Preparing for War

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 25, 23 June 1909, Page 33

Preparing for War

MAKING ARMOUR PLATES FOR BATTLESHIPS

THE bulk of Sheffield’s toilers, to the number of 23,200, are engaged in the great me tai lie and engineering trades that to-day make the city England’s great steel centre. There are volumes that have been said, ami still volumes unsaid, in regard to its potential industrial wonders—wonders that are materialised in a mass of blinding furnaces, lathes, steam hammers, casting pits, and monster hydraulic presses. In the making of armour plates and guns. Sheffield is one of the world’s largest centres. For the production of the fabulous amount of war material that

every year is hurried off to the great shipbuilding yards, it has been found necessary to lay down immense costly plants, and erect machines beside which the stature of the human unit is dwarfed to insignificance. The scale on which these mechanical monsters are designed is something that belongs to the titanic. When one speaks of armour plate rollers weighing sixty tons, or the capacity of a hydraulic press as 14.000 tons, it is impossible to picture what the material evidence of such things represent. These modern appliances and plant of the great works are capable of pro-

during ami handling blocks or ingots of steel weighing up to fifty, sixty, or -evvnty tons, or even more. The area the premises cover varies from twentylive to fifty or sixty acres, whilst there art* in some cases large areas held for the requirements of the future. Plant and appliances are represented by the hew ildering arras of machinery gathered into great buildings ami linked up. organ ised, and run continuously on a system that only a century of toil and invention could devise. The conglomeration of gas furnaces, lathes, hammers and presses, fed for the most part by 50, 100, ami 150 electric overhead cranes, tempts one to think of the fabulous. Such is the force of this tremendous inspiring reality. Each works has its own network of railways, with direct communication to tin* main lines. It possesses a full equipment of locomotives, and. in some cases, rolling stock. The traffic through the great works never ceases. The accumulation of industry and the amount of .specialised thought that they present discloses a capacity on tin* part of mankind intermixed with many anomalies. All his forces appear to be focussed there into a stupendous and that effort is production. Both night and day gather to its demand with ceaseless tires and the thunder of tireless machines. Sheffield is the temple of the great Iron God of Industry. There is neither worship nor thanksgiving—only a mighty coming and going of toilers.

under lurid skies and >nmk >. to the call of the white, lurid stream of eternal steel. An early impression that suddenly assails one on entering the yard of a big works is the tremendous vitality concentrated in such an industry. A vista of retorts, travelling cranes, and other apparatus, overshadowed by long, lank shafts, vomiting smoke and fire ami steam, falls into perspective. The world, for you. is transformed into a great arena, throbbing and panting with dominant energies. The eye hovers between a sea of black, irregular roots and wide, grimy spaces tilled with men ami locomotives, or horses dragging a massive block of steel that one day will (*merge into a great gun or a mon ster marine crank. Every human unit, dirty and sweating, maybe, is the ex pression of a pent-up energy beside which l he clamour of the machines ean offer no distraction. A theory was om-e propounded that the universe was an experiment in crea lion, and it had gathered >o much fore and impetus since the dawn of tim • that it had passed beyond the divine control. It would seem that on plunging into the heart of a great steel work' that its piles of machinery had ru-lied from the power of man. and that he. powerle-- al the might of hi- own crea lion, wa- Iwing drawn into a vortex where destruction was ultimate. 'The in dividual -elf seems hopele-sly overpower e-d before all the force that casts, squeezes, rolls and pounds into .shape the livid, molten ingots. The blinding heat and blaze of tires, tin* leaping, daz r.ling clouds of steam, conspire with -ug gestive perspectives looming through the smoke to trick the imagination. The

whole scene partakes of the force of some fantastic proceeding. The senses -tagger beneath Iwwildering noises and movement*. But illusions have no chance Indore that grim, blatant reality. The picture of men’* disordered machines en-

