attainment, and therefore of general consumption,
whether it be a labourer's spade or a child's marble, is unimportant in
a commercial point of view. The wooden figures of horses and sheep that
may be bought for twopence in the toy-shops furnish employment to cut
them, during the long winter nights, to a large portion of the peasantry
of the Tyrol. The Swiss peasant cuts a piece of white wood into a boy or
a cottage, as he is tending his herd on the side of a mountain. These
become considerable articles of export. In the town of Sonneberg, near
the forest of Thuringia, four thousand inhabitants are principally
employed in the toy-trade, and also find employment for the neighbouring
villagers. Mr. Osler, of Birmingham, some years ago, addressing a
Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject of his beads and
trinkets, said,--"On my first journey to London, a respectable-looking
man in the City asked me if I could supply him with dolls' eyes; and I
was foolish enough to feel half offended. I thought it derogatory to my
new dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls' eyes. He took me into a
room quite as wide and perhaps twice the length of this (one of the
large rooms for Committees in the House of Commons), and we had just
room to walk between stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of
dolls. He said, 'These are only the legs and arms--the trunks are
below.' But I saw enough to convince me that he wanted a great many
eyes; and as the article appeared quite in my own line of business, I
said I would take an order by way of experiment; and he showed me
several specimens. I copied the order. He ordered various quantities and
of various sizes and qualities. On returning to the Tavistock Hotel, I
found that the order amounted to upwards of five hundred pounds."
Mr. Osler tells this story to show the importance of trifles. The making
of dolls' eyes afforded subsistence to many ingenious workmen in glass
toys; and in the same way the most minute and apparently insignificant
article of general use, when rendered cheap by chemical science or
machinery, produces a return of many thousand pounds, and sets in
motion labour and labourers. Without the science and the machinery,
which render the article cheap, the labourers would have had _no_
employ, for the article would not have been consumed. What a pretty
article is a common tobacco-pipe, of which millions are used! It is made
cheap and beautiful in a mould--a machine for copying pipes. If the pipe
were made without the mould, and other contrivances, it would cost at
least a shilling instead of a halfpenny:--the tobacco-smoker would go
without his pipe, and the pipe-maker without his employment.
Amongst articles of great demand that have become of importance, though
apparently insignificant, in our own day, there is nothing more worthy
of notice than the Lucifer-Match. About twenty years ago chemistry
abolished the tinder-box; and the burnt rag that made the tinder went to
make paper. Slowly did the invention spread. The use of the
lucifer-match is now so established that machines are invented to
prepare the splints. In London one saw-mill annually cuts up four
hundred large timber-trees for matches. The English matches are
generally square, and thus thirty thousand splints are cut in a minute.
The American matches are round; and the process of shaping being more
elaborate, four thousand five hundred splints are cut in a minute. We
will follow a bundle of eighteen hundred of the square splints, each
four inches long, through its conversion into three thousand six hundred
lucifer-matches.
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
mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. 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. The matches are to be cut, and the empty boxes
filled, by this 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
slides into an outer case; and he 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.
It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer
than in the winter. The increased summer demand for the lucifer-matches
shows that the great consumption is among 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. Their value was sufficiently shown
when an officer in camp at Balaclava wrote home that no want was
greater than that of the ready means of procuring fire and light, and
that he should hold a box of lucifer-matches cheap at half-a-crown.
[Illustration: Envelope-making machine.]
We may notice one other article of almost universal use, which is of
very recent introduction--the Envelope. It is a labour-saving
contrivance for the writer of letters. The use of the envelope has been
mainly created by the penny postage. We find, in the census, that seven
hundred persons, chiefly females, are employed in making envelopes. But
there is a beautiful machine also for making them, at the rate of
twenty-five thousand a day. The envelope-making machine was one of the
most attractive objects in the Great Exhibition.