Page:On the economy of machinery and manufactures - Babbage - 1846.djvu/333

Rh peculiar skill in performing it ceased to derive any advantage from their dexterity.

(363.) It is somewhat singular that another and a still more remarkable instance of the effect of combination amongst workmen, should have occurred but a few years since in the very same trade. The process of welding the "skelps," so as to convert them into gun-barrels, required much skill, and after the termination of the war, the demand for muskets having greatly diminished, the number of persons employed in making them was very much reduced. This circumstance rendered combination more easy; and upon one occasion, when a contract had been entered into for a considerable supply to be delivered on a fixed day, the men all struck for such an advance of wages as would have caused the completion of the contract to be attended with a very heavy loss.

In this difficulty, the contractors resorted to a mode of welding the gun-barrel, for which a patent had been taken out by one of themselves some years before this event. The plan had not then succeeded so well as to come into general use, in consequence of the cheapness of the usual mode of welding by hand-labour, combined with some other difficulties with which the patentee had to contend. But the stimulus produced by the combination of the workmen, induced him to make new trials, and he was enabled to introduce such a facility in welding gun-barrels by rollers, and such perfection in the work itself, that, in all probability, very few will in future be welded by hand-labour.

This new process consisted in folding a bar of iron, about a foot long, into the form of a cylinder, with