Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1879 — INDUSTRIAL. [ARTICLE]

INDUSTRIAL.

American street-cars are now running in nearly every large city in the world. Porcelain heads or knobs mav be Joined, to metal spikes with a thick paste made of a mixture of Portland cement and glue. A lamp-chimney manufacturing farm in Pittsburgh heats Its furnaces with benzine. Thirty-three per cent, of the former cost of chimneys is said to be saved by It The secret of the luminous clock-dial is said to consist in mixing a phosphorescent salt with paints and varnishes, and, making the figures with" it. A mixtuxe-of fime ana sulphur is used. In Russian railway shops the use of boiling water in setting tires upon car wheels is practiced. In six years such tires have furnished but one fracture, and less than 1 per cent became loosened upon the wheel. Four gentlemen of New York City have offered 9600 as a premium for the best four designs for a house for workingmen, in which may be secured a proper distribution of light and pure air, with an arrangement of rooms that w ill yield a rental sufficient to pay a fair interest on the Investment . The opening of the new year will inaugurate a general movement among drv goods merchants In the reduction of”wages and salaries. This will apply more particularly to the wholesale than the retail houses, as the latter have for the past year been at work in a gradual reduction of the force employed, as well as in the amount of their pay.—2Z. Y. Economitt.

Some of the Holyoke manufacturers have adopted the system of weekly payments, instead of monthly, paying on Thursday for the week ending on the preceding Saturday. One great advantage of this system over the older one is that it tends to break up the custom among the laboring classes of buying on credit, a custom alike injurious to buyers and sellers. The proprietors and employes of a large cigar factory in New York have just agreed upon asubstitute for strikes and lockouts, and the plan is so simple that it is strange no one on this side of the ocean nas thought of it before. It is merely to refer future differences between employers and employed to a Board of Arbitration, the members of which are to be selected by the two parties.— Exchange.. The canal business during the past season has been up to the average of the past few years. Freights have not been so high, but there has J>een plenty to carry and but little trouble in getting loads. The lumber boats have made full as much as the grain carriers. Most of the boatmen nave made between five and six hundred dollars; some have made more. They express themselves generally satisfied ana are hopeful of the future.— Oswego (N. Y.) Times. While Eastern oysters planted in California waters have grown faster and larger, they have not been known to increase in numbers, but the San Francisco Alta says that recently on the Alameda shore, up in a creek, where the spat had been carried for miles on the tide, has been found abed of Eastern oysters as large as those temptingly displayed in the markets and at the saloons. The discovery was made while digging for clams, and the find caused great rejoicing.