Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

interesting is High Wycombe, the famous chair-making town, which we have already dealt with in a separate article. At Glasgow and Beith, in Birmingham and the neighbour- hood, and in the West of England (especially Bristol, Barnstaple, and Bath) the trade is also carried on very extensively. A corollary to the widespread adoption of machinery is the subdivision of the trade into sections, so that one manufacturer, instead of making all kinds of furniture, will confine his energies to one or two special lines ; thus one will make sideboards only, another mirrors and overmantels, another office furniture, and another “ stuff over ” work—that is to say, easy chairs and couches. In order to examine the latest develop- ments in the application of machinery to the furniture trade, we could not do better than pay a visit to the extensive factories at Lime- house occupied by the firm of H. Herrmann, Limited, a firm which confines its attention almost exclusively to sideboards and bed- room suites. Here about 650 men are em- ployed, and the average daily output amounts to twenty sideboards and from ninety to a hundred complete suites. Such an enormous output is, of course, only possible by the utmost economy of labour and material which care and forethought, aided by the THE FURNITURE TRADE. 263 most perfect mechanical devices, can ac- complish. The factory backs upon the Regent’s Canal, so that at the outset there is a great saving of cartage expense/ the timber, most of which comes from the company’s own saw mills in America, being brought to the works in barges. The wood has first to be thoroughly dried, and this is accomplished by what is known as the “ progressive ” drying system, which consists in passing the wood through successive chambers of varying degrees of moisture, the last being as dry as possible. The dried and seasoned wood has next to be cut into sizes for use on various jobs, except in cases where this has already been done at the American saw mills. This sizing up is performed by a great number of power- driven saws of various kinds which, working with astonishing rapidity, cut the wood to any required length and thickness with the most perfect accuracy. The lengths of wood are then passed on to another set of workmen in another room, who shape and joint and decorate them ready for gluing together to form the completed piece of furniture. There are machines for planing, sand-paper- ing’, boring’, moulding', dovetailing grooving, mortising, even for such purely decorative processes as carving and inlaying. One THE MACHINE ROOM, GREENOCK CABINET-MAKING CO.’S WORKS.