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Title: Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science
Author: J. Hamilton Fyfe
Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36768]
Language: English
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TRIUMPHS OF
INVENTION AND DISCOVERY
IN ART AND SCIENCE.
[Illustration: GEORGE STEPHENSON'S HOME. Page 120.]
TRIUMPHS OF
INVENTION AND DISCOVERY
IN ART AND SCIENCE.
BY
J. HAMILTON FYFE.
"PEACE HATH HER VICTORIES NO LESS THAN WAR."
LONDON:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW;
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.
1871.
Preface.
"_Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war._"--MILTON.
It is not difficult to account for the pre-eminence, generally assigned
to the victories of war over the victories of peace in popular history.
The noise and ostentation which attend the former, the air of romance
which surrounds them,--lay firm hold of the imagination, while the
directness and rapidity with which, in such transactions, the effect
follows the cause, invest them with a peculiar charm for simple and
superficial observers. As Schiller says,--
"Straight forward goes
The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path
Of the cannon ball. Direct it flies, and rapid,
Shattering that it _may_ reach, and shattering what it reaches.
My son! the road the human being travels,
That on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow
The river's course, the valley's playful windings:
Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines,
Honouring the holy bounds of property!
And thus secure, though late, leads to its end."
The path of peace is long and devious, now dwindling into a mere
foot-track, now lost to sight in some dense thicket; and the heroes who
pursue it are often mocked at by the crowd as poor, half-witted souls,
wandering either aimlessly or in foolish chase of some Jack o' lantern
that ever recedes before them. The goal they aim at seems to the common
eye so visionary, and their progress towards it so imperceptible,--and
even when reached, it takes so long before the benefits of their
achievement are generally recognised,--that it is perhaps no wonder we
should be more attracted by the stirring narratives of war, than by the
sad, simple histories of the great pioneers of industry and science.
Picturesque and imposing as deeds of arms appear, the victories of
peace--the development of great discoveries and inventions, the
performance of serene acts of beneficence, the achievements of social
reform--possess a deeper interest and a truer romance for the seeing eye
and the understanding heart. Wounds and death have to be encountered in
the struggles of peace as well as in the contests of war; and peace has
her martyrs as well as her heroes. The story of the cotton-spinning
invention is at once as tragic and romantic as the story of the
Peninsular war. There were "forlorn hopes" of brave men in both; but in
the one case they were cheered by sympathy and association, in the other
the desperate pioneers had to face a world of foes, "alone, unfriended,
solitary, slow."
The following pages contain sketches of some of the more momentous
victories of peace, and the heroes who took part in them. The reader
need hardly be reminded that this brief list does not exhaust the
catalogue either of such events or persons, and that only a few of a
representative character are here selected.
In the present edition the different sections have been carefully
revised, and the details brought down to the latest possible date.
J. H. F.
Contents.
THE ART OF PRINTING--
1. John Gutenberg, 13
2. William Caxton, 28
3. The Printing Machine, 32
THE STEAM ENGINE--
1. The Marquis of Worcester, and his Successors, 53
2. James Watt, 63
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON--
1. Kay and Hargreaves, 77
2. Sir Richard Arkwright, 81
3. Samuel Crompton, 90
4. Dr. Cartwright, 98
5. Sir Robert Peel, 104
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE--
1. "The Flying Coach," 111
2. The Stephensons: Father and Son, 116
3. The Growth of Railways, 133
THE LIGHTHOUSE--
1. The Eddystone, 141
2. The Bell Rock, 153
3. The Skerryvore, 160
STEAM NAVIGATION--
1. James Symington, 171
2. Robert Fulton, 176
3. Henry Bell, 183
4. Ocean Steamers, 186
IRON MANUFACTURE--
Henry Cort, 193
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH--
1. Mr. Cooke, 201
2. Professor Wheatstone, 204
3. The Submarine Telegraph, 209
THE SILK MANUFACTURE--
1. John Lombe, 221
2. William Lee, 225
3. Joseph Marie Jacquard, 227
THE POTTER'S ART--
1. Luca Della Robbia, 237
2. Bernard Palissy, 241
3. Josiah Wedgwood, 250
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP--
1. Sir Humphrey Davy, 263
2. George Stephenson's Lamp, 275
PENNY POSTAGE--
1. Sir Rowland Hill, 279
2. New Departments of the Postal System, 292
THE OVERLAND ROUTE--
1. Lieutenant Waghorn, 299
2. The Suez Canal, 309
The Art of Printing.
I.--JOHN GUTENBERG.
II.--WILLIAM CAXTON.
III.--THE PRINTING MACHINE.
The Art of Printing.
"A creature he called to wait on his will,
Half iron, half vapour--a dread to behold--
Which evermore panted, and evermore rolled,
And uttered his words a millionfold.
Forth sprung they in air, down raining in dew,
And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew."
LEIGH HUNT, _Sword and Pen_.
I.--JOHN GUTENBERG.
Some Dutch writers, inspired by a not unnatural feeling of patriotism,
have endeavoured to claim the honour of inventing the Art of Printing
for a countryman of their own, Laurence Coster of Haarlem. Their sole
reliance, however, is upon the statements of one Hadrian Junius, who was
born at Horn, in North Holland, in 1511. About 1575 he wrote a work,
entitled "Batavia," in which the account of Coster first appeared. And,
as an unimpeachable authority has remarked, almost every succeeding
advocate of Coster's pretensions has taken the liberty of altering,
amplifying, or contradicting the account of Junius, according as it
might suit his own line of argument; but not one of them has succeeded
in producing a solitary fact in confirmation of it. The accounts which
are given of Coster's discovery by Junius and his successors present
many contradictory features. Thus Junius says: "Walking in a
neighbouring wood, as citizens are accustomed to do after dinner and on
holidays, he began to cut letters of beech-bark, with which, for
amusement--the letters being inverted as on a seal--he impressed short
sentences on paper for the children of his son-in-law." A later writer,
Scriverius, is more imaginative: "Coster," he says, "walking in the
wood, picked up a small bough of a beech, or rather of an oak-tree,
blown off by the wind; and after amusing himself with cutting some
letters on it, wrapped it up in paper, and afterwards laid himself down
to sleep. When he awoke, he perceived that the paper, by a shower of
rain or some accident having got moist, had received an impression from
these letters; which induced him to pursue the accidental discovery."
Not only are these accounts evidently deficient in authenticity, but it
should be remarked that the earliest of them was not put before the
world until Laurence Coster had been nearly a hundred and fifty years in
his grave. The presumed writer of the narrative which first did justice
to his memory had been also twelve years dead when his book was
published. His information, or rather the information brought forward
under cover of his name, was derived from an old man who, when a boy,
had heard it from another old man who lived with Coster at the time of
the robbery, and who had heard the account of the invention from his
master. For, to explain the fact of the early appearance of typography
in Germany, the Dutch writers are forced to the hypothesis that an
apprentice of Coster's stole all his master's types and utensils,
fleeing with them first to Amsterdam, second to Cologne, and lastly to
Mentz! The whole story is too improbable to be accepted by any impartial
inquirer; and the best authorities are agreed in dismissing the Dutch
fiction with the contempt it deserves, and in ascribing to JOHN
GUTENBERG, of Mentz, the honour to which he is justly entitled.
* * * * *
Of the career of Gutenberg we shall speak presently, but let us first
point out that the invention of typography, like all great inventions,
was no sudden conception of genius--not the birth of some singularly
felicitous moment of inspiration--but the result of what may be called a
gradual series of causes. Printing with movable types was the natural
outcome of printing with blocks. We must go back, therefore, a few
years, to examine into the origin of "block books."
Mr. Jackson observes that there cannot be a doubt that the principle on
which wood engraving is founded--that of taking impressions on paper or
parchment, with ink, from prominent lines--was known and practised in
attesting documents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Towards
the end of the fourteenth, or about the beginning of the fifteenth
century, he says, there seems reason to believe that this principle was
adopted by the German card-makers for the purpose of marking the
outlines of the figures on their cards, which they afterwards coloured
by the practice called _stencilling_.
It was the Germans who first practised card-making as a trade, and as
early as 1418 the name of a _kartenmacher_, or card-maker, occurs in the
burgess-books of Augsburg. In the town-books of Nuremburg, the
designation _formschneider_, or figure-cutter, is found in 1449; and we
may presume that block books--that is, books each page of which was cut
on a single block--were introduced about this time. These books were on
religious subjects, and were intended, perhaps, by the monks as a kind
of counterbalance against the playing-cards; "thus endeavouring to
supply a remedy for the evil, and extracting from the serpent a cure for
his bite."
The earliest woodcut known--one of St. Christopher--bears the date of
1432, and was found in a convent situated within about fifty miles of
the city of Augsburg--the convent of Buxheim, near Memmingen. It was
pasted on the inside of the right hand cover of a manuscript entitled
_Laus Virginis_, and measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, by
eight and one-eighth inches in width.
The following description of it by Jackson is interesting:--
"To the left of the engraving the artist has introduced, with a noble
disregard of perspective, what Bewick would have called a 'bit of
nature.' In the foreground a figure is seen driving an ass loaded with a
sack towards a water-mill; while by a steep path a figure, perhaps
intended for the miller, is seen carrying a full sack from the back-door
of the mill towards a cottage. To the right is seen a hermit--known by
the bell over the entrance to his dwelling--holding a large lantern to
direct St. Christopher as he crosses the stream. The couplet at the foot
of the cut,--
'Cristofori faciem die quacunque tueris,
Illa nempe die morte mala non morieris,'
may be translated as follows,--
Each day that thou the image of St. Christopher shall see,
That day no frightful form of death shall chance to fall on thee.
These lines allude to a superstition, once popular in all Catholic
countries, that on the day they saw a figure or image of St.
Christopher, they would be safe from a violent death, or from death
unabsolved and unconfessed."
Passing over some other woodcuts of great antiquity, in all of which the
figures are accompanied by engraved letters, we come to the block books
proper. Of these, the most famous are called, the _Apocalypsis, seu
Historia Sancti Johannis_ (the "Apocalypse, or History of St. John");
the _Historia Virginis ex Cantico Canticorum_ ("Story of the Virgin,
from the Song of Songs"); and the _Biblia Pauperum_ ("Bible of the
Poor"). The first is a history, pictorial and literal, of the life and
revelations of St. John the Evangelist, partly derived from the book of
Revelation, and partly from ecclesiastical tradition. The second is a
similar biography of the Virgin Mary, as it is supposed to be typified
in the Song of Solomon; and the third consists of subjects representing
many of the most important passages in the Old and New Testaments, with
texts to illustrate the subject, or clinch the lesson of duty it may
shadow forth.
With respect to the engraving, we are told that the cuts are executed in
the simplest manner, as there is not the least attempt at shading, by
means of cross lines or hatchings, to be detected in any one of the
designs. The most difficult part of the engraver's task, says Jackson,
supposing the drawing to have been made by another person, would be the
cutting of the letters, which, in several of the subjects, must have
occupied a considerable portion of time, and have demanded no small
degree of perseverance, care, and skill.
These block books were followed by others in which no illustrations
appeared, but in which the entire page was occupied with text. The
Grammatical Primer, called the "Donatus," from the name of its supposed
compiler, was thus printed, or engraved, enabling copies of it to be
multiplied at a much cheaper rate than they could be produced in
manuscript.
And thus we see that the art of printing--or, more correctly speaking,
engraving on wood--has advanced from the production of a single figure,
with merely a few words beneath it, to the impression of whole pages of
text. Next, for the engraved page were to be substituted movable letters
of metal, wedged together within an iron frame; and impressions, instead
of being obtained by the slow and tedious process of friction, were to
be secured by the swift and powerful action of the press.
* * * * *
About the year 1400, John Gænsfleisch, or Gutenberg, was born at Mentz.
He sprung from an honourable family, and it is said that he himself was
by birth a knight. He seems to have been a person of some property.
About 1434 we find him living in Strasburg, and, in partnership with a
certain Andrew Drytzcher, endeavouring to perfect the art of typography.
How he was induced to direct his attention towards this object, and
under what circumstances he began his experiments, it is impossible to
say; but there can be no doubt that he was the first person who
conceived the idea of _movable types_--an idea which is the very
foundation of the art of printing.
An old German chronicler furnishes the following account of the early
stages of the great printer's discovery:--
"At this time (about 1438), in the city of Mentz, on the Rhine, in
Germany, and not in Italy as some persons have erroneously written, that
wonderful and then unheard-of art of printing and characterizing books
was invented and devised by John Gutenberger, citizen of Mentz, who,
having expended most of his property in the invention of this art, on
account of the difficulties which he experienced on all sides, was about
to abandon it altogether; when, by the advice and through the means of
John Fust, likewise a citizen of Mentz, he succeeded in bringing it to
perfection. At first they formed or engraved the characters or letters
in written order on blocks of wood, and in this manner they printed the
vocabulary called a 'Catholicon.' But with these forms or blocks they
could print nothing else, because the characters could not be transposed
in these tablets, but were engraved thereon, as we have said. To this
invention succeeded a more subtle one, for they found out the means of
cutting the forms of all the letters of the alphabet, which they called
_matrices_, from which again they cast characters of copper or tin of
sufficient hardness to resist the necessary pressure, which they had
before engraved by hand."
This is a very brief and summary account of a great invention. By
comparison of other authorities we are enabled to bring together a far
greater number of details, though we must acknowledge that many of these
have little foundation but in tradition or romance.
Let us, therefore, take a peep at the first printer, working in
seclusion and solitude in the old historic city of Strasburg, and
endeavouring to elaborate in practice the grand idea which has been
conceived and matured by his energetic brain. Doubtlessly he knew not
the full importance of this idea, or of how great a social and religious
revolution it was to be the seed, and yet we cannot believe that he was
altogether unconscious of its value to future generations.
Shutting himself up in his own room, seeing no one, rarely crossing the
threshold, allowing himself hardly any repose, he set himself to work
out the plan he had formed. With a knife and some pieces of wood he
constructed a set of movable types, on one face of each of which a
letter of the alphabet was carved in relief, and which were strung
together, in the order of words and sentences, upon a piece of wire. By
means of these he succeeded in producing upon parchment a very
satisfactory impression.
