VISITS TO 1.111, GREAT EXHIBITION OF INDUSTRY.
Dr former papers we have marked the leading- features of the Exhibition, industrial and artistic and, observing the proprieties of international courtesy, have given Precedence to a general view of the competitive display made by our nearest neighbour and closest rival, France : we may now make a special survey of some particular field of our own peculiar display in the purely industrial divisions. Let us take the range of the textile manufactures, which employ so much of our national labour and yield so much of our national wealth. The cotton and wool manufactures are more extensive than those of flax and silk, but flax can be taken at an earlier stage and can be accompanied through a more complete series of processes than either of the other materials; so we will choose that; and when we have inspected the whole of its transformations, we shall have anticipated nearly all the transformations of cotton, wool, and silk. About the middle of the great room devoted to machinery in motion, and just Northward of the centrifugal pumps which attract the notice of most passers-by, is a series of three machines invented by Messrs. Plum- mer of Newcastle, for converting the rough stalk of the flax-plant into those delicate locks of fibre which are spun into yarn and thread for the warp and weft of linen cloth.
On the table before you are spread bundles of flax-stalks, just as they are received from the agriculturist after having been steeped in water a sufficient time to fit them for the first stage of this process of conversion into " line " or "lint." Take up a handful; examine it closely. The flax-stalk is the stem of a plant which grew to the height of about two feet and rather more in a few months, bore a blossom, which was suc- ceeded by small round pods of seeds, and then, died leaving its haulm standing on the ground like a very small leafless reed. If you knew where some of this little annual had grown wild under a hedge, and had come to watch it from week to week as the autumn waned, you
would have seen that exposure to the rains and winds caused its decay in this wise. The dead stalk is tough and fibrous in its outer sur- face, but soft and porous in its interior, and Nature has put such a marked boundary between the tough fibrous outside and the pithy inside that exposure to the weather makes the inside portion decay and disappear first. As the core of the stalk is carried away, the plant is bent double in many places, and at last is stretched on the hank a loose fibrous lock, which the birds will carry away to work into their nests, or the worms will draw into their subterranean cells, in the fast genial Jaya of the spring. Thus observing Nature, you would have learned from her how the stiff pithy-looking stalk of the flax-weed was contained in a cylinder of fibrous bands, which could be converted into loose filaments of remarkable flexi- bility and toughness. If you had broken your flatting-rod, and by chance knew of a bed of wild fax growing at the foot of some grassy bank whose surface would have prevented the rotting of the " lint " till late in the second year of its existence, you might have twisted up some twine ex- tempore, and spliced your tackle with it as efficiently as if you had got the needful " wax-end" in your pouch.
But you are now in the Great Exhibition of Industry, to note what has been done by man in improving on these rough operations of Nature. Before you are two bundles of flax ; take a stalk from each and rub kin the palm of your hand : one stalk merely bends and crumples; the other appears to break at every turn, and to become converted into a loose skein of fibres loaded with chaff. The first stalk is just as it came from the farmer's field, before any natural or artificial decay had taken place; the second stalk has been steeped in water for some weeks or days by the fanner, to rot the worth- less interior, and to cause it to separate easily from the valuable fibrous exterior. In the stalk which turns into " a skein of fibres loaded with chaff," this steeping process has been well performed : if you beat the skein with a piece of wood, administering your blows deftly, you will jerk all the chaff out of the skein, and have only fibres left. This pro- cess, called " scutching," has hitherto been performed by hand labour, not unlike that by which corn is thrashed from the wheat straw ; except- ing that the instruments are different in shape, and are applied with far less power, and with a more peculiar dexterity, than the thrasher needs to exercise. By good application, we understand that a man can turn about a third of a ton of flax-stalks into flax by a week's labour; about six- sevenths or seven-eighths in weight disappearing as useless chaff.
This process of scutehing is accomplished by the machinery of Messrs. Plummer in about one-seventh of the time taken to perform it manually; as much is done in one day by their machine as is done in a week by the hand. The flax-stalks are first presented to a series of fluted rollers, which instantly crumple it, so that the dried pithy chaff is cracked into lengths of about half an inch, and partially disengaged from the contain- ing fibrous coat. The next machine consists simply of a great revolving wooden disc mounted with brushes of bristles. These bristles are not placed on the edge of the disc, but on its marginal plane; and they act on the flax when it is presented to them exactly as the bristles and leather in Kent's revolving knife-cleaners act on the table-knives presented to be cleaned. The disc revolves like a grindstone, perpendicularlyto the floor ; it is covered in by boarding everywhere except at one point on each side of it, where attendants present the flax to the operation of the brushes as they fly round. The motion of these brushes is so rapid and powerful that the hand of the attendant might be drawn with the flax against the disc and wounded severely : wherefore wooden rests are fixed, like the rests in a turning-lathe, on which the hand of the attendant lodges ; and then, the flax being held with a firm grip by one hand, and being spread properly by the other hand, it is brushed clean with incredible quickness. Cleaned of the chaff, the material is the flax of commerce, as we see it brought in bales from Belgium and Russia. In this state_ its price varies immensely according to the quality of the fibre. For a long time the Belgian flax was supreme in the market : the English and Irish flax now carries the palm, and Mr. Warnes, of Trimmingham, has lately carried the excellency of his produce to an extraordinary height : we were told that the usual price of the best flax is about seventy pounds per ton, but were shown some fax lately grown by Mr. Warnes, of which the exhibitor de- dared with practical eagerness, that he would, " today," buy "all that comes," at a hundred pounds per ton. The filaments of this flax were of marvellous delicacy and power ; it even resembled organzine in its silky touch and great strength of fibre.
