IMPLEMENTS OF WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume XL, Issue 35, 10 February 1909, Page 6

IMPLEMENTS OF WAR.

th k anGHaar-.cxF she:fetei£>*s MACHINES. i (By CHAKLES C. READE.) -The bulk of Sheffield's toilers, to tho number of 23,200, are engaged in the great metallic and engineering trades that to-day make the city England's greatest steel centre. In the manufacture of amour plates and guns, Sheffield is one of the world's largest centres. For the production of the fabulous amount of war material thate very yeari3 hurried off to the great ship-building yards, it has been found necessary to lay down immense costly plants, and erect machines besides which the stature of the human unit is 'dwarfed to insignificance.

These modern appliances and plant of the great works are capable of producing and handling blocks of ingots of steel weighing up to sixty -or seventy tons, or even more. The area the premises cover varies from twenty-five to fifty or sixty acres, whilst there are in some cases large areas held for the requirements of the future. Plant and appliances are represented by the bewildering array of machinery gathered into great building 3 and linked up, organised, and run. continuously on a system that only a century of toil and invention could devise. The conglomeration of gas furnaces, lathes, hammers end presses fed for the most part by 60, 100, and 150 electric overhead cranes, tempts one to think of the fabulous. Such is the force of this tremendous inspiring reality.

Each work has its own network of railways, with direct communication, to ithe main lines. It possesses a full equipment of locomotives, and, in some cases, rolling stock. ,The traffic through the great work never ceases. The accumulation of industry and the amount of specialised thought that they present discloses a capacity on the part of mankind intermixed with, many anomalies. All his forces appear to be f ocussed thereinto a stupendous effort, and that effort is production. Both night and day gather to its demand with ceaseless fires and the thunder of tireless machines. Sheffield is the temple of the great Iron God of Industry. There is neither worship nor thanksgiving—only a mighty coming and going of toilers under lurid ekies and smoke to the call of the stream of blinding c-teeL .

An early impression that suddenly assails one on entering the yard of a big works is the tremendous vitality concentrated in such an industry. A vista of retorts, travelling cranes, and other apparatus" overshadowed Dy long Isnk shafts vomiting smoke and fire and steam falls into perspective. The world, for you x is transformed into a great arena, throbbing and panting with dominant energies. The eye hovers between a sea of- black irregular roofs and <wide grimy spaces ■ filled-.with men and locomotives, or horses - dragging a massive block of steel that one., day- will emerge into a great gun ,-pr ,a monster marine crank. Every human unit, dirty and sweating may be; 13 the expression of a pent up energy beside which the clamour of the machines can offer no distraction.

A theory, was once propounded that the universe was an,experiment in creation, and it had gathered so much force and impetus since the dawn of time, that it had passed beyond the divine control. It would seem on plugging into the heart of a great steel works that its piles of machinery had rushed from the power of man, and that he, powerless at the might of his own creation, was being drawn into a vortex where destruction was ultimate. The individual self seems hopelessly overpowered before all the force that casts, squeezes, rolls and pounds into shape the livid molten ingots. The blinding heat and blaze of fires, the leaping, rtamling clouds of "steam conspire with suggestive' prospectives looming through the smoke to /trick the. imagination. The whole scene. partakes of the force of some faniastie proceeding. ■ The senses" stagger beneath bewildering noises end movements. But ilusipns' have no chance" before that'grim "blatant reality. The piohire of man's disordered machines engulphing him in' destruction palee, and out of a "mass of fitful impressfon"there slowly emerges, the realisation of a marvellously complex scheme- of labour in which the genius of order for production is triumphant." ' •