To be out of the way of prying eyes, he took up his quarters in the
ruins of the old monastery of St. Arbogaste, outside the town, which had
long been abandoned by the monks to the rats and beggars of the
neighbourhood; and the better to mask his designs, as well as to procure
the funds necessary for his experiments, he set up as a sort of
artificer in jewellery and metal-work, setting and polishing precious
stones, and preparing Venetian glass for mirrors, which he afterwards
mounted in frames of metal and carved wood. These avowed labours he
openly practised, along with a couple of assistants, in a public part of
the monastery; but in the depths of the cloisters, in a dark secluded
spot, he fitted up a little cell as the _atelier_ of his secret
operations; and there, secured by bolts and bars, and a thick oaken
door, against the intrusion of any one who might penetrate so far into
the interior of the ruins, he applied himself to his great work. He
quickly perceived, as a man of his inventiveness was sure to perceive,
the superiority of letters of metal over those of wood. He invented
various coloured inks, at once oily and dry, for printing with; brushes
and rollers for transferring the ink to the face of the types; "forms,"
or cases, for keeping together the types arranged in pages; and a press
for bringing the inked types and the paper in contact.
[Illustration: GUTENBERG IN THE OLD MONASTERY. Page 22.]
Day and night, whenever he could spare an instant from his professed
occupations, he devoted himself to the development of his great design.
At night he could hardly sleep for thinking of it, and his hasty
snatches of slumber were disturbed by agitating dreams. Tradition has
preserved the story of one of these for us as he afterwards told it to
his friends. He dreamt that, as he sat feasting his eyes upon the
impression of his first page of type, he heard two voices whispering at
his ear--the one soft and musical, the other harsh, dull, and bitter in
its tones. The one bade him rejoice at the great work he had achieved;
unveiled the future, and showed the men of different generations, the
peoples of distant lands, holding high converse by means of his
invention; and cheered him with the hope of an immortal fame. "Ay," put
in the other voice, "immortal he might be, but at what a price! Man,
more often perverse and wicked than wise and good, would profane the new
faculty this art created, and the ages, instead of blessing, would have
cause to curse the man who gave it to the world. Therefore let him
regard his invention as a seductive but fatal dream, which, if
fulfilled, would place in the hands of man, sinful and erring as he was,
only another instrument of evil." Gutenberg, whom the first voice had
thrown into an ecstasy of delight, now shuddered at the thought of the
fearful power to corrupt and to debase his art would give to wicked men,
and awoke in an agony of doubt. He seized his mallet, and had almost
broken up his types and press, when he paused to reflect that, after
all, God's gifts, although sometimes perilous and capable of abuse, were
never evil in themselves, and that to give another means of utterance to
the piety and reason of mankind was to promote the spread of virtue and
intelligence, which were both divine. So he closed his ears to the
suggestions of the tempter, and persisted in his work.
Gutenberg had scarcely completed his printing machine, and got it into
working order, when the jealousy and distrust of his associates in the
nominal business he carried on, brought him into trouble with the
authorities of Strasburg. He could have saved himself by the disclosure
of all the secrets of his invention; but this he refused to do. His
goods were confiscated; and he returned penniless, with a heavy heart,
to his native town Mentz. There, in partnership with a wealthy goldsmith
named John Fust, and his son-in-law Schoeffer, he started a printing
office; from which he sent out many works, mostly of a religious
character. The enterprise throve; but misfortune was ever dogging
Gutenberg's steps, and he had but a brief taste of prosperity. The
priests looked with suspicion upon the new art, which enabled people to
read for themselves what before they had to take on trust from them. The
transcribers of books,--a large and influential guild,--were also
hostile to the invention, which threatened to deprive them of their
livelihood. These two bodies formed a league against the printers; and
upon the head of poor Gutenberg were emptied all the vials of their
wrath. Fust and Schoeffer, with crafty adroitness, managed to conciliate
their opponents, and to offer up their partner as a sacrifice for
themselves. By the zeal of his enemies, and the treachery of his
friends, Gutenberg was driven out of Mentz. After wandering about for
some time in poverty and neglect, Adolphus, the Elector of Nassau,
became his patron; and at his court Gutenberg set up a press, and
printed a number of works with his own hands. Though poor, his last
years were spent in peace; and when he died, he had only a few copies of
the productions of his press to leave to his sister.
Meanwhile, at Strasburg, some of his former associates pieced together
the revelations that had fallen from him, while at the old monastery, as
to his invention; and not only worked it with success, but claimed all
the credit of its origin. In the same way, Fust and Schoeffer, at Mentz,
grew rich through the invention of the man they had betrayed, and tried
to rob of his fame.
There is a curious, but not very well authenticated story about a visit
Fust made to Paris to push the sale of his Bibles. "The tradition of the
Devil and Dr. Faustus," writes D'Israeli in the "Curiosities of
Literature," "was said to have been derived from the odd circumstances
in which the Bibles of the first printer, Fust, appeared to the world.
When Fust had discovered this new art, and printed off a considerable
number of copies of the Bible to imitate those which were commonly sold
as MSS., he undertook the sale of them at Paris. It was his interest to
conceal this discovery and to pass off his printed copies for MSS. But,
enabled to sell his Bibles at sixty crowns, while the other scribes
demanded five hundred, this raised universal astonishment; and still
more when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted, and even
lowered his price. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder.
Informations were given in to the magistrates against him as a magician;
and on searching his lodgings, a great number of copies were found. The
red ink, and Fust's red ink is peculiarly brilliant, which embellished
his copies, was said to be his blood; and it was solemnly adjudged that
he was in league with the Infernal. Fust at length was obliged, to save
himself from a bonfire, to reveal his art to the Parliament of Paris,
who discharged him from all prosecution in consideration of the
wonderful invention."
The edition of the Bible, which was one of the very first productions of
Gutenberg and Fust's press, is called the Mazarin, in consequence of the
first known copy having been discovered in the famous library formed by
Cardinal Mazarin. It seems to have been printed as early as August
1456, and is a truly admirable specimen of typography; the characters
being very clear and distinct, and the uniformity of the printing
perfectly remarkable. A copy in the Royal Library at Paris is bound
in two volumes, and every complete page consists of two columns,
each containing forty-two lines. The reader will recognize the
appropriateness of the fact that from the first printing press the first
important work produced should be a copy of God's Word. It sanctified
the new art which was to be so fruitful of good and evil results--the
good superabounding, and clearly visible--the evil little, and destined,
perhaps, to be directed eventually to good--for successive generations
of mankind. It was a fitting forerunner of the long generation of books
which have since issued so ceaselessly from the printing press; books,
of the majority of which we may say, with Milton, that "they contain a
potency of life in them to be as active as those souls were whose
progeny they are; to preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and
extraction of the living intellects that feed them."
Gutenberg's career was dashed with many lights and shadows, but it
closed in peace. In 1465, the Archbishop-elector of Mentz appointed him
one of his courtiers, with the same allowance of clothing as the
remainder of the nobles attending his court, and all other privileges
and exemptions. It is probable that from this time he abandoned the
practice of his new invention. The date of his death is uncertain; but
there is documentary evidence extant which proves that it occurred
before February 24, 1468. He was interred in the church of the Recollets
at Mentz, and the following epitaph was composed by his kinsman Adam
Gelthaus:--
"D. O. M. S.
"Joanni Gesnyfleisch, artis impressoriae repertori, de omni
natione et lingua optime merito, in nominis sui memoriam
immortalem Adam Gelthaus posuit. Ossa ejus in ecclesia D.
Francisci Moguntina feliciter cubant."
II.--WILLIAM CAXTON.
During the last thirty or forty years of the fifteenth century, while
printing was becoming gradually more and more practised on the
Continent, and the presses of Mentz, Bamberg, Cologne, Strasburg,
Augsburg, Rome, Venice, and Milan, were sending forth numbers of Bibles,
and various learned and theological works, chiefly in Latin, an English
merchant, a man of substance and of no little note in Chepe, appeared at
the court of the Duke of Burgundy at Bruges, to negotiate a commercial
treaty between that sovereign and the king of England; which
accomplished, the worthy ambassador seems to have liked the place and
the people so well, and to have been so much liked in return, that for
some years afterwards he took up his residence there, holding some
honourable, easy appointment in the household of the Duchess of
Burgundy. This was William Caxton, who here ripened, if he did not
acquire, his love of literature and scholarship, and began, from hatred
of idleness, to take pen in hand himself.
"When I remember," says he, in his preface to his first work, a
translation of a fanciful "Recueil des Histoires de Troye," "that every
man is bounden by the commandment and counsel of the wise man to eschew
sloth and idleness, which is mother and nourisher of vices, and ought to
put himself into virtuous occupation and business, then I, having no
great charge or occupation, following the said counsel, took a French
book, and read therein many strange marvellous histories. And for so
much as this book was new and late made, and drawn into French, and
never seen in our English tongue, I thought in myself, it should be a
good business to translate it into our English, to the end that it might
be had as well in the royaume of England as in other lands, and also to
pass therewith the time; and thus concluded in myself to begin this said
work, and forthwith took pen and ink, and began boldly to run forth, as
blind Bayard, in this present work."
While at work upon this translation, Caxton found leisure to visit
several of the German towns where printing presses were established, and
to get an insight into the mysteries of the art, so that by the time he
had finished the volume, he was able to print it. At the close of the
third book of the "Recuyell," he says: "Thus end I this book which I
have translated after mine author, as nigh as God hath given me cunning,
to whom be given the laud and praise. And for as much as in the writing
of the same my pen is worn, mine hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyen
dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, and my courage not so
prone and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me
daily, and feebleth all the body; and also because I have promised to
divers gentlemen and to my friends, to address to them as hastily as I
might, this said book, therefore I have practised and learned, at my
great charge and dispense, to ordain this said book in print, after the
manner and form you may here see; and is not written with pen and ink as
other books are, to the end that every man may have them at once. For
all the books of this story, named the 'Recuyell of the Historyes of
Troye,' thus imprinted as ye here see, were begun in one day, and also
finished in one day" (that is, in the same space of time).
By the year 1477, Caxton had returned to London, and set up a printing
establishment within the precincts of Westminster Abbey; had given to
the world the three first books ever printed in England,--"The Game
and Play of the Chesse" (March 1474); "A boke of the hoole Lyf of
Jason" (1475); and "The Dictes and Notable Wyse Sayenges of the
Phylosophers" (1477),--and was fairly started in the great work of
supplying printed books to his countrymen, which, as a placard in his
largest type sets forth, if any one wanted, "emprynted after the forme
of this present lettre whiche ben well and truly correct, late hym come
to Westmonster, in to the Almonesrye, at the reed pale, and he shal have
them good chepe." From the situation of the first printing office, the
term chapel is applied to such establishments to this day.
[Illustration: WILLIAM CAXTON. Page 30.]
Caxton published between sixty and seventy different works during the
seventeen years of his career as a printer, all of them in what is
called black letter, and the bulk of them in English. He had always a
view to the improvement of the people in the works he published, and
though many of his productions may seem to us to be of an unprofitable
kind, it is clear that in the issue of chivalrous narratives, and of
Chaucer's poems (to whom, says the old printer, "ought to be given great
laud and praising for his noble making and writing"), he was aiming at
the diffusion of a nobler spirit, and a higher taste than then
prevailed.
In 1490, Caxton, an old, worn man, verging on fourscore years of age,
wrote, "Every man ought to intend in such wise to live in this world, by
keeping the commandments of God, that he may come to a good end; and
then, out of this world full of wretchedness and tribulation, he may go
to heaven, unto God and his saints, unto joy perdurable;" and passed
away, still labouring at his post. He died while writing, "The most
virtuous history of the devout and right renouned Lives of Holy Fathers
living in the desert, worthy of remembrance to all well-disposed
persons."
Wynkyne de Worde filled his master's place in the almonry of
Westminster; and the guild of printers gradually waxed strong in numbers
and influence. In Germany they were privileged to wear robes trimmed
with gold and silver, such as the nobles themselves appeared in; and to
display on their escutcheon, an eagle with wings outstretched over the
globe,--a symbol of the flight of thought and words throughout the
world. In our own country, the printers were men of erudition and
literary acquirements; and were honoured as became their mission.
III.--THE PRINTING MACHINE.
Between the rude screw-press of Gutenberg or Caxton, slow and laboured
in its working, to the first-class printing machine of our own day,
throwing off its fifteen or eighteen thousand copies of a large
four-page journal in an hour, what a stride has been taken in the noble
art! Step by step, slowly but surely, has the advance been made,--one
improvement suggested after another at long intervals, and by various
minds. With the perfection of the printing press, the name of Earl
Stanhope is chiefly associated; but, although when he had put the
finishing touches to its construction, immensely superior to all former
machines, it was unavailable for rapid printing. In relation to the
demand for literature and the means of supplying it, the world had, half
a century ago, reached much the same deadlock as in the days when the
production of books depended solely on the swiftness of the
transcriber's pen, and when the printing press existed only in the
fervid brain and quick imagination of a young German student. Not only
the growth, but the spread of literature, was restricted by the labour,
expense, and delay incident to the multiplication of copies; and the
popular appetite for reading was in that transition state when an
increased supply would develop it beyond all bounds or calculation,
while a continuance of the starvation supply would in all likelihood
throw it into a decline from want of exercise.
Such was the state of things when a revolution in the art of printing
was effected which, in importance, can be compared only to the original
discovery of printing. In fact, since the days of Gutenberg to the
present hour, there has been only one great revolution in the art, and
that was the introduction of steam printing in 1814. The neat and
elegant, but slow-moving Stanhope press, was after all but little in
advance of its rude prototype of the fifteenth century, the chief
features of which it preserved almost without alteration. The steam
printing machine took a leap ahead that placed it at such a distance
from the printing press, that they are hardly to be recognised as the
offspring of the same common stock. All family resemblance has died out,
although the printing machine is certainly a development of the little
screw press.
Of the revolution of 1814, which placed the printing machine in the seat
of power, _vice_ the press given over to subordinate employment, Mr.
John Walter of the _Times_ was the prominent and leading agent. But for
his foresight, enterprise, and perseverance, the steam machine might
have been even now in earliest infancy, if not unborn.