gulpiimg mm in destruction pale*, and out of a ma** of titful impre**ion there — lowly emerge.* the Realisation of a marvellously complex scheme of labour, in which the genius of order i* triumphant. In tin* proce-se* by which, after month* ot labour, a great mm or an armour plate i* produced, involve* some of ’.he mo*t *pectaeular proce**es in modern industry. The initial proce*s of ca*ting. -ay. a -evenly ton ingot i* a ti-*r\ ordeal f<»r both workers and .watcher*. Eor twelve hours the great furnace ba* been in a flood of tire in order to bring the metal to the requisite molten state. By tiie use of blue spectacles it is possible to obtain a peep of the boiling inferno within. \ moment or two is sufficient to make the bead- of perspiration start, and one retreat* con-viou- of a darkness. in the atmo*paere. whi’-t the mem rv of a livid white flood, boiling and

like th- *urfa<e of a planet in eruption. * a . 1 - before tin- eye*. \ travelling overhead elect r. < rane. rca hing .uro-- tin- full width of the bo-: de the furnace, and lower* tie- mould into po-ition. The latter is an i:nmen*o affair. -tiapjied t-gether by thick hand•»f *teel. Half a dozen men. naked, to tle w a i*t. a ppo.i i the < rane glide- forward . jaiii. bearing thi- time a ni«»n-t< r la 1 th., -eventv ton- of glowing miml from the turn i • to the mould. A long trough i- swung into position between the furnace and th - ladle. Th - men already drip with jm r-pir;<tion. "If thov didn’t -went.” *.iid a workman. " the iv.it would

The foreman suddenly appears with a long crowbar, ami commences t<> pound i hole in the furnace wall just a Love the trough. The workmen steady the ladle with long poles, and the anticifiatioii that has long tilled the watcher is transformed

to a vivid expectancy. Showers ot ml hot ashes begin to fly from the point of the crowbar. Every thud strikes into one’s heart and brain, but still the psychological moment does not arrive. The monotony of this slow, deliberate prove*- of penetration becomes maddening. Minutes of suspense seem to separate the blow. Each stroke is charged with tremendous excitement. Suddenly there i* a shout, the crowbar drops with a crash. Tin* moment of realisation comes with a violent upheaval of red dust and ashes, and in a flash, a yellow flood leaps out in a blinding spurt and tumbles headlong into the great ladle. One is tremendously dazzled by the flood as it falls, hissing, ioaring, suckling and laughing, with the exultant frenzy of tire. Showers of sparks rush up and burst into hundreds of fiery atoms. A great cloud of vapour curl* out of the ladle, and bulge* huo the blackened girders of the roof as they are

u.in — it with a vivid reflection. Like a flood of lava, the thick, hot flood rise* in the limn’d, torn with desperate sputtering* and gurgle- t iat tiemble through the long vi-ta of the foundry. The workmen -tand a- rn-ar a* they dare, black .Hid ragged. I he -went run- channels down their grimy faces. The great ladle - ovvly fill-, and the < loud of sparks growTb» colour of the met il change-. There i- a -limit. The long trough tips upon end. and from the gaping wound in tin* furnace, the -lag gu-lips redly out. only to be lost amongst the dust and a-hrs of the pit below. Out of the gloom over-li.-.id an arm of -reel descend-. and in a trice the ladle with its molten mass jhoi*ed dear and swung like a baby over

the mould itself. At a touch from the foreman a valve under the ladle is liberated. and the metal spills steadily into the gaping mouth of the mould. So the monster ingot grows apace, brimming to the very edge of the walls that shape it. The piocess which follows brings into operation all the marvellous powers of the hydraulic pre-s that can develop a pits-ure from 10.000 to 14.000 tons per -quare inch. The hydraulic press is virtually an evolution from the steam hammer. Where on the one hand there are noises and blows that shake the very eart i with a tremendous force of impact, on the other there is only a black monster moving noiselessly to the touch of a lever with hardly a vibration in all its marvellous silent exhibition of force. It

