Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 65, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1917 — SHELLMAKING AS SEEN BY NOTED BRITISH AUTHOR [ARTICLE]

SHELLMAKING AS SEEN BY NOTED BRITISH AUTHOR

Arnold Bennett Describes Visit to One of Many Projectile Factories in Britain. WOMEN WORKING WITH MEN Bix-lnch and Nine-Inch Death Dealers Are the Product—Present Output Is Monument to Brains and Energy of Country. London. —Here is an article written by Arnold Bennett, with the approval of the ministry of munitions, with the object of inspiring the British public to still greater Exertions in the manufacture of munitionsof war. The article, entitled, “N. P. F.: A Working Example of the New Phenomena,” follows : By ARNOLD BENNETT. You see these letters on the doormat of the office. They standforNatiomfl Projectile Factory. I know not how many N. P. F.’s there are In Britain. Perhaps Mr. Montagu, the minister of munitions, knows. This particular factory Is a very large one. -It has over Ji acres beneath a single roof. A farmer can visualize a ten-acre field, but to the man in the industrial street an acre is a mere tend. Imagine an area of one mile long by a hundred feet broad. That is roughly the area of the factory, though naturally its shape is much hearer a square. Over 5,000 “hands” (the more spiritual Russians would say “souls”) are employed there, and of these very considerably over half are women, of whom a large part are young or youngish and attractive, and husbands in the army. Now, you can observe a N. P. F. in various aspects. There is the human aspect of its picturesque adjuncts. For instance, the canteen (under its own separate roof, with a prodigious veranda for the al fresco), -surpassing town-halls hi size and supplying afl diverse cooking and eating accommodations which young women who know on which side their bread ought —to be buttered require. There are the women’s dressing rooms and lavatories. —I never saw before and do not hope to see again so many white falenge basins with hot and cold, water, rows and rows~Tnicirfows, and "scores. In a r<Av. There is thh iihibiilance station with every device, and a nurse always waiting in the secret expectation of a “major” case and rarely getting anything better than a scratch or a cut. , There are the women in the roof controlling the overhead traveling electric cranes that command every foot of the floor space. Each Ijps a rope to slide down by in an emergency, and for practice sake she Is obliged to slide down that rope at least once a week., There are the other women who drive . the electric carriages on the floor itself—miles of line —sitting in a sort of easy chair and tickling levers. (Sixinch and nine-inch shells are not to be lightly thrown about. The latter, weigh mo re than a man, and it takes either electricity or two men to shift per eent of the shifting). There are still other women in pegtop trousers. These last piquant creatures, start witli two minute points near the ground and very often finish near the top with an elaborate white, lacy corsage or a Honing, glowing scarf. The phenomenon looks queer in a factory. It ought not to look queer. It ought to be far more prevaTenL —I liked Io see a girl checker delicately rolling a nirte-inch shell over with her fashionable glace-kid boat that peeped out beneath the yellow overall. These tilings, happily, will peep out. So will the vase of flowers and the strange personal belongings in the wire cage cupboard of which each machinist, has one near her machine. There are the long queues of women in variegated street attire at the pay desks. VW from 6501-7020” is one of the signs.) There are the war savings desks—astutely placed next to the pay desks. “War Savings Certificates. They are subscribed today in THE section. Are YOU subscribing?” Well, as a rule, die was. . The Manufacturing Aspect. So I might continue with the human picturesque aspect, but I must turn to. the manufacturing aspect; for, after all, this fast‘rumbling maze of wheels and women and men exists for shells. And, like the men, all these women,’ however nice and happy, are consciously engaged in the preparation of the means of and slaughter. Steam is at the bottom of this affair T-a row of boilers and furpaces. "Step inside the power house and, behold, the steam -has been translated into electricity —three units of 750 kilowatts each and three more of 450 kilowatts each. A little further, and much of the power has become hydraulic. You can see the huge hydraulic accumulators rising and falling according as the creation of power here overtakes .or is overtaken by the dissipation of power in the factory. / Having grasped this, you may enter the factory. You there discover an ordinary railway wagon behind 4 row of forges*- The wagon is full of steel Ingots which have made a long journey, They are craned out—they

