COOPERAGE, the art of malcing vessels of pieces of wood bound together by hoops. Such vessels were in use among the Romans at the period of the Christian era. The upright pieces for the sides of a barrel or cask are called staves. The swelling at the middle of the barrel, called the belly or bulge, is formed by skilfully shaping each stave broad in the middle and narrowed at the ends so as to form part of the required double conoid. A skilful cooper can work this curve so accurately that no further fitting or alterations shall be needed when the staves are put together. The staves are made to meet at their inner edges and b.y driving the hoops very hard, the inner part is compressed till the slight gaping outside. is dosed, and thus slight inaccuracies of fitting are remedied. The bulging shape of barrel and cask seems only a fashion. It has been sug gested that the purpose is only to malce more difficult the cooper's trade. During the last few years a strong effort has been made to introduce perfectly cylindrical casks in their place; the room saved in packing cars, etc., being the strongest argument for the new shape, which could be made by much cheaper machinery besides.
There are several branches of cooperage. The wet or tight cooper makes vessels for hold ing liquids. The dry cooper does inferior work, such as barrels for containing dry goods, where an inferior degree of accuracy is sufficient. The white cooper makes chums, pails, etc., which for the most part have straight sides. The best work is made of oak, which must be thoroughly dried before being put together. Other woods employed are elm, pine, gum, beech and bass in the order named. In warm countries, the dry ing of the sun is sufficient, and casks are there fore mounted in summer only; but in the United States, artificial drying is commonly resorted to. The hoops are hammered down from the nar row to the wide part of the cask, by means of a mallet striking a piece of wood held against the hoop. Iron hoops are sometimes put on hot, in order that their contraction on cooling may bind the work together. Most ingeniously constructed machinery is now generally used in barrel-making. Like most other processes of manufacture, the cooper's trade has changed in modern times, with the substitution of machinery for hand work. Barrel-malcing ma
chinery may be divided into machines for the manufacture of staves, machines for manufac turing heads and machines for setting up and finishing the barrel. Consult Wagner, (Cooper age : A Treatise on Modern Shop-Methods and Practice) (Yonkers, N. Y., 1910) ; Newlin, *Tests of Wooden Barrels,* in (Bulletin of the United States Department of Agriculture, No. 86) (1914). Statistical bulletins on tight and slack cooperage stock are compiled by the United States Census Bureau in co-operation with the Forest service of the Department of Agriculture and are published annually. Other bulletins from the Forest Service dealing with cooperage are issued from time to time.
in modern parlance the association of people for the accomplishment of any desired end, especially the association of working people for the management of their industnal interests in store, workshop or other undertaking, and the equitable distribution of profits. The advantages of co-operation consist in the lower prices paid for the ordinary arti cles of life and of manufacture, the common use of capital, machines, buildings, water power and in common production. Instances of co-opera tive industry have been discovered among Eng lish miners and New England fishermen m the 17th century and among Greek sailors of the Levant. Co-operative societies established as early as 1777-95 are still in successful opemtion. The earliest in England was founded in 1794 at Mongewell, in Oxfordshire, by Shute Bar rington, bishop of Durham. During the Owenite agitation, between 1820 and 1845, hundreds of co-operative societies rose up. Robert Owen (q.v.), failing to convert his brother manufac turers to the innovations he had introduced for the benefit of his operatives in his New Lanark mills, appealed to the government to adopt measures that would alleviate the poverty of the laboring masses, but without success. He there fore abandoned these efforts and turned to the task of establishing co-operative communities that would put his ideas into practice. One hundred and seventy shops had been organized under the Owen plan in 1830, but four years later most of these had ceased to exist.