Account of Sheffield 1800

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Account of Sheffield

From The Iris 1800

The following magnificent description of the Sheffield Manufacturers, extracted from a provincial Paper,

cannot fail to amuse our Readers in this town, who will smile to see how happily the writer has misrepresented their Engines and themselves.

At Rotherham and Sheffield the machines are so lofty and grand, that Don Quixote had been forgiven,

had he mistaken such mills for giants.

When they rise to the astonished eye of the traveller, a beam or lever is seen to librate from the ground to the summit of a tall house, or to rise and descend through three stories of a tall building!

The impression of the view, the mingled sensation of awe and pleasure, is literally electric; it shocks and animates.

Survey the interior of the engines, or rather the collection of engines, and wonder is lost or increased in the regular increase of our knowledge, and in the gradual explanation of machines so apparently complicate, yet so regularly accurate in their movements..

For example, One warehouse composed of a single engine is employed in the forming of razors: it slits the iron, it beats the plate, it cuts the metal into the due form: it gives the edge, it polishes, it stamps.

The rude iron is converted into the purest and most splendid steel.

In this work many hundreds of mill stones are turned by the same primary wheel, and 460 men labour at their several trades at the two sides of the same ascending and descending lever!

In a second manufactory numerous hammers of various weights are placed upright on a rolling cylinder: the end of their handle moves around a small iron staple in the cylinder.

While it rolls the attentive hammers are each waiting their turn to strike the piece of iron laid on the large anvil; are each anxious to perform their share of the work They work in time and in musical tones.

To ascend from machines to men! So numerous are the labourers in the manufactories of Sheffield, and so habituated to their labour, that a chamber filled with musical workmen will sing a part in an oratorio and an adjoining chamber will join in the same chorus. They work in time and in musical tones.

Happy Country, where labour is so voluntary, is so richly paid and so loudly thankful.!

In the same chambers the sub-division of labour is remarkable. Each workman attends to a single and apparently a trivial part of the manufacture. In a pen knife the horners in succession heat the horn in warm water, bend it in a heated state, rasp and polish it ; a second class forms the iron pins ; a third cuts with large scissors the tough iron into plates ; a fourth beats the plate into steel; a fifth marks the blade; a sixth polishes; a seventh sharpens; an eight unites the various parts.

Each man employs only one set of tools, and finishes one division of the work.

Hence he acquires a rapidity of the execution, a perfection of skill; hence his instruments and utensils are ever at hand, and no portion of his valuable time is lost by removal or by delays his three days wage is often one pound.

In an adjoining warehouse works a long row of women and children at the lighter and more ornamental manufacture of plated goods.

The same graduation of labour, the same succession at the work here takes place.

One tea urn is passed through a unity of hands. The wage of these industrious females is frequently a pound a week.

If we descend from the elevated ware-rooms into the coal mines in the neighbourhood,

we behold a race of men, sooty and dark in complexion, strong and nervous in labour. If we descend into the mines in the basket, which raises the coal, we may remark their singular attitude sitting on their hams, the body bent forward their arms confined in the narrow space which admits them to work with the pick and the hammer,.

The newspapers detail the accidents to which miners are subject. Yet the danger of their trade with due caution is so inconsiderable, that their wage is not greater than that of a farmer, and is less than a labourers in a sea port.

The caution they use in the letting down of a fire-pan into the pit, which eats up the blue lights or the flame of deadly air.

If this caution is neglected and a miner descends to it with a candle, it explodes with the noise of a gun, and penetrates his body with the fatal rapidity of electrical lightening.

End