ANNUAL ADDRESS. XLIII. 



by taking a locomotive up Druitt-street and along George-street 

 to the railway under steam. As our machine shops increase their 

 appliances and enlarge their powers year by year, we are enabled 

 to do work which, by comparison with that of earlier epochs, seems 

 wonderful and perfect. 



Take for instance, the first Australian bridge, or a culvert as 

 we should now call it, which Mr. Alt set over the tank stream at 

 Bridge-street. No doubt all his energies were taxed to obtain a 

 satisfactory job with the ignorant men and rude tools which then 

 were alone available. Contrast this with the proposed bridge to 

 the North Shore, for which designs are now being invited by the 

 Government. If that bridge is to be worthy of Sydney it will 

 involve the use of nearly thirty thousand tons of steel, and yet 

 there are plenty of firms who will undertake the whole respon- 

 sibility of supply and erection, and the preliminary work necessary 

 in the drawing office and factory will be carried on with simplicity, 

 precision and regularity. How different to the days when a 

 toothed wheel had to be built up out of wood, then have its rim 

 mortised, afterwards being cogged, and lastly be pitched and 

 have the teeth formed by hand. Before the middle of the 

 century, mechanical engineering had so far advanced, that there 

 were cast iron mortise wheels for the mills instead of wooden 

 ones, and lathes for turning them up. The very first job the 

 author had when he was apprenticed was to get out iron bark cogs 

 in the rough, for the mortise wheels of flour mills; but fifty years 

 before that there could be no accurate or high class work in the 

 field of mechanical engineering here at all, because the necessary 

 tools were not then in existence, and skilled men were 16,000 

 miles away. 



It is interesting to compare the degree of precision to which the 

 mechanic then worked, with that of present standards, this shows 

 it to have been a very low one. The larger mill shafts were often 

 of timber, with cast iron winged gudgeons secured by means of 

 iron hoops shrunk on ; these gudgeons had to be turned by hand 

 with a heel tool, as there were no slide rests. Wooden bearings 