Familiar as the invention of the steam printing machine is now, in the
beginning of the present century it shared the ridicule which was thrown
upon the project of sailing steam ships upon the sea, and driving steam
carriages upon land. It seemed as mad and preposterous an idea to print
off 5000 impressions of a paper like the _Times_ in one hour, as, in the
same time, to paddle a ship fifteen miles against wind and tide, or to
propel a heavily laden train of carriages fifty miles. Mr. Walter,
however, was convinced that the thing could be done, and lost no time in
attempting it. Some notion of the difficulties he had to overcome, and
the disappointments he had to endure, while engaged in this enterprise,
may be gathered from the following extracts from the biography of Mr.
Walter, which appeared in the _Times_ at the time of his death in July
1847:--
"As early as the year 1804, an ingenious compositor, named Thomas
Martyn, had invented a self-acting machine for working the press, and
had produced a model which satisfied Mr. Walter of the feasibility of
the scheme. Being assisted by Mr. Walter with the necessary funds, he
made considerable progress towards the completion of his work, in the
course of which he was exposed to much personal danger from the
hostility of the pressmen, who vowed vengeance against the man whose
inventions threatened destruction to their craft. To such a length was
their opposition carried, that it was found necessary to introduce the
various pieces of the machine into the premises with the utmost possible
secresy, while Martyn himself was obliged to shelter himself under
various disguises in order to escape their fury. Mr. Walter, however,
was not yet permitted to reap the fruits of his enterprise. On the very
eve of success he was doomed to bitter disappointment. He had exhausted
his own funds in the attempt, and his father, who had hitherto assisted
him, became disheartened, and refused him any further aid. The project
was, therefore, for the time abandoned.
"Mr. Walter, however, was not the man to be deterred from what he had
once resolved to do. He gave his mind incessantly to the subject, and
courted aid from all quarters, with his usual munificence. In the year
1814 he was induced by a clerical friend, in whose judgment he confided,
to make a fresh experiment; and, accordingly, the machinery of the
amiable and ingenious Koenig, assisted by his young friend Bower, was
introduced--not, indeed, at first into the _Times_ office, but into the
adjoining premises, such caution being thought necessary upon the
threatened violence of the pressmen. Here the work advanced, under the
frequent inspection and advice of the friend alluded to. At one period
these two able mechanics suspended their anxious toil, and left the
premises in disgust. After the lapse, however, of about three days, the
same gentleman discovered their retreat, induced them to return, showed
them, to their surprise, their difficulty conquered, and the work still
in progress. The night on which this curious machine was first brought
into use in its new abode was one of great anxiety, and even alarm. The
suspicious pressmen had threatened destruction to any one whose
inventions might suspend their employment. 'Destruction to him and his
traps.' They were directed to wait for expected news from the Continent.
It was about six o'clock in the morning when Mr. Walter went into the
press-room, and astonished its occupants by telling them that 'The
_Times_ was already printed by steam! That if they attempted violence,
there was a force ready to suppress it; but that if they were
peaceable, their wages should be continued to every one of them till
similar employment could be procured,'--a promise which was, no doubt,
faithfully performed; and having so said, he distributed several copies
among them. Thus was this most hazardous enterprise undertaken and
successfully carried through, and printing by steam on an almost
gigantic scale given to the world."
On that memorable day, the 29th of November 1814, appeared the following
announcement,--"Our journal of this day presents to the public the
practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing
since the discovery of the art itself. The reader now holds in his hands
one of the many thousand impressions of the _Times_ newspaper which were
taken off last night by a mechanical apparatus. That the magnitude of
the invention may be justly appreciated by its effects, we shall inform
the public that after the letters are placed by the compositors, and
enclosed in what is called a form, little more remains for man to do
than to attend and watch this unconscious agent in its operations. The
machine is then merely supplied with paper; itself places the form, inks
it, adjusts the paper to the form newly inked, stamps the sheet, and
gives it forth to the hands of the attendant, at the same time
withdrawing the form for a fresh coat of ink, which itself again
distributes, to meet the ensuing sheet, now advancing for impression;
and the whole of these complicated acts is performed with such a
velocity and simultaneousness of movement, that no less than 1100 sheets
are impressed in one hour."
Koenig's machine was, however, very complicated, and before long, it was
supplanted by that of Applegath and Cowper, which was much simpler in
construction, and required only two boys to attend it--one to lay on,
and the other to take off the sheets. The vertical machine which Mr.
Applegath subsequently invented, far excelled his former achievement;
but it has in turn been superseded by the machine of Messrs. Hoe of New
York. All these machines were first brought into use in the _Times'_
printing office; and to the encouragement the proprietors of that
establishment have always afforded to inventive talent, the readiness
with which they have given a trial to new machines, and the princely
liberality with which they have rewarded improvements, is greatly due
the present advanced state of the noble craft and mystery.
The printing-house of the _Times_, near Blackfriars Bridge, forms a
companion picture to Gutenberg's printing-room in the old abbey at
Strasburg, and illustrates not only the development of the art, but the
progress of the world during the intervening centuries. Visit
Printing-House Square in the day-time, and you find it a quiet, sleepy
place, with hardly any signs of life or movement about it, except in
the advertisement office in the corner, where people are continually
going out and in, and the clerks have a busy time of it, shovelling
money into the till all day long. But come back in the evening, and the
place will wear a very different aspect. All signs of drowsiness have
disappeared, and the office is all lighted up, and instinct with bustle
and activity. Messengers are rushing out and in, telegraph boys, railway
porters, and "devils" of all sorts and sizes. Cabs are driving up every
few minutes, and depositing reporters, hot from the gallery of the House
of Commons or the House of Lords, each with his budget of short-hand
notes to decipher and transcribe. Up stairs in his sanctum the editor
and his deputies are busy preparing or selecting the articles and
reports which are to appear in the next day's paper. In another part of
the building the compositors are hard at work, picking up types, and
arranging them in "stick-fulls," which being emptied out into "galleys,"
are firmly fixed therein by little wedges of wood, in order that
"proofs" may be taken of them. The proofs pass into the hands of the
various sets of readers, who compare them with the "copy" from which
they were set up, and mark any errors on the margin of the slips, which
then find their way back to the compositors, who correct the types
according to the marks. The "galleys" are next seized by the persons
charged with the "making-up" of the paper, who divide them into columns
of equal length. An ordinary _Times_ newspaper, with a single inside
sheet of advertisements, contains seventy-two columns, or 17,500 lines,
made up of upwards of a million pieces of types, of which matter about
two-fifths are often written, composed, and corrected after seven
o'clock in the evening. If the advertisement sheet be double, as it
frequently is, the paper will contain ninety-six columns. The types set
up by the compositors are not sent to the machine. A mould is taken of
them in a composition of brown paper, by means of which a "stereotype"
is cast in metal, and from this the paper is printed. The advertisement
sheet, single or double, as the case may be, is generally ready for the
press between seven or eight o'clock at night. The rest of the paper is
divided into two "forms,"--that is, columns arranged in pages and bound
together by an iron frame, one for each side of the sheet. Into the
first of these the person who "makes up" the paper endeavours to place
all the early news, and it is ready for press usually about four
o'clock. The other "form" is reserved for the leading articles,
telegrams, and all the latest intelligence, and does not reach the press
till near five o'clock.
The first sight of Hoe's machine, by several of which the _Times_ is now
printed, fills the beholder with bewilderment and awe. You see before
you a huge pile of iron cylinders, wheels, cranks, and levers, whirling
away at a rate that makes you giddy to look at, and with a grinding and
gnashing of teeth that almost drives you deaf to listen to. With
insatiable appetite the furious monster devours ream after ream of snowy
sheets of paper, placed in its many gaping jaws by the slaves who wait
on it, but seems to find none to its taste or suitable to its digestion,
for back come all the sheets again, each with the mark of this strange
beast printed on one side. Its hunger never is appeased,--it is always
swallowing and always disgorging, and it is as much as the little
"devils" who wait on it can do, to put the paper between its lips and
take it out again. But a bell rings suddenly, the monster gives a gasp,
and is straightway still, and dead to all appearance. Upon a closer
inspection, now that it is at rest, and with some explanation from the
foreman you begin to have some idea of the process that has been going
on before your astonished eyes.
The core of the machine consists of a large drum, turning on a
horizontal axis, round which revolve ten smaller cylinders, also on
horizontal axes, in close proximity to the drum. The stereotyped matter
is bound, like a malefactor on the wheel, to the central drum, and round
each cylinder a sheet of paper is constantly being passed. It is
obvious, therefore, that if the type be inked, and each of the cylinders
be kept properly supplied with a sheet of paper, a single revolution of
the drum will cause the ten cylinders to revolve likewise, and produce
an impression on one side of each of the sheets of paper. For this
purpose it is necessary to have the type inked ten times during every
revolution of the drum; and this is managed by a very ingenious
contrivance, which, however, is too complicated for description here.
The feeding of the cylinders is provided for in this way. Over each
cylinder is a sloping desk, upon which rests a heap of sheets of white
paper. A lad--the "layer-on"--stands by the side of the desk and pushes
forward the paper, a sheet at a time, towards the tape fingers of the
machine, which, clutching hold of it, drag it into the interior, where
it is passed round the cylinders, and printed on the outer side by
pressure against the types on the drum. The sheet is then laid hold of
by another set of tapes, carried to the other end of the machine from
that at which it entered, and there laid down on a desk by a projecting
flapper of lath-work. Another lad--the "taker-off"--is in attendance to
remove the printed sheets, at certain intervals. The drum revolves in
less than two seconds; and in that time therefore ten sheets--for the
same operation is performed simultaneously by the ten cylinders--are
sucked in at one end and disgorged at the other printed on one side,
thus giving about 20,000 impressions in an hour.
Such is the latest marvel of the "noble craft and mystery" of printing;
but it is not to be supposed that the limits of production have even now
been reached. The greater the supply the greater has grown the demand;
the more people read, the more they want to read; and past experience
assures us that ingenuity and enterprise will not fail to expand and
multiply the powers of the press, so that the increasing appetite for
literature may be fully met.
* * * * *
We have briefly alluded to stereotyping; but some fuller notice seems
requisite of a process so valuable and important, without which, indeed,
the rapid multiplication of copies of a newspaper, even by a Hoe's
six-cylinder machine, would be impossible. If stereotyping had not been
invented, the printer would require to "set up" as many "forms" of type
as there are cylinders in the machine he uses; an expensive and
time-consuming operation which is now dispensed with, because he can
resort to "casts." There is yet another advantage gained by the process;
"casts" of the different sheets of a book can be preserved for any
length of time; and when additional copies or new editions are needed,
these "casts" can at once be sent to the machine, and the publisher is
saved the great expense of "re-setting."
The reader is well aware that while many books disappear with the day
which called them forth, so there are others for which the demand is
constant. This was found to be the case soon after the invention of
printing, and the plan then adopted was the expensive and cumbrous one
of setting up the whole of the book in request, and to keep the type
standing for future editions. The disadvantages of this plan were
obvious--a large outlay for type, the amount of space occupied by a
constantly increasing number of "forms," and the liability to injury
from the falling out of letters, from blows, and other accidents. As
early as the eighteenth century attempts seem to have been made to
remedy these inconveniences by cementing the types together at the
bottom with lead or solder to effect their greater preservation. Canius,
a French historian of printing, states that in June 1801 he received a
letter from certain booksellers of Leyden, with a copy of their
stereotype Bible, the plates for which were formed by soldering together
the bottom of common types with some melted substance to the thickness
of about three quires of writing-paper; and, it is added, "These plates
were made about the beginning of the last century by an artist named Van
du Mey."
This, however, was not true stereotyping; whose leading principle is to
dispense with the movable types--to set them again, as it were, at
liberty--by making up perfect fac-similes in type-metal of the various
combinations into which they may have entered. These fac-similes being
made, the type is set free, and may be distributed, and used for making
up fresh pages; which may once more furnish, so to speak, the punches to
the mould into which the type-metal is poured for the purpose of
effecting the fac-simile.
The inventor of this ingenious process of casting plates from pages of
type was William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1735. Not possessing
sufficient capital to carry out his invention, he visited London, and
sought the assistance of the London stationers; from whom he received
the most encouraging words, but no pecuniary assistance. But Ged was a
man not readily discomfited, and applying at length to the Universities
and the King's printer, he obtained the effective patronage he needed.
He "stereotyped" some Bibles and Prayer-books, and the sheets worked off
from his plates were admitted equal in point of appearance and accuracy
to those printed from the type itself.
But every benefactor of his kind is doomed to meet with the opposition
of the envious, the ignorant, or the prejudiced. "The argument used by
the idol-makers of old, 'Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our
wealth,' and, 'This our craft is in danger to be set at nought,' was, as
is usual in such cases, urged against this most useful and important
invention. The compositors refused to set up works for stereotyping, and
even those which were set up, however carefully read and corrected, were
found to be full of gross errors. The fact was, that when the pages were
sent to be cast, the compositors or pressmen, bribed, it is said, by a
typefounder, disturbed the type, and introduced false letters and
words. Poor Ged died, and left the dangerous secret of his art (which he
did not disclose during his life-time) to his son, who, after many
struggles for success, failed as his father had done before him." There
is a tradition current, however, that he joined the Jacobite rebellion,
was arrested, imprisoned, tried, and sentenced, but was eventually
spared in consideration of the value of his father's admirable
invention.
That invention, after being forgotten for nearly half a century, was
revived by a Dr. Tilloch, and taken up, improved, and extended by the
ingenious Earl Stanhope. It is now practised in the following manner:--
The type employed differs slightly from that in common use. The letter
should have no shoulder, but should rise in a straight line from the
foot; the spaces, leads, and quadrats are of the same height as the stem
of the letter; the object being to diminish the number and depth of the
cavities in the page, and thus lessen the chances of the mould breaking
off and remaining in the form. Each page is corrected with the utmost
care, and "imposed" in a small "chase" with metal furniture (or
frame-work), which rises to a level with the type. Of course the number
of pages in the form will vary according to the size of the book; a
sheet being folded into sixteen leaves, twelve, eight, four, or two for
16mo, 12mo, 8vo, quarto, or folio.
