Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Drawing by machinery
DRAWING BY MACHINERY.
I had just come up from Ross—that quaint old Western town, where the salmon-traversed Wye, fresh from Plynlimmon, gambols along amongst everything that is beautiful in nature,—and was waiting at Birmingham for the Northern Evening Express. The great station in the New Street of that town, though one of the finest in the kingdom, is not, perhaps, one of the most agreeable at which to spend a spare half-hour. The din of the arriving and departing trains of the six different lines that meet there; the panting and shrieking of some dozen or two unattached engines, that prowl wistfully to and fro, as if in search of prey; and the strange reverberations of all these discordant noises high up in the arched glass-roof that stretches away for a quarter of a mile and covers everything but the two tunnelled outlets to the station, are not the pleasantest companions for an evening promenade, nor the best possible incentives to serenity of mind or continuity of thought. Nor is there much to admire in the building itself, except the engineering skill that devised so great a span of roof without the aid of intervening pillars. So, quite stunned out, and “used up,” I determined on a short stroll in the “Hardware Village” to while away the time. Setting out in prosecution of this design, I had hardly reached that peculiarly stark-looking statue of Thomas Attwood, which fronts the station-gates, when I was slapped familiarly on the back by no feeble hand; and, turning round, I recognised in my smiling assailant an old school-friend of nomadic tendencies, whom I had not met for some six or seven years. The last time I saw him, he was purser in a ship lying off Calcutta; the time before that, I think, he was engaged on a Government survey in Wales. Like most of his class, too, he had had something to do in the Crimea, during the war; had taken trips to New Zealand, China, and Japan; and, in fact, had been almost everywhere excepting to the North Pole and the Lake Nyanza.
Preliminary greetings over, therefore, my first inquiry was as to what he was doing in Birmingham.
“Well, you see, I got married about two years ago,” he replied; “and as it then became necessary that I should settle down, I took to a quiet little drawing business in this ‘great Midland Metropolis’—that is the phrase by which we modest Brums know Birmingham.”
“Drawing!” I repeated; “I did not know your tastes lay that way.”
“Nor do they, in the ordinary acceptation of the word ‘drawing,” he said, with the suspicion of a twinkle of fun in his eye; “but the fact is, I draw by machinery. I hate that dreary old hard work, you know.”
“Surely, you do not mean that you have settled down as a photographer?”
“O no,” he replied, laughing at my evident perplexity; “something far more lucrative than that. By the way, didn’t you see any of my work in the Exhibition?”
“No, not to my knowledge.”
“You must have seen it, my boy; I had tons of it there. However, just run up to my studio and I’ll show you some.”
I explained to him that I could not do so then, but promised to call and see him on my return from Windermere.”
“Well,” he replied, “if you like to run up and spend a few weeks with us, we shall be delighted to give you welcome; but pray, do not come for the purpose of seeing any of my works of art, or you’ll be disappointed. To tell you the truth, I am a wire-drawer—a most interesting and important manufacture I assure you. You should see the trade-circular I drew up for the American market; that will give you an insight into the uses of wire. It took me weeks to do it, but I flatter myself it’s the thing. Just listen; I know it all by heart. ‘Who,’ it asks, ‘has ever seriously thought of the inconveniences that would attend a sudden annihilation of that simple commodity called wire? To suppose the infant world deprived of its pins, and the feminine world of its hooks and eyes and bonnet-wire, were to suppose a disordered state of dress in those we love shocking to contemplate; and to suppose the home circle’—that’s a good term, isn’t it?—‘deprived of its fire-guards, were to suppose Paterfamilias driven to dispense altogether with his fires and the comforts thereof, on pain of allowing his wife and daughters to become burnt-offerings to fashion. And, then, who has knowledge to say to what extent the mysteries of cooking depend upon contrivances in wire, or what in point of convenience could replace our house-bell system? But for wire, too, the pianos of our daughters would cease to charm away the cares of business in the evening, and spring-chairs would no more soothe us into after-dinner slumbers. The only tenants of our houses, indeed, to whom the annihilation of wire would not come as a misfortune, would be our prisoned songbirds, with, here and there, a giddy squirrel doomed to run forever the narrow circuit of his barrel-cage.’ All this, you see, gives the matter a domestic interest,—now listen: “But taking a broader view of the matter, and travelling out of our homes for a while, we shall find wire in use almost everywhere,—sometimes as a convenience, oftener as an essential. It is the highway along which our telegraphic messages are flashed with a swifter speed than lightning—the agent by which signals are turned on and off, and life preserved on our railways. In our manufactories it releases hundreds of tons of steam-power at a touch; enters into a thousand processes; binds up the products of British industry for shipment to all parts of the world. Twisted, it deposits the miner safely in the bowels of the earth; worked into gauze, it protects him there. Without it, electricity could scarcely be evolved for any useful purpose; to it chemistry owes many valuable discoveries and delicate tests. It is employed, in short, in most arts and some sciences, and may be found in almost every piece of mechanism in existence—from a rat-trap to a gold chronometer, from a child’s toy to a steam-engine. Price-lists sent free on application.’ What do you think of that, my boy?”
