R. BELL & CO. LTD.'S MATCH FACTORY, WELLINGTON.

Progress, Volume II, Issue 3, 2 January 1907, Page 86

R. BELL & CO. LTD.'S MATCH FACTORY, WELLINGTON.

wheel away loads of these frames to the dipping, or heading, department which has a building to itself away from the main workroom. There a man is busy at a metal table finely levelled, spreading the material — phosphorus, chlorate of potash, and glue — into a layer \ inch deep. He employs a gauge to ensure this uniform thickness. That done, he takes up the top frame (still full of tapers as we saw it last at the frame filling machine) from the trolly, and lays it bodily down in the ultramarine mass on the table, picks it up in a few seconds, and behold, every one of the evenly protruding matches has a head upon it. Away now to the drying bins, where the matches, still held in the frame, are turned heads down in order that the blue phosphorus mixture may settle into the rounded tops peculiar to match heads. After this the frames with their loads of headed matches are finally sent to the boxing tables and the match girls. The girls unscrew the frames, take out the rows of matches heads up in handfuls, and drop them into the boxes. The pace they do it at is something wonderful, those who have had practice (and they have no time to deal gingerly with their work) ramming the handfuls of matches into the boxes. Occasionally a match resents this energic treatment, and a half -filled box becomes a miniature volcano. There is a hiss and a flare, a smoke, and a match box falls out of the path of the useful — a failure. The filled boxes are finally cased, and that ends the process. In order to manufacture such an apparently simple article as a wax match, nearly every portion of the globe has to be searched for material wherewith to accomplish the work ; the sheep on a thousand hills supply the stearine, the teeming cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama, the cotton for the core of the match ; the tropical forests of Java, Borneo and Sumatra and the gorgeous slopes of the Amazon country, the gum which hardens, and without which no match would strike, and the gum which binds ; the Swedish factory where the chlorate of potash is made for the head by an electrical process patented there, which has reduced the cost to one-fourth ; and the phosphorus and strawboard from England. In one year the processes of matchmaking and boxmaking at Messrs. Bell's absorb the following quantities of raw material : cotton, 35 tons ; wax, 150 tons ; New Zealand glue, 12 tons ; strawboard, 50 tons ; chlorate of potash, 15 tons ; and English phosphorus, 3 tons. The phosphorus has to be kept under fresh water until required for mixing with the glue and other substances of which the match head is composed, and it much resembles clarified kauri gum.