Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/521

Rh fastened the soles to the uppers by nails, and, in order to do this, the leather was pressed between clamping plates of the same shape as the sole, the margin of the plate acting as a guide for a knife by which the sole was cut to the desired pattern. This sole was afterward clamped to a last, and there brought under the action of an awl and plunger operated by a lever. The sole-fastenings, usually nails, had to be placed in these awl-holes by hand, and were then driven in by the plunger, the awl at the same time making another hole for the next nail. Devices were also made for spacing the holes and clinching the nails on the inside of the shoe; but the shoes thus made proved unsatisfactory, the nails in them working loose.

In the actual solution of this problem two courses were pursued, the extension of the principle involved in the Randolph and Brunei devices and the application of the principle of the sewing machine. From the development of the one have come the pegged, nailed, and screwed boot and shoe; from the other, the stitched ones. In point of order the pegging machine came before the solesewing machine, standing as the invention of A. C. Gallahue, and under the date of 1851. Its operations were essentially the same as those of the cobbler who pierces the hole through the sole of the boot before him with his awl, and then, taking a peg from the generous store with which he has previously filled his mouth, drives it home with his hammer. Joseph Walker, of Hopkinton, Mass., had invented the shoe-peg about 1818, and it had commended itself to the craft at once. Machines were made for the manufacture of the pegs, and so thrifty were some of those engaged in their production that it is said they were sold in certain sections of the country not only as shoe-pegs but as a new kind of oats. Gallahue's machine included a cylinder on which were wound, like the spring of a watch, ribbons of birch of the same width as the length of the peg and sharpened on one edge. These were fed to the machine which, with knife, awl, and plunger, split the strips into widths of a peg, made a hole in the sole, and drove the peg into the shoe jacked beneath. Gallahue's invention was perfected by Messrs. E. Townsend and B. F. Sturtevant, of Boston. This idea has been still further developed in machines for riveting the two parts of the shoe together, the nails being clinched by coming in contact with an iron last, in a way suggestive of Brunei's method, and in machines for screwing them together. The screw machine, which came into use about 1875, is provided with a reel of stout screw-threaded brass wire, and this by the revolution of the reel is inserted into and screwed through the out-sole, upper edge, and in-sole. Within the upper a head presses against the in-sole directly opposite the point of the screw, and, when screw and head touch, the wire is cut level with the out-sole.