Having our pages of type in complete order, we now proceed to rub the
surface with a soft brush which has been lightly dipped into a very thin
oil. Plumbago is sometimes preferred. A brass rectangular frame of three
sides, with bevelled borders adapted to the size of the pages, is placed
upon the chase so as to enclose three sides of the type, the fourth side
being formed by a single brass edge, having the same inward sloping
level as the other three sides. The use of this frame is to determine
the size and thickness of the cast, which is next taken in
plaster-of-paris--two kinds of the said plaster being used; the finer is
mixed, poured over the surface of the type, and gently worked in with a
brush so as to insure its close adhesion to the exclusion of bubbles of
air; the coarser, after being mixed with water, is simply poured and
spread over the previous and finer stratum.
The superfluous plaster is next cleared away; the mould soon sets; the
frame is raised; and the mould comes off from the surface of the type,
on which it has been prevented from encrusting itself by the thin film
of oil or plumbago.
The next step is to dress and smoothen the plaster-mould, and set it on
its edge in one of the compartments of a sheet-iron rack contained in an
oven, and exposed, until perfectly dry, to a temperature of about 400°.
This occupies about two hours. A good workman, it is said, will mould
ten octavo sheets, or one hundred and sixty pages in a day: each mould
generally contains a couple of octavo pages.
[Illustration]
In the state to which it is now brought, the mould is exceedingly
friable, and requires to be handled with becoming care. With the face
downwards it is placed upon the flat cast-iron _floating-plate_, which,
in its turn, is set at the bottom of a square cast-iron tray, with
upright edges sloping outwards, called the "dipping pan." It has a
cast-iron lid, secured by a screw and shackles, not unlike a copying
machine. This pan having been heated to 400°, it is plunged into an iron
pot containing the melted alloy, which hangs over a furnace, the pan
being slightly inclined so as to permit the escape of the air. A small
space is left between the back or upper surface of the mould, and the
lid of the dipping-pan, and the fluid metal on entering into the pan
through the corner openings, _floats_ up the plaster together with the
iron plate (hence called the _floating-plate_) on which the mould is
set, with this effect, that the metal flows through the notches cut in
the edge of the mould, and fills up every part of it, forming a layer of
metal on its face corresponding to the depth of the border, while on
the back is left merely a thin metallic film.
The dipping-pan, says Tomlinson, is suspended, plunged in the metal, and
removed by means of a crane; and when taken out, is set in a cistern of
water upon supports so arranged that only the bottom of the pan comes in
contact with the surface of the water. The metal thus _sets_, or
solidifies, from below, and containing fluid above, maintains a fluid
pressure during the contraction which accompanies the cooling.
As it thus shrinks in dimensions, molten metal is poured into the
corners of the pan for the purpose of maintaining the fluid pressure on
the mould, and thus securing a good and solid cast. For if the pan were
allowed to cool more slowly, the thin metallic film at the back of the
inverted plaster mould would probably solidify first, and thus prevent
the fluid pressure which is necessary for filling up all the lines of
the mould.
Tomlinson concludes his description of these interesting processes by
informing us that an experienced and skilled workman will make five
dips, each containing two octavo pages, in the course of an hour, or, as
already stated, at the rate of nearly ten octavo sheets a day.
When the pan is opened, the cake of metal and plaster is removed, and
beaten upon its edges with a mallet, to clear away all superfluous
metal. The stereotype plate is then taken by the _picker_, who planes
its edges square, "turns" its back flat upon a lathe until the proper
thickness is obtained, and removes any minute imperfections arising from
specks of dirt and air-bubbles left among the letters in casting the
mould. Damaged letters are cut out, and separate types soldered in as
substitutes. After all this anxious care to obtain perfection, the plate
is pronounced ready for working, and when made up with the other plates
into the proper form, it may be worked either at the hand-press or by
machine.
Other modes of stereotyping have been introduced, but not one has
attained to the popularity of the method we have just described.
The Steam Engine.
I.--THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER.
II.--JAMES WATT.
The Steam Engine.
"It is said that ideas produce revolutions and truly they
do--not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical."--CARLYLE.
I.--THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER.
As the last century was drawing to its close, two great revolutions were
in progress, both of which were destined to exercise a mighty influence
upon the years to come,--the one calm, silent, peaceful, the other full
of sound and fury, bathed in blood, and crowned with thorns,--the one
the fruit of long years of patient thought and work, the other the
outcome of long years of oppression, suffering, and sin,--the one was
Watt's invention of the steam engine, the other the great popular revolt
in France. These are the two great events which set their mark upon our
century, gave form and colour to its character, and direction to its
aims and aspirations. In the pages of conventional history, of course,
the French revolution, with its wild phantasmagoria of retribution, its
massacres and martyrdoms, will no doubt have assigned to it the foremost
rank as the great feature of the era,--
"For ever since historians writ,
And ever since a bard could sing,
Doth each exalt with all his wit
The noble art of murdering."
But those who can look below the mere surface of events, and whose fancy
is not captivated by the melo-drama of rebellion, and the pageantry of
war, will find that Watt's steam machine worked the greatest revolution
of modern times, and exercised the deepest, as well as widest and most
permanent influence over the whole civilized world.
Like all great discoveries, that of the motive power of steam, and the
important uses to which it might be applied, was the work, not of any
one mind, but of several minds, each borrowing something from its
predecessor, until at last the first vague and uncertain Idea was
developed into a practical Reality. Known dimly to the ancients, and
probably employed by the priests in their juggleries and pretended
miracles, it was not till within the last three centuries that any
systematic attempt was made to turn it to useful account.
But before we turn our attention to the persons who made, and, after
many failures and discouragements, _successfully_ made this attempt, it
will be advisable we should say something as to the principle on which
their invention is founded.
The reader knows that gases and vapours, when imprisoned within a narrow
space, do struggle as resolutely to escape as did Sterne's starling from
his cage. Their force of pressure is enormous, and if confined in a
closed vessel, they would speedily rend it into fragments. Let some
water boil in a pipkin whose lid fits very tightly; in a few minutes
the vapour or steam arising from the boiling water, overcoming the
resistance of the lid, raises it, and rushes forth into the atmosphere.
Take a small quantity of water, and pour it into the hollow of a ball of
metal. Then with the aid of a cork, worked by a metallic screw, close
the opening of the ball hermetically, and place the ball in the heart of
a glowing fire. The steam formed by the boiling water in the inside of
the metallic bomb, finding no channel of escape, will burst through the
bonds that sought to confine it, and hurl afar the fragments with a loud
and dangerous explosion.
These well-known facts we adduce simply as a proof of the immense
mechanical power possessed by steam when enclosed within a limited area.
Now, the questions must have occurred to many, though they were
themselves unable to answer them,--Why should all this force be wasted?
Can it not be directed to the service and uses of man? In the course of
time, however, human intelligence _did_ discover a sufficient reply, and
_did_ contrive to utilize this astonishing power by means of the machine
now so famous as the Steam Engine.
Let us take a boiler full of water, and bring it up to boiling point by
means of a furnace. Attach to this boiler a tube, which guides the steam
of the boiler into a hollow metallic cylinder, traversed by a piston
rising and sinking in its interior. It is evident that the steam rushing
through the tube into the lower part of the cylinder, and underneath the
piston, will force the piston, by its pressure, to rise to the top of
the cylinder. Now let us check for a moment the influx of the steam
_below_ the piston, and turning the stopcock, allow the steam which
fills that space to escape outside; and, at the same time, by opening a
second tube, let in a supply of steam _above_ the piston: the pressure
of the steam, now exercised in a downward direction, will force the
piston to the bottom of its course, because there will exist beneath it
no resistance capable of opposing the pressure of the steam. If we
constantly keep up this alternating motion, the piston now rising and
now falling, we are in a position to profit by the force of steam. For
if the lever, attached to the rod of the piston at its lower end, is
fixed by its upper to a crank of the rotating axle of a workshop or
factory, is it not clear that the continuous action of the steam will
give this axle a continuous rotatory movement? And this movement may be
transmitted, by means of bands and pulleys, to a number of different
machines or engines all kept at work by the power of a solitary engine.
This, then, is the principle on which the inventions of Papin, the
Marquis of Worcester, Newcomen, and James Watt have been based.
The great astronomer Huyghens conceived the idea of creating a motive
machine by exploding a charge of gunpowder under a cylinder traversed by
a piston: the air contained in this cylinder, dilated by the heat
resulting from the combustion of the powder, escaped into the outer air
through a valve, whereupon a partial void existed beneath the piston,
or, rather, the air considerably rarified; and from this moment the
pressure of the atmospheric air falling on the upper part of the piston,
and being but imperfectly counterpoised by the rarified air beneath the
piston, precipitated this piston to the bottom of the cylinder.
Consequently, said Huyghens, if to the said piston were attached a chain
or cord coiling around a pulley, one might raise up the weights placed
at the extremity of the cord, and so produce a genuine mechanical
effect.
[Illustration: GENERAL PRINCIPLE OF THE STEAM ENGINE.]
But Experiment, the touchstone of Physical Truth, soon revealed the
deficiencies of an apparatus such as Huyghens had suggested. The air
beneath the piston was not sufficiently rarified; the void produced was
too imperfect. Evidently gunpowder was not the right agent. What was?
Denis Papin answered, Steam. And the first Steam Engine ever invented
was invented by this ingenious Frenchman.
Papin was born at Blois on the 22nd of August 1645. He died about 1714,
but neither the exact date nor the place of his death is known. The
lives of most men of genius are heavy with shadows, but Papin's career
was more than ordinarily characterized by the incessant pursuit of the
evil spirits of adversity and persecution. A Protestant, and devoutly
loyal to his creed, he fled from France with thousands of his
co-religionists, when Louis XIV. unwisely and unrighteously revoked the
Edict of Nantes, which permitted the Huguenots to worship God after
their own fashion. And it was abroad, in England, Italy, and Germany,
that he realized the majority of his inventions, among which that of the
Steam Engine is the most conspicuous.
In 1707 Papin constructed a steam engine on the principle we have
already described, and placed it on board a boat provided with wheels.
Embarking at Cassel on the river Fulda, he made his way to Münden in
Hanover, with the design of entering the waters of the Weser, and thence
repairing to England, to make known his discovery, and test its
capabilities before the public. But the harsh and ignorant boatmen of
the Weser would not permit him to enter the river; and when he
indignantly complained, they had the barbarity to break his boat in
pieces. This was the crowning misfortune of Papin's life. Thenceforward
he seems to have lost all heart and hope. He contrived to reach London,
where the Royal Society, of which he was a member, allowed him a small
pittance.
In 1690 this ingenious man had devised an engine in which atmospheric
vapour instead of steam was the motive agent. At a later period,
Newcomen, a native of Dartmouth in Devonshire, conceived the idea of
employing the same source of power.
But, previously, the value of steam, if employed in this direction, had
occurred to the Marquis of Worcester, a nobleman of great ability and a
quick imagination, who, for his loyalty to the cause of Charles I., had
been confined in the Tower of London as a prisoner. On one occasion,
while sitting in his solitary chamber, the tight cover of a kettle full
of boiling water was blown off before his eyes; for mere amusement's
sake he set it on again, saw it again blown off, and then began to
reflect on the capabilities of power thus accidentally revealed to him,
and to speculate on its application to mechanical ends. Being of a
quick, ingenious turn of mind, he was not long in discovering how it
could be directed and controlled. When he published his project--"An
Admirable and Most Forcible Way to Drive up Water by Fire"--he was
abused and laughed at as being either a madman or an impostor. He
persevered, however, and actually had a little engine of some two horse
power at work raising water from the Thames at Vauxhall; by means of
which, he writes, "a child's force bringeth up a hundred feet high an
incredible quantity of water, and I may boldly call it the most
stupendous work in the whole world." There is a fervent "Ejaculatory and
Extemporary Thanksgiving Prayer" of his extant, composed "when first
with his corporeal eyes he did see finished a perfect trial of his
water-commanding engine, delightful and useful to whomsoever hath in
recommendation either knowledge, profit, or pleasure." This and the rest
of his wonderful "Centenary of Inventions," only emptied instead of
replenishing his purse. He was reduced to borrow paltry sums from his
creditors, and received neither respect for his genius nor sympathy for
his misfortunes. He was before his age, and suffered accordingly.
* * * * *
In 1698 his work was taken up by Thomas Savery, a miner, who, through
assiduous labour and well-directed study, had become a skilful engineer.
He succeeded in constructing an engine on the principle of the pressure
of aqueous vapour, and this engine he employed successfully in pumping
water out of coal mines. We owe to Savery the invention of a vacuum,
which was suggested to him, it is said, in a curious manner: he
happened to throw a wine-flask, which he had just drained, upon the
fire; a few drops of liquor at the bottom of the flask soon filled it
with steam, and, taking it off the fire, he plunged it, mouth downwards,
into a basin of cold water that was standing on the table, when, a
vacuum being produced, the water immediately rushed up into the flask.
In tracing this lineage of inventive genius, we next come to Thomas
Newcomen, a blacksmith, who carried out the principle of the piston in
his Atmospheric Engine, for which he took out a patent in 1705. It is
but just to recognize that this engine was the first which proved
practically and widely useful, and was, in truth, the actual progenitor
of the present steam engine. It was chiefly used for working pumps. To
one end of a beam moving on a central axis was attached the rod of the
pump to be worked; to the other, the rod of the piston moving in the
cylinder below. Underneath this cylinder was a boiler, and the two were
connected by a pipe provided with a stop-cock to regulate the supply of
steam. When the pump-rod was depressed, and the piston raised to the top
of the cylinder, which was effected by weights hanging to the pump-end
of the beam, the stop-cock was used to cut off the steam, and a supply
of cold water injected into the cylinder through a water-pipe connected
with the tank or cistern. The steam in the cylinder was immediately
condensed; a vacuum created below the piston; the latter was then forced
down by atmospheric pressure, bringing with it the end of the beam to
which it was attached, and raising the other along with the pump-rod. A
fresh supply of steam was admitted below the piston, which was raised by
the counterpoise; and thus the motion was constantly renewed. The
opening and shutting of the stop-cocks was at first managed by an
attendant; but a boy named Potter, who was employed for this purpose,
being fonder of play than work, contrived to save himself all trouble in
the matter by fastening the handles with pieces of string to some of the
cranks and levers. Subsequently, Beighton, an engineer, improved on this
idea by substituting levers, acted on by pins in a rod suspended from
the beam.
