New articles are made in this metal every day. One manufacturer, who first hit upon the hand-clip for papers, made a very handsome sum by it. The Registration of Designs Act has been a great stimulus to certain branches of this trade. Lucifer boxes are quite a new article, unknown the other day, now manufactured in thousands for all quarters of the globe, Germany, Russia, Holland, India, Australia, California. Then there are ornaments for South American and Cuban saddles and harness; rings for la.s.sos, and bells for sheep, cattle, and sledges, bra.s.s rings, as coins for Africa; and weights for weighing gold in California.
Among the branches of the bra.s.s trade which have become important, since the increase of emigration about 5000 ship lamps have been made in one year, at a cheap rate; and within the last five years bra.s.s egg cups have been sent in enormous numbers to Turkey, where they are used to hand round coffee. South America is a great mart for cheap bra.s.s ware.
Of this trade, it may be said, in the words of a vulgar proverb, "as one door shuts another opens."
The use of china and gla.s.s, in conjunction with bra.s.s for house furniture and chandeliers, has also created a variety, and afforded an advantageous impetus to the trade.
Mr. Winfield is one of the manufacturers in bra.s.s whose showrooms are open to the public. He also has claims on our attention for the wise and philanthropic manner in which he has endeavoured to supply the lamentable deficiency of education among the working cla.s.ses.
He holds a very leading position as a manufacturer of bal.u.s.trades, tables, window-cornices, candelabra chandeliers, brackets, curtain-bands, and above all of metal bedsteads, which last he has supplied to some of the chief royal and princely families of Europe, besides Spain, Algeria, and the United States. In all these works great attention has been paid to design as well as workmanship, as was amply proved both at the local exhibition in 1849, where a large gas bracket, in the Italian style, of bra.s.s, with Parisian ornaments, excited much admiration; and in 1851, in Hyde Park, where we especially noted an ormolu cradle and French bedstead in gilt and bronze, amid a number of capital works of his production.
Mr. Winfield is patentee of a curious process for drawing out the cylinders used in making bedsteads.
Messrs. Messengers and Sons have one of the finest manufactories in ornamental iron, bra.s.s, and bronze, for lamps, chandeliers, and table ornaments. For a long series of years they have spared no expense in obtaining the best models and educating their workmen in drawing and modelling. In their show-rooms will be found many very pleasing statues in gold-colour, in bronze, and copies from antique types of vases, lamps, candelabra, etc.
Messrs. Salt and Lloyd are also eminent lamp makers, and generally exhibit, beside table-lamps, the last and best carriage-lamps.
Messrs. Ratcliffes are another enterprising firm.
All such of these manufactories as have show-rooms open to strangers, will be found by an inquiry at any hotel; for although Birmingham is a large town, everybody knows everybody, and the cab drivers will usually be found competent to guide through the voyage of investigation.
Next, after bra.s.s, we will take steel, divided into heavy and light steel toys.
HEAVY STEEL TOYS.--Heavy steel toys are the name by which, by a sort of Brummagem Bull, a variety of articles which are the very reverse of toys, and which are often not made of steel at all, are designated. Heavy steel toys are tools or articles of an implement nature, used in domestic economy.
The list includes nearly 600 articles. Among these are included the tools of carpenters, coopers, gardeners, butchers, glaziers, farriers, saddlers, tinmen, shoemakers, weavers, wheelwrights, as well as corkscrews, sugar- tongs, sugar-nippers, boot-hooks, b.u.t.ton-hooks, door-sc.r.a.pers, calipers, printing-irons, dog-collars, chains, whistles, tinderboxes, and tobacco- stoppers.
Hammers occupy a leading place, of which there are two or three hundred varieties, belonging to different trades, each of which is divided into eight or ten different weights. Birmingham has the largest share of the heavy toy trade, although there are extensive manufacturers in Sheffield and Wolverhampton. Fine edge tools are chiefly and best made at Sheffield.
This trade increases annually in importance, as it consists of articles which are greatly in demand in new countries; and new markets are opened by every new colonising enterprise of the Anglo-Saxon race. The manufacture includes a great deal of wood-work for handles, as well as iron and steel. For although many axes are made for the American market, after special patterns, and with national mottoes, no handles are ever sent, as the backwoodsmen have better wood for their purpose at command. Our axe handles are stiff; a backwoodsman must have a flexible handle or haft.
The Germans once tried to compete with us in the home market, but the attempt was a failure.
