To digress a moment, I will observe, that, when I first saw these ingenious contrivances to escape the washerwoman's bill, as well as the cuffs made by the same process for ladies' use, they both struck me so favorably, while their cheapness was so surprising, that my curiosity was inflamed to see and know how they were made. In company with my sister, I visited the manufactory. It was in a large building, and employed many hands, who operated with machinery that exceeds my ability to describe. They took a whole piece of thin, cheap muslin, to each side of which they pasted a covering of the finest white paper by passing the three layers between iron rollers. The paper and muslin were in rolls many hundred feet long. The beautiful product of this union was then parted into strips of the proper width and dried, then passed through hot metal rollers, combining friction with pressure, whence it was delivered with a smooth, glossy, enamelled surface. The material for many thousand collars was thus enamelled in five minutes. It was then cut by knives into the different shapes and sizes required, and so rapidly that a man and boy could make more than ten thousand in an hour. Every collar was then put through a machine which printed upon it imitation stitches, so exactly resembling the best work of a sewing-machine as to induce the belief that the collar was actually stitched. Two girls were working or attending two of these machines, and the two produced nearly a hundred collars per minute, or about sixty thousand daily. The button-holes were next punched with even greater rapidity, then the collar was turned over so nicely that no break occurred in the material. Then they were counted and put in boxes, and were ready for market.
Besides these shirt-collars, there was a great variety of ladies' worked cuffs and collars, adapted to every taste, and imitating the finest linen with the nicest exactness, but all made of paper. Some hundreds of thousands of these were piled up around, ready for counting and packing, sufficient, it appeared to me, to supply our whole population for a twelvemonth. They were sold so cheaply, also, that it cost no more to buy a new collar than to wash an old one. Like friction-matches, they were used only once and then thrown away; hence, the consumption being perpetual, the production was continuous the year round.