CHAP, ix.l VARIOUS APPLICATIONS OF STEAM. 491 



or wheelwright ; to see these shears cut off pieces of rough iron, and 

 divide thick sheets of metal, like a tailor's scissors working on the 

 softest material? Formerly iron was filed with difficulty, but now 

 it is planed like wood, and is cut up and pierced like cardboard. 

 Some Indret machines are so firmly fixed that they can take off a 

 shaving of 40 mm. over a length of 11 metres; the holder that 

 carries the planing-iroii alone weighing fourteen tons. Among the most 

 curious of the Indret machines, we ought to mention a Mazeline lathe 

 for circularly planing bent shafts. Its planing iron is carried by a 

 disc turning in a frame; the piece to be trimmed crosses this disc and 

 advances against the holder, so as to present to the tool the successive 

 points which have to be thinned off. We must likewise notice M. 

 Calla's mandrel lathe, the bed of which is five metres in diameter, 

 and the benches for boring and drilling cast and wrought-iron and 

 brass in every known way. 1 



If we wished to enumerate and describe, even summarily, all the 

 uses of the steam-engine in modern industry, we should not require 

 a chapter only, but a book, and a large book too. It is used in blast 

 furnaces, where horizontal engines work as bellows for keeping up the 

 fires ; at the diamond cutter's, where steam gives to the grinders the 

 prodigious velocity of 2500 turns a minute; in brass foundries, where 

 it works the pumps that transfer the molten metal ; in paper manu- 

 factories, where it works the machines for washing and whitening the 

 paper ; in the manufacture of tiles, of bedding, and pianos ; at the wood- 

 cutter's, and workers of arabesques of all shapes ; at the jeweller's, at 

 the mint where the Uhlborn presses, improved by Thonnelier and moved 

 by steam, strike off 2400 coins in an hour ; in tobacco and chocolate 

 factories, and indeed iii a hundred other industrial operations where a 

 powerful, regular, rapid, and continuous motive power is used. But 

 it is in the large manufactories that steam plays so immense a part 

 in cloth and cotton factories supplying clothes for the whole human 

 race, and in typographic arid lithographic printing which gives us 

 intellectual food in the most assimilable form, the book and the 

 drawing. 



A few words as to the application of steam to printing. It was in 

 November, 1814, that by means of a press invented by F. Konig, the 

 first sheets printed by steam were struck off. The Times newspaper 

 1 Tui'gan, Les Grandes Unincs de France. 