Properly speaking, Newcomen's engine was not a steam, but an atmospheric
engine; for though steam was employed, it formed no essential feature of
the contrivance, and might have been replaced by an air-pump. All the
use that was made of steam was to produce a vacuum underneath the
piston, which was pressed down by the weight of the atmosphere, and
raised by the counterpoise of the buckets at the other end of the beam.
Watt, in bringing the expansive force of steam to bear upon the working
of the piston, may be said to have really invented the steam engine.
Half a century before the little model came into Watt's hands,
Newcomen's engine had been made as complete as its capabilities
admitted of; and Watt struck into an entirely new line, and invented an
entirely new machine, when he produced his Condensing Engine.
II.--JAMES WATT.
There are few places in our country where human enterprise has effected
such vast and marvellous changes within the century as the country
traversed by the river Clyde. Where Glasgow now stretches far and wide,
with its miles of swarming streets, its countless mills, and warehouses,
and foundries, its busy ship-building yards, its harbour thronged with
vessels of every size and clime, and its large and wealthy population,
there was to be seen, a hundred years ago, only an insignificant little
burgh, as dull and quiet as any rural market-town of our own day. There
was a little quay at the Broomielaw, seldom used, and partly overgrown
with broom. No boat over six tons' burden could get so high up the
river, and the appearance of a masted vessel was almost an event.
Tobacco was the chief trade of the town; and the tobacco merchants might
be seen strutting about at the Cross in their scarlet cloaks, and
looking down on the rest of the inhabitants, who got their livelihood,
for the most part, by dealing in grindstones, coals, and fish--"Glasgow
magistrates," as herrings are popularly called, being in as great repute
then as now. There were but scanty means of intercourse with other
places, and what did exist were little used, except for goods, which
were conveyed on the backs of pack-horses. The caravan then took two
days to go to Edinburgh--you can run through now between the two cities
in little more than an hour. There is hardly any trade that Glasgow does
not prosecute vigorously and successfully. You may see any day you walk
down to the Broomielaw, vessels of a thousand tons' burden at anchor
there, and the custom duties which were in 1796 little over £100, have
now reached an amount exceeding one million!
Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the gigantic strides which it
has made, to the genius, patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his
boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, used to be scolded by his
aunt for wasting his time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it
on again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over the steam as it
rose from the spout, and catching and counting the drops of water it
fell into. James Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in
that science, his practical application of which in after life was to
revolutionize the whole system of mechanical movement, and place an
almost unlimited power at the disposal of the industrial classes.
When a boy, James Watt was delicate and sickly, and so shy and sensitive
that his school-days were a misery to him, and he profited but little by
his attendance. At home, though, he was a great reader, and picked up a
great deal of knowledge for himself, rarely possessed by those of his
years. One day a friend was urging his father to send James to school,
and not allow him to trifle away his time at home. "Look how the boy is
occupied," said his father, "before you condemn him." Though only six
years old, he was trying to solve a geometrical problem on the floor
with a bit of chalk. As he grew older he took to the study of optics and
astronomy, his curiosity being excited by the quadrants and other
instruments in his father's shop. By the age of fifteen he had twice
gone through De Gravesande's Elements of Natural Philosophy, and he was
also well versed in physiology, botany, mineralogy, and antiquarian
lore. He was further an expert hand in using the tools in his father's
workshop, and could do both carpentry and metal work. After a brief stay
with an old mechanic in Glasgow, who, though he dignified himself with
the name of "optician," never rose beyond mending spectacles, tuning
spinets, and making fiddles and fishing tackle, Watt went at the age of
eighteen to London, where he worked so hard, and lived so sparingly in
order to relieve his father from the burden of maintaining him, that his
health suffered, and he had to recruit it by a return to his native air.
During the year spent in the metropolis, however, he managed to learn
nearly all that the members of the trade there could teach, and soon
showed himself a quick and skilful workman.
In 1757 we find the sign of "James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker
to the College," stuck up over the entrance to one of the stairs in the
quadrangle of Glasgow College. But though under the patronage of the
University, his trade was so poor, that thrifty and frugal as he was, he
had a hard struggle to live by it. He was ready, however, for any work
that came to hand, and would never let a job go past him. To execute an
order for an organ which he accepted, he studied harmonics diligently,
and though without any ear for music, turned out a capital instrument,
with several improvements of his own in its action; and he also
undertook the manufacture of guitars, violins, and flutes. All this
while he was laying up vast stores of knowledge on all sorts of
subjects, civil and military engineering, natural history, languages,
literature, and art; and among the professors and students who dropped
into his little shop to have a chat with him, he soon came to be
regarded as one of the ablest men about the college, while his modesty,
candour, and obliging disposition gained him many good friends.
[Illustration: JAMES WATT. Page 67.]
Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experimented a little in the
powers of steam; but it was not till the winter of 1763-4, when a model
of Newcomen's engine was put into his hands for repair, that he took up
the matter in earnest. Newcomen's engine was then about the most
complete invention of its kind; but its only value was its power of
producing a ready vacuum, by rapid condensation on the application of
cold; and for practical purposes was neither cheaper nor quicker than
animal power. Watt, having repaired the model, found, on setting it
agoing, that it would not work satisfactorily. Had it been only a little
less clumsy and imperfect, Watt might never have regarded it as more
than the "fine plaything," for which he at first took it; but now the
difficulties of the task roused him to further efforts. He consulted all
the books he could get on the subject, to ascertain how the defects
could be remedied; and that source of information exhausted, he
commenced a series of experiments, and resolved to work out the problem
for himself. Among other experiments, he constructed a boiler which
showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in a given time,
and thereby ascertained the quantity of steam used in every stroke of
the engine. He found, to his astonishment, that a small quantity of
water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of water injected
into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further
examination, he ascertained the steam heated six times its weight of
well water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212°). After
various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to the conclusion that, to
make a perfect steam engine, two apparently incompatible conditions must
be fulfilled--the cylinder must always be as hot as the steam that came
rushing into it, and yet, at each descent of the piston, the cylinder
must become sufficiently cold to condense the steam. He was at his wit's
end how to accomplish this task, when, as he was taking a walk one
afternoon, the idea flashed across his mind that, as steam was an
elastic vapour, it would expand and rush into a previously exhausted
place; and that, therefore, all he had to do to meet the conditions he
had laid down, was to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a
communication between this vessel and the cylinder of the steam-engine
at the moment when the piston was required to descend, and the steam
would disseminate itself and become divided between the cylinder and the
adjoining vessel. But as this vessel would be kept cold by an injection
of water, the steam would be annihilated as fast as it entered, which
would cause a fresh outflow of the remaining steam in the cylinder, till
nearly the whole of it was condensed, without the cylinder itself being
chilled in the operation. Here was the great key to the problem; and
when once the idea of separate condensation was started, many other
subordinate improvements, as he said himself, "followed as corollaries
in rapid succession, so that in the course of one or two days the
invention was thus far complete in his mind."
It cost him ten long weary years of patient speculation and experiment,
to carry out the idea, with little hope to buoy him up, for to the last
he used to say "his fear was always equal to his hope,"--and with all
the cares and embarrassments of his precarious trade to perplex and
burden him. Even when he had his working model fairly completed, his
worst difficulties--the difficulties which most distressed and harassed
the shy, sensitive, and retiring Watt--seemed only to have commenced. To
give the invention a fair practical trial required an outlay of at least
£1000; and one capitalist, who had agreed to join him in the
undertaking, had to give it up through some business losses. Still Watt
toiled on, always keeping the great object in view,--earning bread for
his family (for he was married by this time), by adding land-surveying
to his mechanical labours, and, in short, turning his willing hand to
any honest job that offered.
He got a patent in 1769, and began building a large engine; but the
workmen were new to the task, and when completed, its action was
spasmodic and unsatisfactory. "It is a sad thing," he then wrote, "for a
man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to
pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I
cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme,
and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst." And just
then, to make matters still more gloomy, he learned that some rascally
linen-draper in London was plagiarizing the great invention he had
brought forth in such sore and protracted travail. "Of all things in
the world," cried poor Watt, sick with hope deferred, and pressed with
little carking cares on every side, "there is nothing so foolish as
inventing."
When nearly giving way to despair, and on the point of abandoning his
invention, Watt was fortunate enough to fall in with Matthew Boulton,
one of the great manufacturing potentates of Birmingham, an energetic,
far-seeing man, who threw himself into the enterprise with all his
spirit; and the fortune of the invention was made. An engine, on the new
principle, was set up at Soho; and there Boulton and Watt sold, as the
former said to Boswell, "what all the world desires to have,
POWER;"--the infinite power that animates those mighty engines, which--
"England's arms of conquest are,
The trophies of her bloodless war:
Brave weapons these.
Victorious over wave and soil,
With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,
Pierces the everlasting hills,
And spans the seas."
Watt's engine, once fairly started, was not long in making its way into
general use. The first steam-engine used in Manchester was erected in
1790; and now it is estimated that in that district, within a radius of
ten miles, there are in constant work more than fifty thousand boilers,
giving a total power of upwards of one million horses. And the united
steam power of Great Britain is considered equal to the manual labour of
upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number
of males on the face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, Watt's
improved engines were dispersed all over the country, especially in
Cornwall--the firm receiving the value of a third part of the coal saved
by the use of the new machine. In one mine, where there were three pumps
at work, the proprietors thought it worth while, it is said, to purchase
the rights of the inventors, at the price of £2500 yearly for each
engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must
have been at least £7500 a year.
In the first year of the present century, Watt withdrew himself entirely
from business; but though he lived in retirement, he did not let his
busy mind get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one time he
took it into his head that his faculties were declining, and though
upwards of seventy years of age, he resolved to test his mental powers
by taking up some new subject of study. It was no easy matter to find
one quite new to him, so wide and comprehensive had been his range of
study; but at length the Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he
immediately applied himself to master it, the facility with which he did
so, dispelling all doubt as to the failing of his stupendous intellect.
He thus busied himself in various useful and entertaining pursuits, till
close upon his death, which took place in 1819.
Extraordinary as was Watt's inventive genius, his wide range of
knowledge, theoretic and practical, was equally so. Great as is the
"idea" with which his name is chiefly associated, he was not a man of
one idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject which came under
his notice which he did not master; and, as was said of him, "it seemed
as if every subject casually started by him had been that he had been
occupied in studying." He had no doubt a rapid faculty of acquiring
knowledge; but he owed the versatility and copiousness of his
attainments above all to his unwearied industry. He was always at work
on something or other, and he may truly be called one of those who--
"Could Time's hour-glass fall,
Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all."
In a recent volume of memoirs by Mrs. Schimmel Pennick, we find the
following graphic sketch of this extraordinary man:--"He was one of the
most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was
generally bent forward or leaning on his hand in meditation, his
shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in, his limbs lank and
unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His utterance was slow and
impassioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his
manners gentle, modest, and unassuming. In a company where he was not
known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly passed the whole time
in pursuing his own meditations. When he entered the room, men of
letters, men of science, many military men, artists, ladies, and even
little children, thronged around him. I remember a celebrated Swedish
artist being instructed by him that rat's whiskers made the most pliant
painting-brushes; ladies would appeal to him on the best modes of
devising grates, curing smoking chimneys, warming their houses, and
obtaining fast colours."
His reading was singularly extensive and diversified. He perused almost
every work that came in his way, and used to say that he never opened a
book, no matter what its subject or worth, without learning something
from it. He had a vivid imagination, was passionately fond of fiction,
and was a very gifted story-teller himself. When a boy, staying with his
aunt in Glasgow, he used every night to enthral the attention of the
little circle with some exciting narrative, which they would not go to
bed till they had heard the end of; and kept them in such a state of
tremor and excitement, that his aunt used to threaten to send him away.
Since Watt's time, innumerable patents have been taken out for
improvements in the steam engine; but his great invention forms the
basis of nearly all of them, and the alterations refer rather to details
than principles of action. The application of steam to locomotive
purposes, however, led to the construction of the high pressure engine,
in which the cumbrous condensing apparatus is dispensed with, and motion
imparted to the piston by the elastic power of the steam being greater
than that of the atmosphere.
The Manufacture of Cotton.
I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES.
II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.
III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON.
IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT.
V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL.
The Manufacture of Cotton.
"Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men who walk
daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk
shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men."--CARLYLE.
I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES.
On the 3d of May 1734, there was a hanging at Cork which made a good
deal more noise than such a very ordinary event generally did in those
days. There was nothing remarkable about the malefactor, or the crime he
had committed. He was a very commonplace ruffian, and had earned his
elevation to the gallows by a vulgar felony. What was remarkable about
the affair was, that the woollen weavers of Cork, being then in a state
of great distress from want of work, dressed up the convict in cotton
garments, and that the poor wretch, having once been a weaver himself,
"employed" the last occasion he was ever to have of addressing his
fellow creatures, by assuring them that all his misdeeds and misfortunes
were to be traced to the "pernicious practice of wearing cottons."
"Therefore, good Christians," he continued, "consider that if you go on
to suppress your own goods, by wearing such cottons as I am now clothed
in, you will bring your country into misery, which will consequently
swarm with such unhappy malefactors as your present Object is; and the
blood of every miserable felon that will hang after this warning from
the gallows will lie at your doors."
All which sayings were no doubt greatly applauded by the disheartened
weavers on the spot, and much taken to heart by the citizens and gentry
to whom they were addressed.
This is only one out of the many illustrations which might be drawn from
the chronicles of those days, of the prejudice and discouragement cotton
had to contend against on its first appearance in this country.
Prohibited over and over again, laid under penalties and high duties,
treated with every sort of contumely and oppression, it had long to
struggle desperately for the barest tolerance; yet it ended by
overcoming all obstacles, and distancing its favoured rival wool.
Returning good for evil, cotton now sustains one-sixth of our
fellow-countrymen, and is an important mainstay of our commerce and
manufactures.
