THE EVOLUTION OF THE LEATHER INDUSTRY 195 



extraction obtained. The evaporator also makes easy the 

 preparation of the strong liquors used in modern tanning. 



Hand-in-hand with quicker production and manipulation 

 are the attempts to obtain a larger turnover. It is realized 

 that the big business attains cheap production. Even before 

 the war the smaller factories were disappearing. A small 

 tannery must now either extend or close down. This has 

 been better realized in the heavy than in the light leather 

 trades. In the sole leather tanneries very often many 

 thousand hides per week are put into work, but in the glace 

 kid factories there is nothing yet to correspond to the 

 output of American glace factories, which sometimes reaches 

 three or four thousand dozen a day. 



Another very prominent feature of factory evolution 

 is the increased use of labour-saving machinery. This 

 practice has been in operation for a considerable time, but 

 with marked acceleration during the last few years owing 

 to the labour shortage occasioned by military service. This 

 development of machine work has largely dispensed with 

 that labour which involved any skill or training. The 

 journeyman currier is now practically extinct. In the 

 beam house, too, fleshing, unhairing and scudding are 

 rapidly becoming machine instead of hand operations. 

 Many devices are now being adopted also which reduce the 

 quantity of unskilled labour needed. Instead of " handling " 

 the goods from pit to pit, modern tanneries aim at moving 

 the liquors. Thus in the " Forsare " and " Tilston " systems 

 of liming, hides are placed in a pit and lie undisturbed until 

 ready for depilation, the soak liquors and lime liquors being 

 supplied and run off just as required, whilst these liquors 

 are agitated as often as desired by means of a current of 

 compressed air. This agitation replaces the " handling " 

 up and down once practised. In the tanyard proper the 

 same tendency is at work, " rockers " are increasingly 

 preferred to " handlers," and an inversion of the press leach 

 system permits the exhaustion of tan liquors by a gravity 

 flow, and so avoids the handling forward from pit to pit. 

 There is also a tendency to install lifts, overhead runways, 

 trucks on lines, motor lorries, etc., to replace carrying 



