Photographs of Emery Roth and Lazlo Gyorsok
will be among images used in an upcoming CPTV documentary on
The History of
the program will air Thursday evening
CPTV, 8 PM, May 17
PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: "Dr. Howe's Pin-making, Whirligig Carousel"
WIlliam Cowper also described the process of making a pin, but he did it in verse:
One fuses metal o’er the fire,A second draws it into wire,The shears another plies;Who clips in length the brazen threadFrom him who, chafing every shred,Gives all an equal size.A fifth prepares, exact and round,The knob with which it must be crown’d;His follower makes it fast;And with his mallet and his fileTo shape the point, employs awhileThe seventh and the last.
The machine Dr. Howe began building in the abandoned rubber factory had to gear all of those functions except the making of the wire to a single "driving shaft.” The machine's actions had to be adjustable and accurate, not only on the first pin but on the millionth and through varying temperatures and as parts wore. It also needed to be as compact as possible and when the driving shaft turned it had to rhyme like a poem.
I can only imagine riffs and counter-riffs as Dr. Howe’s Rotary Pin Machine began to turn, a whirligig-clockwork-carousel with eight spinning chucks pointing radially outward from a hub, each chuck loaded with a length of wire waiting to be shaped, pointed and headed. All at once the carousel of chucks rotates 45° and stops. Opposite some chucks tiny grinding and filing “mills” are spinning, whirring and rasping as the “mills” begin shuttling in and out as they spin and spit against the wire shafts in the chucks which are spinning in the opposite direction. One mill is shaping, another further on is pointing, a third further yet is polishing, up to five mills can be added, all grinding the shafts to the desired point and finish as so many laborers had once done. Elsewhere around the carousel two "carriers" in circular reciprocating motion, withdraw a pointed shaft from a chuck, turn it and deliver it to gripping dies before retreating just prior to the “upsetting" and “heading" which follow with two metallic snaps (I imagine) as a finished, headed pin is clawed into a hopper while wire fed to an empty chuck is nipped to pin length with a tiny snap. And then the whole carousel-hub of loaded chucks rotates again, moving each future-pin to the next station to repeat the same whirring syncopations, snapping out 24,000 pin per day to the driving shaft’s steady beat.
Designing and building a model required skills, experience and equipment that Howe probably lacked, and he turned to Robert Hoe who had been designing, building and selling printing presses, and Howe moved his efforts to Robert Hoe’s shop. The working model he eventually produced won a silver ribbon at the American Institute Fair of 1832 and was the basis for further improvements and to the solid-headed machines with which he began producing pins in his Birmingham factory on Anson Phelps’s canal in 1841.
