USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 45
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In July, 1866, he was commissioned colonel in the regular army, and given command of the 40th U. S. Infantry. He was made brigadier-general in 1880, major-general in 1890, and lieutenant-general, by act of Congress, in 1900, and again lieutenant-general in 1901, under the law reorganizing the army. He was retired August 8, 1903.
General Miles' military career was a brilliant one. His promotion to brigadier-general in 1867 was "for gallant and meritorious services at Chan- cellorsville" where he was severely wounded, and the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him in 1892 was for "distinguished gallantry" in that battle. His brevet of major-general in 1864 was for "highly meritorious and dis- tinguished conduct throughout the campaign and particularly for gallantry and valuable services at the battle of Reams Station, Virginia." When he was twenty-five years old he commanded in the field an army corps of 26,000 men.
Following the Civil War, General Miles conducted several campaigns against hostile Indians, notably the Sioux under Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph, and the Apaches under Geronimo and Natchez, whose surrender he forced, thus bringing to a close hostilities with the Indian tribes.
General Miles represented the United States at the seat of the Turco- Grecian War, and at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. He was senior officer of the United States Army from 1895 to 1903, and as such commanded the army in the Spanish-American War. He led the expedition which invaded Porto Rico and took possession after a bloodless campaign. He declined service with the Cuban expedition, believing it was inadequately organized to conduct a tropic campaign at mid-summer, which proved to be the case and cost the country hundreds of lives.
After his retirement in 1903 General Miles made Westminster, his birth- place, his summer home. In 1905 he commanded the Massachusetts Militia.
He was the author of "Personal Recollections; or from New England to the Golden Gate" (1896) ; "Military Europe" (1898) ; "Observations Abroad; or Report of Major General Nelson A. Miles, commanding U. S. Army, of His Tour of Observation in Europe" (1899); and "Serving the Republic" (1911). General Miles received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard University in 1896, from Brown University in 1901, and from Colgate University in 1910.
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Charles H. Morgan, 1831-1911-Victor E. Edwards, 1862-1931- (The Morgan Continuous Billet Mill and the Edwards Flying Shear, Simul- taneous, Complemental Inventions, Revolutionized the Steel Industry Over night. )-Two Worcester men, the late Charles H. Morgan, founder and head of the then infant Morgan Construction Company, and the late Victor E. Edwards, his young engineer, afterwards a director, vice-president and chief engineer of the company, are given full credit for revolutionizing the steel industry by epoch-making inventions. Mr. Morgan, veteran mechanical engineer and inventor, for many years superintendent of the works of the Washburn & Moen Manufacturing Company, now the American Steel & Wire Company, produced the mill which first rolled steel billets continuously, which had been thought an impossibility.
Victor Edwards accomplished the more spectacular invention, a shear which would cut off to desired lengths the speeding hot billet as it emerged from the final pass through the train of rolls. Without it the continuous mill would have been impotent, for in no other way could the finished billet be handled. The two inventions were perfect complements to one another. The story of why and how they originated is an industrial epic.
In 1892 Charles Briggs of the Jones & Laughlin Company, Pittsburgh, went to Mr. Morgan, saying he had seen a Morgan continuous rod mill, and felt that the same continuous principle could be applied to roughing mills in general. If so, he said, it would obviously be a development which would give to steel plants a machine so efficient and so saving of hard manual labor under fierce heat conditions, as to be not only a great mechanical contribution to the art of rolling, but would rise even higher as a boon to mankind.
As a result of their meeting, Mr. Morgan went to Pittsburgh, and returned to Worcester carrying in his pocket a contract with the Jones & Laughlin Company, which called for the design of what appeared to be, in the light of previous development in the industry, a mechanical impossibility and a mechanical miracle. The impossible was that the proposed mill should do what no mill had ever done before, roll steel or copper billets continuously. The miracle was that an 800-foot straight billet should be rolled on the plot of land designated, a three cornered bit which was 150 feet on its longest side. There could be no coiling of this elongated mass of hot steel. Therefore it must be sheared into short lengths as it emerged from the finishing pass through the rolls. No known shear could operate under such conditions, for the billet could not pause to receive the cutting stroke. The solution of this problem must be a great basic invention.
