This match-splint making is not a peddling,
low-caste, garret-shop kind of employment.
At the City Saw Mills piles of yellow pine
are built up, each as high, and as broad,
and as deep as an ordinary six-roomed house,
all intended exclusively for lucifer match
splints. We believe that a lucifer differs
from a Congreve in the nature of the
chemical composition with which it is tipped,
but lucifer is such a dashing light-giving
name, that we shall take the liberty to use it
for all our splints. Lucifers, then, use up all
the stacks or heaps of pine wood to which we
have just adverted; and so far from true is it
that this wood (as many would surmise)
consists of scraps and odds and ends, that the very
reverse of this is the case. The wood is the
very best and dearest which the pine forests
can supply; and not only the best, but
the best of this best, for only the choicest
deals out of the choicest cargoes are selected.
This fastidiousness does not arise from any
necessity in respect to the quality of the
lucifers themselves, but because the machinery
will not work well unless the material worked
upon be sound, clear-grained, and free from
knots. The manufacturers would lose more
in waste of wood, waste of time, and injury
to machinery by the use of cheap timber,
than they would gain by cheapness of price:
therefore is the lucifer timber the best of the
good.

The deals employed are about three inches
in thickness; but the length, breadth, and
thickness might all vary considerably without
affecting the correctness of the manufacture.
Two men, aided by a small circular saw
rotating with great velocity, cut the planks into
pieces varying from three to four inches long,
each piece to be long enough for a splint for
two matches, and the matches to be a little
under or a little over two inches long, according
to the kind. The pieces or blocks are
carried into a room where a machine of most
singular and admirable construction is at
work: a machine which must have cost much
thought and labour to bring it to perfection.
It is the cutting machine whereby the blocks
are reduced to splints. Let us endeavour
to describe it: There are about fifty lancet-pointed
knives arranged horizontally, one
above another and all strictly parallel; their
distance apart is equal to the thickness of
an ordinary lucifer match, which we may
take probably at about one-fifteenth part of
an inch; the points, and the edges near the
points are exceedingly sharp. These knives
are fixed in a frame, from the vertical
face of which they project to a distance little
more than equal to the thickness of a lucifer
match. Projecting also from this frame is one
long keen blade, placed diagonally from top
to bottom, and standing out from the surface
of the frame to a distance also equal to the
thickness of the splint to be made; this long
blade acts and cuts in the manner of the
plane-iron used by a carpenter, or the spoke-shave
used by a cooper. The frame is
connected with a steam-engine, which gives it a
hundred and twenty horizontal reciprocating
movements in a minute: carrying with it,
of course, the long blade and the fifty lancet-knives.
Now for the cutting. A workman
arranges five blocks close together in a row,
exactly opposite to the knives, and with
the grain of the wood horizontal; these
blocks are placed upon a stage, which he
can advance to and from the knives, by
means of a handle under his command. He
advances the blocks within reach of the knife-points;
a forward movement of the frame
enables the knives to take off a slice from all
the blocks; he quickly draws back the
blocks, to free them from the backward
action of the frame; he as quickly advances
them again, to encounter the second forward
movement of the knives; a second slice is
taken off; a second recession occurs; a
third advance; a third slicing—and so forth,
until all the blocks have been cut away in
splints.

Now what extent of wood-cutting occurs in
one minute of these operations? In the first
place, the fifty knives make fifty horizontal
incisions in each block; and in the next place,
the diagonal blade, which follows immediately
after the lancet knives, cuts off a slice of the
little splints which have been thus loosened—
and this in the one hundred and twentieth
part of a minute, or half a second. There
are, we will say, fifty splints in the thickness
of each block; and, as there are five blocks,
this will give two hundred and fifty splints at
each slice; and as there are a hundred and
twenty slicings in a minute, this gives thirty
thousand splints in a minute. Moreover, as
each splint is long enough for two lucifers,
the number is thus multiplied to sixty
thousand in a minute, or three millions six hundred
thousand in an hour. There are three such
machines in the establishment; and if we
suppose (which we may, in illustration of the
actual power available) that all three machines
work ten hours a day for three hundred
days in a year, they would produce from
nine to twelve thousand million lucifers in
a year.

The splints fall, as they are cut, in to a trough
or chest, which speedily becomes filled; and
from this trough they are shovelled down
through a hole in the floor into a drying room
beneath, where the dampness evaporates from
them to the extent of something like a tun of
water in a day. They are then packed into
bundles, and sold to the lucifer match-makers.
Four hundred three-inch planks are
generally cut up into splints in a week; and there
is one match-maker who purchases to the
value of four thousand pounds a year—
notwithstanding that the splints are sold so
marvellously cheap.

Thus, then, have we seen a few among the
many curious things done by wood-cutters:
cutters, too, limited almost wholly to those