22_.
Yesterday morning we started between 10 and 11 for Stourbridge, first
to see some clay which is celebrated all over the world as the only
clay which is fit to make pots for melting glass, &c. You know that in
all these fiery regions, fire-clay is a thing of very great
importance, as no furnace will stand if made of any ordinary bricks
(and even with the fire-clay, the small furnaces are examined every
week), but this Stourbridge clay is as superior to fire-clay as
fire-clay is to common brick-earth. Then we went to Fosters' puddling
and rolling works near Stourbridge. These are on a very large scale:
of course much that we saw was a repetition of what we had seen
before, but there were slitting mills, machines for rolling the
puddled blooms instead of hammering them, &c., and we had the
satisfaction of handling the puddling irons ourselves. Then we went to
another work of the Fosters not far from Dudley, where part of the
work of the Tube Bridge for the Menai is going on. The Fosters are, I
believe, the largest iron masters in the country, and the two
principal partners, the elder Mr Foster and his Nephew, accompanied us
in all our inspections and steppings from one set of works to another.
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