Margaret Proudfit’s biography of her father, Henry Burden, gets downright giddy over the invention that made his fortune, the horseshoe machine:
Watch this wonderful piece of mechanism at work which in a second of time makes a horseshoe. Before you are two strong frames between which are four revolving shafts geared together and getting their motion from a pulley-wheel. On the shaft most exposed to view, you see three cams, one of which raises a cutting lever, another lifts a bending frame on which is a bending tongue, and the third works the flattening pieces … Observe now the rapid movements of these shafts and their appurtenances. Gliding like a fiery serpent, you see a red-hot bar of iron, moving toward the machine, on the feeding rollers. Already the iron jaws of the monster are opening to catch between its incisive teeth this glowing rib of iron. The end of the bar has passed to the opposite side of the ravenous automaton’s mouth, which is the proper measurement of the length of the intended shoe – the cutter comes up and severs it, and for an instant stops the feed; the bending tongue raises up and is pushed against the cut bar and bends it between two forked cams; it is then caught between the upper and lower dies, taking their impression, the bending tongue falls back, and the side levers close in the heel-ends …
In the [punching-room] are seen a long line of men seated astride of the saddles of the punching machines making the nail-holes through the indented marks previously put in the creased part of the shoes. Thence they are conveyed in hand-cars to the swaging furnaces in which they are placed before they are swaged.
Boys are at work here, taking with tongs the heated shoes from the furnace and putting them singly on the revolving dies of the swaging machine. After the heated shoe is seated upon one of these dies, it is carried to the top of the machine where it is stopped for a moment; a top die descends on it and two side steels swage the sides of the shoe, removing all bulges and making the outside edges of the shoe perfectly smooth …
The shoes when packed for shipping are then taken out, weighed and packed in kegs, in each of which are to be found 100 pounds of perfectly made horseshoes.
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