in which it is to be finally perfected and used. The modes of preparation are various, according to the ultimate object-whether that may be for it to assume the form of the hard, unelastic comb, a door spring, a steam valve, a carpet, or any of the thousand shapes it is made to take.

there is drawn out a long railway carriage. On this are placed the goods, which are then rolled in, the boiler closed, and steam admitted. In from 8 to 12 hours, the singular transformation known as vulcanizing, takes place.

The manufacture of "Croton hose" is It may be here remarked that the dis- similar. A long iron tube, of the proper covery, great as it was, was but the first step diameter (and hose is made from inch to in the great series of improvements that has 12 inches) is covered with a sheet of careresulted from it. After 18 years of incessant fully-prepared rubber. This, however, inlabor, Mr. Goodyear had perfected a raw tended to be pliable, would not of itself be material-but a raw material for what? It of sufficient strength to sustain a strong was necessary to know to what articles it head of water, hence it is covered with could be applied before there could be any webs of cloth prepared in the manner of demand for it; until then it was of no market- the belting duck. When a sufficient numable value. It was necessary to invent or dis- ber of folds have been applied to give the recover all the uses to which it might be ap- quired strength, an outside covering of pure plied. The shoe business was the first to rubber is applied. A heater of immense make it available; but since then, vast as length then receives the pipes, with the has been the number of manufactures based hose on them, to be cured by the same on it, discoveries are being daily made to process as the belts. The hose is then extend it. drawn off the pipe to be subjected to proof. This hose will withstand a pressure that will burst the most powerful leather hose.

The manufacture of "belting" and "hose" is a very large business. The belts are used for driving machinery, and are superior One of the most useful applications of vulto every other means. They are stronger canized India-rubber, is steam packing. The than the best sole leather, and adhere to vulcanized rubber is the only material that the drum or pulley with a tenacity that will preserve its elasticity and counteract the prevents slipping. This manufacture is a expansion and contraction of metals exposed peculiar process. Cotton duck, similar to to the heat of steam, thus making a joint that of which sails are made, is woven in a perfectly steam-tight. It is used to pack mode to give double the usual strength lon- round piston rods in steam machines; to gitudinally. This duck is impregnated with place between the iron plates of steam pipes, the rubber, under the influence of powerful wherever a joint is required; for gaskets, machinery, which drives the substance valves, and rings. Some ocean steamers through and through its meshes. It is then have huge rubber valves, five feet in diamtaken to the calender machine, seen in the eter, which play up and down in the vast engraving. The large cylinders of which it cylinder, opening and shutting like the is composed have a perfectly polished sur- valves of a colossal artery. The use of face. The rubber having gone through the rubber is now so great a necessity, wherever mixing process, is in the shape of sticky, steam is used, that the mind wonders how slate-colored dough, and passing through it could ever have been dispensed with. It the calenders, is rolled out into a perfectly is not only steam, however, but every branch even sheet, upon the prepared duck. When of mechanics that demands its presence, in this is completed, the "bolts" are taken to the shape of sheets, plates, rings, hollow elthe belt-room, spread out upon tables 100 lipses, of all imaginable forms and sizes, of feet long, and cut into the strips desired for which none but a mechanic can conceive the various kinds of belting. For one of the number applicable to his own art. great strength, several of the strips are placed one upon the other, and then pressed together with immense power, by rollingmachines; thus giving them the strength of metal, with the peculiar friction surface found only in rubber. The belts are now ready for the heaters. These are long steam boilers, the door of which being opened,

The use of rubber for car-springs has become almost universal. The high degree of elasticity which the sulphur imparts, makes that application an admirable one, and the more so that it does not lose the elasticity by prolonged use.

The "elastic metal" supplants the rigid one in numberless uses. House-sinks, in

certain regulations and restrictions, by which the ruinous effects of competition are abol ished. The progress of the manufacture has been very rapid. In 1850, the value of the rubber goods made in the United States was $3,024,335. In 1860, it amounted to $5,642,700, an increase of 86-6 per cent. The number of establishments had diminished, but they employed a larger capital, used more raw material, and made a much larger quantity of goods. Since 1860 the manufacture has nearly or quite tripled. New York, though not so largely engaged in the manufacture as several other states, made goods to the value of $1,974,000 in 1865, and has doubled since that time. The hard rubber, or vulcanite, is used for jewelry, buttons, dress ornaments, pencils, canes, &c.