But the flax of commerce is quite unfit for being spun into yarn. In the first place, there is a vast quantity of loose fibre of a short weak sta- ple, which is of no value at all for making thread ; all this must b3 gotten out ; and then the remainder, consisting of the long strong filaments, must be so arranged that the stout and slender filaments shall fall parallel, and constitute a thread of perfectly equable diameter at all points of its length. The process of getting out the short and weak staple is called hackling or heckling. Locks of flax are taken out of the bale, and fixed in wooden holders which are fed in as rapidly as the fax in them is sufficiently combed by combs of wire points set on the surface of a revolving cylinder, just as the little metal pegs are seen on the revolving cylinder of a mu- sical snuffbox. As soon as the coarser series of combs has done its work, the flax passes on to a finer and still finer series, till at last it conies out as smooth as the hair of a lady just from her dressingroom, or as that beau- tiful production spun glass. At each stage of combing, the refuse which was combed out of the fine flax was collected in suitable receptacles as the " tow " of commerce, in the various stages of coarseness and fine- ness, suitable for the purposes of the ship-caulker and packer, the drug-. gist, or the colourman.
The fax is now nearly in the same stage as the wool which the housewife places at the end of her distaff for spinning with the wheel. But yen, cannot spin flax as you can wool, because of the peculiarity of its texture. In spinning wool, Bilk, or cotton, the tact of the human finger enables the sinner to regulate the thickness and firmness of the thread; but in spin- nmg the irregular and comparatively harsh fibres of flax, the finger would fail to secure a delicate, equable, and firm thread. Drawing-ma- chines are therefore invented, to imitate the action of the spinner's hand in drawing out and compressing the filamentswhich are afterwards twisted into thread. A stud of these machines is grouped immediately behind you, Eastward of the scutching and heckling machines you have been watching.
In these the flax is spread as equally as the eye and hand can accomplish, in loose bands, on an endless plane of webbing, which presents it to the clutch of small leather-mounted rollers, revolving very slowly in contact with each other. From the first pair of rollers the flax is drawn through a little forest of wire spikes, which keep all its fibres in the same parallelism
which they possessed at starting. It is thus drawn by a pair of rollers which revolve at some forty,or sixty times the rate of the first pair of rollers, and which therefore draw it out to forty, fifty, or sixty times its previous length, and proportionately reduce its thinness of layer. Other rollers further attenuate it to still thinner and thinner degrees, at the same time that they unite successive pairs of the diminishing slivera," with the object of equalizing the distribution of stronger and more deli- cate filaments. At last the "slivers" issue from the machine so thin and equal that you might think them gauze ribands, or semitransparent shavings of some wood of the most even and parallel grain. In this state the flax is fit to undergo the first process of spinning, called roving. The roving-machine is simply a framework combining a multitude of small spinning apparatuses, simultaneously put in motion by a single axle attached to the prime motive power—a steam- engine. In the first process of roving, the flax is but loosely twisted into a thread of large diameter and porous texture. The thread thus spun is passed through successive ravings or spinnings, which draw it out thinner, and give it an additional twist, till at last it is deemed of the proper fineness and density. It is wonderful how far the ingenuity of the mechanician has rivalled the tact of the human hand in this department of manufacture. We give an illustration from the cotton manufacture. For a long time the highest feat of spinning by machinery was the production of a thread technically described, if our memory be right, as 1500 leas" ; but we are told that the Messrs. Hoaldsworth have lately produced a thread more than one-third more delicate—" 2250 leas" ; which is described as "finer than the most delicate thread ever twisted by the fingers of the women of Dacca," for those world-famed meslins a whole "piece" of which can be drawn through a wedding- ring. The thread is now fit for use as warp and weft in the loom ; and you can scarcely walk twenty yards in any direction among the moving ma- chinery of this room without seeing power-looms at work, converting the flax you have thus watched from the stalk into webs of linen cloth. If you have ever seen a common hand-loom at work, with its perpetual un- oiled creak and its clatter of the shuttle, you will do well to inspect care- fully a power-loom, watch its exact and easy motion, and observe the extraordinary rapidity with which the shuttle is made to leap from one side of the web to the other : admire the faithful intelligence, as it were, with which the machine throws itself out of gear the moment the deli- cate thread carried by the shuttle may have broken, and waits perfectly quiescent till the attendant has come and repaired the thread, and with a starting impulse has given fresh orders to go on. When you have looked at the several groups of looms, take a short walk across the nave, into the department where exhibitors have displayed hundreds of competing spe- cimens of linen thread, and cloth, in all their variety of sorts and their degrees of fineness. Now you have made a complete inspection of all the