The Teagle

No. 212 - THE PENNY MAGAZINE - July 25, 1835

The Teagle

(Abridged from Dr. Ure's 'Philosophy of Manufactures.')

The moving power of a large factory, besides performing its proper tasks of carding roving, spinning, weaving, &c., does a vast deal of miscellaneous drudgery It raises the coals from their bin in the boiler-yard by a sloping, series of buckets, like those of a dredging machine for deepening rivers, and delivers them on an elevated railway platform into a waggon-through the drop-bottom of which they are duly distributed among the range of hoppers attached to Stanley's ingenious furnace-feeding machines, and are thereby strewn into the fires in proportion to the demand for steam to work or warm the mill. In this way the fire-man is entirely freed from muscular effort, so that he can tend with ease many great steam-boilers, and is not liable through ignorance or negligence to mismanage the heat, or dissipate the fuel in such black clouds as lour over a London brewery. It is no uncommon thing in Manchester to see engine-boilers equivalent to the force of from 200 to 300 horses generating their steam without any sensible smoke.

But there is another office more truly menial assigned to the engine, that of transporting any of the workpeople upwards or downwards to any floor of the factory, to which their business may call them' at any time, and this with equal celerity and safety. To ascend and descend rapidly through several flights of stairs is no trifling source of fatigue, as domestic servants in some fashionable houses well know. Masters of mills, with the twofold motive of benevolence and economy, have long ago taken measures to supersede this painful exertion, by the construction of moveable platforms, inclosed in upright' tunnels placed in convenient parts of their many-storied buildings. This apparatus is called a hoist or a teagle, and is usually of such size and stability as to allow half a dozen persons, old and young, to travel at once from any- one floor to any other. The motion is perfectly smooth and agreeable, as I have often experienced; and is. so entirely under control as to cease at any desired instant opposite to any, of the issue-doors in the side of the tunnel.

The muscular force expended in mounting stairs was made the subject of experiment by M. Coulomb Amontons had previously found that an active mail, weighing 150 lbs. English, was completely exhausted in ascending, by steps, Sixty-five feet. in thirty-two seconds. The full work of a man is obtained by his going up-stairs At. the, rate of forty-five feet in one minute. A man weighing 160 lbs. can ascend by stairs three feet per second for a space of fifteen or twenty seconds ; and if he be supposed going up-stairs for a day. he' actually raises 450 lbs, to the height of 3281 feet; or 1,476,450 lbs. one foot high. If the day be reckoned at ten hours, or 600 minutes, he will raise 2460 lbs. one foot high in a minute, which is only one-thirteenth of Watt's estimate of a- horse's power =3200 lbs. raised one foot high per minute. With a winch a man does, according to Coulomb, only five-eighths as much work as in going up stairs. If the above observations be nearly correct, they prove the expenditure of power in ascending stairs. to be great Coulomb says that this mode of action is the most advantageous for the muscular force of man, though he rates its amount at little more than one-half of Smeaton's estimate of an English labourer's force.

The teagle (tackle?) or hoist, consists of three principal parts.

1. The perpendicular shaft or pit, having a horizontal section, of about five or six feet square, placed in the most convenient part of the building, and extending from the ground-floor to the top story.

2. The ascending and descending platform suspended by ropes from pulleys, and moved up and down by machinery. It is a strong frame-work of timber, about six feet high, boxed up on three sides with deals, leaving the front side open, in correspondence with a series of doors on the several floors of the factory. The power required for hoisting is moderated by overbalancing the platform with two counter-weights, together about a hundred weight heavier than itself, which ascend and descend equably with the descent and ascent of the platform; and which, as well as the platform, are suspended by ropes from the opposite sides of the shaft to secure a steady vertical motion. Two large planks are fixed upright upon the opposite walls of the shaft, as guides to the platform, and two smaller ones as guides to tile counter-weights, the latter being sunk groovewise into the building.

3. The third part of the teagle is the machinery capable of being set in train with the moving power.

The following figure shows a longitudinal view of the working gear, and a section of the pit with the platform raised to the top story, opposite the door of the uppermost floor.

wood-cut engraving