Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.Knight, Charles
Philosophy
Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.
Knight, Charles
Industrial arts; Industries
mordant, and is washed out from the parts not touched. When what is
called a substantive colour is at once impressed upon the white cloth,
much of the beauty is also derived from subsequent processes. The
chemist, the machinist, the designer, and the engraver--science and
art--set the calico-printing works in activity; and the carrying on
these complicated processes can only be profitably done upon a large
scale. In the earlier days of our cotton manufacture there were small
print-works in the neighbourhood of London, where the imperfect
machinery was turned by water-power. The steam-engine of one Lancashire
factory now produces more printed cottons and muslins than all the
rivers of southern England in the last century. The calico-printers now
number about twenty-seven thousand persons. But no direct enumeration
can be made of the employments that are required merely to produce the
dyes with which the calico-printer works. The mineral and vegetable
kingdoms, and even the animal kingdom, combine their natural productions
in the colours of a lady's dress. The sulphur-miner of Sicily, the
salt-worker of Cheshire, the hewer of wood in the Brazils, the Negro in
the indigo plantations of the East and West Indies, the cultivator of
madder in France, and the gatherer of the cochineal insect in Mexico,
are all labourers for the print-works of England and Scotland. The
discoveries of science, in combination with the experience of practice,
has set all this industry in motion, and has given a value to
innumerable productions of nature which would otherwise be useless and
unemployed. But these demands of manufactures do more--they create modes
of cultivation which are important sources of national prosperity. Jean
Althen, a Persian of great family, bred up in every luxury, became a
slave in Anatolia, when Kouli-Khan overthrew the Persian empire. For
fourteen years he worked in the cotton and madder-fields. He then
escaped to France, carrying with him some madder-seeds. Long did he
labour in vain to attract the attention of the government of Louis XV.
to his plans. At length, having spent all the fortune which he had
acquired by marriage with a French heiress, he obtained the patronage of
the Marquis de Caumont, in his attempts to introduce the cultivation of
madder into the department of Vaucluse. His life was closing in
comparative indigence when a new branch of industry was developed in his
adopted country. The district in which he created a new industry has
increased a hundred-fold in value. The debt of gratitude was paid by a
tablet to his memory, erected sixty years after he was insensible to
human rewards. We starve our benefactors when they are living; and
satisfy our consciences by votive monuments. Althen's daughter died as
poor as her father. The tablet was erected at Avignon when the family
was extinct.
[Illustration: Calico-printing by Cylinder.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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