The contract showed Mr. Morgan's superb enterprise and courage, and his faith in his brilliant young engineer, not yet thirty years old, who had
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taken his degree as mechanical engineer from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute only nine years before, and had but recently joined the Morgan Construction Company's staff.
Mr. Morgan had already designed and built two continuous rod mills for the Washburn & Moen plant. But rods, the raw material from which wire is drawn, are of small diameter. They are rolled from billets, and are handled by coiling on reels. To make the subject clearer, it may be well to explain that the first step in this branch of steel-making is pouring the molten metal from the furnace into moulds to form massive ingots. These are rolled down to thick blooms, in a special mill, and the next process is the reduction of the blooms to billets.
Up to this time, billets had always been rolled in short lengths, passed back and forth through a single stand of rolls having grooves of diminishing size. The handling of this white-hot steel was done by men, a terribly danger- ous task. As the billet emerged from the rolls it was seized with tongs, and its end introduced into the next smaller groove. Maimings and killings were commonplaces. Damages for such injuries mounted to such a figure that they were entered as a factor of overhead cost. Therefore if the continuous process could be applied to rolling billets, and means provided to handle the output mechanically instead of by human hands, the humanitarian element of achievement would be enormous.
Mr. Morgan, in designing the new mill, established a principle, by passing the steel through a series of horizontal rolls, and, which was the essence of the invention, giving the billet a quarter turn between each succeeding pair. Every continuous rolling mill in use today embraces the Morgan principle.
To Victor Edwards was entrusted the problem of the shear. The result was a great invention, the first of a long series, many of which marked impor- tant steps of rolling mill practice. Before it had been given even one bite of a billet it was dubbed in derision "the Flying Shear." And so it has always been known through the years, even to this day, but the name is now spoken in respectful admiration. From the very beginning its massive mechanism was as exact in its automatic action as that of the little machine which pro- duces such trifles as safety pins and hooks and eyes.
The mill and shear were promptly built and installed. Then things began to lag. As Major Edwards told the story years later, everybody in Pittsburgh seemed to lose interest and the Jones & Laughlin people, having sunk so much in a venture which had come to appear dubious, seemed unwilling to spend the additional money necessary for installing the equipment required for getting the steel to and from the mill.
The mill superintendent said it was all foolishness. He said he could roll small billets better on his old 28-inch blooming mill. He attempted it and
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failed, but his failure only served to convince him and his associates that the new mill and shear would be a still more disastrous failure. Even if the con- tinuous mill did work, the shear would not, they said, and therefore in the cramped location the entire equipment would be valueless for anything but junk. The poor shear was the butt of many a jest. In derision somebody called it a "Flying Shear" and the name stuck.
The steel company's chief engineer lost faith and even hope in that foolish Flying Shear. The Morgan Company's erector felt the same way. The new mill and shear had lost all its friends. Why, they asked in Pittsburgh, should Jones & Laughlin continue to sink money in such a crazy scheme?
Their general superintendent finally sent for Edwards and said: "Mr. Edwards, up to now you have been very successful in not making any definite promises. Now I want you to make definite promises as to what this mill and shear will do." His words were gentle, but his tone and eye clearly indicated a rapidly approaching crisis. He had to have a clear-cut answer, and he got it.
Said Edwards: "You well know that the mill, the shear and also the mill crew are all new and wholly undemonstrated. It is, therefore, difficult to guar- antee much, but as you must have definite promises, I will make you two. First, for the reasons just stated, you may experience considerable difficulty in starting the mill. The second promise is much more definite. If you and your assistants have not faith in the mill and the shear, the entire equipment will land in the scrap heap."