The processes by which, after, months of labour a great gun or an armour plate is produced, involves some of the most spectacular processes in modern industry. The initial process of easting, say, a seventy ton ingot is a'fiery ordeal for both workers and watchers. For twelve hours the great furnace has been in a flood of fire in order to bring the metal to the requisite imolten state, By the use of blue spectacles, it is possible to obtain a peep of the boijing inferno within. A moment or two 13 sufficient to make the beads of perspiration start, and one retreats conscious of a darkness in the atmosphere, whilst the memory of a livid white flood, boiling arid bubbling like the" surface -/.of a planet" in eruption, swinish "before, the eyes." A travelling overhead electric pjaije reaching across the full width of tie building suddenly glides over the pit beside the furnace," and lowers the mould into position". The latteiTis: an immense affair, strapped together by thick bands of steel. Half a dozen men, naked 1;o the waist, appear as the crane glides forward again, bearing this time a mon.» ster ladle or bucket that is to be used to convey the seventy tons of glowing metal from the furnace to the mould. A long trough 13 swung into position between the furnace and the ladle. The men already drip with perspiration, "if they didn't sweat," said a workman, "the heat would burn them up." The foreman suddenly appears with a long crowbar, and commences to pound a hole in the furnace wall just above the trough. The workmen steady the ladle with long poles, and-the anticipation that has long filled the watcher, is transformed to a vivid expectancy. Showers of red iot ashes begin to fly from the point of.the crowbar. Every thud 6trikes into ones heart and brain, but still the psychological moment does not arrive. The monotony of this slow, deliberate process of penetration "becomes maddening. Minutes of suspense- seem to separate the blow. Each stroke is charged with tremendous excitement..

Suddenly there is a shout, the crowbar drops with a crash. The moment of realisation comes with a violent upheaval of red dust and ashes, and in a flash, a yellow flood leaps out in a Winding spurt and tumbJes 3iea<dlong into the great, ladle. One ,|a tremendously dazzled by the. flpod as it falls, hissing, roaring, suelding, and laughing, with the exultant freney of fire. Showers of -sparks rush np and buret- into hundreds of- fiery, atoms. - A. great cloud of vapour curls" but ,of. the" ladle, and bulges into the BlaakeneiJ girders.pfVfche roof as they are caught with vrrid re-

flections. a .flood of larva'the" tnicfc: hot flood rise&in the mould, torn with desperate spntterings and gurgles that tremble tlirough the long vista, of the foundry. , The "workmen stand as near as they dare, black and ragged. The sweat runs channels down their grimy, faces. The great ladle slowly fills, and thp cloud of sparks grows less. The colour of the metal changes. There is a shout The long trough tips up on end, and from the gaping wound in the furnace the slag gushes redly out, only to be lost amongst the dust and ashes of the pit below. Out of the gloom overhead an arm of steel descends, and in a trioe the ladle, with its molten mass, is hoisted clear and swung like a baby over the mould itself. At a touch from the foreman a valve under the ladle is liberated, and the metal spills steadily into the gaping mouth of the mould. So the monster ingot grows apace, brimming to the very edge of the walls that shape it.

The process which follows brings into operation all the marvellous powers of the hydraulic press that can develop a pressure from 10,000 to 14,000 tons per square inch. The hydraulic press is virtually an evolution from the steam hammer. Where on the one hand there are noises and blows that shake the very earth with a tremendous force of impact, on the other there is only a black monster moving noiselessly to the touch of a lever with hardly a vibration in all its marvellous silent exhibition of force. It reaches high into the roof, combining with a pair of immense cranes an array of forces before which the resistance of that solid seventy tons of glowing metal appears to be no more than if it were butter. The mass of metal is drawn out of the furnace at white heat and swung gently under the jaws of the waiting monster. It betrays nothing of its nature or purpose. A man touches a lever and the press glides softly downwards. It kisses the white hot metal without a sound. Nothing happens, only the presr does not stop. Great black splinters sud denly start off the sides of the ingot blacken and fall. One is thrilled to tii marrow to see the solid steel shrinking before the eyes, going down gradually before that noiseless marvellous force. 1 is one of the most remarkable mechanical developments of the nineteenth century Neither nature nor man seems ever to have achieved before a thing that se cures without fuss or sound such crush ing invincible power-