processes—except such ones as steeping and bleaching—which flax undergoes in being con- verted from a raw material into the elaborated produce fit for the most artificial desires of civilized man. It so chances that flax, our own na- tive produce, requires the most manipulation and goes through the most complicated processes of all the textiles used in our national manufactures. Silk, wool, and cotton, are all of them more tractable materials than flax ; and each therefore requires less laborious and complicated treatment to convert it into the yarn with which the weaver feeds his loom. It will be interesting, however, to go into France and Italy, and India, for a glance at the first stages of the silk fibre as they are given to us by the unconscious industry of the silk-worm. In France you will see the common rude racks of wood, resembling a wall covered with unplastercd laths set widely apart, on to which the worms are turned as soon as they begin to form their cocoons : these wooden racks are crammed with co- coons, just as you may sometimes see a spray of hawthorn in a hedge, stuffed up with the nests of the black caterpillar which next summer will emerge from the chrysalis state into the beauteous butterfly, the Vanessa Atalanta. Near the nest-racks are cases of the cocoons from which the crude outside silk has been removed, showing the smooth and valuable core, which can be wound off in a single unbroken thread for the use of the spinner. From this first stage of silk, skipping over the intermediate stages, which you have already observed in the analogue of flax, you may go at once to the last stage, and if an Irishman may especially gratify your national vanity, by inspecting the process of weaving poplins of flowered pattern and rich surface. Near the model of Liverpool, in the recess under the stairs leading to the South gallery, is a large hand-loom actually working a beautiful web of poplin. In the room devoted to cotton machinery there are the cotton bales just as they came from New Orleans; and you soon observe that here the chief difficulty is to free the raw material from dust and impurities, and, by tearing it between thousands of wire teeth, to reduce it to a soft furry down. One stage of this process shows the cotton in a very beautiful form. A bar some four feet long, trembles with a hovering motion in front of a cylinder with a surface of short wires—the " combing-machine" —which presents the soft furry down to an edge of hair-like teeth, set along the front of the bar. These teeth touch the down so lightly as only just to raise it off the cylinder, and leave it hanging like a gossamer cur- tain in the air. A rude breath would seem enough to tear the waving veil. At starting, the attendant gathers the whole breadth of four feet, and with a light hand draws it through a small hole behind which are rollers that capture it and continue to wind it up as fast as it is generated. The mar- vellous delicacy of the translucent veil, and its slow lifelike motion, with the beautiful curves which it takes as the rollers gather its full breadth within the narrow tube, make this process delightfully interesting. These specialities may conclude our general survey of the textile ma- nufactures which form the most important branch of our national in- dustry.
The number of those who paid the "genteel" rate of five shillings on Saturday was about 17,000, and these with the sfeady throng of season- ticket holders made the building seem very full. On Monday the shil- ling admittances were purchased by more than 40,000 ; on Tuesday by 53,371; on Wednesday by 55,254; and on Thursday by 55,059. The receipts at the shilling-fee have therefore averaged nearly 2500L each day. Yesterday the same average was equalled by the receipts at the half-crown rate: the sum of 2558/. I Is. was received from 26,134 persons.
Public bodies have made arrangements for giving their servants holy- days, andin many cases gratuities, to visit the Exposition : the clerks of
the London Corporation will have a day and a guinea. Several railway companies do the like. Mr. George Hitchcock, of St. Paul's, gives a day and a guinea to his 130 assistants ; and many other tradesmen have been mindful of their workpeople. Mr. Joynsen, the paper-maker of St. Mary's Cray, has sent up 150 workmen at his own expense. Messrs. Garratt and Son, the eminent agricultural engineers of Leiston works in Suffolk, have fitted up two sailing-vessels, with steam-tug, provisions, and every need- ful convenience, to send all their workmen above fifteen years of age to spend a week in London. The Dean of Windsor has invited all his tenantry and the principal tradespeople of Butfield to Windsor, that they may avail themselves of day-tickets for the Exposition. More than one journal has suggested plans for rendering the visit in- structive by oral explanations. Certain professors of public bodies already perform that office for their own classes ; but the thing desiderated is a facile interpretation for the vulgar. One writer suggests that visiting parties be formed, and that they appoint a "a leader "; another hints that " ciceroni " might be usefully engaged by parties, and might find the work profitable.
Two new and very attractive features have been displayed this week : the Russian collection is partially opened—magnificent gates of green malachite inlaid with gold, with colossal vases, and rich furniture, are exposed: and Mr. Hope, M.P., has placed in the compartment of Hol- land, a selection from the celebrated collection of gems made by his fa- ther, the late Mr. Hope of Amsterdam—including a pearl the size of a small pear, the largest in the world.
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