Show SHELL MAKING AS SEEN BY NOTED BRITISH AUTHOR arnold bet bennett inett describes visit to one of many projectile factories in britain WOMEN WORKING WITH MEN six inch and nine inch death dealers are ara the product prod act present output is monument to brains and energy of country london here Is an article written by arnold bennett with the approval of the ministry of munitions w with ith the object of inspiring the british public to still greater exertions in the manufacture of munitions of war the article entitled N P F A working example of the new phenomena follows by ARNOLD BENNETT you see t these hise letters on the doormat doorman of the office they stand for national nation 21 projectile factory I 1 know not how many N P F s there are in britain perhaps mr montagu the minister of munitions knows this particular factory Is a very large one it has over 11 acres beneath a single roof A farmer armer can visualize vi a ten acre field but to the man in the industrial street an acre nc re Is a mere term imagine an area of one mile long by a hundred feet broad that Is roughly the area of the factory though naturally its shape Is much nearer a square over hands the more spiritual russians would say souls are employed there and of these very considerably over halt half are women of whom whom a large part are boung young or youngish and attractive and possess husbands in the army now you can observe a N P F in various aspects there Is the human aspect of its picturesque adjuncts for instance the canteen under its town ge separate parate roof with a prodigious veranda for the nl at fresco surpassing town halls in size and supplying all the diverse cooking and eating accommodations which young women who know on on which side their b read bread ought to be buttered require there are the dressing rooms and lavatories I 1 never saw before and do rothope not hope to see again so many white faience basins with hot and cold water rows and rows and rows and scores in a row there Is the arab ambulance diance station with every device and a nurse always waiting in the secret expectation of a major majoe case and rarely getting anything better than a scratch or a cut there are the women in the roof controlling the overhead traveling electric cranes that command every foot of the floor space each has a rope to slide down by in an emergency and for practice sake she Is 13 obliged to slide down that rope at least once a week there are the other women who drive the electric carriages on the floor itself miles of line sitting in a sort of easy chair and tickling levers six inch and nine dine inch shells are not to be lightly thrown about tile the latter weigh more than a man and it takes either electricity or two men to shift them to and fro electricity does 90 per cent of the shifting shit ting there are still salu other women in peg top trousers these last piquant creatures start with two minute points near the ground and very aften often finish near the top with an elaborate white lacy corsage or a flowing glowing scarf the phenomenon looks queer in a factory it ought not to look queer it ought to be barmore far more prevalent I 1 liked to see a girl checker delicately rolling a nine inch shell over with her fashionable glace kid boot that peeped out beneath the yellow overall these things happily will peep out so will the vase of flowers find and the strange personal belongings in the wire cage cupboard of which each machinist ling lias one near her machine there are arc the long queues of women in variegated street attire at tho the pay debits pay from Is one of the signs there are the war savings desks astutely placed next to the pay desks war savings certificates they are subscribed today in THE section tion are YOU subscribing well RB as a rule che was the th manufacturing aspect so I 1 might continue with the human picturesque aspect but I 1 must turn to the he manufacturing aspect for after all this fast rumbling m maze a ze of wheels wheel s and women and men exists for or shells and like the men nil all these women however nice and happy are consciously engaged in the preparation of the means of destruction and slaughter steam Is at the bottom of this affair a row of boilers and furnaces step inside the power house and behold the steam has been translated into electricity three units of kilowatts each and three more of kilowatts each A little further and much of the power has become hydraulic you tan can see the huge hydraulic accumulators rising and falling failing according as the creation of power here overtakes or Is overtaken by the dissipation of power dower in the factory having grasped this you may enter the factory you there discover an ordinary railway wagon behind a row of forges the wagon Is full of steel gogots which itch have bavo made a long jour ley gey they ore are craned out they weigh three nod and one halt half hundredweight apiece and put into uie the forges and when they are white hot they ire are dropped into a machine which both pierces and shapes them and from which they emerge emerge utter after a pressure of tons in inthe the shape ot of nine dine inch shells that Is the first operation out of more than ft a score ot of quite separate operations then the rough carcass Is cent centered ercil its nose Is bored its cavity Is bored and the screw thread Is milled lit in the cavity the beautiful sink and wave channels are cut in to go the base plug Is fitted and no mortal power could unscrew that base plug once it Is screwed in the inside Is polished and varnished and the varnish dried the base Is faced then cornea comes the copper band business which resembles in Us its finish the jewe jewelers leri craft the cimper band Is jammed on by Ingred incredible IbM main force but after it Is on it Is 13 treated with the most astounding finesse and the shell leaves that series of operations gleaming with its cut and carved bangle you s see e it next in the painting room where everything and everybody is of a yell brown color and where there Is not such a thing ns