That brought action. The absurdity of condemning a costly equipment without adequate trial was too apparent. The atmosphere changed. The missing equipment was installed. The mill was tried. It refused to take the first piece. The rolls would not "bite." One can imagine the ill-concealed triumph of the group of Doubting Thomases. But the first pair of rolls was then "ragged," that is to say, slightly roughened, and a second bloom was delivered to the mill. That was all there was to it. The mill and shear worked perfectly. The revolution of the steel industry had begun.
The mill and shear continued to work with little or no trouble, night and day, for sixteen years. Then the once ridiculed Flying Shear was pulled out because the company wished to double the speed of the once-doubted mill, and a later type Edwards flying-shear was installed. And this did its work until, some years later, Jones & Laughlin decided that the old Morgan mill could do three times its original work, and so a third flying-shear was put in. Morgan and Edwards knew what they were about when more than forty years ago they revolutionized in a few weeks the rolling of steel billets, and
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paved the way for the application of the same principles of mill and shear to the rolling of many other classes of steel.
Mr. Edwards' problem was an exceedingly difficult one. But weary days and nights finally resulted in the invention of a type of shear where the cut- ting stroke was merely incidental to the forward stroke or travel of the shear with the billet, and where the upper knife was hinged to permit the billet to continue freely on its way while the shear was slowing down, stopping and returning to its starting point. The first flying-shear was operated by hydraulic power, but steam was substituted in all succeeding models. One rea- son for this was that the hydraulic shear shot up a fountain of water with each stroke. But the principle remained the same. To be briefly technical, quoting the inventor :
"All the hinged type after the first were operated by a direct connected steam cylinder having a large piston rod. Full boiler pressure is always main- tained on the upper or piston-rod end. Full pressure is maintained on the head end when the shear is at rest. This keeps both ends of the piston hot and gives instantaneous response when the exhaust valve is opened on the head end."
Such is the manner in which the young inventor solved the perplexing problem of overcoming instantly the inertia of a huge weight of metal that must move at high speed. In the original model, hundreds of pounds of steel swung backward and forward many times a minute. In the big shear of recent design the moving parts weigh close to ten tons and make fifty strokes per minute, swinging forward and back, a complete cycle in just over one second, and, while moving, the shear bites off a billet five inches square or a slab having a section 30 inches wide by one inch thick.
The control of the shear is electrical. In one of the pictures, a general view of a mill, the control box is shown at the left. Through it runs a long screw for moving the box back and forth to take position for any required length of cut. Hanging from it is a panel called the "flag." When the end of the oncoming billet strikes the "flag" an electrical circuit sets the shear in motion.
Different uses demanded different types, so that this field of invention alone was a broad one. There are flying shears for cutting rods and billets, barrel hoop and cotton ties, skelp, which is the thin flat stock from which pipes are rolled, sheet bar and other shapes, and variations in each of these. He also made important inventions on cooling beds which dispose of the cut off billets or other forms of rolled steel after they have been sheared; and the automatic reels for taking the output of rod mills and other mills whose product is coiled. More than 100 patents were issued to Major Edwards in the United States and foreign countries. The economic value of these chil-
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dren of his brain is beyond conception. The number of accidents to work- men which his inventions have prevented must total a huge figure.
Dr. William T. G. Morton, Discoverer of Anaesthesia, 1819-1868- Dr. William Thompson Green Morton, native of Charlton, discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic, causing insensibility to pain, entered the Baltimore Dental College in 1840, and two years later started the practice of dentistry in Boston. Later he pursued his studies in medicine and surgery at the Har- vard Medical School, but did not take his degree. But Washington College bestowed upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1852, in recognition of his epoch-marking discovery, which revolutionized surgical practice.
He was attracted to research, and concentrated on the problem of anaes- thesia. He experimented in many ways on dogs, and finally hit upon sul- phuric ether as a probable solution of the problem. Chance helped him. One day a bottle of ether slipped from his hand and broke, and he sopped up some of the liquid on a piece of linen and held it to the nostrils of his dog. The animal promptly lost consciousness. His experiments covered a long time. He swept the Boston docks for human subjects, who were willing to submit to etherization for pay. He extracted teeth without inflicting conscious suf- fering. Finally he obtained permission of the chief surgeon of the Massa- chusetts General Hospital to give a demonstration in the operating room.
