Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1887 — TRADE AND LABOR. [ARTICLE]

TRADE AND LABOR.

Philadelphia Record. ( -- A new blast furnace is to be erected in St. Louis. The Canadian iron making interests are prospering. Large railroad machine shops are to be built at Macon, Ga. A large quantity of electric light apparatus is going to panada. A bridge is to be built across the Oliio at Louisville to cost $1,500,000. All the Augusta, Ga., mills have been shut down on account of freshets. Several iron works are to be restarted in Wales to make steel bars for tin plates. Jay Gould will erect sixteen large railroad shops at Atchison, Kan.; cost $300,000. The miners, mill men and shop and factory hands generally are quite busily employed. ' Immense beds of coal, veins ranging from eight to four feet, are found in northern Alabama. A New York electric light company is shipping a big arc and incandescent plant to La Paz, Bolivia. A goodly number of cotton operatives are going from Lancashire, England, to New England and Canada. A Southington, Conn., firm is making machinery to be sent to England to make the Bartholdi burner. A St. Louis company with $400,000 capital has been formed to make paving blocks out ofblast furnace slag. A Dover, N. H., manufacturer has just shipped a large consignment of leather belting to Melbourne, Australia.

The locomotive works at Rome, N. Y., have to be run day and night in order to turn out thirteen engines per month. The average Pullman car costs $15,000. The dearest ever built cost $40,000. The Pullman company employs 7,500 persons. One thousand coke ovens will soon be built in the Connellsville region, and also 400 tenements to accommodate 1000 workmen. Over 1,000 hides were used to make a belt for a Fall River concern. It is four feet wide, three thicknesses, 103 feet long and weighs 1,200 pounds. There are a great many combinations of firms in various lines of business. These combinations are found necessary to prevent unnecessary competition. Manufacturing establishments are increasing their capacity in nearly all places, and little shops and foundries are springing up in unheard-of localities. Horace Abbott, who recently died at Baltimore at the age of 81, filled an order from the government for 250,000 pounds ot iron within forty-eight hours after receiving it. A Lawrence, Mass., machine company has a contract to make four pumps, each of which will pump 18,000 gallons per minute, or 72,000 gallons per minute in all, equal to 386,000 tons of water per day.■ _ _ A large body of coking coal has been found in Indiana, and capital has been liberally subscribed to develop it. Western mills and foundries within a year or two will be largely supplied with coke made from Western coal.

A Bridgeport, Conn., concern is sending large numbers of a family button hole machine to India and Japan, and the Home sewing machine people have just received an order for fifty-seven sewing machines for Asiar A branch of the Hotchkiss Company is to be located at Hartford, Conn. Over 5,000 of the Hotchkiss guns have been made-and sold to all countries. One man can discharge twenty-three six pound shells per minute with a six pound gun. Corrugated sheet iron casks are used in Germany to transport liquids which expand by heat. Tney stand an internal pressure of thirty pounds to the square inch, and are a great saving all around to manufacturers, storekeepers and cons'umers. J - The German system for pensioning workmen in their old age will cause a tax of three marks per year on all, estimated at 7,257,000 marks. This will give a state credit of about. 12,000,000 marks. Workmen over fifty years of age, when the bill shall have passed, will be excluded. English engineers throw a fine film of dry sand under the drivers of their engines to prevent slipping. It' is being introduced here, and an engine is being made at Boston with-a single pair of drivers and with the sand blast attachment. It has been said that it can be made to run very fast. Nearly 1,500 looms are standing idle at this time in Lowell, Mass., for want of operatives. Throughout most of the leading textile manufacturing centers of New England the same complaint is made. The cause is the vacation to Canada whiclr the well paid operatives are able to take each summer. They are absent from two to six weeks.