Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
The class of workmen it employs is often of a particularly
high grade. German painters quote Kotzebue and sing the songs of Uhland
as they weave their graceful harmonies of line and color over the
panels; and the sculptors who carve antique heads over the doorways of
palace cars make the place merry with studio jokes from the Berlin
Academy. It is evident that a community of artists like this, furnishing
the aesthetic department to an immense manufactory, will also elevate the
tone of the industrial society outside, if they can but be kept free
from vice and supplied with means of culture; more of which anon.
Meantime, as a kind of standard of what the manufacturers themselves
arrive at in prosecuting the amenities of life, we will quote the fine
residence of Mr. Job Jackson, a magnate of the company.
The wheel on which the car is mounted is of course another specialty,
turned off in another manufactory. We leave the rooms where the work
goes on with easy smoothness like a demonstration in a lecture-hall, and
come to raging, roaring, deafening furnaces and hammers. The
hollow-chested artists give way to cyclops. Here we are in the Lobdell
Car-wheel Company's premises. Negligently leaning up against each other,
like wafers in the tray of an ink-stand, are wheels that will presently
whiz over the landscapes of Russia, of Mexico, of England; wheels that
will behave rashly and heat their axles; wheels that will lie turned up
in the air at the bottoms of viaducts; and wheels that in various ways
will see astonishing adventures, because in railway-transit there are
telescopings and wheels within wheels. The English and the foreign trade
of the Lobdell Company is due to its manufacture of wheels in the
material or process lately known as chilled iron. This manufacture has
not yet penetrated the British intellect. Take the foreman of an English
car-manufactory, tell him that you will supply him a wheel about as
durable as a wheel with a steel tire at less than half the cost, and he
will laugh at you for an impudent idiot. But they _use_ our wheels. The
"chilling" of iron, when poured into a mould partly iron-faced, is very
singular: as the melted metal hardens against the metallic boundary, its
granulation changes to a certain depth, and the outside becomes
excessively strong: species of crystals seem to form, presenting their
ends to the surface, and meeting the wear and tear there to be
experienced. The use of this fact secures, in many manufactures, a
hardness approaching that of steel, without increase of cost. This
company employs the process both for car-wheels and for the large
cylinders (or "rolls") used in paper-mills. It is not to be supposed
that the work is all rude and rough, like ordinary iron casting. The
polishing of the large cylinders almost suggests diamond-cutting, it is
so fine. So true is the finish that a pair of these broad rolls, perhaps
five feet across, may be approached so near each other that the light
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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