The fury of a volcano, the bursting of a meteor, the blowing up of a battle ship, all present forms of intense force. There is force, too, in the Lusitania's tur bines, in Niagara, or the omnipotent rush of tie avalanche; hut with all thesr things there are disturbances and vio lence. The hydraulic press will pulverise tons of steel without bo much as a trem our. Its embrace is irresistible, its slow, silent force stupendous. In the rolling of the rough shaped plate which follows ■ is one of the finest spectacular sights in the works. Xhi plate is drawn from the furnace white and glowing. The cranes drop it exactly into position on the floor of the rolling mill. The latter is made up of a series of small cylinders. At a touch from, a lever they revolve, and the mass is shol along and Ehrast into the jawa of the main rollers themselves. With an immense rumble that makes the ground vi brate, the Tollers seize the glowing mass, and in a flash it is banged through on the other side, flattened a little by the colossal pressure. The plate is passed backwards and forwards through, the massive sixty ton rollere by reversing the mil) each time. As it passes through, pilet of wet brushwood are thrown on to tinTed hot surface to enable the scale on the surface of the metal to be got rid of. Immediately the brushwood reaches the rollers there is a sound like the bursting of a dozen, steam pipes. Flames shoot up twenty or thirty feet above the mill, and one is dazzled by a blinding effusion of sparksj fire, and clouds of steam. The violence of the display is astounding. After all that fierce uprushing of fire and water so rapid is the combustion that only the blackened plate remains to tell of it. But a curious result has been effected. Aβ a rake is passed over the plate the scale comes away freely, leaving only the smooth surface to speak for the power and efficiency of the machine. Jhe Armour Plate Mill is another of the.giant 3 that the dominant thought ■of industry has produced. Inspired "by great engines its thunders shake not only the earth, but reach far down into the depths of the social fa-brie itself. It is animated by the same spirit that virtually dominates all Sheffield. That spirit is the Demon of War. So far the processes described nave been the casting of the ingot and the rolling of the plate. They are merely the preliminaries to a long series by which the plate passes over acres ol ground, through numerous departments in order that it may be bent, rounded, bored, planed, cut, drilled, ground, and finally tempered so hard that a punch hit by a sledge hammer will not leave so much as a mark upon its surface. Thus it is after months of labour, representing a vast expenditure of human energy, of thought, of natural resources, of money, that it emerges at last from the great black works, a finished product, to be but one small constituent part in' the mass of a big battleship. Beside armour plates, the processes which represent largely the energy, thought, and human activities of Sheffield's (thousands of workers, are just as involved in the production of guns, monster twelve-inch guns, over fifty feet long, that cost pounds and pounds sterling—in the making, too, of the giant engines that are to drive the fighting machine on its -mission of death and destruction. In Sheffield, as in all manufacturing centres, there are other things than big works to consider. Small concerns are a very far-reaching feature in the life of the city. They exist to-day in large, though decreasing, numbers from the fact that they long preceded the advent of the big works." With these small concerns, the greatest evils that grew with the industrial system of the twentieth century are associated-devils that and revealed in overcrowding, insanitary surroundings, dirty, ill-paid, underfed men, women, and children, and all the consequent social horrors that resulted therefrom. The work ahead of Sheffield to-day, work that must be achieved for the most part by the collective action of the municipal authorities, is almost impossible to describe. But if industrial phthisi3 and infant mortality are to take their fangs out of the social life of the people, if the 1796 liquor licenses pf the city are to be prevented from reaping their annual toll of misery and degradation; if those wretched slums are to be no more than a black stain on the past, and the great mass of the people are to be raised from the slough, of ignorance and. poverty, Sheffield must both work and fight. Whether that work will be ever accomplished or what the fight ipr progress may entail is beyond conjecture. The problem seemed to gather great force as I left Sheffield one wet, grey evening, looming through, smoke " and rain. A line of Hick retorts, tanks,

and long shafts, were blurred against the dying day. But from the distant stieets, from those channels of the life of the people themselves, a flash ot lights sprang up and touched .the gloomy heavens with a soft pint glow. It was a strange, glad light in the darkness, and I wondered how many of the great army of workers down there in the rain and the smoke would see in the wet and glittering street what I saw reflected on the heavens.