icache* high mt.. the roof, combining with a pair of immense cranes an array of force- before which the resistance of that solid seventy tons of glowing meta! appears to be no more than if it were butter itself. The mass of metal is drawn out of the furnace at white heat and swung gently under, the jaw s of the wailing monster. It betrays nothing of it- nature or purpose. A man touches a lever and the press glide- softly downwards. It kisses the white , hot metal without a -ound. Nothing happen-, only the press does not stop. Great black splinters suddenly -tart off the sides of the ingot, blacken and fall. One is thril’ed to the marrow to see the solid steel -hrinking before the eyes, going

down gradually before that noiseless marvellous force. It js one of the most remarkable mechanical developments of the nineteenth century. Neither nature nor man has ever achieved before a thing that secures without fuss or sound such crushing invincible power. ’l'he fury of a volcano, the bursting of a meteor, the blowing up of a battleship, al! present forms of intense force. There is force, too. in the Lusitania’s turbines, in Niagara, or the omnipotent rush of the avalanche; but with all these things there are di*iurbances and violence. The hydraulic pre-s will pulverise ton* of steel with-mt -a much as a tremor. Itembrave is irresistible, its -low -ilent force stupendous. in the rolling of the rou»gh shaped

plate which follow* is one of the fine-t sppt-ta -uk’r eights in the works. The piate is drawn from the turnace white and glowing. The cranes drop it exactly into position on the floor of the rolling mill. The latter is made up of a serit s of -mall cylinders. At a touch from a liver they revolve, and the mass is shot a! >ng and th‘u-‘ into the jaw* of th: main rolbtrs them-elves. With an immense nimble that makes the ground vibrate, the roller- seize the glowing mass, and in a tl.ish it is banged through on the other -ide. flattened a little by the (idos-al prv->ure. The plate iI a-sed backward- and forwards through the massive -ixty ton rollers by icvei's-

ing the mill each time. As it passes through, piles of wet brushwood are thrown on to the red hot surface to enable the scale on the surface of the metal to be got rid of. Immediately the brushwood reaches the rollers there is a sound like the bursting of a dozen steam pipes. Flames shoot up twenty or thirty feet above the mill, and one is dazzled by a blinding effusion of sparks, fire, and clouds of steam. The violence of the display is astounding. After all that fierce uprushing of fire and water, so rapid is the combustion that only the blackened plate remains to tell of it. But a curious result has been effected. As a rake is passed over the plate the scale comes away freely, leaving only the smooth surface to speak for the power and efficiency of the machine. The armour plate mill is another of the giants that the dominant thought of industry has produced. Inspired by great engines its thunders shake not only the earth, but reach far down into the depths of the social fabric- itself. It is animated by the same spirit that virtually dominates all Sheffield. That spirit is the Demon of War. So far tlie processes described have seen the casting of the ingot and the rolling of the plate. They are merely the preliminaries to a long series by which the plate passed over acres of grounds, through numerous departments in order that it may be bent, rounded, bored, planed, cut, drilled, ground, and finally tempered so hard that a punch hit by a sledge hammer will not leave so much as a mark on its surface. Thus it

is, after months of labour, representing a vast expenditure of human energy, of thought, of natural resources, of money, that it emerges at last from the great black works, a finished product to be but one small constituent part in the mass of a big battleship. Beside armour plates, the processes which represent largely the energy, thought, and human activities of Sheffield’s thousands of workers are just as involved in the production of guns. Monster twelve-inch guns, over fifty feet long, that cost thousands of pounds sterling—in the making, too, of s the giant engines that are to drive the fighting machine on its mission of death and destruction. The works themselves usually take a day to explore, and their magnitude may perhaps be gauged if one takes the excellent up-to-date premises of Messrs Vickers, Son and Maxim. They cover C 5 acres, and employ on an average 4000 hands. Cammell and Co. are another historic firm who employ from 3000 to 4000 hands on an area of 32 acres; also Thomas Firth and Son, with 2000 hands and 40 acres. There are many others, not omitting John Brown and Co., who built the Mauretania. Most of the larger works have their own ship-building yards on either the east or west eoast, and their head offices in London.

