Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

THE MAKING OF BIG GUNS. up to 40 tons to the fineness of a 1,000th part of an inch. A titanic gun, whose projectile will devastate a city, is built up with a watchmaker’s skill. The visitor leaves the works with an overwhelming sense of their tremendous energy, and a profound impression of their creator’s genius ; but the central idea he carries away is the perfect union of strength and precision which he sees everywhere around him. The ordnance works are infinitely great and infinitely little, and if genius is the art of taking pains then the gun-maker is the greatest genius of us all. At Elswick over fifty large shops (including the steel works) are devoted to the making of guns, these shops covering over fifty acres, employing a busy army of from 15,000 to 16,000 men, and turning- out an average of eighty-five guns of all sizes and types per month, besides mountings, carriages, turrets, and ammunition. The enormous value of this work may be judged from the fact that a 50-ton gun is worth more than 10,000, and the mountings as much more. Like the battleship for which it is in- tended, like all things great and strong, the 225 modern big gun is of slow growth. Its parts pass through almost incomprehensible stages in the process and manufacture, and are subjected to test after test, and then are slowly, and with the utmost care, pieced together, only to be subjected to more tests before finally leaving the makers’ hands. It takes from ten to twelve months to make a 12-inch Armstrong gun. Its birth begins in the melting-furnace, where Siemens-Martin steel of the finest quality is subtly com- pounded of the best Swedish iron, rich oxide ore, and ferro-manganese, and emptied, molten and glowing, into a great casting- ladle, from which it runs into the moulds, and is slowly cooled into ingots of from 20 to 40 tons. The ingot from which the barrel of a 12-inch gun is made weighs over 40 tons. Measuring 13 or 14 feet in length when it comes from the furnace, a hole is bored through it, and it is then compressed and drawn out in the powerful hydraulic press which works up to 6,000 tons pressure, until it measures three or four times that length. Before the elongated ingot leaves the steel works it is rough-turned in a heavy turning machine, and, most important detail, a disc is cut off FORGING A GUN TUBE. (From a photograph supplied by Messrs. Cammeh & Sous, Ltd., Sheffield.'} 29