2-913-870 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Ammunition Works at Northfleet - Bullet-Casting, 1854. Kent factory of Schlesinger & Wells during the Crimean War - '...extensive contract for the supply of ball cartridges to the Turkish government...It sounds almost like a joke to say that a contractor should undertake to manufacture, and...deliver, in five months, thirty-five million ball cartridges...in the furnaces, 200 pigs of lead (100 cwt...) are daily used, and transformed into bullets...The moulds, into which the molten lead is poured, contain...eighteen bullet-holes...and. when the mould opens, the bullets drop to the ground in clusters...Troops of boys are ever busily employed in carrying these strings of bullets to the other part of the room, where sixty other boys are seated before...clipping-machines, for disencumbering the bullets of that spray of lead by which, on issuing from the moulds, they are still attached together...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1854.