kinds and quantities of clothing. Fifty years ago the cobbler “whipped the cat" and worked in families. Then, an average shoemaker, by laboring fifteen hours a day, could make 200 pairs of boots in twelve months. Now machinery does the cutting, forming, lasting, channeling, chamfering, pegging, sewing, heeling, trimming, and finishing, eighty-five per cent. of the entire work. Sturtevant's pegging-machine drives per minute 900 pegs, cut from a wooden strip 100 feet long. Formerly the shoemakers of New England annually drove with a hammer 450,000 bushels of shoe pegs, costing about seventy-five cents a bushel. Last year machinery sewed 45,000,000, and pegged 55,000,000 pairs of boots and shoes. A gang of the men, with machinery, make 500 pairs of pegged shoes in a day. The operatives of the New England shoe factories average annually 2,600 pairs of boots and shoes each, an increase, in half a century, of 1,300 per cent. The 2,000 patents granted in this business, have revolutionized the trade. Small, scattered shops have been concentrated, workingmen centralized and classified, and compensation advanced from fifty to one hundred per cent.

The aggregate wages are about $50,000,000. The annual production is over $200,000,000, and the boot and shoe trade is exceeded only by iron, flouring mill products, and lumber. The export of boots and shoes to Europe and South America is rapidly increasing.

Mr. Bally, a Swiss gentleman of more than ordinary intelligence and capacity, visited our Centennial as Commissioner from industrious Switzerland. He resides at Schoenenworth, and is the largest shoe manufacturer in Europe. He has visited the United States several times, and was prompted to hire American mechanics to fit up his immense factory with American patent machinery. After several months' experiment, he was brought almost to despair by the fact that Massachusetts shoes were delivered to the trade in Switzerland, cheaper than he could manufacture them. He immediately wrote a pamphlet to arouse his countrymen and demand a patent system for his Government, claiming that Americans, by ever improving their machinery, by their quicker and better use of the same, could surpass Europeans, even though wages in America were higher. Women's gaiter boots, better sewed and finished, are sold to the trade, notwithstanding an advance of 50 per cent. in material, for $18 per dozen pairs. The price of hand-made work would not be less than $40. The annual saving to the general public on boots and shoes cannot be less than $150,000,000. The patentees receive as royalties less than three per cent. of the gains. In fact all patents are comparatively short lived, and speedily become the property of the people.

SPINNING.

The distaff and spindle, which Penolope used for Ulysses, was not improved until 1510, when a Frenchman made the first spinning wheel. In 1769 Arkwright gave us the spinning frame. A day's work on the old fashioned spinning wheel of New England was twelve skeins, or over three miles of thread, to spin which five miles must be walked. Now a girl, without walking, can operate eight hundred spindles, and make in a day nearly twenty-one hundred miles of thread, reaching from Boston to Chicago and return. Over a thousand miles of thread have been spun by machinery from a single pound of cotton. In 1774 Edmund Cartwright, of England, invented a loom for weaving cotton cloth. In 1810 the marvellous Jacquard loom appeared in France. In 1814 the first mill in the United States for converting raw cotton into finished cloth, was constructed in Waltham, Mass. Many valuable improvements have been added by Crompton, Knowles, and others, until now one operative can weave with eight looms 330 yards of cloth in ten hours. In the same time our mothers wove only three yards.

LOOMS,

for weaving fancy woolens and cottons, or ginghams, were invented by Crompton and Bigelow. Thirty years ago Bigelow constructed a power-loom which enabled him to weave seventy five yards of five-frame Brussels carpet, superior in execution to any hand-work on exhibition in London, in 1851. Five yards by hand was a day's work. During the rebellion cotton sold as high as $1.85 per pound, which to-day sells for 12 cents. Brown sheetings and prints sold then at 45 and 20 cents per yard, now at 61⁄2 and 4 cents, respectively. Cotton cloth has been sold to the trade as low as 31⁄2 cents per yard. Material of tasteful design for a dress costs sixty cents.

THE AMOSKEAG COMPANY,

of Manchester, New Hampshire, organized in 1831, is probably the largest corporation manufacturing textile fabrics in the world. They use fifteen turbine water-wheels, and a thousand horse-power steam-engine, or a total of forty-four hundred horse-power, equal to the force of an army of 26,400 working men. The Amoskeag Company use

Their daily product is 100,000 yards, or nearly 30 yards a second. This company yearly spins sixty million miles of thread-enough to wind the globe twenty-four hundred times. Their domestic and tickings, denims and stripes, sheetings and drillings, ginghams and fancy dress fabrics, are sold in the markets of the world. For forty-two years the Amoskeag Company has earned an average annual profit of over fifteen per cent. Capital, $3,000,000.

THE NELSON KNITTING MACHINE

is a marvel of industry. It begins at the top of the stocking, knits down, widening and narrowing, shapes the heel with a changed stitch, and finishes at the end of the toe with a single thread, and immediately commences the next, and so on. At Rockport, Illinois, a boy runs twelve Nelson machines, which knit weekly 5,600 pairs of hose, and in three or four colors, if desired. The boy's wages are four dollars a week, making the cost of knitting, per pair, one-sixth of a mill, or sixty pairs for a cent.