First imported into Great Britain towards the middle of the seventeenth
century, cotton was but little used for purposes of manufacture till the
middle of the eighteenth. The settlement of some Flemish emigrants in
Lancashire led to that district becoming the principal seat of the
cotton manufacture; and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil
induced the people to resort to spinning and weaving to make up for the
unprofitableness of their agricultural labours.
A nobler monument of human skill, enterprise, and perseverance, than the
invention of cotton-spinning machinery is hardly to be met with; but it
must also be owned that its history, encouraging as it is in one aspect,
is in another sad and humiliating to the last degree. It is difficult at
first to credit the uniform ingratitude and treachery which the various
inventors met with from the very men whom their contrivances enriched.
"There is nothing," said James Watt in the crisis of his fortunes, worn
with care, and sick with hope deferred--"there is nothing so foolish as
inventing;" and with far more reason the inventors of cotton-spinning
machines could echo the mournful cry. It is sad to think that so proud a
chapter of our history should bear so dark a stain.
In 1733 the primitive method still prevailed of spinning between the
finger and thumb, only one thread at a time; and weaving up the yarn in
a loom, the shuttle of which had to be thrown from right to left and
left to right by both hands alternately. In that year, however, the
first step was made in advance, by the invention of the fly-shuttle,
which, by means of a handle and spring, could be jerked from side to
side with one hand. This contrivance was due to the ingenuity of John
Kay, a loom-maker at Colchester, and proved his ruin. The weavers did
their best to prevent the use of the shuttle,--the masters to get it
used, and to cheat the inventor out of his reward. Poor Kay was soon
brought low in the world by costly law-suits, and being not yet tired of
inventing, devised a rude power-loom. In revenge a mob of weavers broke
into his house, smashed all his machines, and would have smashed him
too, had they laid hands on him. He escaped from their clutches, to find
his way to Paris, and to die there in misery not long afterwards. Kay
was the first of the martyrs in this branch of invention. James
Hargreaves was the next.
The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and
the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought
to a stand-still for want of weft to go on with, and had to spend their
mornings going about in search of it, sometimes without getting as much
as kept them busy for the rest of the day. The scarcity of yarn was a
constant complaint; and many a busy brain was at work trying to devise
some improvement on the common hand-wheel. Amongst others, James
Hargreaves, an ingenious weaver at Standhill, near Blackburn, who had
already improved the mode of cleaning and unravelling the cotton before
spinning, took the subject into consideration. One day, when brooding
over it in his cottage, idle for want of weft, the accidental
overturning of his wife's wheel suggested to him the principle of the
spinning-jenny. Lying on its side, the wheel still continued in
motion--the spindle being thrown from a horizontal into an upright
position; and it occurred to him that all he had got to do was to place
a number of spindles side by side. This was in 1764, and three years
afterwards Hargreaves had worked out the idea, and constructed a
spinning frame, with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel, which he
christened after his wife Jenny, whose wheel had first put him in the
right track. Directly the spinners of the locality got knowledge of this
machine that was to do eight times as much as any one of them, they
broke into the inventor's cottage, destroyed the jenny, and compelled
him to fly for the safety of his life to Nottingham. He took out a
patent, but the manufacturers leagued themselves against them. Sole,
friendless, penniless, he could make no head against their numbers and
influence, relinquished his invention, and died in obscurity and
distress ten years after he had the misfortune to contrive the
spinning-jenny.
The history of the cotton manufacture now becomes identified with the
lives of Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright--the inventors of the
water-frame, the mule, and the power-loom.
II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.
Somewhere about the year 1752, any one passing along a certain obscure
alley in Preston, then a mere village compared with the prosperous town
into which it has since expanded, might have observed projecting from
the entrance to the underground flat of one of the houses, a blue and
white pole, with a battered tin plate dangling at the end of it, the
object of which was to indicate that if he wanted his hair cut or his
chin shaved, he had only to step down stairs, and the owner of the sign
would be delighted to accommodate him. But either people in that quarter
had little or no superfluous hair to get rid of, or they had it taken
off elsewhere; for Dicky Arkwright, the barber in the cellar, for whom
the pole and plate stood sponsor in the upper world, had few
opportunities of displaying his talents, and spent most of his time
whetting his razors on a long piece of leather, one end of which was
nailed to the wall, while the other was drawn towards him, and keeping
the hot water and the soap ready for the customers who seldom or never
came. This sort of thing did not suit Dick's notions at all; for he was
of an active temperament, and besides feeling very dull at being so much
by himself all day, he pulled rather a long face when he counted out the
scanty array of coppers in the till after shutting up shop for the
night. As he sat one night, before tumbling into his truckle bed that
stood in a recess in one corner of the dingy little room, meditating on
the hardness of the times, a bright idea struck him; and the next
morning the attractions of the sign-pole were enhanced by a staring
placard, bearing the urgent invitation:--
COME TO THE
SUBTERRANEOUS BARBER!
HE SHAVES FOR A PENNY!!
Now twopence, as we believe all those who have investigated the subject
are agreed, was the standard charge for a clean shave at that period;
and as soon as this innovation got wind, we can fancy how indignant the
fraternity were at the unprincipled conduct of one of their number; how
they denounced the reprobate, and prophesied his speedy ruin, over their
pipes and beer in the parlour of the "Duke of Marlborough," which they
patronized out of respect for that hero's enormous periwig,--in their
eyes his chief title to immortality, and a bright example for the
degenerate age, when people had not only taken to wearing their own
hair, but were even beginning to leave off dusting it with flour! And to
make matters worse, here was a low fellow offering to shave for a penny.
A number of people, tickled with the originality of the placard, and not
unmindful of the penny saved, began to patronize the "Subterraneous
barber," and he soon drew so many customers away from the higher-priced
shops, that they were obliged to come down, after a while, to a penny as
well. Not to be outdone, Arkwright lowered his charge to a halfpenny,
and still retained his rank as the cheapest barber in the place.
Arkwright's parents had been very poor people; and as he was the
youngest of a family of thirteen, it may be readily supposed that all
the school learning he got was of the most meagre kind,--if, indeed, he
ever was at school at all, which is very doubtful. He was of a very
ardent, enterprising temperament, however, and when once he took a thing
in hand, stubbornly persevered in carrying it through to the end. About
the year 1760, being then about thirty years of age, Arkwright got tired
of the shaving, which brought him but a very scanty and precarious
livelihood, and resolved to try his luck in a business where there was
more scope for his enterprise and activity. He therefore began business
as an itinerant dealer in hair, travelling up and down the country to
collect it, dressing it himself, and then disposing of it in a prepared
state to the wig-makers. As he was very quick in detecting any
improvements that might be made in the process of dressing, he soon
acquired the reputation amongst the wig-makers of supplying a better
article than any of his rivals, and drove a very good trade. He had also
picked up or discovered for himself the secret of dyeing the hair in a
particular way, by which he not only augmented his profits, but enlarged
the circle of his customers. He throve so well, that he was able to lay
by a little money and to marry. He was very fond of spending what
leisure time he had in making experiments in mechanics; and for a while
was very much taken up with an attempt to solve the attractive problem
of perpetual motion. No doubt he soon saw the hopelessness of the
effort; but although he left the question unsolved, the bent thus given
to his thoughts was fruitful of most valuable consequences.
Living in the midst of a manufacturing population, Arkwright was
accustomed to hear daily complaints of the continual difficulty of
procuring sufficient weft to keep the looms employed; while the
exportation of cotton goods gave rise to a growing demand for the
manufactured article. The weavers generally had the weft they used spun
for them by their wives or daughters; and those whose families could not
supply the necessary quantity, had their spinning done by their
neighbours; and even by paying, as they had to do, more for the spinning
than the price allowed by their masters, very few could procure weft
enough to keep themselves constantly at work. It was no uncommon thing,
we learn, for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and
call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him
for the rest of the day. Arkwright must have been constantly hearing of
this difficulty, and of the restrictions it placed on the manufacture of
cotton goods; and being a mechanical genius, was led to think how it
might be lessened, if not got rid of altogether. The idea of having an
automaton spinner, instead of one of flesh and blood, had occurred
before then to more than one speculator; but the thing had never
answered, and no models or descriptions of the machines proposed were
preserved. One inventor had, indeed, destroyed his own machine, after
having constructed it and found it to work, for fear that if it came
into use it would deprive the poor spinners of their livelihood,--in
reality its effect would have been to provide employment and food for
thousands more than at that time got a miserable living from their
spinning-wheels.
While Arkwright was intent on the discovery of perpetual motion, he fell
in with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, who assisted him in making
wheels and springs for the contrivance he was trying to complete. This
led to an intimate connection between them; and when Arkwright had given
up the perpetual motion affair, and applied his thoughts to the
invention of some machine for producing cotton weft more rapidly than by
the simple wheel, Kay continued to help him in making models. Arkwright
soon became so engrossed in his new task, and so confident of ultimate
success, that he began to neglect his regular business. All his
thoughts, and nearly all his time, were given up to the great work he
had taken in hand. His trade fell off; he spent all his savings in
purchasing materials for models, and getting them put together, and he
fell into very distressed circumstances. His wife remonstrated with him,
but in vain; and one day, in a rage at what she considered the cause of
all their privations, she smashed some of his models on the floor. Such
an outrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and they separated.
In 1768, Arkwright, having completed the model of a machine for spinning
cotton thread, removed to Preston, taking Kay with him. At this time he
had hardly a penny in the world, and was almost in rags. His poverty,
indeed, was such, that soon after his arrival in Preston, a contested
election for a member of Parliament having taken place, he was so
tattered and miserable in his appearance, that the party with whom he
voted had to give him a decent suit of clothes before he could be seen
at the polling-booth. He had got leave to set up his machine in the
dwelling-house attached to the Free Grammar School; but, afraid of
suffering from the hostility of the spinners, as the unfortunate
Hargreaves had done some time before, he and Kay thought it best to
leave Lancashire, and try their fortune in Nottingham.
Poor and friendless, it may easily be supposed that Arkwright found it a
hard matter to get any one to back him in a speculation which people
then regarded as hazardous, if not illusory. He got a few pounds from
one of the bankers in the town; but that was soon spent, and further
advances were refused. Nothing daunted, Arkwright tried elsewhere for
help, and at length succeeded in convincing Messrs. Need and Strutt,[A]
large stocking-weavers in the place, of the value of his invention, and
inducing them to enter into partnership with him. In 1769 he took out a
patent for the machine, as its inventor, and a mill, worked by
horse-power, was erected for spinning cotton by the new machine. Two
years after, he and his partner set up another mill in Derbyshire,
worked by a water-wheel; and in 1775 he took out another patent for some
improvements on his original scheme.
The machinery which he patented consisted of a number of different
contrivances; but the chief of these, and the one which he particularly
claimed entirely as his own invention (for he frankly admitted that some
of the other parts were only developments of other inventors), was what
is called the water-frame throstle for drawing out the cotton from a
coarse to a finer and harder twisted thread, and so rendering it fit to
be used for the warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, which were
formed of linen, as well as the weft. This apparatus was a combination
of the carding and spinning machinery; and the principle of having two
pairs of rollers, one revolving faster than the other, was now for the
first time applied to machinery.
In a year or two the success of Arkwright's inventions was fairly
established. The manufacturers were fully alive to its importance; and
Arkwright now reaped the reward of all the toil and danger he had
undergone in the shape of a diligent and persistent attempt to rob him
of his monopoly, which was carried on for a number of years, and was at
length successful. Some of the manufacturers, who were greedy to profit
by the new machinery without paying the inventor, got hold of Kay, who
had quarrelled with Arkwright some time before, and found him a willing
instrument in their hands. It would take too long to go over all the law
processes which Arkwright had now to engage in to defend his rights. Kay
got up a story that the real inventor was a poor reed maker named Highs,
who had once employed him to make a model, the secret of which he had
imparted to Arkwright; and this was a capital excuse for using the new
machinery in defiance of the patent, although the evidence at the
various trials is now held completely to vindicate Arkwright's title as
inventor. One law plea was lost to him, on account of some technical
omission in the specifications; another restored to him the enjoyment of
his monopoly; and a third trial destroyed the patent, which Arkwright
never took any steps to recover.
Besides trying to defraud Arkwright of his patent-rights, the rival
manufacturers, with jealous inconsistency, did their best to
discountenance the use of the yarns he made, although much superior in
quality to what was then in use. But Arkwright not only surmounted this
obstacle, but turned it to good account, for it set him to manufacturing
the yarn into stockings and calicoes, the duty on which being soon
after lowered, in spite of the strenuous opposition of the
manufacturers, turned out a very profitable speculation.
For the first five years Arkwright's mills yielded little or no profit;
but after that, the adverse tide against which he had struggled so
bravely changed, and he followed a prosperous and honourable career till
his death, which happened in 1792. He was knighted, not for being, as he
was, a benefactor to his country, but because, in his capacity of high
sheriff, he chanced to read some trumpery address to the king. He left
behind a fortune of about half a million sterling.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled.
III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON.
Excellent as was the yarn produced by the spinning-jenny and the
water-frame, compared with the old hand-spun stuff, it was coarse and
full of knots; and when a demand arose for imitations of the fine India
muslins, the weavers found they could produce but a very poor piece of
work with such rough materials.
Among those who were inconvenienced for want of a better sort of yarn
was young Samuel Crompton, who lived with his widowed mother and two
sisters in an old country house called Hall-in-the-Wood, near what was
then the little rural town of Bolton in the Moors. When Samuel was only
five years old his father died, and left his widow with the three
children on her hands, to struggle through the world as best she could.
A hard-working, energetic, God-fearing woman, she buckled to the fight
with a stout heart and a resolute will. Her husband had been both farmer
and weaver, like most of the men in that quarter; and she did her best
to fill his place, looking after the little farm and the three cows, and
working at the loom, the yarn for which she taught the bairns to spin.
Whatever she took in hand she did with might and main, and the result
was, her webs were the best woven, her butter the richest, her honey the
purest, her home-made wines the finest flavoured of any in the district.
Small as her means were, she gave her boy the best education that could
be got in Bolton--first at a day-school, and afterwards, when he was old
enough to take his place by day between the treadles, at a night-school.
