OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : NOVEMBER 14, 1865. 47 



endwise ; each ring was made of bars wound upon an arbor spirally, 

 like winding a ribbon upon a block, ^nd, being welded and shaped in 

 dies, were joined endwise when in the furnace at a welding heat, and 

 afterwards pressed together in a mould by a hydrostatic press of one 

 thousand tons' force. 



" Finding in the early stage of the manufacture that the softness of 

 the wrought iron was a serious defect, I formed those made afterwards 

 with a lining of steel, the wrought-iron bars being wound upon a pre- 

 viously formed steel ring. Eight of these guns were six-pounders of 

 the common United States bronze pattern, and eleven were thirty-two- 

 pounders, of about eighty inches' length of bore and nineteen hundred 

 pounds' weight." 



The soundness and value of this principle of construction were fully 

 confirmed in England by the experiments of Sir William Armstrong 

 in 1855, and attested by his evidence before a committee of the House 

 of Commons in 1863. He there describes his own gun as one "with 

 a steel tube surrounded with coiled cylinders," — as " peculiar in being 

 mainly composed of tubes, or pipes, or cylinders, formed by coiling 

 spirally long bars of iron into tubes and welding them on the edges, as 

 is done in gun-barrels." His indirect testimony to the originality of 

 Mr. Treadwell's process is equally clear, being that, within his knowl- 

 edge, no cannon had ever been made upon this principle until he made 

 his own in 1855, — he being, as we must suppose, ignorant of what 

 Mr. Tread well had done thirteen years before. The statement of Mr. 

 Anderson (witness before the Commons' Select Committee), made be- 

 fore the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1860, is equally explicit as to 

 the nature and value of this method of constructing cannon. And, 

 finally, the high estimate of its importance abroad is shown not only 

 by the honors and emoluments conferred by the British government on 

 the re-inventor, but still more by the actual adoption of this gun as the 

 most efficient arm yet produced. For it must be borne in mind that 

 the faults or failures, complete or partial, of the Armstrong and similar 

 guns are not of the cannon itself, as originally constructed, but of 

 breech-loading contrivances, of the lead coating of the projectile, or of 

 other subsidiary matters. 



That our colleague's original invention, the value of which is now so 

 clearly established, should have been so generally unacknowledged by 

 inventors abroad is his misfortune, not his fault. For, not only were 

 his guns made and tested here, and their strength as clearly demon- 



