CHAPTER V.
THE GREAT FACTORY.
Our lady friends may like to know how and where the “Singer” was made which has done such valued service in their homes, and as it is a most natural desire, we are glad to be able to gratify the same. We, therefore, cordially invite all who feel disposed to come along while we take a hurried, but, we hope, interesting glance at the various parts of this mammoth workshop.
[Illustration:
FORGING SHOP. ]
[Illustration:
CLOCK TOWER. ]
Leaving the City of New York by the New Jersey Central Railroad, we dash through a dozen pretty Jersey villages, cross Newark Bay upon a bridge which lacks but a few feet of being two miles long, rush past the walls of the great Singer Factory, and alight at the Elizabethport Station, just beyond. This is one of the seven railroad depots of the beautiful City of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Looking back down the track, we see a finely laid-out park, with well-kept walks, handsome shrubbery and trees, and a profusion of flowers, in the centre of which stands a large fountain. This is the private park of the Factory, and is by far the handsomest in the city. The Singer Company bought an entire block in front of the Factory, and transformed it into a park which they maintain at their own expense. Beyond “Singer Park” loom up the massive proportions of the Singer Factory, four floors high, the upper story having a massive Mansard roof. The building is built of brick, iron and slate, with iron beams and girders, and is proof against those conflagrations which so often destroy human life in large manufactories. The front is constructed of handsome pressed brick, and the structure is adorned with a tower in which a large clock shows the “hours as they fly” to all the neighborhood.
[Illustration:
SHIPPING SHEDS. ]
Passing through the light and handsome offices, we find ourselves in what at first sight appears to be another park, shut in on three sides by long lines of high buildings. This is, however, not designed for a park, but is nothing more than the superbly-kept Factory Yard, embracing ten or twelve acres. Asphalt walks run down and across, connecting the various buildings that skirt the yard with each other, and with the dock at its foot. Beside and between the walks, every square foot of ground in this immense yard has been seeded with grass, whose green and well-kept borders are here and there fringed with shrubs and flowers. The walks are neatly kept, and though over two thousand workmen tramp daily through the yard, we will not see a bit of dirt as big as a filbert anywhere.[1] Up and down run railroad tracks from the main gate to the dock, with branch tracks to each shop door. These tracks aggregate over five miles in length, and are in constant use in bringing coal, iron, and lumber from the Central Railroad track outside, or the dock at the foot of the yard, or carrying car loads of machines to one or the other outlet. For this purpose the Company owns a locomotive, the “I. M. Singer,” which puffs away busily at its work from morning till night. Here are long sheds, beneath which cars are being loaded with Singer machines for Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco. There are long trestles opposite the foundry doors, upon which coal cars, direct from Pennsylvania mines, are pushed by the “I. M. Singer,” and their contents deposited “where they will do the most good.” Iron, sand, and lumber cars are sent similarly to the exact spot where they are to be worked up, and so an immense cost of handling is saved. At the dock, which lies along Staten Island Sound nearly a thousand feet, the Company’s steamer “Edward Clark,” is taking on board a cargo of machines for New York City, or perhaps for some European steamship lying in New York Bay.
Footnote 1:
An amusing instance recently occurred in a Southern State of the use to which these grass plats could be put by persons whose tender consciences would not permit outright lying. A man interested in selling a cheap imitation “Singer,” sent a letter to a Southern paper, enclosing a spear of grass which, he said, he “had plucked in the yard of the Singer Factory,” as evidence that the Singer Company was falling into decay, and its great factory being overgrown with grass and weeds.
Taking it for granted that all women are methodical, we must ask our fair visitors to go with us to the foot of the yard, and begin studying the manufacture of sewing machines just where the manufacturer is obliged to begin making them—at the foundry.