Rigid in her sense of duty, and resolute to do her own share of the
work, she exacted the same from others, and kept her lad tightly to the
loom. Every day he had to do a certain quantity of work; and there was
no looking her in the face unless each evening saw it done, and well
done too. Anxious to satisfy his mother, and yet get time for his
favourite amusement of fiddle-making and fiddle-playing, Sam grew
quickly sensitive of the imperfections of the machinery he had to work
with. "He was plagued to deeath," he used to say, "wi' mendin' the
broken threeads;" and could not help thinking many a time whether the
jenny could not be improved so as to spin more quickly, and produce a
better thread. By the time he came to man's estate, in 1774, his
thoughts had settled so far into a track, that he was able to begin
making a contrivance of his own, which he hoped would accomplish the
object he had in view. He had a few common tools which had belonged to
his father, but his own clasp-knife served nearly every purpose in his
ready hands. He had his "bits of things" filed at the smithy, and to get
money for materials, he fiddled at the theatre for 1s. 6d. a night.
Every minute he could spare from the task-work of the day was spent in
his little room over the porch of the hall in forwarding his invention.
As it advanced, he grew more and more engrossed with it, and often the
dawn found him still at work on it. The good folks down in Bolton were
sorely puzzled to think what light it was that was so often seen
glimmering at uncanny hours up at the old hall. The story went abroad
that the place was haunted, and that the ghost of some former resident,
uneasy from the sorrows or the sins of his past life, kept watch and
ward till cock crow, with a spectral lamp. The mystery was cleared up at
last. It was discovered that the ghost was only Sam Crompton "fashing
himself over bits of wood and iron;" and Sam was pointed out as a
"conjuror"--the cant term for inventor--when he walked through the town.
The five years of labour and anxiety bore fruit in 1779, when the
"mule-jenny" with its spindle carriage was finished and set to work. As
its name indicates, it was an ingenious cross between the jenny and the
water-frame, combining the best features of both with several novel
ones, which rendered it a very valuable machine.
Just as Crompton had put the finishing touches to his mule, the weavers
and spinners broke out in open riot at Blackburn, and scoured the
country with the cry, "Men, not machines;" breaking every machine they
could lay hands on. To keep himself out of trouble and save his mule,
Crompton took it to pieces, and hid it in the roof of the hall. When the
storm had swept past, he brought it out, put it together, and began to
use it in his daily work. The fine yarn he turned out made quite a
sensation, and the fame of his invention spread far and wide. People
came from all quarters to get a sight of it; and when denied admittance,
brought ladders and harrows, and climbed up to the window of the room
where it stood. One pertinacious fellow actually ensconced himself for
several days in the cockloft, from which he watched Crompton at work in
the room below, through a gimlet hole he bored in the ceiling. Crompton
lost all patience with this constant espionage. "Why couldn't folk let
him enjoy his machine by himself?" he asked. A friend, whose advice he
asked, urged him not to think of taking out a patent, but to make a
present of his invention to the community at large. Save me from my
friends, Crompton might well have cried. Simple, guileless fellow that
he was, he acted on his "friend's" advice, and on a number of
manufacturers putting down their names for subscriptions varying from a
guinea to a crown, threw open the invention to the world. When the time
came for the subscriptions to be called in, some of the manufacturers
actually were base enough to refuse payment of the paltry sums they had
promised, and overwhelmed with abuse the man by the fruit of whose brain
they were making their fortunes. When all the money was collected, it
amounted to only £60, just as much as built Crompton a new machine, with
no more than four spindles.
Shy, simple, confiding, innocent of the cunning ways of the world, sadly
backward in the study of mankind, and perhaps somewhat ungenial and
unpractised to boot, Crompton, from the time when one would have thought
he had set his foot on the first round of the ladder of fortune, went
stumbling on from one misfortune to another, ill-used on every side, and
unsuccessful in every effort to get on in the world. Wheedled out of his
patent rights, cheated of the money promised him, his workmen lured away
from him as soon as he had taught them the construction of the mule, he
grew morbid and distrustful of everyone. He would have no more workmen;
and as the production of his machines was thus restricted to the labours
of his own hands, he could not compete with the large factories, who
drew all the customers away from him. Peel, the father of the statesman,
offered him first a lucrative place of trust, and afterwards a
partnership; but he would not listen to him. He grew more wretched and
discouraged every day. In despair he cut up his spinning machines, and
hacked to pieces with an axe a carding machine he had invented,
exclaiming bitterly, "They shall not have this too."
He then retired into comparative obscurity at Oldham, where he drudged
away at weaving, farming, cow-keeping, and overseeing the poor, and
found it no easy matter withal to support his family, for he had married
some years before. Afterwards he re-appeared at Bolton as a small
manufacturer; and there was a brief interval of sunshine. The muslin
trade was very brisk, and the weavers walked about with five-pound notes
stuck in their hats, and dressed out in ruffled shirts and top boots,
like fine gentlemen. While this lasted Crompton found abundant sale for
his superior yarn. But trade grew depressed, and the gloom settled over
Crompton's life to its close.
The idea was started of getting Parliament to do something for him; but
he was too independent to supplicate government officials in person.
Spencer Perceval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was willing to
befriend him; but Crompton's ill luck was at his heels. On the 11th of
May 1812, Crompton was talking with Peel and another gentleman in the
lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval walked up to them, saying,
"You will be glad to know we mean to propose £20,000 for Crompton. Do
you think it will be satisfactory?" Crompton walked away out of delicacy
not to hear the answer. An instant afterwards there was a great shout,
and a rush of people in alarm. Perceval lay bathed in his own blood,
slain by the bullet of the assassin Bellingham. Crompton had lost his
friend.
When the subject of a grant to the inventor of the spinning-mule was
brought up in the House a few days afterwards by Lord Stanley (now Lord
Derby), only £5000 was proposed. No one thought of increasing it. "Let's
give the man a £100 a-year," said an honourable member; "it's as much as
he can drink." So the vote was agreed to; though at that very time the
duty accruing to the revenue from the cotton wool imported to be spun
upon the mule was £300,000 a-year, or more than £1000 a working day. The
impulse which this invention gave to the cotton manufactures of Great
Britain, and the commercial prosperity to which it led, enabled the
country to bear the heavy drain of the war taxes; and it has been said,
with no little truth, that Crompton contributed as much as Wellington to
the downfall of Napoleon. As soon as it became known, the mule-spindle
took the lead in cotton-spinning machines. In 1811 above 4,600,000
mule-spindles, made by his pattern, were in use. At the present time it
is calculated that there are upwards of 30,000,000 in use in Great
Britain; and the increase goes on at the rate of above 1,000,000 a-year.
In France there were in 1850 about 3,000,000 spindles on Crompton's
principle; and one firm of mule makers (Hibbert, Platt, and Company, of
Oldham), make mules at the rate of 500,000 spindles a-year. The immense
impetus given to trade, money, civilization, and comfort by this
invention is almost incalculable.
The grant of £5000 was soon swallowed up in the payment of his debts,
and in meeting the losses of his business. "Nothing more was ever done
for him. The king, who was fond of patronizing merit, took no notice of
him; his eldest son was promised a commission, which he did not get; and
some time after, when struggling through life on only £100 a-year, the
post of sub-inspector of the factories in Bolton became vacant; though
he applied for the office, for which he was eminently qualified, he was
passed over in favour of the natural son of one of the ex-secretaries of
state--a man who did not know a mule from a spinning-jenny."[B]
Crompton spent his last days in poverty and privation, and died at the
age of seventy-four, in 1827.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Athenæum.
IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT.
In the summer of 1784 a number of gentlemen were chatting, after dinner,
in a country house at Matlock in Derbyshire. Some extensive cotton-mills
had recently been set up in the neighbourhood, and the conversation
turned upon the wonderful inventions which had been introduced for
spinning cotton. There were one or two gentlemen present connected with
the "manufacturing interest," who were very bitter against Arkwright and
his schemes.
"It's all very well," said one of the grumblers, "but what will all this
rapid production of yarn lead to? Putting aside the ruin of the poor
spinners, who will be starved because they haven't as many arms as these
terrible machines, you'll find that it will end in a great deal more
yarn being spun than can be woven into cloth, and in large quantities of
yarn being exported to the Continent, where it will be worked up by
foreign weavers, to the injury of our home manufacture. That will be the
short and the long of it, mark my words."
"Well, but, sir," remarked a grave, portly, middle-aged gentleman of
clerical appearance, after a few minutes' reflection, "when you talk of
the impossibility of the weaving keeping up with the spinning, you
forget that machinery may yet be applied to the former as well as the
latter. Why may there not be a loom contrived for working up yarn as
fast as the spindle produces it. That long-headed fellow Arkwright must
just set about inventing a weaving machine."
"Stuff and nonsense," returned the "practical man" pettishly, as though
it were hardly worth while noticing the remarks of such a dreamer. "You
might as well bid Arkwright grow the cloth ready made. Weaving by
machinery is utterly impossible. You must remember how much more complex
a process it is than spinning, and what a variety of movements it
involves. Weaving by machinery is a mere idle vision, my dear sir, and
shows you know nothing about the operation."
"Well, I must confess my ignorance on the subject of weaving," replied
the clergyman; "but surely it can't be a more complex matter than moving
the pieces in a game of chess. Now, there's an automaton figure now
exhibiting in London, which handles the chess men, and places them on
the proper squares of the board, and makes the most intricate moves, for
all the world as if it were alive. If that can be done, I don't see why
weaving should baffle a clever mechanist. A few years ago we should have
laughed at the notion of doing what Arkwright has done; and I'm certain
that before many years are over, we shall have 'weaving Johnnies,' as
well as 'spinning Jennies.'"
Dr. Cartwright, for that was the clergyman's name, confidently as he
foretold that machine-weaving would be devised before long, little
dreamt at that moment that he was himself to bring about the fulfilment
of his own prediction. A quiet, country clergyman, of literary tastes, a
scholar, and poetaster, he had spent his life hitherto in the discharge
of his ministerial duties, writing articles and verses, and had never
given the slightest attention to mechanics, theoretical or practical. He
had never so much as seen a loom at work, and had not the remotest
notion of the principle or mode of its construction. But the chance
conversation at the Matlock dinner table suddenly roused his interest in
the subject. He walked home meditating on what sort of a process weaving
must be; brooded over the subject for days and weeks,--was often
observed by his family striding up and down the room in a fit of
abstraction, throwing his arms from side to side like a weaver jerking
the shuttles,--and at last succeeded in evolving, as the Germans would
say, from "the depths of his moral consciousness," the idea of a
power-loom. With the help of a smith and a carpenter, he set about the
construction of a number of experimental machines, and at length, after
five or six months' application, turned out a rude, clumsy piece of
work, which was the basis of his invention.
"The warp," he says, "was laid perpendicularly, the reed fell with the
force of at least half a hundredweight, and the springs which threw the
shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. In short,
it required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a
slow rate, and only for a short time. This being done, I then
condescended to see how other people wove; and you will guess my
astonishment when I compared their easy modes of operation with mine.
Availing myself of what I then saw, I made a loom in its general
principles nearly as they are now made. But it was not till the year
1787 that I completed my invention."
Having given himself to the contrivance of a loom that should be able to
keep pace in the working up of the yarn with the jenny which produced
it, solely from motives of philanthropy, he felt bound, now that he had
devised the machine, to prove its utility, and bring it into use. To
have stopped with the work of invention, would, he conceived, have been
to leave the work half undone; and, therefore, at no slight sacrifice of
personal inclination, and to the rupture of all old ties, associations,
and ways of life, he quitted the ease and seclusion of his parsonage,
abandoned the pursuits which had formerly been his delight, and devoted
himself to the promotion of his invention. He set up weaving and
spinning factories at Doncaster, and, bent on the welfare of his race,
began the weary, painful struggle that was to be his ruin, and to end
only with his life. "I have the worst mechanical conception any man can
have," wrote his friend Crabbe, "but you have my best wishes. May you
weave webs of gold." Alas! the good man wove for himself rather a web of
dismal sack-cloth, sore and grievous to his peace, like the harsh shirts
of hair old devotees used to vex their flesh with for their sins. The
golden webs were for other folk's wear,--for those who toiled not with
their brain as he had done, but who reaped what they had not sown.
He had invented a machine that was to promote industry, and save the
English weavers from being driven from the field, as was beginning to be
the case, by foreign weavers; and masters and men were up in arms
against him as soon as his design was known. His goods were maliciously
damaged,--his workmen were spirited away from him,--his patent right was
infringed. Calumny and hatred dogged his steps. After a succession of
disasters, his prospects assumed a brighter aspect, when a large
Manchester firm contracted for the use of four hundred looms. A few days
after they were at work, the mill that had been built to receive them
stood a heap of blackened ruins.
Still, he would not give up till all his resources were exhausted,--and
surely and not slowly that event drew nigh. The fortune of £30,000 with
which he started in the enterprise melted rapidly away; and at length
the day came when, with an empty purse, a frame shattered with anxiety
and toil, but with a brave, stout heart still beating in his breast,
Cartwright turned his back upon his mills, and went off to London to
gain a living by his pen. As he turned from the scene of his
misfortunes, he exclaimed,--
"With firm, unshaken mind, that wreck I see,
Nor think the doom of man should be reversed for me."
The lion that has once eaten a man has ever after, it is said, a wild
craving after human blood. And it would seem that the faculty of
invention, once aroused, its appetite for exercise is constant and
insatiable. Cartwright having discovered his dormant powers, could no
more cease to use them than to eat. A return to his quiet literary ways,
fond as he still was of such pursuits, was impossible. An inventor he
was, and an inventor he must continue till his eye was glazed, and his
brain numbed in death. When a clergyman he set himself to study
medicine, and acquired great skill and knowledge in the science, solely
for the benefit of the poor parishioners, and now he gave himself up to
the labours of invention with the same benevolent motives. Gain had not
tempted him to enter the arena,--discouragement and ruin were not to
drive him from it. The resources of his ingenuity seemed inexhaustible,
and there was no limit to its range of objects. Wool-combing machines,
bread and biscuit baking machines, rope-making machines, ploughs, and
wheel carriages, fire-preventatives, were in turn invented or improved
by him. He predicted the use of steam-ships, and steam-carriages,--and
himself devised a model of the former (with clock-work instead of a
steam-engine), which a little boy used to play with on the ponds at
Woburn, that was to grow up into an eminent statesman--Lord John
Russell. To the very last hour of his life his brain was teeming with
new designs. He went down to Dover in his eightieth year for warm
sea-bathing, and suggested to his bathman a way of pumping up the water
that saved him the wages of two men; and almost the day before his
death, he wrote an elaborate statement of a new mode he had discovered
of working the steam-engine. Moved by an irresistible impulse to promote
the "public weal," he truly fulfilled the resolution he expressed in
verse,--
"With mind unwearied, still will I engage,
In spite of failing vigour and of age,
Nor quit the combat till I quit the stage."
