These belts are now largely used in England, many good improvements have been made in them, and almost every belt maker in Great Britain manufactures them.

Mr. Jabez Oldfield, of Glasgow, has the reputation of making the best and most reliable link belt in Great Britain.  He has also the reputation of being the originator of these belts.  This is, however, an error, the credit of the invention belonging, as we have said, to Mr. Roullier.

Mr. Oldfield, nevertheless, has invented many useful machines for cutting and assorting the links.  He has also introduced improved methods for putting the links together.

For more than twenty years after Mr. Roullier’s visit, nothing was done with leather link belting in this country.

In 1882, however, Mr. N.W.  Hall, of Newark, N.J., patented a link belt, composed of leather and steel links.  His method was to place a steel link after every third or fourth leather one, in order to strengthen the belt.  In practical use this belt was found to be very defective, because the leather links soon stretched, and thus all the work had to be done by the steel links.  The whole strain coming thus upon the steel links, they in course of time cut through the bolts and thus broke the belt to pieces.  So this invention proved worthless.

In 1884 a Chicago belt company obtained a patent on another style of link belt.  In this belt all the little holes in the links were lined with metal, similar to the holes in laced shoes.  This produced an effect similar to that produced by Hall’s patent.  The metal lining of the holes cut the bolts into pieces by friction and thus ruined the belt.  Therefore this patent proved a failure also.

After all these failures it fell to our lot to improve these belts so that they may now be worked successfully on our American fast running machinery.  During the past two years we have made and sold over five hundred leather link belts, which are all in actual use and doing excellent service, as is proved by many testimonials which we have received.

Our success with these belts has been so surprising that we think we have found, at last, the long looked for “missing link,” not in “Darwinism,” however, but in the belting line.  We prophesy a great future for these belts in this country.

How have we attained such success?  First:  We found that Roullier made a mistake in using leather offal, as, in the links of an iron chain, if one link is weak or defective, the whole chain is worthless, so in link belts, if one or two links are weak or made of poor material, the whole belt is affected by them.  It is therefore of vital importance that only the best and most solid leather be used in making the links; second, the leather must be made very pliable, but at the same time its toughness and tenacity must not be injured, or it will stretch and break.

[Illustration:  FIG 1.]

These things are of great importance, and are the principal reasons for the failures of all former efforts.  The leather which Roullier used was stiff, hard, and husky.  He believed that the harder the link the greater its tensile strength, but upon actual test this was found to be a fatal error.