Bushwick Glass Works installing a tank furnace

NEW YORK NOTES.

OFFICE OF THE ELECTRICAL WORLD,

NEW YORK, March 29, 1886.

There is now on exhibition in this city a new writing machine, having a wider scope of usefulness than the ordinary type writer. Among its superior features may be mentioned the following: The ribbon is dispensed with and printing ink is applied directly to the face of the type, thus giving a clear-cut outline to the characters. Another valuable feature is what is technically known as "variable spacing." Probably the most important feature is what the inventors term "automatic justification." As explained to me the machine, will automatically make the line and carriage movements, enlarging or decreasing the width of the word-spaces as required to make the line end on an even margin as seen in a book page, instead of ending zig-zag as by the ordinary type-writer. With this method a printed page may be secured without the use of movable type, either in transfer ink on transfer paper, or in the shape of a matrix from which a cast may be taken — in either case duplicate copies maybe easily secured various styles and sizes of type may be used and a change from one size or style of type to another takes but a few sebonds [sic] seconds.

Perhaps the feature most interesting to electricians is that a message sent from New York — say by the Associated Press — may be reproduced in any newspaper office in Philadelphia, Washington and other places in any size or style of type ready to go to press without the intervention of any other operator than the sender of the message. A company has been formed to push the inventions as rapidly as possible.

I am sorry to say that Mr. Fix, of Fulton street, this city, manufacturer of messenger call boxes, fire alarm boxes, etc., lies very sick at home. He is, I believe, the oldest manufacturer in his line, and still retains bis earliest customers, I hope soon to see him out again.

Another sick man is Mr. J. W. Carter, the electrican and general manager of the United States Electrical Company. He has been detained at home for some time by pneumonia, and his company miss him the more because it is busily engaged developing several specialties. It may not be generally known that Mr. Carter was the inventor and patentee of the extension bells now in general use on magnetos, etc. The company will shortly put on the market a full line of its new motors, its sensophone, and other goods, including the new Lathrop battery and battery zinc in screw form.

The Columbia Electric Company, corner Morris and West streets, is manufacturing annunciators, etc. Mr. Hermann, of this company, was formerly of Fix & Hermann. He is a competent manufacturer of electrical supplies, and I have every reason to think he will succeed in his new departure.

Mr. Chas. H. Hinds, 416 West Twenty-seventh street, has long been interested in the manufacture of frictional machines, and was associated with Mr. Smith, the inventor of the machine for gas lighting, before that gentleman sold the patent rights to the Laflin & Rand Powder Company. Mr. Hinds is making a specialty of automatic gas lighting for churches, halls, etc., and furnishes all descriptions of burners.

The Bushwick Glass Works of William Brookfield, on Grand street, Brooklyn, have been for some little time past the scene of an experiment which promises to revolutionize the whole art of glass-blowing. The new idea which is there put into practice is so simple that the only wonder is nobody has hit upon it before. In substance it consists only in dispensing with the old-fashioned crucible in which the glass mixture was melted, and the heating and management of which made no small part of the expense and the labor of glass-producing. By the old method the first step in glassmaking was crucible-making. The big crucible of molders' clay, once constructed, was wheeled upon an iron frame into a furnace, where, filled with a ton of glass mixture, it sizzled and boiled at a temperature of 3,000 degrees for twenty-four hours or more. Then the blowers stuck their long tubes into the whitehot material and blew until they used it up.

By the new process, instead of four, five or six unwieldy crucibles formerly required to keep an establishment going, all the material required for ordinary green glass is dumped into a single great tank, from which the molten glass is run off as needed through small flues into other compartments tor the blowers' use. The advantages of the new method are numerous. There is no breaking of crucibles and waste of glass; the piocess is continuous, new mixture melting while the old is being used; the expense of fuel is considerably less; the force of men who watched and tended the crucibles, wheeling them into and out of position, is dispensed with. A German named Ferrari is the inventor of the process, and it is expected that its manifest economy will bring about a considerable reduction in the cost of articles made of the glass. It is virtually a new application of the Siemens gas furnace system, and promises to Mr. Brookfield, who is widely known as an extensive manufacturer of telegraph insulators, the rewards due to energy and enterprise.

W. T. H