Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

264 BRITAIN AT WORK. machine does nothing but cut in a drawer front the cavity which is to receive the lock ; another takes the completed drawer and trims it to the exact size required to fit easily into the drawer space prepared for it—per- forming, in fact, just those nice adjustments on which the handicraftsman often spends a lot of time when the piece of furniture is virtually completed. But most astonishing of all, perhaps, is the WOOD-CARVING BY MACHINERY (MESSRS. herrmann’s works). use of machinery for purely decorative work. The wood-carving machine is a marvel of ingenuity, and produces work of the most elaborate as well as of the simplest kind. The process consists in reproducing in wood the pattern of an iron mould called a “ negative ” ; a series of carefully adjusted cutters are attached to the negative, and when the machine is in motion they reproduce with the utmost exactness and precision every line of the original. Each machine is capable of carving simultaneously a dozen panels, not necessarily of the same pattern, and a single machine will in the course of a day turn out 120 completed panels. At every turn one notices some evidence of forethought and ingenuity resulting in an economy of time or material, small, perhaps, in itself, but forming part of a system care- fully devised to produce the maximum output at the minimum cost. The shavings and sawdust, for instance, instead of being wasted, are by an ingenious arrangement removed from the place where they are a hindrance and inconvenience and devoted to a practical use. Over each machine is fixed a conduit through which the dust and shavings are sucked up by means of a strong air current into a chamber where an artificially produced “cyclone” conveys them to an outfall leading to the furnaces. The stokers thus have brought to them automatically a continuous supply of fuel amounting to eighty per cent, of the total quantity required. Were it not for some such arrangement, the workmen at the sawing machines would be smothered in sawdust, so that it serves a useful encl apart altogether from the saving effected in the cost of fuel. Even in such an apparently trivial matter as the lubricating of the engines a mechanical invention is introduced, which effects an economy in oil by collecting it so that it can be used over and over again. In the scientific arrangement of the work of the factory, the completeness and “ up-to- dateness ” of its whole equipment, and the apparent indifference to an immediate outlay in order to obtain the utmost possible efficiency, we see in operation those business principles which we are sometimes taught to regard as essentially American. As a matter of fact, the British furniture trade has been but little affected as yet by American competition, and the claim sometimes made that our cousins on the other side can send their ready-made furniture into this country at rates which compete successfully with our English manufacturers is disproved by the experience of many well-known firms. In regard to a few specialities, such as certain kinds of writing-desks, the Americans have undoubtedly taken the lead, but in general classes of furniture it may be confidently asserted that British manufacturers are fully holding their own. There is another and entirely different phase of the furniture trade which, in a