[Illustration: The Manganese Bronze Propeller-Blade of the Wrecked Steamer Mosel, after it had beaten upon a reef.]
There is a special department for the casting of manganese bronze, which is used for the blades of propellers. Standing against a wall not far off is a blade saved from the propeller of the wrecked steamer Mosel. She ran ashore on a rocky coast, and her propeller played upon the reef like a flail upon a threshing-floor without break or fracture; so great is the strength of the bronze that the only effect upon it was a feathering of the edges as revealed by the blade in question.
Then we see the engineering, forge, and pattern shops. Forgings of steel are made which weigh as much as thirty tons, as in the case of the crank-shafts of the new North German Lloyd steamers. A shafting of that weight is lifted as easily, and with as little commotion, as a bar of angle iron, and placed on a table to be finished. All the tools are of enormous size, and nearly all of them are adaptations of the well-known turning-lathe. Either the tool turns or the work turns. A steamer’s cylinders are bored out with a bar, the bar moving. In turning a thrust-shaft the shaft moves, not the tool. In facing a condenser the tool moves, not the condenser. Cutting, planing, and turning are all accomplished by modifications of the lathe. There are in all nearly forty lathes, vertical, horizontal, and oblique, each gnawing at some vital part of a ship, and there—there is the “devil.” This is the name given by the workmen to an immense metallic disk, over sixteen feet in diameter, which bores through solid steel at the rate of two and a quarter inches in four minutes. The workmen fill what standing room there is between propeller blades, cylinder liners, piston-valves, and sole-plates; they swarm like ants, each gang carrying on its specified work with diligence and singleness of purpose.
Let the reader figure to himself the gleaming tools, the whirring machinery for the distribution of power, the begrimed toilers, the ponderous masses of iron and steel—now swinging in mid-air, then clutched to the breast of an excoriating monster like the “devil;” let his eye rest on those forty lathes all busy at once, eating with unwearying jaws into the metal fed them, and on the plane which shaves an armor-plate as if it were a deal board; then let him fill his ears with the groaning, creaking, hissing, grinding, shrieking of all this activity, and add to it the battle-like din of the boiler-makers. Thus he may know what Fairfield is like.