There are the presses also that are used in compressing cotton. When it is remembered that cotton is raised in about twenty different countries, and that the cotton crop of the United States of 1897-98 was 10,897,857 bales, of about 500 lbs. each; of India, (estimated) for the same period, 2,844,000, of 400 lbs each; of China about 1,320,000, of 500 lbs each, and between two and three million bales in the other countries, it is interesting to consider how the world's production of this enormous mass of elastic fibre, amounting to seventeen or eighteen million bales, of four and five hundred pounds each, is compressed and bound.
The screw press was the earliest form of machine used, and then came the hydraulic press. Later it has been customary to press the cotton by screw presses or small hydraulic presses at the plantation, bind it with ropes or metal bands and then transport it to some central or seaboard station where an immense establishment exists, provided with a great steam-operated press, in which the bale from the country is placed and reduced to one-fourth or one-third its size, and while under pressure new metallic bands applied, when the bale is ready for shipment. This was a gain of a remarkable amount of room on shipboard and on cars, and solved a commercial problem. But now this process, and the commercial rectangular bale, seem destined to be supplanted by roller presses set up near the plantations themselves, into which the cotton is fed directly from the gin, rolled upon itself between the rollers and compressed into round bales of greater density than the square bale, thus saving a great amount of cost in dispensing with the steam and hydraulic plants, with great additional advantages in convenience of handling and cost of transportation.
It is so arranged also that the cotton may be rolled into clean, uniform dense layers, so that the same may be unwound at the mill and directly applied to the machines for its manufacture into fabrics, without the usual tedious and expensive preliminary operations of combing and re-rolling.
It has also remained for the developed machine of the century to convert hay into an export commodity to distant countries by the baling process. Bale ties themselves have received great attention from inventors, and the most successful have won fortunes for their owners.
Most ingenious machines have been devised for picking cotton in the fields, but none have yet reached that stage of perfection sufficient to supplant the human fingers.
Fruits and Foods.– To prepare and transport fruits in their natural state to far distant points, while preserving them from decay for long times, is, in the large way demanded by the world's great appetites, altogether a success of modern invention.
To gather the fruit without bruising by mechanical pickers, and then to place the fruit, oranges for instance, in the hands of an intelligent machine which will automatically, but delicately and effectually, wrap the same in a paper covering, and discharge them without harm, are among the recent inventive wonders. In the United States alone 67 patents had been granted up to 1895 for fruit wrapping machines.
Inventions relating to drying and evaporating fruit, and having for their main object to preserve as much as possible the natural taste and colour of the fruit, have been numerous. Spreading the fruit in the air and letting the sun and air do the rest is now a crude process.
These are the general types of drying and evaporating machines:
First, those in which trays of fruit are placed upon stationary ledges within a heated chamber; second, those in which the trays are raised and lowered by mechanical means toward or farther from the source of heat as the drying progresses; third, those in which the fruit is placed in imperforate steam jacketed pans. Many improvements, of course, have been made in detail of form, in ventilation, the supplying and regulating of heat and the moving of trays.
The hermetically sealed glass or earthenware fruit jar, the lids of which can be screwed or locked down upon a rubber band, after the jar is filled and the small remainder of air drawn out by a convenient steam heater, now used by the million, is an illustration of the many useful modern contrivances in this line.
Sterilisation.– In preserving, the desirability of preventing disease and keeping foods in a pure state has developed in the last quarter of a century many devices by which the food is subjected to a steam heat in chambers, and, by devices operated from the outside, the cans or bottles are opened and shut while still within the steam-filled chamber.
Diastase.– By heating starchy matters with substances containing diastase, a partial transformation is effected, which will materially shorten and aid its digestion, and this fact has been largely made use of in the preparation of soluble foods, especially those designed for infants and invalids, such as malted milk and lactated food.
Milkers.– Invention has not only been exercised in the preservation and transportation of milk, but in the task of milking itself. Since 1860 inventors have been seeking patents for milkers, some having tubes operated by air-pumps, others on the same principle in which the vacuum is made to increase and decrease or pulsate, and others for machines in which the tubes are mechanically contracted by pressure plates.
Slaughtering.– Great improvements have been made in the slaughtering of animals, by which a great amount of its repulsiveness and the unhealthfulness of its surroundings have been removed. These improvements relate to the construction of proper buildings and appliances for the handling of the animals, the means for slaughtering, and modes of taking care of the meat and transporting the same. Villages, towns, and even many cities, are now relieved of the formerly unsavoury slaughter-houses, and the work is done from great centres of supply, where meats in every shape are prepared for food and shipment.
It would be impossible in a bulky volume, much less in a single chapter, to satisfactorily enumerate those thousands of inventions which, taking hold of the food products of the earth, have spread them as a feast before the tribes of men.
Tobacco.– Some of the best inventive genius of the century has been exercised in providing for man's comfort, not a food, but what he believes to be a solace.
"Sublime Tobacco! which from East to West
Cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest."
In the United States alone, in the year 1885, there were 752,520 acres of land devoted to the production of tobacco, the amount in pounds grown being 562,736,000, and the value of which was estimated as $43,265,598. These amounts have been somewhat less in years since then, but the appetite continues, and any deficiency in the supply is made up by enormous importation. Thus, in 1896, there were imported into the United States, 32,924,966 pounds of tobacco, of various kinds, valued at $16,503,130. There are no reliable statistics showing that, man for man, the people of that country are greater lovers of the weed than the people of other countries, but the annual value of tobacco raised and imported by them being thus about $60,000,000, it indicates the strength of the habit and the interest in the nurture of the plant throughout the world. Neither the "Counterblaste to Tobacco" of King James I., and the condemnations of kings, popes, priests and sultans, that followed its early introduction into Europe, served to choke the weed in its infancy or check its after growth. Now it is attended from the day of its planting until it reaches the lips of the consumer by contrivances of consummate skill to fit it for its destined purpose. Besides the ploughs, the cultivators and the weeders of especial forms used to cultivate the plant, there are, after the grown plant is cut in the field, houses of various designs for drying it, machines for rolling the leaves out smoothly in sheets; machines for removing the stems from the leaves and for crushing the stem; machines for pressing it into shape, and for pressing it, whether solid or in granular form, into boxes, tubs and bags; machines for granulating it and for grinding it into snuff; machines for twisting it into cords; machines for flavouring the leaf with saccharine and other matters; machines for making cigars, and machines of a great variety and of the most ingenious construction for making cigarettes and putting them in packages.
Samples of pipes made by different ages and by different peoples would form