CARPENTRY is the art of fashioning and framing timber for the purposes of architecture, machinery, and the like. It is distinguished from JOINERY, which considers only the fashioning and adaptation of the smaller and more curious works in wood, where the chief requisites are convenience, neatness, or elegance of form ; whereas carpentry is applied to the fitting together of the greater masses, so as to combine with magnitude, strength, du rability, and economy.
It is evident, therefore, that the intelligent carpenter would require an intimate acquaintance with the strength of the materials he employs ; the cohesion and corpus cular force of their particles ; the principles of statics and mechanics, to enable him to discover what may be the stress acting upon his work ; and the mode in which strains are propagated through the different parts of his framing, that lie may be thereby enabled effectually to resist them.
Carpentry, therefore, is an important department of physics. It constitutes one of the most beautiful and useful applications of the liberal sciences to the arts of life, and is a necessary part of the learning of the en gineer.
The performances of the ancients in this art have none of them reached our times. But the works of modern carpenters arc such as leave us little room for regret. They might many of them challenge comparison with any thing that has ever appeared in the world.
Among modern nations, the value of the art is univer sally acknowledged. But perhaps there was never a nation upon earth to which the science of carpentry was of such immense consequence as our own. Thousands of our ships, those noble specimens of art, traverse the ocean. We have risen at home to a pitch of wealth and prospe rity unequalled in the history of the world. We have attained it, by the extent of our commei ce, the superi ority of our manufactures, and the improvement of our agriculture. And this chiefly by the wonderful multi plication of machinery, and its application to almost eve , y description of labour. Our many great works of pub
lic utility, or private magnificence, have rendered our ..ountry the scat and theatre of art. Add to all this, that our declared enemy, by endeavouring as far as in his power to prevent our usual supplies of timber, has ihreatcned to cut off the very sources of our prosperity. 1 n such a nation, where the physical sciences have been ..uccessfully and diligently cultivated, which possesses many men of sufficient genius and ability, ardently desi on--; to promote the prosperity of their country, it were natural to think that this important science (for it well deserves the name) would have received the greatest attention, would have been prosecuted to the utmost li mits of investigation, and would long ago have been arranged into a body of doctrine, founded ion the exten siN e experience of our great masters, and illuminated by the po wet ful torch of mathematical and physical learn inv. But, strange to tell, we may search through the compass of English literature, and scarcely find a sin gle work which professes to treat of the science of car pentry.
The books which arc usually in the hands of the work man are totally destitute of any thing like principle, and content themselves with showing the method of forming the draft which is to guide the saw or the chisel. Nei ther the Royal Society of London, or any other of our learned societies, has ever published a single paper for the instruction of the public in these matters. Indeed, almost the only information our language can produce, is the result of the labours of a single individual, detailed in a work like our own.
A work of much merit, which appeared from the pen of a member of our national school for engineers, contains, on this subject, little more than we find delivered two centuries ago by the learned Galileo.
To look for any thing of the same nature in the flimsy productions of our itinerant lecturers, and popular books of philosophy, were to search for knowledge and learn ing among the school-books of children.