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