#eddystone

Well, the moon’s a beautiful creature—God bless her! How often have we longed for her in the dark winter, channel-cruising, when the waves were flying over the Eddystone, and trying in their malice to put out the light. I don’t wonder at people making songs to the moon, nor at my singing them.

— Frederick Marryat, Jacob Faithful

Today’s #WorkerWednesday post features employees of the Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company’s Print Works Division at Eddystone, Pennsylvania. The photograph above shows a pantagraph operator at work at one of the textile manufacturer’s twenty-five machines, seen below. She is transferring a pattern for transfer onto fabric.

In this system, the operator engraves a pattern onto a zinc plate surface.The machine’s stylus is guided to follow the cut line on the zinc plate, and this motion is transferred through diminution bars and carriages to the diamond carriers that rescale the image for transfer onto varnished copper cylinders, seen at the bottom of the above photograph and mounted at the top of most of the machines, with one cylinder for each color component of the pattern.

This photograph, meanwhile, shows a sketchmaker at work designing patterns to be reduced in size and transferred by a pantagraph operator at a later date.

          By 1910, the British became concerned that their Lee-Enfield rifles, which had been in service for 15 years, would not do well facing German M1898 Mausers, so they began design work on a potential replacement. The intention was that the new rifles would use new, higher-velocity, .276-caliber ammunition, and incorporate several Mauser-inspired features, including the bolt-locking system and clip-fed internal magazine. A test run of slightly over a thousand M1912 rifles in .276 were produced at the Enfield Armory in 1912 and ’13. However, rather than halt the production of the Lee-Enfields in England, the decision was made to contract production of the new models to the American firms of Winchester and Remington.

          In 1914, just as production of the new rifle was scheduled to begin, war broke out in Europe, making it an inopportune time to introduce a new model rifle requiring different ammunition from the standard British .303. Therefore, when the new rifle, designated the P1914 Enfield, went into production at three sites in the U.S., it was chambered for the old .303 ammunition. Guns were produced by Winchester in New Haven, Connecticut and by Remington both in Ilion, New York and Eddystone, Pennsylvania. In two years, the three plants produced over one million rifles, with the majority coming from the two Remington plants.