Many of the modern builders of what Chordal calls the hyphen Corliss engine claim to have made a great advance by putting a post under the center of the frame, but whether in acknowledgment that the frame would be likely to go down or the stonework come up I could never make out.  What I should fear would be that the stone would come up and take the frame with it.  Every brick mason knows better than to bed mortar under the center of a window sill; and this putting a prop under the center of an engine girder seems a parallel case.  They say Mr. Corliss would have done the same thing if he had thought of it.  I do not believe it.  If Mr. Corliss had found his frames too weak, he would soon have found a way to make them stronger.

John Richards, once a resident of this city, and likely the best designer of wood-working machinery this country, if not the world, ever saw, pointed out in some of his letters the true form for constructing machine framing, and in a way that it had never been forced on my mind before.  As dozens, yes, hundreds, of new designs have been brought out by machine tool makers and engine builders since John Richards made a convert of me, without any one else, so far as I know, having applied the principle in its broadest sense, I hope to present the case to you in a material form, in the hope that it may be more thoroughly appreciated.

The usual form of lathe and planer beds or frames is two side plates and a lot of cross girts; their duty is to guide the carriages or tables in straight lines and carry loads resisting bending and torsional strains.  If a designer desires to make his lathe frame stronger than the other fellows, he thinks, if he thinks at all, that he will put in more iron, rather than, as he ought to think, How shall I distribute the iron so it will do the most good?

In illustration of this peculiar way of doing things, which is not wholly confined to machine designers, I should like to relate a story, and as I had to carry the large end of the joke, it may do for me to tell it.

While occupying a prominent position, and yet compelled to carry my dinner, my wife thought the common dinner pail, with which you are probably familiar (by sight, of course), was not quite the thing for a professor (even by brevet) to be seen carrying through the streets.  So she interviewed the tinsmith to see if he could not get up something a little more tony than the regulation fifty-cent sort.  Oh, yes; he could do that very nicely.  How much would the best one he could make cost?  Well, if she could stand the racket, he could make one worth a dollar.  She thought she could, and the pail was ordered, made, and delivered with pride.  Perhaps you can guess the result.  A facsimile of the original, only twice the size.

Now, this is a very fair illustration of the fallacy of making things stronger by simply adding iron.  To illustrate what I think a much better way, I have had made these crude models (see Fig. 1), for the full force of which, as I said before, I am indebted to John Richards; and I would here add that the mechanic who has never learned anything from John Richards is either a very good or very poor one, or has never read what John Richards has written or heard what he has had to say.