[Illustration: [Furnace]]
[Illustration:
BRASS FURNACE. ]
Passing the great piles of pig-iron and the greater heaps of coal, we enter the foundries. Upon yonder high platform two men are throwing great lumps of coal into the blazing, roaring mouth of a fiery furnace; and presently they stop throwing in coal, and begin to pitch in heavy bars of pig-iron, while the furnace hisses aloud with its fervent heat till it reminds us of Nebuchadnezzar’s. At the foot of this furnace or “cupola” two or three men are catching the molten iron in a huge pot on wheels which, when full, is drawn to another part of the foundry, and there another lot of men surround it, their hand ladles are poured full, and away they hurry with their hot and heavy burden to fill the long rows of moulds which cover the floor. Four such cupolas are breathing out great blasts of fire at their tops, and running streams of fiery liquid iron at their bases. Three of them have a capacity for melting eight tons of iron each per hour, and the other converts six tons of pig-iron into liquid each hour. The morning hours are occupied by the moulders in making moulds in sand of the various parts to be cast; and for about two hours in the afternoon the cupolas send out their sparkling streams, and the men fill the moulds with molten iron. When sufficiently cooled, the moulds of sand are knocked to pieces and the iron taken out and thrown into piles about the floor, while the sand is shoveled up and moistened for another day’s moulding. Four hundred men are employed in this immense foundry, which melts up sixty-five tons of iron every day in the week. The ground floor of the foundry has an area of over _two acres_. Imagine a two-acre field filled every day with iron castings of Singer sewing machines!
And this is only a part of the iron work composing the machine. Much of the machine is composed of steel and wrought iron, which starts on its trip from the Forging Shop, instead of the Foundry. The portions cast in the foundry embrace the machine legs or “stands,” the “arm” and “bed,” the balance-wheel, band-wheel and a few minor parts. These parts, after cooling and being removed from the moulds, are taken to the Rumbling Room, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long, and put into revolving barrels filled with small five-pointed cast iron stars, which tumble about the barrels among the castings for hours together, and by the constant friction wear off all the sand and roughness.
The machine legs or stands then go to the Drilling Room, where the screw-holes are drilled out, and thence to the Japanning Room, where a set of grimy men, in half undress costume, souse them into a vat of liquid japan, after which they are put into great brick ovens, and left for several days for the japan to thoroughly bake and harden. This gives them a handsome, black, glossy finish and prevents rust. The other cast iron parts are similarly treated, except the “arm” and “bed;” these, after being firmly secured together, are japanned and scoured down; then japanned again, and again scoured down. A third japanning and scouring is then given and they go to the Ornamenting Room, of which we shall see something shortly. The wheels, and other parts which work against other portions of the machine, go before japanning to the Milling Department, an immense shop 1,250 feet long, upon two floors, and 50 feet wide, where they are put upon a lathe and shaved off with steel knives to the exactness of a hair.
Next above the Rumbling Room we come to the Forging Shop. Here numbers of great drop hammers are stamping out, at a single blow, the steel and wrought iron parts of the machines. These hammers weigh from three hundred to fifteen hundred pounds each. They are made with a “die” on their face, and the bed or anvil on which they drop has a corresponding die, so that a bar of hot iron held on the anvil is, by a single blow of the falling hammer, converted into a shuttle, a feed driver or a completely formed lever. Even the shuttle, which looks so much like a little boat, is made with a single blow of a huge drop hammer, which converts a square bar of iron in an instant of time into a perfectly formed shuttle. It is afterwards taken to another room, where another machine, with just one vigorous _push_, forces the shuttle through a sharp-edged aperture in a steel die, which trims off all unevenness and every bit of steel that may have projected beyond the edges of the die in the drop hammer. In another room the shuttle is drilled with holes for the thread; in another it is polished on an emery wheel, and in yet another is fitted with the little check spring, and then, after receiving the bobbin, it is ready for service in _your_ Singer machine. The Forging Shop is 423 feet long and 50 feet wide.
[Illustration:
STOCK ROOM. ]
Leaving the Milling Department, each article is passed to the Inspection Department for “Parts,” where every piece or “part” is examined and measured with an accurately made steel gauge, and only such as are found to be exact and true to the thousandth part of an inch, are permitted to go on to the Stock Room. The rejected parts (and such is the accuracy of the machinery that these are comparatively few) go again into the furnace to be made over from the beginning. It is largely owing to the impartial rigidity of these inspections that the Singer machine has become so famous for evenness of work and for immunity from the periodical “fits” of misbehaving which so often afflict machines of other makes.
And so the Singer Company makes no second grade articles, and puts nothing but the very best material and workmanship into any of its machines, finding, by practical experience, that it pays to put just as good parts into its cheapest as into the highest priced pearled and ornamented cabinet machine. Indeed, the only difference between the cheapest genuine Singer and the most costly machine is in the finish, decorations and cabinet work. All the working parts are exactly the same.