As an instance of the odd accidents that affect the Birmingham trade, about three years ago, when flounces were in fashion, a great demand sprang up for pinking irons, previously only used for ornamenting the hems of shrouds. A workman informed the correspondent of the Morning Chronicle that he had earned about 3 pounds a week for two years at making them.
The scientific tools of housebreakers are known to be made by certain journeymen in the steel toy trade. On the other hand, hand-cuffs, leg-irons, and similar restraining instruments are manufactured for home use and exportation.
Occasionally, London and Liverpool houses in the Brazilian or Cuban trade have ordered suits of chains, intended for the use of slave-ships. These are cheap, coa.r.s.e, painted black, and horrid looking. Among the orders on the books of a manufacturer, were several dozen pair of hand-cuffs for ladies.
THE EDGE TOOL MANUFACTURE, which is increasing in Birmingham, probably in consequence of the repeated strikes at Sheffield, added to the superior position of Birmingham as regards coal, and the markets of London, Liverpool, and Bristol, is often carried on in conjunction with that of steel toys.
There are forty-five different kinds of axes; fourteen for the American market, twelve adzes, twenty-six bills and bill-hooks, and upwards of seventy hoes for different foreign countries--Spain, Portugal, South America, the United States, and Australia, which will soon consume as much hardware as America did fifty years ago.
LIGHT STEEL TOYS.--These include chatelains, watch chains, keys, seals, purses, slides, beads, waist buckles, dress swords, steel b.u.t.tons for court dresses, bodkins, spectacle frames, knitting and netting implements, and steel snuffers. Shoe and knee buckles, which were once universally worn, alone employed five thousand persons in their manufacture, when it was the staple trade of the town. The expense and inconvenience of shoe buckles sent them out of fashion. Dragoons hung in the stirrup, and cricketers tore the nails of their fingers in picking up cricket b.a.l.l.s, from the inconvenient buckle.
The trade is extremely fluctuating, and depends very much on inventive taste in which we are manifestly inferior to the French. Some articles we can make better than they can, but they are always bringing out something new and pretty. In small beads they undersell us enormously, while in beads of 1/6th of an inch in diameter, and upwards, we can undersell them.
A visit to a manufactory of light steel toys will afford a great deal of amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction.
MEDALLING.--DIE SINKING.--Here again are trades by which Birmingham keeps up its communication with all the civilised, and part of the uncivilised world.
The first great improvements in coining the current money of the realm originated at Soho, near Birmingham, at the manufactories of two men whose memory Englishmen can never hold in sufficient respect--Matthew Boulton and James Watt. They were the inventors of the machinery now in use in the Royal Mint; for a long period they coined the copper money, as also some silver money for the United Kingdom, as well as money of all denominations for many foreign countries, tokens, and medals innumerable. They made coins for the French Convention.
During the war, when money was scarce and small notes were in circulation, many tradesmen, and several public establishments issued "tokens," which were, in fact, metal promissory notes, as they were seldom of the intrinsic value stamped on them. By this expedient retailers advertised themselves, and temporarily increased their capital. Some successful speculators made fortunes, others were ruined by the presentation of all their metal notes of hand at periods of panic.
At any rate, the manufacture of these articles had a great deal to do with the education of workmen for the medal manufacture which is now so extensively carried on.
The dies from which coins and medals are struck, are, of course, all executed by hand, and the excellence of each coin or medal depends on the skill of each individual workman; therefore there has been no great improvement in execution--indeed, some medals and coins struck two thousand years ago, rival, if they do not excel, the best works of the present day. The improvements of modern mechanical science are all in the die presses, and in producing cheap metal. These improvements have enabled Birmingham to establish a large trade in cheap medals, which are issued in tens of thousands on every occasion that excites the public mind. Jenny Lind and Father Mathew were both excellent customers of the medallists in their day.
The medallists are not confined to the home market; France has been supplied with effigies of her rival Presidents, Louis Napoleon and Cavaignac, and we should not be surprised to find that some day a contract has been taken for the medals which the Pope blesses and distributes. Schools and Temperance Societies are good customers, and occasionally a good order comes in from a foreign state or colony, for coins. In 1850 Mr. Ralph Heaton made ten tons of copper coin for Bombay, called c.o.c.k money, so called because bearing a c.o.c.k on the obverse, from dies purchased at the sale at Soho.
The late Sir Richard Thomason was a considerable manufacturer of medals, and a very curious collection may be seen at the showrooms of his successor, Mr.