The patient, Gilbert Abbott, was suffering from a tumor of the jaw which was to be removed. The surgeons present had no confidence in the efficacy of the Morton method. They had seen other drugs applied-brandy, opium, laudanum-all without adequate results. Even hypnotism had been tried. But there was no escape from the agony, and from the groans and screams of the tortured patients, strapped and held down by brute force. There was never surprise when man or woman died under the shock of agony.
So the patient Abbott was strapped down according to custom, and Dr. Morton proceeded to etherize him. He lost consciousness. The operation proceeded, one which should have produced awful pain. The patient did not notice it. There were no screams and shrieks. The operation ended, the senior surgeon turned to his associates and voiced the opinion of the civilized world, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug." From that day to this, the operating room has never again been a torture chamber.
Dr. Morton was wont to say in after life that he was the only person in the world to whom the discovery of ether was a pecuniary loss. Immediately following the announcement to the world, Dr. Jackson, in whose laboratory Morton had carried on his research, demanded his share of all financial profit.
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Repeated attempts to have the discovery patented met with failure. The con- troversy raged fiercely. A wag of the day proposed that the two doctors fight it out with ether bottles, he who last lost consciousness to be declared the winner. The discoverer, whose contribution to mankind was one of the greatest of all time, was destined never to profit. The Massachusetts General awarded him $1,000. He received a few hundred dollars from other sources. Time and again Congress was within an ace of voting him $100,000 but some- thing always intervened. But millions of people have blessed his name for what he did for them or theirs.
On Dr. Morton's gravestone is this epitaph :
Inventor and revealer of anaesthetic inhalation, Before whom in all time surgery was agony, By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled, Since whom science has control of pain.
Each year, on October 16, commemorative services are held at the Massa- chusetts General Hospital. And the name of William T. C. Morton is inscribed in the American Hall of Fame.
Charles H. Norton, Inventor of the Precision High Production Grind- ing Machine which made Possible Mass Production of Automobiles and Many Other Essentials of Modern Life, 1851-Charles Hotchkiss Norton was born in Plainville, Connecticut, and spent the first twenty years of his business life from young boyhood as mechanic and superintendent in the employ of the Seth Thomas Clock Company. He began to give special atten- tion to grinding machines in 1886 when he entered the employ of the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company as inventor and designer. In that plant he acquired his knowledge of the grinding machines of the time and con- ceived the idea that greater accuracy in grinding could be obtained from a much heavier and more expensive machine by methods that were then con- sidered revolutionary in character. It was his firm belief that the cost of the machine should be measured only on the basis of the ultimate result in improved work, increased production and consequent lower cost.
When Charles H. Norton joined the Norton Company in 1900, precision grinding as a production method for making accurate, economical, cylindrical and flat surfaces required in all kinds of machinery was unknown. The grinding machine was then a light, small-powered tool designed to polish the surface of the work and in some cases to produce at great cost accurate sizing to a limit of a hundredth of an inch. Today the grinding machine is a metal cutting production tool commercially producing cylindrical work ground to precision to a quarter of a thousandth of an inch, at less cost than lathe work alone was then costing. Modern machine production owes its rapid develop-
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ment as much to the development of rapid grinding as to the invention of high speed steel which revolutionized the art of turning.
The Norton Company and Mr. Norton decided to experiment in the man- ufacture of a heavier machine and in that year the first Norton machine was built- capable of removing one cubic inch of metal per minute, with greater accuracy than had previously been attained. This machine demonstrated the soundness of Mr. Norton's theory that economy would result if heavy cuts were made with the lathe and the grinding machine used for the final reduc- tion and finishing of the surface. It was Mr. Norton's idea to make the grinding wheel more than a polishing tool. It was also to be a cutting tool for cutting off stock as well as for finishing it, thus eliminating the finishing cut of the lathe.