weigh three and one-half hundredweight put into the forges, and when they are white hot they are dropped into a hydraulic machine which both pierces and shapes them and from which they emerge, after a pressure, of 750 tons, in the shape of nine-inch shells. That is the first operation out of more than a score of quite separate operations. Then the rough carcass is ’“centered,” its nose is bored, its cavity is bored, and the scrdw-thread is milled hr the cavity, the beautiful “sink-and-wave” channels are cut in to go, the base plug is fitted (and no mortal power could unscrew that base plug once It is screwed in), the inside is polished and varnished and the varnish dried, the base is “faced.” ■Then comes the copper-band business, which resembles in its finish the jeweler’s craft. The copper band is jammed on by incredible main force, but after it is bh It is treated with the most astounding finesse, and the shell leaves that series of operations gleaming with its cut and carved bangle. You see it next in the painting room, where everything and everybody is of a yellowish-brown color and where there is not such a thing as a brush except the floor sweeper. The paint is sprayed on to the shells as they hang in rows and thus the painting is accomplished with an evenness, a precision, and a’celerity which would fatally shock house-painters, A few yards further, and the shells are dried in gas-heated cupboards and out of these cupboards they are wafted into an ordinary railway wagon and they disappear from the factory forever. They are not yet truly shells. They are only shell-cases. They travel everywhere to be filled. Therefore you do not witness either the beginning of the work (the steelmaking) or the end of it. The metal, as far as you are concerned, springs from one mystery and vanishes away into another. Men Able to Endure More. I have catalogued by no means all the operations, and I have given no hint of the important differences in the two nevertheless similar processes for fiine-inch shells and for six-inch shells. I have offered only a general Indication, and space will not permit more. It should be added that some of the operations are done exclusively by men (such as forging) and some exclusively by women (such as painting) and some elpially by men and women. For example, there are four “bays” of nose and body-boring machines, two hays for each sex. I was told that in the briefer operations demanding close concentration the women rivaled and perhaps excelled the men. whereas In the long, tedious operations (not demanding physical strength) the men easily beat the women, whose attitude was apt to be: “Oh, bother! I’ve had enoiigh of this exasperating dullness Another aspect of the colossal or-

ganlsm is the checking and testing aspect. If you examine this long enough you will become obsessed by it. so that you will arrive at the stage of thinking that the manufacture of shells consists chiefly in checking and testing. Every shell, as soon as it has cooled from the redhot condition, is provided with its biography, which it bears on a card in its cavity. Everywhere on the walls are tabular statements which are continually being added to. At every corner stand girls and men writing down figures in notebooks. Every shell is gauged for all its dimensions TTTs also weighed, for a shell may be right in dimensions ams yet wrong in weight, in which case Evory gauge is periodically tested by experts in the gaugetesting room. And a certain percentage of shells, when they are almost finished, are ..deliberately sawed to pieces again, and samples of their steel turned into bars of a given diameter, and these bars are fractured—or rather pulled in two—by machines of a given power, and the quality ■of the steel thus laid bare for inspection. In the fracturing room on shelves are thousands of fractured bars with their jagged ends exposed, and in them you can see how steel differs. Under the terrific influences of the pulling machines the finest steel behaves rather like stale bread. Finally, in addition to the factory tests and the government tests within the factory, tltere is the government outside test, for which some shells go into the sacred bondroom, where-- no unhallowed person may enter and whence the chosen shells are removed for realistic trials in distant spots. When that is over all has been done that can be done to furnish the artilleryman with an utterly reliable shell-case. Product of Creative Brains. And - lastly there is the esoteric aspect and unless you have eyes to see this aspect you will never get the National Projectile Factory in a true perspective. I rtean the aspect" Of the creative brains, invisible and yet omnipresent in the organism. These men and women are wonderful and praiseworthy and very clever. The machinery which they manipulate is marvelous. But every machine has been slowly evolved and perfected by some brain or brains. Not one process out of hundreds of processes but has sprung from a creative brain. Everything has had to be devised. The electric torch by which women peer into the cavity of the shells is beautifully thought out. So is the overhead trolley railway, handworked, on which the shells pass dangling through the painting room to the railway wagon. The exquisite details can be counted In thousands. Then consider the architectural planning of the factory, a matter of absolutely Infernal complexity; the mere

placing of the machinery, the interworking of the cranes. A hiatus or an overlapping of one foot over all the expanse of these 11 acres would put a young woman out of her stride and bring wasteful friction and perhaps a stoppage into the organism. And consider also the affair of linking up the shifts, where the women work in three ahlftsy but tho men’tin two! It might well have taken 20 years to perfect the N. P. F. How long did it take? The proposal for the factory was made on July 8, 1915, and sanctioned on August 17. The land on which the factory now stands was then chiefly a dumping ground. Part of It being subject to inundations, part of the construction had to be founded on piles. The ironwork was started on September 25. By March 26, 1916, the power was installed, and much of the machinery had been manufactured in Britain. In > the first week of June 127 shells were made. Within a year of the sanctioning of the proposal 48,549 sheUs had been delivered. The output is now over 10,000 a week, and they are big shells. How was it done? It was done In principle by putting a big armament firm in charge, but this firm supplied .only two men direct, though it gavu foremen ■ a fortnight’s course of training in its own shops. The manager was brought from India. There was no difficulty about female labor, but the skilled male labor had to be invented, created, conjured up out of nothing, for when this N. P. F. was first thought of the country was supposed to have been swept clear of tho commodity, and it practically was.