One cannot escape or ignore the potent fact that in the production of war material all the big works depend largely upon the British Admiralty for existence. A certain process of eause and effect, too, can be traced out in the opposition to a policy of naval retrenchment, when one begins to look into the Boards of Directors or examine the share lists. Under the present commercial competitive basis of industry, and where works are in the hands of a number of private individuals in the guise of a public company, one can understand why any action on the part of a Government which results in a depreciation of share dividends produces unpopularity. The morality of the thing is another ques.tion which cannot be dealt with here, however much one would like to differentiate between the actual standard required for England’s naval supremacy on the oneNiand, and the keenness of certain commercial classes on the other to do business and make dividends at the expense of the nation. In recent years one has heard a good deal in regard to the backwardness of England’s industries in comparison with those of Germany and America. There is much talk still of the hidebound conservatism of both the average English employer and worker in recognising the possibilities of inventions, and a regard for old methods tliat was almost hopeless for new. In numbers of the older factories, the condition of things give some

colour to such pessimistic assertions. One finds them badly laid out, dark, dirty and very little ventilation. The machinery and appliances are quite in keeping with the surroundings. In England, the sentiment which attaches itself to the antique is national. In Sheffield one finds evidence of such sentiment in the dirtv accumulations that have done duty for years. But all that, with some of its glaring records of heavy industrial mortality, of scant wages, and other injustices to the mass of its humanity, are passing away. Even within the last five years, Sheffield's big works have undergone great changes. Old plant has lieen swept away and "scrapped" with almost ruthless vigour. New machines- have been obtained, and the manufacturers, when necessary, have not been afraid to go abroad for them. Better, brighter, and larger works have sprung up, bringing not only the example of modern ingenuity, to contrast with the old, but far healthier conditions for the workers. The latter are at last being recognised as of vital importance, not so much to the workers, but to England’s industrial efficiency itself. It is eommonsense that clean houses, good food, and sanitary conditions of labour are essential to any standard at all of industrial efficiency. The effect of the newer premises on the appearance of the workmen is astonishing only by the comparison it makes' with those of the older premises." On' one hand, there are pale, dirty, physically defective and frequently dispirited bodies of men; on the other, an alert body of workers keenly alive to the needs of their companions. In Sheffield, however, in common with other manufacturing centres, tnere are other things than big works to consider. Small concerns are a far-reaching feature in the life of the city. They exist to-day in large, though decreasing, numbers, from the fact they long preceded the advent of the big works, which increase in number every year. With the small concerns, the greatest evils of the industrial system of the Nineteenth Century were associated —evils that are revealed ■in overcrowding, insanitary surroundings, dirt, ill-paid, underfed men, women

and children, and all the consequent social horrors that resulted therefrom.

The work ahead of KheiVadd to-day, work that must be achieved for the most part by the collective action of the municipal authorities, is almost impossible to tiescribe. But if industrial phthisis and infant mortality are to take their fangs out of the social life of the people, if the 1,796 liquor licenses of the city are to l»e prevented from reaping their annual toll of misery and degradation, if those wretched slums are to be no more than a black stain on the past, and the great mass of the people are to be raised from the slough of ignorance and poverty, Sheffield must Iwith work and light. Whefh r that work will be ever accomplished or what the light for progress may entail is beyond conjecture here. The problem seemed to gather great force, as 1 left Sheilield one wet. grey evening looming through smoke and rain. A line of black retorts, tanks and long shafts, were blurred against the lying day. But from the distant streets, from those channels of the life of the people themselves, a flash of lights sprang up and touched the gloomy heavens with a sort of pink glow. It was a strange, glad light in the darkness, and 1 w ndered how many of the great army of workers down there in the rain and the smoke would see in the wet and glittering street what 1 saw reflected on the heavensa