The carefully inspected parts, after passing muster, are sent to the General Stock Room, where long rows of cases, extending nearly to the high ceiling, receive each sort into its appropriate box or shelf. Thence they are distributed in due proportions to the Assembling Department when called for. The Stock Room is 50 feet wide and 180 feet long.
Our fair friends will remember that we left the machine heads and bed plates in the Japanning Room, being scoured down after japanning. We must go back to them in order to keep up the connection. After being carefully scoured, the heads are sent to the Ornamenting Department, where skillful workmen pencil out, with a fine camel’s hair brush, the designs of flowers and scroll work which ornament that portion of the machine which rests upon the table. The rapidity with which these pretty and often intricate designs are traced is wonderful. Look at your machine at home; observe all the gilded ornamentation and design, and then fancy a man doing such a machine head “offhand,” without the least guide for hand or brush, at the rate of 100 machines a day! As quickly as the penciling is done the machine is seized by another man, holding in his hand a book of gold leaf, which he deftly lays over every pencil-line. The gold leaf firmly adheres to the “sizing” laid on by the brush and the rest is rubbed off by a single touch of another man who passes a piece of soft cotton batting over it. The whole is then varnished with the best quality of white varnish and placed in a huge oven, where it bakes till it has become perfectly dry, hard and glossy. The Ornamenting Room is 125 feet long and 75 feet wide.
[Illustration:
ORNAMENTING THE MACHINE. ]
The larger parts of the machine having now been japanned and ornamented, are brought to the “Assembling Room,” and at the same time the small working parts are brought from the Stock Room, and here all these parts are “assembled,” or brought together, and each placed in its proper position within or upon the machine head. Each of these parts has been so nicely fitted, and so accurately worked by the machinery which made it, that when the numerous and varying pieces come together in the assembling process, it requires little and often no adjustment whatever, and each fits in the place made for it, resulting in a complete and harmonious whole. Connecting with this Department is the Adjusting Department, where long rows of machines on benches are being run by steam at a very high rate of speed. This is yet another of the many testing processes through which your family “Singer” has gone in order to insure the absolute perfection of its working parts. Up and down these long rows of humming machines, skillful and patient mechanics are passing, narrowly watching each machine to see if it runs smoothly and properly. If a wheel revolves unevenly here, or a “bearing” pinches or is too loose there, back goes the machine to have the deficiency remedied, after which it must again pass the same ordeal. The Assembling and Adjusting Departments are 50 feet wide, and occupy a length of 1,100 feet on two floors. The views in these rooms cannot be adequately described, and we therefore give our readers accurate full page representations of the same.
Next comes the Machine Inspection Department, 200 feet long and 50 feet wide. Here the machines are again inspected by competent artisans, and if perfect in every respect are passed over to long rows of girls, who put them through the further test of stitching, and see that they are capable of producing an absolutely perfect stitch. Over fifty girls are constantly employed in this particular work.
[Illustration:
“SETTING UP” THE MACHINES. ]
The next process is what is technically known as “setting up.” The Setting Up Department is 460 feet long and 60 feet wide, and here the stands and tables are put together and placed in long rows; the complete machine head is properly fastened in its place, the belts and treadle are adjusted, and the machine stands on its table ready for duty.
Only one more operation is necessary for transportation, and that is packing or crating the machine. This is all done in the Shipping Department, which is 230 feet long by 60 feet wide. The boxes and crates have already been completely made up in the Box Shop, and nothing remains but to put the machine into the box or crate, as the case may be, drive three or four nails, mark the package with a stencil plate for its proper destination, on New England’s shores, on the great prairies of the West, amid the savannas of the South, or, perhaps, across the seas, lower it upon the elevator to the great shed, where it is loaded upon the cars. If its route lies _via_ New York, it is placed upon a platform car, which the Company’s own locomotive, the “I. M. Singer,” draws to the dock to be shipped on board the Company’s boat, the “Edward Clark.”
A few parts of the machine require to be smoothly polished in order to secure the very best working capacity, and these are sent to the Polishing Room, which is a study of itself. Black wheels of all sizes are here revolving with great speed; some are rolling around on a horizontal axis, some are whizzing rapidly on a perpendicular axis, and from all of them the streams of fiery sparks are flying in unceasing currents, throwing the grimy room and the darkened forms of the busy workmen into a still darker background. This Department is 125 feet long and 50 feet wide.
