The gloves of ladies and gentlemen in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and before and after, were most beautiful in hand workmanship and embellishments, but they were usually shapeless things, and in these days no one would wear them; they are not to be compared with the elegant style and artistic finish of the modern product.
When the social world was restricted, so to speak, in the numbers of its members who could afford some of life’s luxuries, the use of the glove was confined largely to royalty, nobility, and the well-to-do. And the trade not being extensive, prices were high--being added to by decorative elaboration in needlework in order that the manufacturer and his employees might extract as much money as possible from the ultimate buyer. While glove making is now one of the stabilities of modern manufacture, it is, nevertheless, constantly changing in styles, due to eagerness for novelties and new fashions.
Glove making of leather, in a rough, crude form, was carried on in this country to a very limited extent in New York State as early as 1760, by glove makers brought from Scotland to settle on the grants of Sir William Johnson, in Fulton county. But there was no general market for the home product until one was found in Albany in 1825. These early gloves, crude and clumsy, were cut with shears from leather by means of pasteboard patterns, and men did the cutting and women the sewing. Dies were later introduced, and this led to a great improvement in the character of the output.
But a still greater step forward was taken when the sewing machine was introduced in 1852. This abolished handwork entirely, but still the industry remained largely of a domestic nature, since it could be carried on at home with a machine as well as in a factory. Later steam power was installed in factories with which to run the machines. The cutting of gloves, and the stitching on the backs, was done before the gloves were sent out to be completed in workers’ homes.
As in everything wherein power can be substituted for hand labor in these days, the methods of glove manufacture have undergone a great transformation. The treating of skins in a great tub, three feet deep, whole dyeing and scouring, in rooms of high temperature, has been displaced by putting skins and colors into a cube-shaped box, which, revolving with an irregular motion, produces the same results more quickly than by the primitive way. But when color is to be applied to but one side the process is the same as of old,--hand use of a brush while the skin is stretched out on a slab.