stead of cast iron, are now formed of rub-| New Brunswick, Millstone, N. J., and elseber, without joint or seam; and these are where. These companies now have common far less fatal to the china washed in them, agencies for the sale of their goods, under than were the metal ones. Springs for doors, from this material, supplant all others. These, for churches, are so arranged that the door may be closed, or held open to a desired distance. For bed-springs, it has become the most desirable, durable, and luxurious material. Carpets and mats for halls, stairways, and public rooms, are formed of it, of infinite variety and usefulness. The mixture of lead in the compound was found to make it more compact and heavy, but the peculiar properties are apparently attained as well without the use of the lead. The combination with sulphur has been effected by exposing the material to the action of sulphurous fluids, as the sulphuret of carbon and the chloride of sulphur. An immersion of one or two minutes, in a mixture composed of 40 parts of sulphuret of carbon to 1 of chloride of sulphur, kept at the usual high Gutta percha is used extensively for simheat, will produce the vulcanization; and ilar purposes as the caoutchouc, and is prepressed into moulds while at the high heat, pared in the same manner by Goodyear's the form becomes permanent when cold. process. It is a gum found in the trees of For the purpose of imparting that hardness the Malay peninsula, and procured in the which is manifest in combs, fancy boxes, same manner as caoutchouc. European atcanes, buttons, knife-handles, and all those tention was first called to it in 1842, and it forms in which it has supplanted bone, shell, began to be imported in 1844. Its chemiand ivory, magnesia is introduced. It is cal composition is identical with that of stated that sulphur, in the proportion of one India-rubber, except that it contains oxygen, to three, will impart the hardness if the which rubber does not. It has a number of high temperature is sustained for a suffi- qualities that make it preferable for certain cient length of time. The magnesia gives uses. It is a bad conductor, and is therea lighter color to the articles in which it is fore very applicable as a covering for telecompounded. In the manufacture, articles graph wires, and its peculiar acoustic propto be heated are buried in pulverized soap-erties make it valuable for speaking-tubes stone, by the introduction of highly heated in public houses and large establishments. steam. The ingenuity of chemists and mechanics is still actively stimulated to produce new compositions and new results, not only in the properties that result from new compounds and varied proportions, but in the applications of which they are sus ceptible. The effect upon the commerce of the country is seen in the following table. The largest proportion of caoutchouc used in the world comes from South America.

The application of gutta percha to the coating of telegraph wires is claimed by Mr. Samuel J. Armstrong, of New York, who for that purpose modified the machinery for gutta percha tubing. The first machinery built for that purpose was in 1848, and the first wire so coated was laid across the Hudson river, at Fort Lee, in August, 1849, for the Morse Telegraph Company. This machinery was furtively carried to England, and there used for the Atlantic Telegraph. The articles made of gutta percha alone, or mixed with other substances, are of very great variety-ornaments, vessels, articles of clothing, fancy articles, surgical articles, dentists' and numerous other articles. Vessels have also been made of it, and its uses are being daily multiplied.

it is not to be supposed that this important field could be neglected. The first attempt, so far as we can learn, to accomplish sewing by machinery, was made by John Knowles, of Monkton, Vermont; who, as early as the year 1819, invented and constructed a sewing machine, which is said to have made a good seam, and to have been, so far as the capacity of forming the stitch is concerned,

THE description of labor which is the most general is, probably, that of sewing, since all women take part in it more or less, and they are aided in the heavier work by men. Áll human clothing, bedding, upholstery, &c., require more or less sewing in their manufacture, and during the present century the amount required has, from various causes, been greatly increased. To the flax, wool, &c., previously used as materials a decided success. It used but one thread, in the manufacture of cloth, cotton has been and made a stitch identical with the ordinary added; and by the aid of machinery, cloth, "back-stitch" made in hand sewing, and by from all these materials, has been produced a process substantially the same. The needle, in greater abundance and at diminished cost; however, was differently constructed, having while the increase of individual wealth among a point at each end, with the eye in the midthe people has given them the means of using dle; and it was passed back and forth through a greater variety and amount of clothing, the cloth without changing its ends. His all of which was required to be made up machine was furnished with a device for with the hand needle. The condition of feeding along the work, automatically, in sewing women became a matter of public concert with the action of the needle; a sympathy; and much sentiment was exer- device similar in principle to the "bastercised over those thus compelled to waste plate of Howe, noticed hereafter; it was, how

their lives in

"Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt."