G. R. Collis, who carries on the same trade, and is consul for a number of countries between Turkey and Timbuctoo.
The most important part of the die-sinking trade, is that for making patterns in bra.s.s, mixed metal, and iron in curtain bands, pins, lamp pillars, cornices, coffin furniture, and all articles in which stamping has superseded the more expensive process of hammering out.
Within the last twenty years, and notably within the last ten years, public taste has required an increased amount of ornament in all domestic manufactures; stimulated by this demand, great improvements have been made in stamping, and excellence in the art of die-sinking has become more widely diffused. The Birmingham die-sinkers admit that they are inferior to the French in design, while in the execution of cutting heavy steel dies, they are decidedly superior. Die-sinking is an art, like painting or sculpture, which requires personal apt.i.tude to enable an apprentice to acquire excellence.
It is carried on in Birmingham by men who work themselves, employing two or three journeymen. The names of these artists seldom appear. A London or Parisian tradesman undertakes an order which is pa.s.sed to some noted Birmingham House, which transmits it to a hard-handed man in a back street.
COFFIN ORNAMENTS.--The manufacture of ornaments for coffins is a very important part of the trade, and it is curious to find, that even in this last concession to human vanity, there is a constant demand for new designs.
Who is it that examines and compares the ornaments of one coffin with that of another? We never heard of the survivors of a deceased examining an undertaker"s patterns. And yet, a house which consumes forty tons of cast iron per annum for coffin handles, stated to the gentleman to whose letters we are indebted for this information, "Our travellers find it useless to show themselves with their pattern books at an undertaker"s, unless they have something tasteful, new, and uncommon. The orders for Ireland are chiefly for gilt furniture for coffins. The Scotch, also, are fond of gilt, and so are the people in the west of England. But the taste of the English is decidedly for black. The Welsh like a mixture of black and white. Coffin lace is formed of very light stamped metal, and is made of almost as many patterns as the ribbons of Coventry. All our designs are registered, as there is a constant piracy going on, which it is necessary to check."
Dies are cut in soft metal and then hardened.
Die-sinking is one of the arts so interesting in all its branches, from the first design to the finished coin or ornament, that every intelligent traveller should endeavour to see it.
PLATERS, GILDERS, AND ELECTRO-PLATERS.--Large fortunes have been made in Birmingham by plating copper, "in the good old times;" but Sheffield was, until within the last ten years, the princ.i.p.al seat of the manufacture.
Sheffield plate was a very superior article, and for years would look and stand wear like silver. Plating was effected by laying a thin film of silver on a sheet of copper, which was afterwards shaped into tea or coffee services, forks, spoons, candlesticks, trays, tea urns, and other articles for house use. It was also applied to harness, saddlery, and every thing formerly made of silver alone. A great impetus was given to this trade by our intercourse with the continent at the close of the war, which sent steel p.r.o.nged forks out of fashion. The first inroad upon the plates on copper was made by the invention of white metal, called German silver. The next was the discovery of the art of plating by galvanic instead of mechanical agency, now known as electro-plating. The result of the application of electric power to plating, however, has been to transfer a large share of the Sheffield plate business to Birmingham. It is a curious fact that a veterinary surgeon (of the name of Askew) invented the first German silver manufactured in England, and that a Dr. Wright, of the same town, discovered the practicability of electro-plating about the same time that several other persons had discovered that metal could be deposited by a galvanic current, but had not thought of applying it practically to manufactures.
The old system of plating is still carried on both in Sheffield and in Birmingham; improvements have been introduced by the employment of a white metal instead of copper as the foundation, and by grafting on, as it were, silver tips to forks and silver edges to prominent ornaments; but the balance of advantage in economy and facility are so greatly in favour of the electro- plating process, that, no doubt, when the patents under which it is now worked expire, its use will become universal.
Since the first patent was published, important improvements have been made in France, Germany, and America, which the original patentees have incorporated. Copperplates cast from wood cuts and stereotypes can be reproduced with great facility and economy, and the exact touches of an artist in clay or wax can be reproduced in metal without the translation of casting. Nothing is too small or too large,--the colossal statue of an Amazon on horseback spearing a lioness, by Kiss, the Berlin sculptor, exhibiting in the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851, was copied in zinc and bronzed by this process; and, by the same means, flowers, feathers, and even spiders" webs have been covered with a metal film.
At present, a handsome electro-plated teapot, exactly resembling silver, may be purchased at what a Britannia metal one cost fifteen years ago.
Messrs. Elkington and Mason, the purchasers of the secret from the original discoverer and authors of valuable improvements, are at the head of one of the finest and most interesting silver and electroplating establishments in the kingdom.