Arsenal—Enfield Small-arms Factory—Lord Armstrong and the Elswick Works—Testing Guns at Shoeburyness—Hiram S. Maxim and the Maxim Machine Gun—The Colt Automatic Gun—Ironclads—Submarine Boats

152
CHAPTER VII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE CYCLE. In praise of Cycling—Number of Cycles in Use—Medical Opinions—Pioneers in the Invention—James Starley—Cycling Tours 192
CHAPTER VIII. STEAMERS AND SAILING-SHIPS. Early Shipping—Mediterranean Trade—Rise of the P. and O. and other Lines—Transatlantic Lines—India and the East—Early Steamships—First Steamer to cross the Atlantic—Rise of Atlantic Shipping Lines—The Great Eastern and the New Cunarders Campania and Lucania compared—Sailing-ships 205
CHAPTER IX. POST-OFFICE—TELEGRAPH—TELEPHONE—PHONOGRAPH. Rowland Hill and Penny Postage—A Visit to the Post-office—The Post-office on Wheels—Early Telegraphs—Wheatstone and Morse—The State and the Telegraphs—Atlantic Cables—Telephones—Edison and the Phonograph 247

---

ROMANCE OF INDUSTRY
AND
INVENTION.

---

CHAPTER I.

IRON AND STEEL.

Pioneers of the Iron and Steel Industry—Sir Henry Bessemer—Sir William Siemens—Werner von Siemens—The Krupps of Essen.

rancis Horner, writing early in this century, said that 'Iron is not only the soul of every other manufacture, but the mainspring perhaps of civilised society.' Cobden has said that 'our wealth, commerce, and manufactures grew out of the skilled labour of men working in metals.' According to Carlyle, the epic of the future is not to be Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man. We all know that iron was mined and smelted in considerable quantities in this island as far back as the time of the Romans; and we cherish a vague notion that iron must have been mined and smelted here ever since on a progressively increasing scale. We are so accustomed to think and speak of ourselves as first among all nations, at the smelting-furnace, in the smithy, and amid the Titanic labours of the mechanical workshop, that we open large eyes when we are told what a recent conquest all this superiority is!

There was, indeed, some centuries later than the Roman occupation, a period coming down to quite modern times, during which English iron-mines were left almost unworked. In Edward III.'s reign, the pots, spits, and frying-pans of the royal kitchen were classed among his majesty's jewels. For the planners of the Armada the greater abundance and excellence of Spanish iron compared with English was an important element in their calculations of success. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the home market looked to Spain and Germany for its supply both of iron and steel. After that, Sweden came prominently forward; and from her, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, no less than four-fifths of the iron used in this country was imported!

The reason of this marvellous neglect of what has since proved one of our main sources of wealth lay in the enormous consumption of timber which the old smelting processes entailed. The charcoal used in producing a single ton of pig-iron represented four loads of wood, and that required for a ton of bar-iron represented seven loads. Of course, the neighbourhood of a forest was an essential condition to the establishment of ironworks; but wherever such an establishment was effected, the forest disappeared with portentous rapidity. At Lamberhurst, on the borders of Kent and Sussex, with so trifling a produce as five tons per week, the annual consumption of wood was two hundred thousand cords. The timber wealth of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex—which counties were then the centres of our iron industry—seemed menaced with speedy annihilation. In the destruction of these great forests, that of our maritime power was supposed to be intimately involved; so that it is easy to understand how, in those days, the development of the iron manufacture came to be regarded in the light of a national calamity, and a fitting subject for restrictive legislation! Various Acts were passed towards the end of the sixteenth century prohibiting smelting-furnaces within twenty-two miles of London, and many of the Sussex masters found themselves compelled, in consequence, to break up their works. During the civil wars of the seventeenth century, a severe blow was given to the trade by the destruction of all furnaces belonging to royalists; and after the Restoration we find the crown itself demolishing its own works in the Forest of Dean, on the old plea that the supply of shipbuilding timber was thereby imperilled. Between 1720 and 1730 the ironworks of Worcestershire and the Forest of Dean consumed 17,350 tons of timber annually, or five tons for each furnace.

'From this time' (the Restoration), says Mr Smiles, 'the iron manufacture of Sussex, as of England generally, rapidly declined. In 1740 there were only fifty-nine furnaces in all England, of which ten were in Sussex; and in 1788 there were only two. A few years later, and the Sussex iron-furnaces were blown out altogether. Farnhurst in Western, and Ashburnham in Eastern Sussex, witnessed the total extinction of the manufacture. The din of the iron hammer was hushed, the glare of the furnace faded, the last blast of the bellows was blown, and the district returned to its original rural solitude. Some of the furnace-ponds were drained and planted with hops or willows; others formed beautiful lakes in retired pleasure-grounds; while the remainder were used to drive flour-mills, as the streams in North Kent, instead of driving fulling-mills, were employed to work paper-mills.' The plentifulness of timber in the Scottish Highlands explains the establishment of smelting-furnaces, in 1753, by an English company at Bunawe in Argyllshire, whither the iron was brought from Furness in Lancashire.

Few of our readers can be unacquainted with the fact that iron-smelting at the present day is performed not with wood but with coal. It will readily, then, be understood that the substitution of the one description of fuel for the other must have formed the turning-point in the history of the British iron manufacture. This substitution,