HISTORY OF THE NEWHOUSE TRAP. 211 



file. The shop so established employed about three hands. 

 The next year it was removed to a larger room in a building 

 connected with water-power, and the number of hands was 

 increased. Among them were Leonard F. Dunn, George W. 

 Hamilton, and several other young machinists, who, together 

 with Messrs. Noyes and Newhouse, exercised their inventive 

 powers in devising mechanical appliances to take the place of 

 hand labor in fashioning the different parts of the trap. A 

 power-punch was the first machine introduced, then a rolling 

 apparatus for swaging the jaws. Soon it was found that mal- 

 leable cast-iron could be used as a substitute for wrought-iron, 

 in several parts of the traps. The brunt of the labor ex- 

 pended had always been in the fabrication of the steel spring, 

 and this was still executed with hammer and anvil wholly by 

 hand. Two stalwart men, with a two-hand sledge and a 

 heavy hammer, reduced the steel to its elementary shape by 

 about one hundred and twenty blows, and it was afterward 

 finished by a long series of lighter manipulations. The at- 

 tempt was made to bring this part of the work within the 

 grasp of machinery. One by one the difficulties in the way 

 were overcome by the ingenuity of our machinists, until at 

 length the whole process of forming the spring, from its con- 

 dition as a steel bar to that of the bent, bowed, tempered, and 

 elastic article ready for use, is now executed by machinery 

 almost without the blow of a hammer. The addition of chain- 

 making (also executed mostly by machine power) makes the 

 manufacture of traps and their attachments complete. 



The statistics of the business thus extended are in part as 

 follows : Eight sizes of traps are made, for the different 

 grades of animals, from the house-rat to the bear ; which have 

 to a great extent superseded the use and importation of for- 

 eign traps in this country and Canada. The number of these 

 made at the Community works during the last eight years is 

 over three fourths of a million. The number of hands em- 

 ployed directly has been, in the busiest seasons, about sixty, 

 besides twenty-five or thirty who have found employment else- 

 where in supplying the iron castings for traps. The amount 

 of American iron and steel used is over 300,000 pounds an- 

 nually. 



