then the handle, which has been moulded, is affixed with a touch of the 'slip'--the porcelain paste in a state of dilution is the cement used in all such situations--and the piece is ready for the fire. A plate or saucer, however, is made by flat pressing; a piece of clay like a pancake is laid on the mould, which is set revolving on a wheel; the deft fingers of the workmen press the clay to the proper shape, and it is then dried. But the elaborate ornamental pieces of graceful design are made in moulds, and for this process the clay is used in the thin or 'slip' state. The mouldsare pressed together, the slip is poured into them through a hole in one side, and when the moisture has been absorbed by the plaster moulds sufficiently, the piece is taken out. It is often necessary, in making a large or complicated piece, to have as many as twenty or thirty castings. In moulding a figure, for instance, the legs and arms and hands, even the thumbs in many cases, are cast separately,
and with many other parts of the design are laid before a workman, who carefully builds up the complete figure out of the apparent chaos of parts, affixing each piece to the body with a touch of slip. When these wares are complete, they have to be fired for the first time; and they are taken to a kiln, and placed with great[Pg 69] care and many precautions in the grim interior. The contraction of the clay under fire is a matter to which the designers must give much study; and the change which takes place during forty hours' fierce firing in the kiln is shown by contrasting an unburnt piece and a piece of 'biscuit' or burnt ware, and marking the shrinkage. Your ware must be calculated to shrink only so much; if it shrink a shade further, the whole process may be spoiled. There is a loss of twenty-five per cent. sometimes in these kilns, in spite of the assiduous care of the workmen. When the biscuit ware has cooled, it is dipped in the glaze, which is a compound of lead and borax and other materials--virtually a sort of glass--and then it is fired for sixteen hours in the 'glost oven.' There is no contraction in this ordeal; but there is a risk none the less from other causes. In
fact, there is the danger of injury every time the ware goes to the fire, and as the highly decorated pieces have to go to the kiln many times, it may be inferred that the labour of weeks and even months is sometimes nullified by an untoward accident in the burning.
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It is during the process of decoration that the ornate vases and figures make so many trips to the fire. The artist department is a very large and important one. The designers, however, are a class of themselves. They project the idea; it is the business of the artist, in these circumstances, to execute it. The painters are taken into the works as lads and trained for the special service. What you remark chiefly in going through the decorating rooms is the great facility of the artists. You see a man with a plate or vase on which he is outlining a landscape, and you marvel at the rapid, accurate touches with which he does the work. Flowers, birds, and figures they can reproduce with great skill, and many of them are artists not merely in facility but in instinct. They work with[Pg 70] metallic colours only. They rely on copper, for instance, to give black and green, on iron to yield red hues, and so on; and the gold work is done with what seems to be a dirty brown paste, but is really pure gold mixed with flux and quicksilver. When the first wash is put on, the piece must be fired, so that the colours shall be burnt into the glaze. Then it returns to the painter, who adds the next touches so far as he can; the firing again follows; the piece is returned to him once more; and so on it goes till the work is complete.
It is therefore a highly technical business, especially as the colours change very much in the fire, and the painter has to work with full knowledge of the chemical processes in every firing. There is one form of the decorative process which is very singular--that is, the piercing work. The artist has the vase in the dried state before the firing, and with a tiny, sharp-pointed knife he cuts out little pieces according to the design in his mind, and produces an extremely beautiful perforated ware, the elaborate pattern and the lace-like deli-cacy of which almost repel the idea that the work is done by the unaided hand of man. In the colour processes, the work is virtually complete when the dull gold has been burnished; and the porcelain is then ready to be transferred to the showrooms, or exported
to America, which is the greatest patron, at present, of Worcester art. America, however, failed to retain one lovely vase no less than four feet high, the largest ever made in the works; it was taken to the Chicago Exhibition and back without accident, and was then sold in England for one thousand pounds.
It is important to remember the distinction between 'pottery' and 'porcelain:' the porcelain is clay purified by the fire, whereas pottery leaves the oven as it entered it--clay. The purification of the ware is really an illustration of the process which sustains the artistic inspiration[Pg 71] of the work. The gross, the vulgar, the mean are eliminated; a standard of beauty is set up, and to it every article must conform. It is to this ideal, sustained by a long succession of artists through a century and a half, that Worcester owes its world-wide reputation as the birthplace of some of the loveliest porcelain ever burnt in a kiln.
Chinese Porcelain Vase. [Pg 72]
CHAPTER III.
THE SEWING-MACHINE.
Thomas Saint--Thimonnier--Hunt--Elias Howe--Wilson--Morey--Singer.
lthough the sewing-machine has not put an end to the slavery of the needle, and although 'The Song of the Shirt' may be heard to the accompaniment of its click and whirr, just as it was to the 'stitch, stitch' of Tom Hood's time, yet has it unquestionably come as
a boon and a blessing to man--and woman. Its name now is legion, and it has had so many inventors and improvers that the present generation is fast losing sight of its original benefactors. Indeed, we take the sewing-machine to-day as an accomplished fact so familiar as to be commonplace. And yet that fact is a product of as moving a history as any in the story of human invention.
It is the growth of the last half-century, prior to which the real sewing-machine was the heavy-eyed, if not tireless, needlewoman, whose flying fingers seemed ever in vain pursuit of the flying hours. Needlework is as old as human history, for we may see the beginnings of it in the aprons of fig-leaves which Mother Eve sewed. What instrument she used we know not, but we do know from Moses that needles were in use when the tabernacle was[Pg 73] built. Yet, strange to say, it was not until the middle of last century that any one tried to supersede manual labour in the matter of stitching. It is said that a German tailor, named Charles Frederick Weisenthal, was the first to attempt it, but for hand-embroidery only--with a double-pointed needle, eyed in the middle. This was
in 1755, and fifty years later, one John Duncan, a Glasgow machinist, worked out Weisenthal's idea into a genuine embroidering machine, which really held the germ of the idea of the 'loop-stitch.' But neither of these was a sewing-machine, and before Duncan's invention some one else had been seized with another idea.
This was a London cabinetmaker called Thomas Saint, who in or about 1790 took out a patent for a machine for sewing leather, or rather for 'quilting, stitching, and making shoes, boots, spatterdashes, clogs, and other articles.' This patent, unfortunately, was taken out along with other inventions in connection with leather, and it was quite by accident that, some eighty years later, the specification
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of it was discovered by one who had made for himself a name in connection with sewing-machines. Even the Patent Office did not seem to have known of its existence, yet now it is clear enough that Thomas Saint's leather-sewing-machine of 1790 was the first genuine sewing-machine ever constructed, and that it was on what is now known as the 'chain-stitch' principle. Rude as it was, it is declared by experts to have anticipated most of the ingenious ideas of half a century of successive inventors, not one of whom, however, could in all human probability have as much as heard of Saint's machine. This is not the least curious incident in the history of the sewing-machine.
In Saint's machine the features are--the overhanging arm, which is the characteristic of many modern machines; the perpendicular action