as a brush except the floor sweeper the paint is sprayed on to the shells as they hang in rows and thus the painting Is accomplished complis hed with an evenness a precision and a celerity which would fatally shock house painters A few yards further and the shells are anro dried in gas heated cupboards and out of these cupboards they are wafted wafred into an ordinary railway wagon find they disappear from the factory forever they are not yet truly shells they are only shell cases they travel everywhere to be filled therefore you do not witness either the beginning of the work the or the end of it the metal as far as you are concerned springs figs from one mystery and vanishes away into another men able to endure more I 1 have catalogued cataloguer catalo gued by no means all the operations and I 1 have given no hint of the important differences in the two nevertheless similar processes for nine inch shells a and nd tor for six inch shells 1 1 I have offered only a general indication and space will not permit more it should be added that some of the operations are done exclusively by men such ns as forging and some exclusively by women such ns as painting and somo some equally by inen men and women for example there are four bays of nose and body boring machines two bays for each sex I 1 was told that in the briefer operations demanding close concentration the women rivaled and perhaps excelled the men whereas in the long tedious operations erat ions not demanding physical strength the men easily beat the women whose attitude altitude was apt to be oh dothery ive had enough of this exasperating aspe rating dullness another aspect of the file col colial coloal organism Is the checking and testing aspect it if you examine this ling mg enough you wll become obsessed obsess ei by it t so lahat that you will arrive at the stage of thinking thinking that the manufacture of shells consists chiefly in checking and testing every shell ns soon as it has cooled from the condition Is provided with its biography which it bears ears on a card in its cavity everywhere on the walls are tabular statements which are continually being added to at every corner comer stand girls and men writing down figures in note books every shell lg Is gauged for all its dimensions men mens lons it Is also weighed tor for a shell may be right in dimensions gild and yet wrong in weight in which case it t wont do every gauge Is periodically tested by experts in the gauge testing estling room and a certain percentage of shells when they are almost finished are deliberately sawed to pieces again and samples of their steel turned into bars of a given diameter and these bars are fractured or rather pulled in two by machines of a given power and the quality of the steel thus laid bare for inspection in the fracturing room on shelves are thousands of fractured bars with their jagged ends exposed and in them you can see how steel differs under the terrific influences of the pulling machines toe the finest steel behaves rather like stale bread finally in addition to the factory tests and the government tests bests within the fact factory opry there Is the government government outside test tor for which some shells go into t the he sacred bon droom where no unhallowed person may enter and whence the chosen shells are removed tor for realistic trials in distant spots when that Is over all bus bits been done that can be done to furnish the artilleryman till eryman with vath an utterly reliable shell case product of creative brains and lastly there Is the esoteric aspect rind and unless you have eyes to see this 3 a aspect you will never get the national projectile factory in a true perspective I 1 mean the aspect of the creative brains invisible and yet omnipresent in the organism these men and women are wonderful nud praiseworthy and very clever the machinery which they man manipulate eulate Is marvelous but every machine lne has been slowly evolved and perfected by some brain or brains not one process out of hundreds of processes but has sprung from a creative brain everything has had to be devised the electric torch by which women peer into the cavity of the ahls is beautifully thought out so I 1 lh h the oye overhead trolley railway hand worked on which the shells pass dangling through the painting room to the railway wagon the exquisite details can be counted in thousands then consider the architectural planning DID ot of the factory a matter of naso cutely infernal complexity tha mere placing of the machinery the inter intel working of the crones cranes A hiatus or an overlapping ot of one foot over rill nil tho expanse of these 11 acres would put a young woman out of her stride and bring wasteful friction and perhaps a stoppage into the organism and consider also the affair of linking up tho the shifts where the women work in three shifts but the men intro 1 it might well have taken 20 years to perfect the X N P P F how long did it take the proposal for the factory was made on july 8 1015 1915 and sanctioned on august 17 the land on which the factory now nov stands was then chiefly a dumping ground part of it being subject to inundations part of the construction st had to be founded on piles the ironwork was started on september 25 hy by march 26 1916 the power was installed and much of the machinery had been manufactured in britain in the first week of june shells were made within a year of the sanctioning of the proposal shells had been delivered the output Is ia now over a week and they are big shells how was it done it was lone done in principle by putting a big armament firm in charge but this firm supplied only two men direct though it gave foremen a fortnights fort nights course of training in its own shops the manager was brought from india there was no difficulty about female labor laboi but the skilled male labor had to be invented created conjured up out of nothing for when this N P F was waa first thought of the country was ivas supposed to have been swept clear of the commodity and it practically was |