INGENUITY AND LUXURY 



was considered ideal for the richer furnishings of 

 churches and palaces. With the improvement of 

 furniture-making at the time of the Renaissance, this 

 fine wood-carving increased in popularity, flat-relief 

 work coming into favor as well as the more elaborate 

 carvings which later characterized the artistic furni- 

 ture period of France in the seventeenth century. 



With the invention of the steam-engine, however, 

 and the introduction of machinery into all fields for- 

 merly confined to hand-labor, efforts were made to find 

 some substitute at least for the rougher hand-carving. 

 With the powerful machines that came into use, the 

 softer woods could be pressed or punched out into 

 rough, decorative patterns, produced so inexpensively 

 that even the cheaper classes of furniture could be 

 made with decorations imitating in a rough manner 

 the art of the wood-carver. 



Such rough pressed work, however, was such a 

 shoddy imitation that it did not compete to any extent 

 with the better-class work of the hand-carver. The 

 products of the hand-tool were still in demand as much 

 as ever in fine furniture, despite the fact that ornate, 

 machine-made, cheap furniture was flooding the market. 



But meanwhile the mechanic was turning his atten- 

 tion to perfecting mechanical devices for working in 

 wood, and very shortly a machine was invented with 

 which patterns could be gouged out mechanically in 

 rough imitation of the wood-carvers' hand-work. 

 Those machines were of various patterns, but a very 

 common type was that of a whirling chisel which could 

 be guided up and down, or in any direction laterally, 



