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EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
form that the greatest progress had been made. While the deep blackness, ease of working and capability of receiving a high polish, long ago suggested the use of vulcanite as a substitute for the fashionable but more expensive and brittle English jet, its plastic qualities have not been employed here to so large extent as in Europe. The Hamburg house first availed itself of these qualities in 1864, and initiated thereby a revolution in the rubber jewelry manufacture, making, at a low price, copies of the boldest and finest carvings, and applying it to all purposes of plastic ornament, from the smallest articles of jewelry to statues, such as those exhibited in the gardens of the Vienna Exhibition, and having in their light brown color, their sharpness of outline, and capability of resisting the weather, some resemblance to the more expensive bronze.
The properties of rubber as a non-conductor of electricity have been largely utilized in the manufacture of electro-magnetic instruments for telegraphic purposes; but owing to some technical difficulties it has not been so largely employed for insulating open-air telegraph wire as might have been expected. In Europe it has been used for this purpose as a substitute for glass and porcelain on the telegraph lines of Eussia, Denmark and North Germany, with so much success as to show that, if more expensive in first cost than the materials hitherto used, it was, in the long run, more economical and effectual. The Prussian government have used large quantities of the vulcanite insulators for their military telegraphs in their operations against Austria and France, and a certificate by the Prussian director of telegraphs, Major-General von Chauvin, bears evidence to the excellence of Meyer’s vulcanite for this purpose.
By far the largest quantity of vulcanite manufactured, is used for the production of combs, of which one factory alone, the Harburg India-rubber Comb Company, have made and sold 10,800,000 combs of this material in one year. In the manufacture of this article, there are no new processes to be noted, but only the excessively low price of many of the goods produced. Rubber surgical instruments, syringes, etc., have hitherto been a specialty of New York, and those exhibited in the German Annexe, in the show-case of the Hamburg New