The Mechanical Handling of Material: Being a Treatise on the Handling of Such as Coal, Ove, Timber, &C. By Automatic or Semi-Automatic Machinery (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Mechanical Handling of Material: Being a Treatise on the Handling of Such as Coal, Ove, Timber, &C. By Automatic or Semi-Automatic Machinery

The following treatise on the Mechanical Handling of Material has not been the work of a day, a month, or a year. Its origin may be fairly dated back some twenty years ago, when I was professionally engaged in a branch of Engineering which in modern times has been peculiarly identified with the automatic handling of material. I am referring to Grinding of Material in general and Modern Flour Milling in particular. This branch, in which the mechanical handling of material both before and after treatment as well as in its intermediate stages is of the utmost importance, greatly attracted me. I began to make a special study of the different mechanical operations of handling; compiling tables, capacities, and speeds of elevators and conveyors for my own use, as well as such other information as was available. It was my lot to standardise such elevators as were used in flour milling, and the results of my work in this and other directions will be found in this work.

Later on, the field of my professional experience was considerably enlarged, and I found myself engaged in planning and designing installations with appliances for the Mechanical Handling of such raw materials as Ore, Coal, and Timber. Some of the results of my studies in this direction have been embodied in a paper which was read before the Institution of Civil Engineers on the 17th February 1903. The subject was, however, far too large to be exhausted within the limited compass of a paper, and I found, perhaps before I was fully conscious of the fact, that a treatise on a somewhat neglected though vast section of engineering had grown up in my hands. At first, with the diffidence natural to one who had never cultivated literature, I hesitated to put my notes in the form of a book, but these doubts vanished as I realised that no book existed in the English language on this important branch of engineering. Indeed, I have been unable to find a complete and connected treatise on the Mechanical Handling of Material in any language.

Therefore I set to work to reduce my rough notes to the orderly sequence of a formal treatise, embodying in carefully compiled tables a list of the results of my own experience, as well as all other available information respecting the capacities and speeds of machinery designed to handle material in substitution of or supplemental to the labours of human hands. I became a diligent collector of drawings and descriptions of such machinery and mechanical processes as are germane to the subject of this work, and several hundreds of these drawings have been used to illustrate the volume.

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