The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1884-05-24
Six Pairs of Shoes a Minute.

and women start with the raw material
and turn out $500 pairs of shoes in ten
hours, or more than six pairs of shoes
minute. The men and women have
! little to do with it. Machines do the
work, and need only to be fed started,
and stopped; all the fine and ingenious
work of building beautiful shoe they
do, one part at time and one ma
chine to each part. For instance, the
first machine cuts the soles out of the
leather. 1t is nothing but a punch
fitted with knife the shape of a shoe
sole. Different sized knives cut out
anything, from a baby's to plantation
darkey's size. Cutting out the soles
| leaves the sheets of leather in tatters.
| The biggest tatters are used for heels:
the smallest make fuel. Leather scraps
make as good a furnace fire as coal
| does. The next machine splits a thin
| slice of the upper surface of the sole q
little way from the edge all around, so
that it looks as if thin sheet had been
pasted on to the sole, leaving the edges
unpasted. Under this loose edge a
machine presses q little gutter or chan
mel in which the mailing or sewing
is done, and afterward hidden by
| pasting the loose edge over it when the
upper is attached.
At the same moment other convicts
are cutting uppers out of sheets OF
| dressed calfskin. They lay patterns on
the skins and thus cut the needed sizes.
| This is done by hand. but the Innings
are sewed to the uppers, and the button
bnlnS q tbra,4n.h hpt, and
lining by machinery. The buttonholes
are stitched by automatic machnes,
consisting of a sewing machine hs9ing
under the needle little plate which
turns exactly in accordance wifi the
outlines of the buttonhole, and stops
When the buttonhole is finished One
man feeds several machines, starts
them, and does not touch then while
! they are at work. After this tle soles
and uppers come into the hants of one
| set of convicts, the lasters AMI tackers
on, who put the two together with
very few small tacks. Thesepeople all
work like lightning, but arr slow be-
side the machinery.
The soles and uppers are firmly joined
in several ways. One machine puts in
brass screws and bites then off exactly
at the right distance between the upper
and the under surface of the leather;
another drives in an iron screw with
the same nicely; another 5ewS the parts
together with wax threat, the thread
passing through heated metal horn,
which keeps it soft and warm; yet an
other initiates hand sewing with yellow
thread, leaving an extended sole, which
is afterward bevelled to look pretty.
The merit of this machine is that the
shoes it sews are pliable and easy to
the foot, and bring a good plice. This
does its work in eleven seconds.
The heels are made separately, and
when finished have all the nails pro-
jecting half an inch below the bottom
of the lower sheet of leather. A con-
Wet puts one of these heels into ametal
cup in press of great power, and over
that he rests q shoe in the right posi-
ton. Then down comes great bar
and squeezes the heel and shoe together,
driving every other nail all the way in
and leaving every other nail sticking a
little way out. He takes the shoe out,
puts a pretty heel tap in, puts the shoe
back, submits it to the pressure, and
then withdraws it, and finds the tap
firmly nailed, with the nails not quite
through the tap, which presents q
smooth, unbroken under service. The
heel-shaving machine presents to the
heel a set of rapidly revolving knives,
shaped to make a straight heel or a
guttered one, or even lady's French,
heel. Another machine cuts the front
of the heel square, and another trims
and smooths the edge of the sole. The
edge of the sole and the sides of the
heel are blackened and the edge is put
under hot iron about the size of fat
chestnut. This iron moves to and fro
with incredible rapidity, in imitation of
the motions of the cobblers who used
to do the work by hand. A large iron,
also heated by gas jet, does the same
thing for the heel, and does it under
such pressure that cracks and uneven
nesses in the heel are Smoothed over,
filled up and concealed.
Some shoe uppers have eyelet holes
instead of buttonholes. There is a
machine in the prison for doing this
work. 1t has two steel rods close to one
another, and while one punches the
holes the other inserts the eyelets,
which run down little gutter, right
side up, exactly in place to fix into
the punctures in the leather, and to
have their edges squeezed over by the
other rod and the piece thatfits upon it.
Twenty years ago shoemaking ma
chinery performed only one-half this
work and did that roughly. Now the
shoes made in Crow Hill prison are such
as most persons wear, and are in all
respects shapely, presentable and well
finished. Some of them retail for four
dollars or five dollars par.
In this prison, side by side with the
scum OF humanity, reputable men and
girls are employed. There are prob
ably two hundred girls in the female
prison who live in Brooklyn, come
svery morning, and are free to go
home whenever they present ticket at
the prison door. The Warden, who is,
in all probability, not consulted, since
these persons work for the contractors,
was asked what he thought was the
effect of such surroundings upon the
youths of good morals. He replied that
there used to a general feeling that the
arrangement was improper and danger
Gus, but it has not proved so. Outside
free labor has been employed in Crow
Hill eleven or twelve years, and of all
the hundreds who have thus come
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