“Bravo, Gus!” I said, as my voluble friend paused to take breath. “Your prospectus has done it. I shall certainly visit your ‘studio’ in a week or two, and bring a friend with me; but, for the present, good-bye, for my train is nearly due, and I must not miss it on any account.”
“Ta-ta! old fellow!” he replied, shaking hands warmly. “Come as soon as you like, and bring as many friends as you like; you shall all be welcome.”
As I am now about to accept my old friend’s offer, I hereby invite as many of my readers as are desirous of knowing out of what wire is produced, and how it comes into existence, to accompany me to Birmingham. There is no difficulty about getting there. Travelling by that quickest of all conveyances, the imagination, it is the easiest thing in the world to suppose ourselves, not only at New Street Station, but fairly out of its Pandemoniac din, and on our way to the manufactory we purpose visiting.
The first thing that strikes us, on approaching it, is its enormous extent. It covers some two or three acres of land, and runs the whole length of two of the scores of narrow streets by which it is encompassed. The noise it gives out is almost deafening—a ceaseless, wearying, rolling sound, as of a hundred iron garden-rollers upon a hard roadway. Are we astonished that so much room should be required to make so small an article as wire, or that so much noise should accompany the manufacture?—we have only to step inside the works, and the secret is revealed. We at once find ourselves in the midst of a frightful chaos of huge wheels, stretching away as far as the eye can follow them, and revolving in all directions, at all speeds. Some are spinning round swiftly, others sluggishly, some edgewise, some flatwise; but all are in motion, and all seem to be deliriously devouring great cakes of red-hot metal, with which they are being fed by some forty or fifty grimy workmen. Close to us are two great iron rollers revolving one over the other, and on either side of them are half-a-dozen workmen, who are passing and repassing an immense sheet of red-hot metal from one to the other through the wheels. The moment the metal is through, bang! go the rollers together; and, in another moment, the sheet is coming over the top of them as swiftly as it went through them. Other pairs of rollers, with their attendant workmen, are doing similar work on every hand; and here and there are immense pairs of shears, whose crocodile jaws are for ever in motion. A piece of metal, an inch thick, is thrust into them, and they bite it asunder; a piece of pin-wire, and they snip it off crisp and clean as a pair of cutting pliers. Huge hammers there are, too, that strike, as the wheels turn and the shears bite, by some agency unseen, but in the extent of its power terrible—hammers that will smash a red-hot cannonball flat, or crack a nut without bruising the kernel. The motive power, of course, is steam, but how applied? Look through all those black beams and rafters that support the roof of the mill—for it is the “rolling mill” we are now inspecting—right out there where the bright sun light is streaming down through the smoke, and steam and dust upon the intermingled mass of wheels, and rollers, and workmen, and red-hot metal. Do you not see that huge black arm, plunging up and down, and swaying from side to side, as if turning some great windlass? There is the Giant who does the work. Let us have a nearer look at him. Two great boilers, buried beneath the floor of the mill, supply him with the power of a hundred horses: and, at the will of his keeper, he distributes that power amongst the whole mass of wheels, and rollers, and hammers, and shears we have seen in our passage. A huge beam of iron, weighing five tons, is his agent. It is poised high up there, in the cupola of glass above the roof. At one end of it is the arm we have seen, which arm grasps hold of one of the spokes of a wheel, whose cogs fit into those of another wheel, whose long axle holds other wheels, whose cogs and axles communicate with other wheels, until we come to the last wheel in the place. So that all the wheels are connected with each other and the great rollers, and by turning one you can turn all, and work the hammers and shears into the bargain. All our Giant has to do, therefore, is to seize hold of that end of the balanced beam farthest from the arm, and to occupy himself in pulling it down and pushing it up continuously. By this means the arm, which hangs free to swing backwards and forwards, pulls the spoke of the wheel to which it is attached up one side, pushes it down the other, and thus sets its own and all the other wheels revolving. And when they are thus set revolving, they help to perform the first process in wire-making. An ingot of copper or brass, or a “bar” of iron, as the case may be, is softened by heat to the point at which it is workable; and a pair of great iron rollers, such as we have seen before, are “set”—that is, raised one above the other to a required point—to receive it. All being ready, the ingot is dragged from the annealing furnace to the “rolls,” and thrust between them; upon which the rolls, turning in opposite directions, seize it; and, carrying it through, flatten it in the passage. It is then run over the top roller by a set of workmen on the other side, and passed through again and again—the upper “roll” being lowered as often as necessary—until it becomes a comparatively thin sheet of metal, ready for the next process.
