Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

AT WORK. BRITAIN CALICO PRINTING MACHINE. {Photo supplied by Messrs. Mather & Platt, Ltd.) by whose industrial skill nearly everything in use on the system, from the Bessemer rails to the luxurious train and the signalling apparatus, are produced. The works of the Great Eastern, Great Northern, Great Central, Midland, Great Western, and London and North Western are striking examples of what can be done in the direction of mechanical engineering. They are all capable of turning out a complete railway equipment, and excel in locomotive making and building. The London and North Western Railway Company, sending upon their track a grand type of locomotive that runs over a mile a minute between Liverpool and London, are not averse from the interchangeability of parts in engine-building, particularly of cylinders, valves, connecting-rods, axle-boxes, and other fittings. They can, at their Crewe works, erect a locomotive in a month, in a fortnight, or, in emergency, in a day; but, however quickly they build it, the engine when in steam is a credit to the builders. It neither leaks nor runs away, like some of the American engines, with a fortune in Meantime, the pessimist who croaks about the decadence of British industry would do well to through the Salford Iron- works of Messrs. Mather and Platt, Limited, at Manchester. The whole place is alert to keep abreast of the foreign competitor, and that even with the fairest and most healthy conditions of employ- ment and the adoption of the eight-hours clay. No labour-saving device is neglected, either for the outside market or for use in the works. There is the swish of plane and the noise of hammer in the pattern shop, the clang of toil in the forge, the move of men in the foundry, and the tinkling din of a thousand bits of brass in the upper storey, in which valves and all small fittings are fashioned by machine and hand ; but the great shops, particularly the erecting shop, are comparatively silent. Nearly all the machinery is driven by electric motors, and the machine tools, moving automatically and doing their various tasks, from the manipulation of the raw material to the output of the finished article, give one the notion that, instead of finely created contrivances of iron and steel, they are sentient beings; though, like Galatea, they are without the gift of speech, and do not argue whatever burden of work they have to bear. In the mechanical engineering shops much heavy machinery and appliances are in course of making and building. The huge filters, gravity and pressure, for filtering the water from lake or river for town or village supply, or for the purification of effluent water from factories, look like iron-clad fortresses. The surface condensers built for the Manchester Corporation, to condense the exhaust steam from the engines driving the dynamos that work the city electric tramways, are perhaps the largest of their kind in the country, and dis- tinctive for careful workmanship both in their huge castings and brass tube plates. Here is a stationary armature ring for a dynamo for coal. run A GREAT STEAM DYNAMO. (Photo supplied ly Messrs. Bro-wett, Lindley & Co., Ltd., Patricro/t, near Manchester.}