MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 505 



fastened the soles to the uppers by nails, and, in order to do this, 

 the leather was pressed between clamping plates of the same 

 shape as the sole, the margin of the plate acting as a guide for a 

 knife by which the sole was cut to the desired pattern. This sole 

 was afterward clamped to a last, and there brought under the ac- 

 tion of an awl and plunger operated by a lever. The sole-fasten- 

 ings, usually nails, had to be placed in these awl-holes by hand, 

 and were then driven in by the plunger, the awl at the same time 

 making another hole for the next nail. Devices were also made 

 for spacing the holes and clinching the nails on the inside of the 

 shoe ; but the shoes thus made proved unsatisfactory, the nails 

 in them working loose. 



In the actual solution of this problem two courses were pur- 

 sued, the extension of the principle involved in the Randolph and 

 Brunei devices and the application of the principle of the sewing 

 machine. From the development of the one have come the pegged, 

 nailed, and screwed boot and shoe ; from the other, the stitched 

 ones. In point of order the pegging machine came before the sole- 

 sewing machine, standing as the invention of A. C. Gallahue, and 

 under the date of 1851. Its operations were essentially the same as 

 those of the cobbler who pierces the hole through the sole of the 

 boot before him with his awl, and then, taking a peg from the 

 generous store with which he has previously filled his mouth, 

 drives it home with his hammer. Joseph Walker, of Hopkinton, 

 Mass., had invented the shoe-peg about 1818, and it had com- 

 mended itself to the craft at once. Machines were made for the 

 manufacture of the pegs, and so thrifty were some of those engaged 

 in their production that it is said they were sold in certain sec- 

 tions of the country not only as shoe-pegs but as a new kind of 

 oats. Gallahue's machine included a cylinder on which were 

 wound, like the spring of a watch, ribbons of birch of the same 

 width as the length of the peg and sharpened on one edge. These 

 were fed to the machine which, with knife, awl, and plunger, split 

 the strips into widths of a peg, made a hole in the sole, and drove 

 the peg into the shoe jacked beneath. Gallahue's invention was 

 perfected by Messrs. E. Townsend and B. F. Sturtevant, of Boston. 

 This idea has been still further developed in machines for riveting 

 the two parts of the shoe together, the nails being clinched by 

 coming in contact with an iron last, in a way suggestive of Bru- 

 nei's method, and in machines for screwing them together. The 

 screw machine, which came into use about 1875, is provided with 

 a reel of stout screw-threaded brass wire, and this by the revolu- 

 tion of the reel is inserted into and screwed through the out-sole, 

 upper edge, and in-sole. Within the upper a head presses against 

 the in-sole directly opposite the point of the screw, and, when screw 

 and head touch, the wire is cut level with the out-sole. 



