Page:On the economy of machinery and manufactures - Babbage - 1846.djvu/184

150 injured, it can either be re-silvered or used as plate-glass for glazing windows. The addition from our manufactories to the stock of plate-glass in the country is annually about two hundred and fifty thousand square feet. It would be very difficult to estimate the quantity annually destroyed or exported, but it is probably small; and the effect of these continual additions is seen in the diminished price and increased consumption of the article. Almost all the better order of shop fronts are now glazed with it. If it were quite indestructible, the price would continually diminish; and unless an increased demand arose from new uses, or from a greater number of customers, a single manufactory, unchecked by competition, would ultimately be compelled to shut up, driven out of the market by the permanence of its own productions.

(200.) The metals are in some degree permanent, although several of them are employed in such forms that they are ultimately lost.

Copper is a metal of which a great proportion returns to use: a part of that employed in sheathing ships and covering houses is lost from corrosion; but the rest is generally re-melted. Some is lost in small brass articles, and some is consumed in the formation of salts, Roman vitriol (sulphate of copper), verdigris (acetate of copper), and verditer.

Gold is wasted in gilding and in embroidering, but a portion of this is recovered by burning the old articles. Some portion is lost by the wear of gold, but, upon the whole, it possesses considerable permanence.

Iron.A proportion of this metal is wasted by