This next process is called “cutting.” Our sheet of metal, its edges trimmed at the shears, is carried out into the “cutting mill,” where we find another chaos of wheels and rollers, more numerous, perhaps, but of smaller dimensions than those we have just left. We find, too, that these rollers are differently constructed. Instead of having a smooth surface, they are deeply grooved; the teeth of the upper roller fitting closely into the grooves of the lower, and vice versâ. Through these grooved rollers, then, one sheet of metal is passed, and, being crushed asunder by the two sets of teeth in its passage, curls out on the other side in little square strips, of whatsoever size the rollers are constructed to produce. All around us are lying piles of these strips, of all sorts and sizes, ready, when cold enough, to be carried into the “drawing room,” which apartment we will now honour with our presence.
Pray, do not run away with the idea that it is a drawing-room in the ordinary sense of the term. No; it is a great barn of a place, uncarpeted, unpapered—even unfurnished, excepting with immense wooden benches, that run all round it and across it in every direction. At regular intervals upon these benches there stand brazen drums as bright as the helmet of a Life Guardsman; and in front of each drum there stands a workman busily engaged in wire drawing. Let us take our stand by one of them for a few seconds and see what he is doing. Taking one of the square strips of brass we have seen in the cutting-mill, he hammers its end to a point on a small anvil at one side of him, and passes it through the eye of a huge needle fixed in the bench on the other side of him. He then seizes the point of the strip of metal with a great pair of pincers attached by a chain to the drum, puts his foot upon a treadle beneath him, and round goes the drum—the Giant in the rolling-mill turns it—dragging the pincers with it, and drawing the strip of metal slowly but surely through the round eye of the needle. As soon as a foot or two of the strip has passed through the eye, the machinery is stopped; the metal released from the pincers, and fastened to the drum; the machinery set in motion again; and the strip, transformed from square to round in its passage through the needle’s eye, is wound off in goodly wire upon the drum. But the wire is very large—as thick as telegraph-wire—and we are told that the whole of the hands are employed on pin-wire. Well, it is merely passed to the next workman, whose needle’s eye is smaller, and to the next and the next, until it is reduced to the required fineness. You could not pass it through the small eyes first; it would break in the passage. So it is passed through the larger ones to reduce it from square to round, and graduated through the smaller to bring it down to its proper size—scarely a particle of metal being lost on the way, but the wire gaining in length what it loses in thickness. I am the happy possessor of a reel of gold wire, so small and so tenacious that any of my lady-readers might sew very fine work with it; and I am still happier in the knowledge that, so long as I retain possession of that reel of wire, I shall never be without what was once a half-sovereign. I cannot tell you how many needles’ eyes that coin passed through before it came to its present condition, any more than I can tell you how many processes and pockets it must pass through before it could be brought back to the state in which it was when I handed it over to those strange workmen who wield the Giant’s power in that strange drawing-room. But this I do know, that I registered up to twenty-five or thirty, and then lost count by reason of being thrown into a perfect fever of anxiety lest my much-loved coin should be drawn to nothing. Of course ordinary wire, not being so finely drawn, does not pass through so many eyes as this—some half-a-dozen or a dozen at the most perhaps. But I mention this as an illustration of the fact that fine wire cannot be produced at one drawing, but must, so to speak, be coaxed down to the requisite degree of attenuation, even when so valuable a metal as gold is used. As a general rule, it may be taken that iron wire requires more coaxing than brass, brass more than copper, and copper more than the precious metals—their different degrees of malleability rendering them amenable to different degrees of treatment. It may also be taken as a rule that those metals which require least coaxing may be drawn finest.
After drawing there is but one other process necessary to the completion of the manufacture, and that is “pickling.” As soon as the wire we have seen drawn is taken from the last drum, it is carried off to the pickling-shed, and there steeped in a solution which effectually preserves its colour and its brightness. And having visited this shed, where there is nothing to see, excepting large vats of pickling-liquor, and a great many workpeople, who look as if they had pickled themselves instead of the wire, we have passed through the whole of the building where my old friend practises “Drawing by Machinery.”