THE SEWING MACHINE

was invented in 1834, by Walter Hunt, of New York. Twelve years later Elias Howe, Jr., patented that which Hunt had invented. As Columbus discovered America and Americus Vespucius gave name to the Continent, so Hunt invented the celebrated lock-stitch machine, and Howe appropriated both honors and profits. His brother, A. B. Howe, sums up Elias' merits: "His career as a builder of sewing machines, ended where it began with constructing three impracticable models." In in 1851 Isaac M. Singer took out patents for making inter-locked stich. The machine manufactured by the Singer Company has a commanding reputation in all parts of the civilized world. Over a quarter of a million of these machines were sold in 1876. Allen B. Wilson invented a device known as the "four-motion-feed," also the unique "rotary hook," both of which inventions all the larger companies were obliged to use, and pay royalties, which richly remunerated him. Singer, a little more than twenty years ago, was poor and in debt. During the last ten years of his life he resided abroad, indulging in a princely expenditure. When he died, in 1865, his wealth was estimated at ten millions.

THREE THOUSAND PATENTS

have been granted on Sewing Machines. The product in the United States in 1876 was about 600,000 machines. In Europe possibly 100,000 more. In 1870, 12,394 were used in the manufacture of boots and shoes alone. Women earn twice as much by the machine as by hand, and the number of tailors in this country has increased one hundred per cent. within the last twenty years. The Sewing Machine appropriated by Howe might have been utilized a dozen years

before, and a fortune saved to Hunt, had not his wife ignorantly objected to its introduction, thinking, as others did, that it would throw all the sewing women out of employment.

THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.

When Franklin established the identity of lightning and electricity, little did he dream that this subtile fluid would be utilized to annihilate distance for mankind. Governments and their representatives, business houses and their agents, practically sit in the same whispering gallery. As early as 1729 the discovery was made that an electrical shock was transmitted through conducting media with great rapidity, but the principle was of little benefit to the public until 1844, when Professor Samuel F. B. Morse built the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. The honors awarded to Morse are largely due to the late Professor Joseph Henry, the real inventor of the sound instrument at present in universal use. It is true that Morse improved an alphabet, now discarded, and added a few minor details; but it is claimed for Henry that in 1830 he operated in Albany a mile and a half of sound telegraphy, years prior to Morse's acquaintance with the subject. Within thirty-five years the globe has been covered with a net-work of telegraphs and ocean cables. Union Company, in 1877, (and largely increased since) operated:

Miles of line,

Miles of wire,

The Western

76,955 194,323

Number of offices,

Capital,

Profits,

7,500

41,073,000

3,141,127

Consolidations and watering, of recent date, make the company's nominal capital $80,000,000.

At the close of 1876 Great Britain, Germany, France and Austria operated;

was laid in 1851, between Dover and Calais, and is 25 nautical miles in length. From this small beginning a magficent system of submarine telegraphy has grown till it embraces 569 cables, with a total length of 63,990 nautical miles. Companies own 149 cables; governments 420 cables. Seventeen cables-five across the Atlantic belong to the Anglo-American Company; capital, $35,000,

Thirty-nine cables connecting England and her Indian possessions are owned by the Eastern Sub-marine Company, capital $6,500,000; the West India and Panama, $9,500,000; other organizations, less amounts. An aggregate of a hundred millions is invested in channels of thought under the sea. When Cyrus W. Field landed the first cable successfully at New Foundland, binding the two continents together, only 3,000 miles of short cables had been laid in previous years. To-day the sub-marine telegraph in use would form a tripple cable round the earth. All distant lands, and islands of the sea, are being grouped under the civilizing influence of Christianity. The telegraph is the lightning messenger of the Nineteenth Century.

SHIP-BUILDING-IRON STEAMERS.

Ship-building, of all the great industries, exerts the most important influence upon the welfare and integrity of the British Empire. A mighty navy with an immense merchant marine have become absolute necessities. Naval architecture has shared in the world's progress of rich developments. Steam, iron, and steel have worked an entire revolution. The nation that builds the best ships leads the world's commerce. This was true of the Genoese and Venetians and later of the Portuguese, Spaniards and Dutch. About the middle of the Seventeenth century Holland possessed 20,000 sea-going vessels; as many as were owned by a dozen European countries, including England. A thousand new ships were built annually. During the French war, the English navy swept the seas, and at its close, her merchant marine, numbering 21,ooo ships, with an aggregate tonnage larger than all the fleets of Europe, gained a supremacy which has been jealously maintained. Twenty years ago, ship-building in the United States advanced at a greater rate than in Great Britain. In 1861 the United States tonnage was 5,500,000, British, 5,900,000. The four years of civil war almost paralyzed American ship building. We are surprised at Great Britain's vast shipping interest and deplore the smallness of our own. The comparison stands thus:

Her vessels exceed those of the United States in number and tonnage over 300 per cent. In fact, she owns half of the shipping of the civilized world.

THE GREAT CENTERS

Of ship-building in Great Britain are on the six rivers, the Clyde, Tyne, Wear, Tees, Mersey and Thames. There were launched in 1873 on the Clyde,