"Put a greater investment in the machine," said Mr. Norton, "utilize more power during a shorter period of time, get greater production and reduce labor costs."
The methods then employed were to advance the work in front of a small grinding wheel a hundredth to one-sixteenth inch per revolution of the work. Mr. Norton planned to use a heavy wheel mounted on a heavy anvil cross slide, to hold the work firmly on a specially constructed table properly sup- ported by steady rests, and to apply power enough to make the grinding wheel a stock-cutting-off tool instead of a polishing or finishing tool. The fastest table speed up to that time was 5' per minute. Mr. Norton doubled it and speed has been gradually increased until table traverse on Norton machines is now in many instances 35' per minute. These Norton ideas were so revolutionary that they were not fully accepted even after they were proved to be sound. As early as 1900 when a half-inch wheel face was con- sidered a wide wheel, Mr. Norton advocated and started using a two-inch wheel face. The Norton machines are now successfully grinding with wheels as wide as sixteen-inch face.
Thus it will be seen that Mr. Norton not only invented an entirely new machine but an entirely new method of grinding, and brought about an entirely new conception of the place of grinding in the machine tool industry. By early methods the average amount of metal removed by the grinding wheel was about one-sixteenth of a cubic inch per minute. The first Norton machine removed one cubic inch and since then machines for removing two, three, four, six and in rare cases twelve cubic inches of metal per minute have been attained. When roughing, and frequently when removing as much as three or four cubic inches per minute, the grinding process of today leaves the work sufficiently accurate and well finished without further refining cuts. While formerly a method of securing refinement at great expense, grinding is now one of the most economical methods of production, as instanced in the
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grinding of automobile crankshafts direct from the forging without prelim- inary turning.
Mr. Norton's inventions include the shape of the table, the mounting of the head-and footstocks, the new and unusual mounting of the wheel slide and feed screw, the construction of the wheel slide without an adjustable gib, the micrometer cross feed for the wheel slide, and the arc of a circle steady- rest. The line of Norton grinding machines started in 1900 has been increased until it now includes machines for a variety of grinding operations, totaling approximately 100 sizes of the several types, including types for grinding crank-pins, crankshafts, camshafts, car wheels, car axles, rolls and locomotive piston rods, as well as universal multi-purpose grinding machines, surface grinding machines and running balance indicating machines. These machines are employed throughout the world in shops where precision grind- ing and rapid production are desired.
The grinding machine now occupies a position of importance in the metal- working world beyond the conception of practically everyone not directly associated with it. It is one of the big factors of low cost and high rate of production of machine tools, automobiles, locomotives, wood-working machinery, armament, printing presses, linotype and monotype machines, sew- ing machines, cash registers, adding machines and typewriters, agricultural machines and of many other kinds of machinery. There is hardly one of the many close-fitting parts of the motor vehicle that is not ground and each of them is a more accurate piece because of grinding, bringing the assembled machine much nearer perfection and at a much lower cost than would be possible by any other method.
Whereas a grinding machine engaged in regular production work was almost unknown in a shop even fifteen or eighteen years ago, today the magnitude of the grinding departments in the large automobile plants, with their batteries of grinding machines of almost every type, is sufficient evi- dence that modern grinding is a large factor in quality, fast production and low manufacturing expense, and that Mr. Norton by his pioneer inventions in this important art has indeed earned a place among "the most deserving," as was indicated when the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia awarded him the John Scott Medal.
Samuel Slater, Founder of American Cotton Industry, 1768-1835- Samuel Slater, founder of the famous Slater Mills at Webster, was the father of the cotton spinning industry in America and built the first woolen mill. As a boy in England he was apprenticed to Strutt, associate of the great Richard Arkwright, and mastered the Arkwright inventions which revolu- tionized cotton spinning and made possible the rapid establishment of the
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