Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

224 THE MAKING OF BIG GUNS. FOR the big guns which bustle menac- ingly from the turrets of her ships of war or grimly stand guard on her fortress ramparts, Great Britain depends on three English ordnance works—the Govern- ment Arsenal at Woolwich, the great Elswick HYDRAULIC FORGING PRESS. (From a photograph supplied by Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., Ltd.) factory on the banks of the Tyne, and the growing works of Vickers, Sons and Maxim at Barrow-in-Furness. Another establishment there is—that founded by Joseph \\ hit worth at Openshaw, Manchester—but it has been amalgamated with the larger concern at Elswick, to which it is now auxiliary, and under whose name and management it is carried on. Openshaw and Barrow produce chiefly quick-firing machine guns of special design and of relatively small size, such as the Maxim, the Gatling, and the Whitworth, together with torpedoes and armour plate ; it is from Woolwich and Elswick that the nation’s heavy ordnance is mainly turned out. It is an impressive and almost a be- wildering sight to see, as the writer has seen, the nation’s guns in the making at Elswick, the premier ordnance manufactory. It is a sight that monarchs, potentates, and ambassadors from every clime have travelled far to see. Elswick is famous for its entertainment of the world’s notabilities who visit Britain’s shores. Shahs from Persia, princes from India, nobles from China and Japan, crowned heads from European States, and uncrowned presidents from American republics, learned societies, and royal pleasure parties have held it a privilege to pass through its maze of shops teeming with human life, reverberating with the shriek of steam, the clang of hammers, and the whirr of machinery, and there witness the manifold pro- cesses through which modern ord- nance passes in its evolution from the molten metal to the bright burnished gun complete in all its intricate parts, and ready at the instant call of the gunner to hurl its death-dealing missile far beyond the range of human vision. You may pass from shop to shop, until you have walked three miles or more, until your ears are deafened by the ceaseless buzz of machinery, until your eyes are dazed with glowing furnace and revolving shafts and cranks, until the senses deaden, and the mind reels in the effort to grasp it all. From the steel works, where the huge ingot of steel comes glowing at white heat from the furnace to meet the irresistible grip of the 6,ooo-ton pressure hydraulic press, to the delivery shop, where the finished gun awaits the firing tests, all is order and design, as precise in the smallest minutiæ as comprehensive in the general scheme. Huge boring machines bore an absolutely flawless steel gun-barrel weighing