Flint
Flint names 5 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Flint a form of quartz
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a form of quartz. It is composed of silica together with a little lime, oxide of iron, water, and carbon. It is related to chalcedony, but it has a light gray or brownish color and lacks luster. It is of concretionary origin and occurs as nodules or sheets in many parts of the world. The chalk cliffs of France and England are noted for flint. Owing to its proverbial hardness, and the ease with which it may be chipped into flakes having sharp cutting edges, flint was very likely the first material used by prehistoric man for knives, hatchets, arrowheads, and spear points. Great numbers of these ancient implements have been found in localities thought to be the sites of prehistoric villages, both in the Old World and in the New. Flint was at one time the chief dependence of the civilized world as a means with which to kindle a fire. In making a fire the flint was held in one hand and a piece of steel in the other. A succession of rapid, glancing blows produced a shower of sparks that fell into a handful of tow, lint, dry leaves, punk, or some other form of tinder. The slender blaze was fed with care. The traveler or hunter caught in a rain was by no means certain of kindling a fire. Flint and steel were replaced by matches about 1835. In the old flint-lock musket, the flint was held in a slot in the hammer. As it descended it struck a grinding, glancing blow on a piece of steel affixed to the barrel of the gun. The sparks fell into a pan containing a pinch of powder called priming. In case the priming burned without exploding the charge of powder in the barrel, it was said to flash in the pan-a most exasperating, but by no means infrequent experience. The soldiers of the American Revolution carried flint-lock muskets. The flint-lock gave way to the percussion cap about the same time that matches came on the market. The cutting of flints for these purposes was at one time an important industry. Flint is now used chiefly as an ingredient of potter's clay. In 1903 $157,000 worth was ground for this purpose in the United States alone. The making of flints is an interesting process. It is the oldest industry in England. It is centered at the village of Brandon, Suffolk County, amid the treeless fens of Ely. Primitive implements and relics found here indicate that Brandon was a source of the flint remains of Europe, chracterizing what is known as the Stone Age . Antiquarians even venture the assertion that flints have been quarried and shaped at Brandon for anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 years. The vocabulary of the peasantry contains words not heard elsewhere in the world. It is quite supposable, at least, that these words were used thousands of years ago by prehistoric man. At the present time the industry consists of four steps,--quarrying, quartering, flaking, and knapping. The flint district is a common. There are hundreds and thousands of old pits. They are known as "Grimes' graves." Permission to dig a fresh pit is obtained readily. The diger preempts a spot by palcing a piece of chalk at each corner. He first digs a square pit as deep as one would care to jump into; then excavating underneath at one side, he digs another pit like the first; then a third, and so on; thus constructing a huge underground, zig-zag series of steps reaching down forty or fifty feet to the layer of chalk in which the best nodules of flint are found. Huge chunks weighing up to 200 pounds are mined and pushed up to the surface by means of the great underground stairway described. The chunks are dried in the shade. They then pass into the hands of a skillful workman, who splits them into brick-like squares by means of a heavy, peculiar hammer. One who does not know just where and with what force to strike will break a flint nodule into comparatively worthless fragments. The quarters, as the nicely squared pieces are called, then go to the flaker. This is the most difficult part of the whole business. An expert flaker steadies the quarter with one hand and works along its edge with a long steel hammer held in the other hand. His hammer rises and falls with such rapidity that long, flat, knife-shaped flakes, one for each blow, fall into a basket at the rate of 5,000 to 7,000 a day. Although the flaker does his work with apparent ease, he requires to have a quick, mechanical eye, and to know the angle, the spot, and the force requisite to a nicety. None but an expert can flake. A bungler simply wastes material. The knapper breaks the flakes into oblong pieces and trims them to size. He wears a heavy apron and sits on a stool. He holds the flakes in his left hand, and a light knapper's hammer in the other. A six-inch iron stake driven into the upper end of a block serves him for an anvil. From four to five flints are made from a flake. A skillful knapper turns out from 2,000 to 3,000 flints a day. Eight sizes are recognized in the trade,--the long Dane, fowling, musket, carbine, horse pistol, single, rifle, and pocket pistol. The largest size is 1 3/4 inches long by 1 inch in width; the smallest is 5/8 of an inch long by 1/2 inch in width. The knapper counts up his finished flints much as a banker counts coin. He separates them into sizes and seeeps them out with a nail, five at a time. For each hundred, he lays aside a counter. He packs his flints in sacks containing from 5,000 to 20,000 each, and ships them to Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, or London. Before the invention of matches and percussion caps, the flint industry was an enormous one. The East India Company , the Hudson Bay Company , and the various countries of Europe placed enormous contracts with the smallarms makers who derived their supplies from Brandon. The Turkish government bought 11,000,000 gun flints for the Crimean War. The industry is by no means dead. The British government forbids the sale of improved firearms to the natives of India and Africa. There is still a large trade in gun flints with the Arabs, who purchase from British sources. In many parts of India and Africa, too, the climate is so rainy that matches become worthless and the flint and steel are still relied upon to kindle a fire. In certain parts of Turkey, steel, flint, and tinder box are used by the older peasants. They see no use in spending money for matches. No attempt has ever been made to introduce machinery. There are no large flint factories. Independent workmen clink away at their trade independently, or at most work for wages. See Fire ; Matches
Flint a crypto-crystalline variety of quartz
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a crypto-crystalline variety of quartz. It is usually gray, smokebrown, or brownish black. If derived, as it mostly is, from the cretaceous formation, the white of the chalk is still seen on its external surface. Luster subvitreous; fracture conchoidal, leaving a cutting edge. Most of the flints scattered on the surface of the ground or existing in Tertiary or more recent sedimentary deposits came originally from the cretaceous rocks, one division of which is termed Upper White Chalk with flints, this being distinguished from the Lower ite Chalk without flints. Next to the White Maestricht beds and Faxe limestone, the chalk with flints constitutes the highest or newest layer yet discovered of the sedimentary rocks. The organic portion of flint pebbles consists of diatoms, seaweeds of low organization, the minute infusorial animals called polycistina, the spicules of sponges, with echinoderms, etc. They are the same as those in agate , solution and chalk. Liquor of flints a of flint in potassic hydrate. To skin a flint, to descend to any false economy or meanness to make a trifling sum of money. DR. SIMON FLEXNER
Flint AUSTIN, an American physician
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
AUSTIN, an American physician; born in Petersham, Mass., Oct. 30, 1812; was graduated at the medical department of Harvard College in 1833. professional career began in North- His ampton, Mass., but after a few years' practice there he removed to Boston, thence to Buffalo, where he remained till 1844. He then accepted a call to a chair in the Rush Medical College in Chicago, where he established the Buffalo "Medical Journal" but soon returned to Buffalo, in 1846, and where later he was one of the founders, and for six years a professor, of the Buffalo Medical College. He was a professor in Louisville University in 1852-1856; Professor of Pathology in the Long Island College Hospital in 1861-1868; president of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1872-1875, and of the American Medical Association in 1884; delegate to the International Medical Congress in Philadelphia in 1876; etc. He was the author of numerous text-books, clinical reports and medical papers. He died in New York City, March 13, 1886.
Flint Flint is a compact homogeneous substance of a steel-gray color
The Encyclopedia of Founding (1892)
Flint is a compact homogeneous substance of a steel-gray color, sometimes brown or black. In composition it consists of almost pure silica, with traces of iron, lime, and alumina. From the earliest times flint has been employed as a fire-producer, especially with a steel implement in the yet familiar form of "flint and steel." Flint enters largely into the composition of fine earthenware, for which purpose it is reduced to powder after it has been calcined and thrown into cold water. See QUARTZ. Floor-moulding is moulding an object on the floor by the process of "bedding in"; or possibly on the floor in flasks, as distinguished from moulding on the bench. The former method is floor-moulding, the latter bench-moulding. See BEDDING IN; ROLLING OVER; BENCH-MOULDER.
Flint a city and county-seat of Genesee co.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a city and county-seat of Genesee co., Mich.; on the Flint river and on the Grand Trunk Western and the Père Marquette railroads; 64 miles N. N. W. of Detroit. Here are a court house, the State Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, a private retreat for the insane, a high school, waterworks, gas and electric lights, public library, a National bank and several daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals. It has a large number of saw mills, carriage and wagon factories, automobile works, iron works, stove works, flour and woolen mills, etc. Pop. (1910) 38,550; (1920) 91,599.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the gunflint trade at Brandon was "by no means dead"; it is now gone, surviving only as a craft demonstration, and gunflints are made mainly by hobbyists and experimental archaeologists. The antiquarians' guess that flint had been quarried there "anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 years" was far too generous: radiocarbon dating, developed in 1949, places the Grimes Graves shafts in the Neolithic, roughly 2700-2300 BC, and the site is now a protected monument where visitors can descend one excavated shaft. The knappers' hazard the article does not mention, silicosis from flint dust, is today a regulated industrial disease, and the ground flint still used in pottery bodies is handled under strict dust controls. Flint's geology as described - a nodular silica concretion in chalk - stands unchanged.
Written for this edition, 2026.