Excerpt from Personal Reminiscences of Men and Things on Long Island Improvement after improvement followed in the Frank lin until perfection was nearly attained. No special credit is due to any one individual, unless it be to Count Rumford who made a cook stove with an oven, then for the first time was learned how to bake and cook and be protected from the (ll rect heat of the fire, which had formerly been done in front of the blazing fire of the hearth, or in a brick oven detached from the house. From these early methods of our ancestors, from the old corner fireplace to the modern steam heat, from the old tallow candle to electricity, from the wheat shock in the field to a bag of Hecker's prepared flour were long and tedious processes of evolution. Machinery has also solved its great problem from the sickle and sythe to the reaping machine and from the old flail, which resounded on the barn floor all winter long, in separating the seed from the sheaf, is now accomplished in hours by the threshing machine where months were formerly involved. The next stage of development was from the house to the factory. Wages were ridiculously low compared with modern times. Carpenters, painters and masons received six shillings per day and found, farm hands, laborers, ten dollars per month in winter and fifteen dollars in summer and board. A day's work was from sun to sun. Plain board at a farm house could be obtained at six shillings per week; women help in the house, six shillings per week. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.