[Illustration:
POLISHING ROOM. ]
Another room is devoted to the manufacture of the steel springs used in the machine. In another large department, 200 feet long, screws are being made by automatic machinery. In another room, 100 feet long, the tools are made and repaired, and here a large force of skilled workmen is constantly employed. In still another room, filled with electro baths, the silver plated attachments are covered with their silver coats.
The Button Hole Department is 150 feet long and 50 feet wide, and here the new Singer Button Hole Machine is put together. This is an intricate and wonderful piece of mechanism, by which an expert operator can make from 1,500 to 2,200 button holes a day, and sew the same thoroughly. This machine has but recently been introduced into general use, but has come rapidly into favor with manufacturers, especially tailors and makers of shoe uppers. It makes and works a complete button hole in either cloth or leather, and has come so extensively into favor that the Button Hole Department has outgrown its original quarters, and must be considerably enlarged. This, indeed, is true of almost every Department in the entire factory. When this great establishment was built, in 1873, it was thought a good week’s work to turn out 4,000 complete machines; but at this time its weekly product is upwards of 8,000 complete machines. Besides these, the Singer Company’s other factory at Glasgow, Scotland, is turning out between 4,000 and 5,000 complete machines each week, and yet the offices throughout the United States and Canada are complaining of the injury their business receives because they cannot get enough machines. The factory at the time of writing is largely behind its orders. Enlargements of various departments have been made from time to time, but the demand is yet far ahead of the capacity for production.
The Needle Department is one of the most interesting features of the entire establishment. Here a coil of steel wire of fine quality is put into a machine, which straightens, then grooves it on both sides above and below the spot where the eye of the needle should be, and cuts it to proper length. A girl then takes a handful of needles, and, feeding them into a machine, punches the needle eye at a single blow. Then they are ground down to a point; after which they are tempered, and then the inside of the needle eye is polished out to prevent its cutting the thread. The whole needle is finally polished, and nothing more then remains but counting the shining bits of steel and packing them away in boxes for the trade. The Needle Department gives employment to 100 men and 50 women.
Below the main building is a three-story brick building 200 feet long, in which the cabinet work is partly done. The Company has a large factory at South Bend, Indiana, where most of the black walnut tables, covers, and cabinet cases are made. Portions of these are sent to Elizabethport in a partly finished condition, and all such receive their finishing in this shop.
Still below is another similar building, the “Box Shop,” where some sixty men are employed in making the packing boxes and crates in which the machines are shipped from the factory. The Box Shop cuts up for this purpose no less than 300,000 feet of pine and spruce lumber every month.
To run this immense establishment, six stationary steam engines are required, which have a combined strength of one thousand horse power. It takes twenty-two boilers, averaging seventy-five horse power each, to furnish the steam for running these engines and heating the buildings. The floors of the buildings have a combined area equal to _thirteen acres_ of ground; and every square foot of the entire area is in constant use. The whole premises, including the fine dockage, covers no less than thirty-two acres of ground.
Such, in brief, is the factory where your Singer machine was made, dear reader. It is believed to be the most complete, systematic, and best-equipped in the world. It is believed to be the largest establishment in the world devoted to the manufacture of a single article. It gives employment to over 2,300 men and women, and when it “shuts down” to take the annual account of stock, it takes 200 men to do it; and this they call “shutting up the factory!” The men are paid off every _Monday_, instead of every Saturday, and thus in more than one family the wife and children have had cause to bless the kind forethought which removed temptation from the path of some easily persuaded man, and saved him and his week’s earnings to themselves.
[Illustration: [Pouring Molds]]
The Singer operatives are among the most thrifty of mechanics. In every case of injury to any of its employés, the Company has dealt with great generosity, and many are the households from which much of the black shadow caused by sickness has been chased by the substantial aid it has afforded. Nor do the hands leave this work alone to their employers. Hardly a man is stricken by disease among their ranks but his comrades interest themselves in his case; and if pecuniary aid is required, the subscription list goes around till every want is supplied at the sick man’s home.
These kindly offices are not confined even to these ample limits. When the ghastly Yellow Fever Spectre was carrying dismay and death throughout the Southern States, the employés of this great factory made up, in less than four days, the splendid sum of $4,100, and sent it out on its errand of mercy to men whom they had never seen nor known.
The factory hands have organized among themselves several very creditable associations. One is a fine Rifle Team, to which the Company contributed a handsome badge for an annual prize; another is a Brass Band of excellent reputation, besides several Ball Clubs having very good records.