When the inventive genius of the age was
directed to the means of facilitating all labors,

ever, defective, as it would move the work only in a direction straight forward, and hence it could be used only to sew upon straight seams. After much unsuccessful effort to correct this defect, so as to adapt his machine to the general purposes of sew

ing, Mr. Knowles abandoned his invention. peculiar shuttle, holding and feeding deAnd yet it appears that his machine em- vices, thread carrier and guide, &c. In its braced nearly all the essential features of a operation, a loop of thread being thrust practical sewing machine; approaching more nearly to the results reached in the first machine of Mr. Howe, than did any other invention between the two. Mr. Knowles did not apply for a patent, and never made but the one machine.

through the fabric by the needle, the shuttle, carrying the lower thread upon a small bobbin within it, passed through the loop, leav ing in it a line of thread, which, being thus interlocked, was drawn into the fabric. The pieces of cloth to be sewed were susDuring the next twenty-five years, many pended upon points of a "baster-plate," with attempts in the same direction were made, proper "holding surfaces," which was moved both in this country and in Europe. In forward, and the length of the stitch reguMay, 1829, a patent was granted, in Eng-lated by a "ratchet wheel." When a land, to Henry Bock, for a tambouring "reach" of the seam had been sewed the machine," the needle having two points and length of the baster-plate, the cloth was an eye; but tambouring is not sewing. July detached, the plate run back, the cloth re17, 1830, a patent was granted in France, to attached to the points, and another reach of M. Thimonier, for a crocheting machine, seam sewed. This constituted the feeding adapted to sewing purposes; but this ma- apparatus. In his later machines, however, chine had no feeding apparatus whatever, the method of holding and feeding the cloth and the material to be sewed had to be is entirely changed. The baster-plate is no moved along by hand. It had a crochet or hooked needle, and a device called an "accroucheur," to lay the thread on the hook, after it had passed through the cloth. It used but one thread, and made the singletambour stitch. An attempt was made to introduce it in the manufacture of army clothing, but the attempt proved a failure, as did the machine.

stitch. Whatever may have been its merits, it proved of no value to the public, as no machine except the model was ever built. A machine for making the "running" or "basting" stitch was patented March 4, 1843, by B. W. Bean, of New York City; but we believe that no machines were ever built for sale. A patent was granted, December 27, 1843, to Geo. R. Corlies, of Greenwich, N. Y., for a machine similar to Greenough's; but no machines were ever made for use.

longer used, the fabric to be sewed being laid upon the horizontal plate or table of the machine, and passed under a straight needle which acts vertically, instead of horizontally as in the original machine. Few mechanical inventions are introduced in a state of absolute perfection; and this, as we have seen, constitutes no exception to the general rule.

The first patent for an improvement upon The first patent issued in this country for Howe's machine was issued to John Brada sewing machine was granted February 21, shaw, of Lowell, Mass., for a device to regu1842, to J. J. Greenough, of Washington late the tension of the thread, and was dated, City. This machine used a needle having Nov. 23, 1848. On the 6th of February, two points and one eye, and made the 1849, J. B. Johnson and Charles Morey, "through-and-through," ог shoemaker's of Boston, Mass., obtained a patent for a machine, having a circular or continuous baster-plate, which was an improvement upon the straight baster-plate of Howe; but other and more valuable improvements for the same purpose soon succeeded this. May 8, 1849, John Batchelder, of Boston, Mass., obtained a patent for an improvement to regulate the feeding of the cloth, automatically, by the machine. And about the same time a patent was also granted to J. S. Conant, of Dracut, Mass., for an improveThe first really practical sewing machine in- ment designed to accomplish the same purvented was that of Elias Howe, Jr., of Cain- pose, by a different arrangement. October bridge, Mass., invented in 1845, and patented 2, 1849, Blodgett & Lerow, of Boston, September 10, 1846. Ilis patent covered, obtained a patent for a machine to make broadly, the formation of a seam for uniting the shuttle-stitch, by a method different pieces of cloth, by the combined action of from that of Howe, the shuttle describing a an eye-pointed needle and a shuttle, or their circle, instead of moving back and forth. equivalent, interlocking two threads. His The introduction of this machine, though it machine, as originally introduced, combined was clearly an infringement of Howe's patent, a grooved and curved, eye-pointed needle, a proved a decided advantage to him; as a