them exclusive privileges, enabling them with a minimum of speed, punctuality, civility, cleanliness, safety and comfort, to exact a maximum of fare from all who are so unfortunate as to be compelled to travel by them.
These unimproved concerns, retrogressive in the very centre of the most brilliant progression, may, however, count their days as numbered, their unhallowed and enormous gains as arrested. The latter rail-road, never exceeding the average speed of good stage-coach travel, is now so seriously rivaled by heavy omnibuses running on a plank-road, that its locomotives to-day barely draw an average of three empty cars, where six weeks since they drew from eight to ten, filled to discomfort.
Hitherto all their underhand attempts to buy up this road, by means of individual stockholders, in order to destroy its efficiency and raise the prices, have failed so signally, that it is evident that the people over whom they have so long driven roughshod will endure their insolent tyranny no longer, and they must either tranquilly submit to pass away into contempt, bankruptcy and abeyance, or they must make their road reasonably cheap, as speedy, punctual and convenient to passengers as others – which they can readily do by diverting a portion of their colossal gains from dividends and personal profits to the exigencies of the public, in laying proper tracks, adopting improved engines, employing clean, comfortable and roomy cars, guided by capable and civil conductors, all at the ordinary price of rail-road transportation on the best, fleetest, and most favored lines.
To produce this excellence and finish, tools of peculiar quality – in the form of power-machines, adapted for planing, turning, and drilling iron, cutting gears, and the like – have become actually necessary; doing their work at an incalculably lower price, and greater celerity than the ablest human hands, and with a mathematical regularity and precision which no human experience or dexterity could possibly equal.
It is the creation of these various power-tool-machines, which, as I have stated, is indispensable for the building of power-machinery of any kind; from the marine-engine, which drives the huge steamships of Cunard or Collins over the wild surges of the Atlantic, with all the punctuality, and nearly all the speed of birds of passage; from the locomotive, with its team of iron chargers, bringing the farthest west to our very doors in the oceanic cities, to the fast power-presses, which roll off the news, collected from the uttermost ends of the earth by the agency of steam and lightning, at the rate of 20,000 copies to the hour – and intellectually feeding their hundred thousand hungry readers or ere the paper is well dry – freighted with the fates of nations.
And it is to the creation of these, in their best form and utmost perfection, that the great works at Matteawan, a lovely spot, embosomed in the grandest part of the Highlands of the Hudson, are devoted; while the Depots in New York are intended to keep, at all times, on hand a large supply of tools, required by machinists of all classes, particularly needed in the railroad and machine shop, and such, in a word, as cannot be dispensed with by any of those artificers, who work upon the tough and stubborn produce of the mines.
All these tools are either manufactured by the Messrs. Leonard themselves at the “Matteawan works,” employing some three hundred and fifty hands, or furnished from the “Lowell machine shops,” where from five hundred to a thousand hands are constantly employed in this class of business; or, again, from “The Great Hadley-Falls shop,” at Holyoke; all of which establishments are represented by the same firm, and all of which turn out work, which – it is believed – cannot be surpassed, if equalled, in the world.
The first of these machines which we propose to notice, a representation of which stands at the head of this paper, is perhaps one of the most important, if not the most important of all the tools employed in the machine shop.
This engine has already been noticed in Graham, as employed in the noble press-works of Messrs. Hoe & Co., of New York – vol. XL., No. 6, p. 576. It is used for finishing the surfaces of whatever portions of the machinery must be brought to a smooth and polished face. This is done by the propulsion of the pieces of iron to be planed in a horizontal and longitudinal direction against cutting edges, which again move horizontally across the moving planes, and are pressed downward on them vertically, so as to effect the planing to the uniform depth required. The abraded portions of the metal are thrown off – from the surface of cast iron in a sort of scaly dust, from that of wrought iron in long curled shavings – and the planes can be wrought up to almost any desirable degree of smoothness and finish.
It is but a short time, comparatively, since this machine was first introduced: it is one of the most important among mechanical tools; and it is indeed a triumph of art to see one of these machines under the direction of one person, performing the usual labor of some fifteen or twenty mechanics in former times with their chisels and files. Art observes, and experience confirms the fact, that machinery can and does perform work much more accurately than the most skillful mechanic; and, perhaps, in no instance is this general principle so happily illustrated as in the performance of these machines. The usual cost of motive power is about twenty-five cents per day, per horse power, and allowing one horse to be equivalent to five men, we shall have the labor of one mechanic furnished for five cents a-day. From this it will be seen how important every invention or improvement becomes to the machine-builder, which tends to perform the usual labor on the machine by machinery.
The above cut represents a very excellent planer. There is a great degree of taste and finish employed in its design; indeed the builder may flatter himself that he has one of the best machines built in this country.
This machine, according to its size, weight, and cost, is divided into Nos. 4, 5, and 6, capable of planeing metal from four feet long, by eighteen inches wide and high, to six feet six inches long, by twenty-four inches wide and high – and weighs respectively 1000, 2,600, and 3,500 pounds.
The machine from which the design at the head of this paper is taken may be seen at No. 60 Beaver Street, New York.
This again is a highly valuable and ingenious machine; its special operation is, as its name implies, the turning of any iron work to its required round circumference and requisite degree of polish, whether it is a perfect cylinder, or of various diameters at various points.
By it, all round work for engines is formed and finished – as rods, shafts, and the like. The action of the machine is simple, easy and almost noiseless. The piece of metal is fixed in the spindle, shown in the cut above in contact with the right elbow of the spectator, and secured, longitudinally of the machine, on the sharp point proceeding from the fixture at the left end of the Lathe, behind the operator’s shoulder.
To this, the object of operation, a rapid rotatory movement on its own axis is given by steam-power, and the cutting is produced by its rotation against two steel edges impinging on it laterally, and made to travel horizontally and longitudinally on a bed, so as to cut the bar, submitted to its agency, equally throughout all its length. This instrument is also directed by one man only, while acting with the combined power of very many, and performs its work with an ease equalled only by its great exactitude.
For the benefit of those of our readers, who have no previous acquaintance with mechanism, we shall merely premise that a gear is a wheel with a toothed circumference, like watch-wheels, or what in ruder mechanism are known as cogged-wheels; and those gears, known as level gears, are such as have the toothing on the circumference not perpendicular to the plane of the diameter, but at an acute angle to it, so that when two gears of a peculiar degree of bevil are set in contact, a horizontal rotatory movement may be communicated to one by a corresponding perpendicular rotation of the other. This will be rendered comprehensible by a careful examination of the motive power of the borer in the representation of the instrument, No. 5.
The above cut represents a very cheap and simple gear-cutter. Its principal novelty consists in the use of the large gear-wheel instead of the common graduated table. It is extremely simple, and at the same time possesses all the advantages of the old machine. It will be observed that the crank is connected to the large wheel by a set of intermediate
