At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into this
Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly found
himself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to me
to figure out the advantage accruing from this shortening of the process
or that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I
made a sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to
this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that. I also
contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the bottles, which
all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly filled with distilled
water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in at the next. This
was an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottling
we needed special taps, and these, too, I invented and patented.
We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass
trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them up
to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in
the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped
in the cork and drove it home with a little mallet.
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