The Sun.
London, England, 1860-02-02 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING,

if worth anything, would be better and more easily
accomplished by machinery.
An immense variety of milling and grinding stages
are next gone through, which merely relate to the
exterior of the barrel, and with which, of course, we
need not trouble ourselves here. A detailed account
of the whole manufacture would be out of the ques-
tion, as our readers may easily imagine, when we say
that the barrel undergoes no less than 66 distinct
processes, and the whole rifle upwards of 700 ere it
is completed. The barrel, then, having so far ad-
vanced in its progress towards completion as to be
bored for the fourth time, it undergoes its first proof
test of nearly one ounce of powdr and one ball.
Not one per cent. of the barrels yield under this
trial, which has sometimes, in the case of doubtful
barrels, or those which it was wished to burst, been
carried to as high a charge as 2} oz. of powder and
17 balls—the whole barrel full, in fact—before the
metal ripped. After this the nipple-screw and
nipple, with the " tang" or tongue which fastens
the barrel to the stock, are made, though not a
single piece is put together till the whole musket is
complete to its minutest detail. Before the barrel
leaves the borinr, room it is again bored out for the
fifth time, and, having been polished by machinery
inside and outside till it shines as bright as silver,
it at last reaches its 56th stage of manufacture, and
is taken to the finishing shop.
With the exception, perhaps, of the Laboratory at
Woolwich, it would be difficult to name any factory
room in the kingdom, not even excepting our largest
cotton mills, which at the first glance presents
such a bewildering scene of active, never-ceasing
industry. Let our readers imagine, if they can, a
single room more than an acre in extent, lofty and
well lit, in which some thousand men and boys are
incessantly employed in superintending machinery.
The ear is pained by the hum of flywheels, which
revolve in thousands till the eye is giddy with their
whirl. Miles of shafting are spinning round mistily
with a monotonous hum, the room is almost darkened
and the view completely obscured by some 50,000
or 60,000 feet of broad flapping lathe-bands, which
are driving no less than 600 distinct machines, all
going together on their own allotted tasks, with a
tremulous rapidity and ease that seem to swallow
up the work like magic, and the first sight of which
is inexpressibly astonishing to the spectator. It
takes some minutes before the visitor can subdue the
overwhelming feeling of surprise which this scene of
activity always excites, no matterhow often entered
on. Following the barrel, then, but with care, into
this maze of lathe-bands, we see the process of
rifling first commenced. The rifling in the Enfield
barrel consists of three broad shallow grooves, with
a pitch of a half turn in the length of the barrel of
three feet six inches. The depth of the rifling is 0.5 at
the muzzle, and 0.13 at the breech, the width of
each groove being 3-16ths of an inch. There are 16
rifling machines at Enfield, each of which turns out
26 barrels a day, though, of course, the grooves are
made separately, and after the same fashion as in
the boring, viz., drawn through the gun from the
muzzle to the breech. Looking at the light through
a newly-rifled barrel has an extraordinary effect,
the rings of reflectedraysshowing like bars of black
and white metal alternately ; and by the aid of
these, as it is said, the workmen are able to distin-
guish whether or not the tube is perfectly accurate.
After the rifling it is again proved with
half an ounce of powder and a single ball ; when
it is retouched, sighted, trimmed-off, milled,
levelled, browned, and gauged, coming out in
the guage-room at last a finished barrel, made to
such perfection and accuracy that the steel gauge of
577 thousandths of an inch passes freely through,
while that of 580 sticks firm in the muzzle. Brown-
ing, as we have said, is the last operation which the
gun undergoes, and this merely ornamental process
occupies a week more than the whole manufacture
of the gun itself—namely, four weeks. The time
thus bestowed, however, is not without its value,
inasmuch as after the " browning" is completed,
though not till then, the gaugers are enabled to
detect the slightest imperfect welding or least per-
ceptible flaw of manufacture, when the piece is in-
stantly rejected, and the workman under whose
hands the flaw took place fined 35., no matter
whether the imperfection is discovered at the very
commencement of the process or when all is finished.
The barrels thus flawed, we regret to say, are sold
as old iron, but still in the form of finished barrels,
and so doubtless find their way back again into the
market as proved pieces. Than this latter arrange-
ment of selling the barrels complete, though as old
iron, nothing can be more objectionable, and we are
sure the 'War-office only require to have their at-
tention drawn to the matter to secure for the future
that all such pieces, before they are sold, shall be
bent and flattened in such a manner as to be totally
useless, at least for gun barrels, ever after.
But, as we intimated at the commencement of this
article, the long processes by which the Enfield is
brought to completion cannot easily be disposed of
in a notice like the present. "We defer, then, to a
future occasion our description of the other portions
of the manufacture and the peculiar -weaknesses
• which render this weapon above all others so liable
on slight occasions to irreparable injury.
10

of the London season—the white silk dress, the
white satin riband, the Brussels lace, the cambric
handkerchief, the pearl bracelet, the kid glove
—seem to have had particular attraction for his
eye, and present a world of minute variety,
fused into one breadth of light: Nor did he need
any particular stuff or costume to develope his
art ; he took what presented itself, equally the
fresh, stiff, fashionable dress, or the soft, tumbled
Indian shawl, and made them both true and beau-
tiful. Thus, while many of his pictures are painted
on a cool and pearly scale, almost an equal number
might be quoted of great depth and richness. Above
all, Sir William possessed the art, and this appears
even in his early historical efforts, of bringing ela-
borate subjects and minute details into one whole.
There is no sign of puzzle or confusion in his ar-
rangement. His lines flow together, where most
picturesquely, most naturally. His backgrounds,
whether the interior of a gorgeous room, the fireside
chair, the more conventional curtain and column,
or an open garden, are all in keeping with his sub-
ject, while they are also finished with a care and
minuteness that triumphantly prove the strength of
his more principal parts. We have implied at the
beginning of this short notice that the merits of Sir
W. Ross as a painter have not been so universally
acknowledged in his own time as they deserve to
be. It is the lot of a portrait painter during his life
to owe much of his fame to the very strength of his
likenesses—an excellence which Sir William pre-
eminently possessed. Posterity, therefore, can alone
fairly judge how far the portrait painter has ren-
dered not only that individual but that general like-
ness to human nature which makes all generations
kin. But in this respect the artist world has, or
should have, the power to antedate the verdict of
posterity, and accordingly we find Sir W. Ross's
warmest admirers among his fellow-painters. They
know the hard things in art he overcame. They
know that precisely what is most difficult to do he
best succeeded in doing. To the elder painters,
therefore, his works are a source of enjoyment ; to
the younger, a school of instruction ; to be prized
the more now that the kind voice is hushed which
was always ready to give help and encouragement
to a junior.