Re: Monday's Answer
Monday answer. Busy day I suppose, few responses.
The only two companies still make men�s dress shoes in the United States. Alden and Allen Edmonds. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4182/is_20070525/ai_n19183086)
The �official� term for a shoe maker is a cordwainer. Dan was close, but only worth a bronze color on the forehead star. Incidentally, the main difference between a Cobbler and a Cordwainer is that the Cobbler is the person who repairs leather work and those who create leather articles using soft leather or Cordwain (Cordovan). By law, the cobblers were not allowed to make shoes from new leather. They had to cobble (cobb) together parts for shoes. Cordwainers got new leather and that was the work done by them. The cobblers could only do the repair works, or make shoes from leather salvaged from old leather items. But from the 16th century onwards they solved their differences with the cordwainers and were allowed to make shoes from new leather, thus joining the cordwainers guild. The guild was difficult to get into. Britian had an exclusive school for the trade and it still survives today.
The man who made the machine that made the automation of high numbers of shoe lasts possible is Thomas Blanchard 1788-1864 .
Blan�chard lathe
1. (Mach.) A kind of wood-turning lathe for making noncircular and irregular forms, as felloes, gun stocks, lasts, spokes, etc., after a given pattern. The pattern and work rotate on parallel spindles in the same direction with the same speed, and the work is shaped by a rapidly rotating cutter whose position is varied by the pattern acting as a cam upon a follower wheel traversing slowly along the pattern. Pictures appear on the web.
He originally invented the machine to make rifle stocks for the military, but the truth is that many more shoe lasts were made than gun stocks.
The Machines of Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a farm in Worcester County, Massachusetts, the home also of Eli Whitney and Elias Howe. Thomas Blanchard began his mechanical career at the age of thirteen by inventing a device to pare apples. At the age of eighteen he went to work in his brother's shop, where tacks were made by hand, and one day took to his brother a mechanical device for counting the tacks to go into a single packet. The invention was adopted and was found to save the labor of one workman. Thomas Blanchard's next achievement was a machine to make tacks, on which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for five thousand dollars. It was worth far more, for it revolutionized the tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great fortune.
The tack-making machine gave Thomas Blanchard a reputation, and he was presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he could improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns. Thomas Blanchard could; and did. His next problem was to invent a lathe for turning the irregular wooden stocks. Here he also succeeded and produced a lathe that would copy precisely and rapidly any pattern. It is from this invention that the name of Thomas Blanchard is best known. The original machine is preserved in the United States Armory at Springfield, to which Thomas Blanchard was attached for many years, and where scores of the descendants of his copying lathe may be seen in action today.
Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of Thomas Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the production of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but it was applied to many branches of wood manufacture, and later on the same principle was applied to the shaping of metal.
Thomas Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for ordinary roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built steamboats to ply upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced in connection with these his most profitable invention, a machine to bend ship's timbers without splintering them. The later years of his life were spent in Boston, and he often served as a patent expert in the courts, where his wide knowledge, hard common sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a welcome witness.