This wire my son made."
Mr. Baker exhibited the sample spoken of. It looked like a tress of silky
hair, and had it not been shown upon a piece of black paper could hardly
have been seen. He went on:
"The draw plates, by means of which these fine wires are made, are
sapphires and rubies. You may fancy for yourselves how extremely delicate
must be the work of making holes of such exceeding smallness to accurate
gauge, too, in those very hard stones. I get all my draw plates from an
old Swiss lady in New York, who makes them herself to order. But, delicate
as is the work of boring the holes, there is something still more delicate
in the processes that produce such fine wire as this. That something is
the filing of a long point on the wire to enable the poking of the end of
it through the draw plate so that it can be caught by the nippers. Imagine
yourself filing a long, tapering point on the end of a wire only one
eighteen-hundredths of an inch in diameter, in order to get it through a
draw plate that will bring it down to one two-thousandths. My son does
that without using a magnifying glass. I cannot say positively what uses
this very thin wire is put to, but something in surgery, I believe, either
for fastening together portions of bone or for operations.
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