WORKING AGAINST TIME.

Evening Star, Issue 11668, 1 October 1901, Page 7

WORKING AGAINST TIME.

Sir Join Throckmorton, a Berkshire baronet, made a wager of a hundred guineas that he .would dm© at aeveu o’clock in a suit of clothes made from wool that was growing on the back of a sheep at sunrise (sajs the ‘ People’s Friend ! ). The offer was accepted, and work began at 5 a.m. The wool was washed, carded, spun, and made into cloth by early'afternoon, and a band of tailors were able to cut up the material and stitch it together before the hour of dinner. That was a very creditable record for fourteen hours. In 1837 a jacket and vest wero made at Ettrick Mills in sixteen hours after shearing the sheep. An American factory made a bubble reputation by what was not nearly so clever. Their promise was to shear a sheep, wash, card, spin, dye, and weave the wool ■ full, dry, and shear tic cldEh; and then make a jacket within twenty-four hours. They easily accomplished the task. A Canadian firm, long afterwards, swept all these records away by doing the whole of the operations in nine and anpiarter hours. That is a feat which, so far as I 'can discover, has not yet been beaten. Another favorite trial of still used to be the making of bread from wheat that was standing in the field in the morning of the same day. Not long ago a Newmarket farmer boasted that he cut a patch of wheat in the morning, threshed it, and sold the grain the same afternoon, and the miller sent back the flour the next morning; • Mr Prosser, of Erdington, cut wheat one morning at ten o’clock, and had it converted into bread by six; o’clock the same evening. That record was beaten by Mr Stanford, who held a farm at Edenbridge, in Kent. Nearly forty years ago he cut some wheat in the morning, and had it made into bread in time for a market dinner held the same dav sixteen miles away. All these feats pale into insignificance when compared, with the achievement of Mr Taylor, of- Blockley, in Worcestershire, of whom it is related that he had bread baked in one hour after the wheat fell to the siclde!