In 1808 he was rewarded by Parliament for his invention of the
power-loom, and the losses it brought upon him, by a grant of £10,000.
He died in October 1823.
V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL.
Cartwright's power-loom was afterwards taken in hand and greatly
improved by other ingenious persons--mechanics and weavers. "The names
of many clever mechanics," says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "who
contributed to advance it, step by step, through failure and
disappointment, have long been forgotten. Some broke their hearts over
their projects when apparently on the eve of success. No one was more
indefatigable in his endeavours to overcome the difficulties of the
contrivance than William Radcliffe, a manufacturer at Mellor, near
Manchester, whose invention of the dressing-machine was an important
step in advance. With the assistance of an ingenious young weaver in his
employment, named Johnson, he also brought out the dandy-loom, which
effects almost all that can be done for the hand-loom as to motion.
Radcliffe was not, however, successful as a manufacturer; he exhausted
his means in experiments, of which his contemporaries and successors
were to derive the benefit; and after expending immense labour, and a
considerable fortune in his improvements, he died in poverty in
Manchester only a few years ago."
To the Peel family the cotton manufacture is greatly indebted for its
progress. Robert Peel, the founder of the family, developed the plan of
printing calico, and his successors perfected it in a variety of ways.
While occupied as a small farmer near Blackburn, he gave a great deal of
attention to the subject, and made a great many experiments. One day,
when sketching a pattern on the back of a pewter dinner-plate, the idea
occurred to him, that if colour were rubbed upon the design an
impression might be printed off it upon calico. He tested the plan at
once. Filling in the pattern with colour on the back of the plate, and
placing a piece of calico over it, he passed it through a mangle, and
was delighted with seeing the calico come out duly printed. This was his
first essay in calico-printing; and he soon worked out the idea,
patented it, and starting as a calico-printer, succeeded so well, that
he gave up the farm and devoted himself entirely to that business. His
sons succeeded him; and the Peel family, divided into numerous firms,
became one of the chief pillars of the cotton manufacture.
To such perfection has calico-printing now been brought, that a mile of
calico can be printed in an hour, or three cotton dresses in a minute;
and so extensive is the production of that article, that one firm
alone--that of Hoyle--turns out in a year more than 10,000 miles of it,
or more than sufficient to measure the diameter of our planet.
It was a favourite saying of old Sir Robert Peel, in regard to the
importance of commercial wealth in a national point of view, "that the
gains of individuals were small compared with the national gains arising
from trade;" and there can be no doubt that the success of the cotton
trade has contributed essentially to the present affluence and
prosperity of the United Kingdom. It has placed cheap and comfortable
clothing within the reach of all, and provided well-paid employment for
multitudes of people; and the growth of population to which it has led,
and consequent increase in the consumption of the various necessaries
and luxuries of life, have given a stimulus to all the other branches of
industry and commerce. From one of the most miserable provinces in the
land, Lancashire has grown to be one of the most prosperous. Within a
hundred and fifty years the population has increased tenfold, and land
has risen to fifty times its value for agricultural, and seventy times
for manufacturing purposes. From an insignificant country town and a
little fishing village have sprung Manchester and Liverpool; and many
other towns throughout the country owe their existence to the same
source. These are the great monuments to the achievements of Arkwright,
Crompton, Peel, and the other captains of industry who wrought this
mighty change, and the best trophies of their genius and enterprise.
The Railway and the Locomotive.
I.--"THE FLYING COACH."
II.--THE STEPHENSONS: FATHER AND SON.
III.--THE GROWTH OF RAILWAYS.
The Railway and the Locomotive
I.--"THE FLYING COACH."
It is the grey dawn of a fine spring morning in the year 1669, and early
though it be, there are many folks astir and gathering in clusters
before the ancient, weather-stained front of All Souls' College, Oxford.
The "Flying Coach" which has been so much talked about, and which has
been solemnly considered and sanctioned by the heads of the University,
is to make its first journey to the metropolis to-day, and to accomplish
it between sunrise and sunset. Hitherto the journey has occupied two
days, the travellers sleeping a night on the road; and the new
undertaking is regarded as very bold and hazardous. A buzz rises from
the knots of people as they discuss its prospects,--some very sanguine,
some very doubtful, not a few very angry at the presumption of the
enterprise. But six o'clock is on the strike--all the passengers are
seated, some of them rather wishful to be safe on the pavement
again--the driver has got the reins in his hand--the guard sounds his
bugle, and off goes the "Flying Coach" at a rattling pace, amidst the
cheering of the crowd and the benedictions of the university "Dons," who
have come down to honour the event with their presence. Learned,
liberal-minded men these "Dons" are for the times they live in; but only
fancy what they would think if some old seer, whose meditation and
research had
"Pierced the future, far as human eye could see,
Seen the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be,"
were to come forth and tell them, that before two centuries were over
men would think far less of travelling from Oxford to London in one hour
than they then did of doing so in a day, by means of a machine of iron,
mounted upon wheels, which should rush along the ground, and drag a
load, which a hundred horses could not move, as though it were a
feather. Roger Bacon had prophesied as much four centuries before; the
Marquis of Worcester was propounding the same theory at that very day,
and yet who can blame them if they treated the notion as the falsehood
of an impostor, or the hallucination of a lunatic?
In these days when railways traverse the country in every direction,
and are still multiplying rapidly, when no two towns of the least
size and consideration are unprovided with this mode of mutual
communication--when we step into a railway carriage as readily as into
an omnibus, and breakfasting comfortably in London, are whisked off to
Edinburgh, almost in time for the fashionable dinner hour,--it requires
no little effort to realize the incredulity and contempt with which the
idea of superseding the stage-coach by the steam locomotive, and having
lines of iron railways instead of the common highways, was regarded for
many years after the beginning of the present century. Even after the
practicability of the project had been proved, and steam-engines had
been seen puffing along the rails, with a train of carriages attached,
even so late as 1825, we find one of the leading periodicals--the
_Quarterly Review_--denouncing the gross exaggeration of the powers of
the locomotive which its promoters were guilty of, and predicting that
though it might delude for a time, it must end in the mortification of
all concerned. The fact was, said the writer, that people would as soon
suffer themselves to be fired off like a Congreve rocket, as trust
themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate--the
rate of eighteen miles an hour, which people now-a-days, accustomed to
dash along in express trains at two or three times that speed, would
deem a perfect snail-pace.
The "railway" had the start of the locomotive by a couple of centuries,
and derives its parentage from the clumsy wooden way-leaves or
tram-roads which were laid down to lessen the labour of dragging the
coal-waggons to and from the place of shipment in the Newcastle
colleries. These were in use from the beginning of the seventeenth
century, but it was not till the beginning of the nineteenth that the
locomotive steam-engine made its appearance. Watt himself took out a
patent for a locomotive in 1784, but nothing came of it; and the honour
of having first proved the practicability of applying steam to the
purposes of locomotion is due to a Cornishman named Trevithick, who
devised a high-pressure engine of very ingenious construction, and
actually set it to work on one of the roads in South Wales. At first,
therefore, there was no alliance between the engine and the rail; and
though afterwards Trevithick adapted it to run on a tram-way, something
went wrong with it, and the idea was for the time abandoned. There was a
long-headed engine-man in one of the Newcastle collieries about this
time, in whose mind the true solution of the problem was rapidly
developing, but Trevithick had nearly forestalled him. The stories of
these two men afford a most instructive lesson. A man of undoubted
talent and ingenuity, with influential friends both in Cornwall and
London, Trevithick had a fair start in life, and every opportunity of
distinguishing himself. But he lacked steadiness and perseverance, and
nothing prospered with him. He had no sooner applied himself to one
scheme than he threw it up, and became engrossed in another, to be
abandoned in turn for some new favourite. He was always beginning some
novelty, and never ending what he had begun, and the consequence was an
almost constant succession of failures. He was always unhappy and
unsuccessful. If now and then a gleam of success did brighten on his
path, it was but temporary, and was speedily absorbed in the gloom of
failure. He found a man of capital to take up his high-pressure engine,
got his locomotive built and set to work, brought his ballast engine
into use, and stood in no want of praise and encouragement; and yet, one
after another his schemes went wrong. Not one of them did well, because
he never stuck to any of them long enough. "The world always went wrong
with him," he said himself. "He always went wrong with the world," said
more truly those who knew him. His haste, impatience, and want of
perseverance ruined him. After actually witnessing his steam engine at
work in Wales, dragging a train of heavy waggons at the rate of five
miles an hour, he lost conceit of his invention, went away to the West
Indies, and did not return to England till Stephenson had solved the
difficulty of steam locomotion, and was laying out the Stockton and
Darlington Railway. The humble engine-man, without education, without
friends, without money, with countless obstacles in his way, and not a
single advantage, save his native genius and resolution, had won the
day, and distanced his more favoured and accomplished rival. It was
reserved for GEORGE STEPHENSON to bring about the alliance of the
locomotive and the railroad--"man and wife," as he used to call
them--whose union, like that of heaven and earth in the old mythology,
was to bear an offspring of Titanic might--the modern railway.
II.--THE STEPHENSONS: FATHER AND SON.
Towards the close of the last century, a bare-legged herd-laddie, about
eight years old, might have been seen, in a field at Dewley Burn, a
little village not far from Newcastle, amusing himself by making
clay-engines, with bits of hemlock-stalk for imaginary pipes. The child
is father of the man; and in after years that little fellow became the
inventor of the passenger locomotive, and as the founder of the gigantic
railway system which now spreads its fibres over the length and breadth,
not only of our own country, but of the civilized world, the true hero
of the half-century.
The second son of a fireman to one of the colliery engines, who had six
children and a wife to support on an income of twelve shillings a-week,
George Stephenson had to begin work while quite a child. At first he was
set to look after a neighbour's cows, and keep them from straying; and
afterwards he was promoted to the work of leading horses at the plough,
hoeing turnips, and such like, at a salary of fourpence a-day. The lad
had always been fond of poking about in his father's engine house; and
his great ambition at this time was to become a fireman like his father.
And at length, after being employed in various ways about the colliery,
he was, at the age of fourteen, appointed his father's assistant at a
shilling a-day. The next year he got a situation as fireman on his own
account; and "now," said he, when his wages were advanced to twelve
shillings a-week--"now I'm a made man for life."
The next step he took was to get the place of "plugman" to the same
engine that his father attended as fireman, the former post being rather
the higher of the two. The business of the plugman, the uninitiated may
be informed, is to watch the engine, and see that it works properly--the
name being derived from the duty of plugging the tube at the bottom of
the shaft, so that the action of the pump should not be interfered with
by the exposure of the suction-holes. George now devoted himself
enthusiastically to the study of the engine under his care. It became a
sort of pet with him; and he was never weary of taking it to pieces,
cleaning it, putting it together again, and inspecting its various parts
with admiration and delight, so that he soon made himself thoroughly
master of its method of working and construction.
Eighteen years old by this time, George Stephenson was wholly
uneducated. His father's small earnings, and the large family he had to
feed, at a time when provisions were scarce and at war prices, prevented
his having any schooling in his early years; and he now set himself to
repair his deficiencies in that respect. His duties occupied him twelve
hours a-day, so that he had but little leisure to himself; but he was
bent on improving himself, and after the duties of the day were over,
went to a night-school kept by a poor teacher in the village of
Water-row, where he was now situated, on three nights during the week,
to take lessons in reading and spelling, and afterwards in the science
of pot-hooks and hangers as well; so that by the time he was nineteen he
was able to read clearly, and to write his own name. Then he took to
arithmetic, for which he showed a strong predilection. He had always a
sum or two by him to work out while at the engine side, and soon made
great progress.
The next year he was appointed brakesman at Black Collerton Colliery,
with six shillings added to his wages, which were now nearly a pound
a-week, and he was always making a few shillings extra by mending his
fellow-workmen's shoes, a job at which he was rather expert. Busy as he
was with his various tasks, he found time to fall in love. Pretty Fanny
Henderson, a servant at a neighbouring farm, caught his fancy; and
getting her shoes to mend, it cost him a great effort to return them to
the comely owner after they were patched up. He carried them about with
him in his pocket for some time, and would pull them out, and then gaze
fondly at them with as much emotion as the old story tells us the sight
of the dainty glass slipper, which Cinderella dropped at the ball,
excited in the breast of the young prince. Bent upon taking up house for
himself, with Fanny as presiding genius, Stephenson now began to save
up, and declared himself a "rich man" when he put his first guinea in
the box.
Instead of spending the Saturday afternoon with his fellow-workmen in
the public-house, Stephenson employed himself in taking the engine to
pieces, and cleaning it; but besides his attention to work, he was also
remarkable for his skill at putting and wrestling, in which he beat most
of his comrades. And he was not without pluck either, as he let a great
hulking fellow, who was the bully of the village, know to his cost, by
giving him such a drubbing as made him a "sadder and wiser man" for some
time afterwards. He still continued his attendance at the night-school,
till he had got out of the master as much instruction in arithmetic as
he was able to supply.
By the time he was of age he had saved up enough to take a little
cottage and furnish it comfortably, though, of course, very humbly; and
in the winter of 1802, Fanny, now Mrs. George Stephenson, rode home from
church on horseback, seated on a pillion behind her husband, with her
arms round his waist; and very proud and happy, we may be sure, he was
that day, as the neighbours came to their doors to wish him "God speed"
in his new mode of life.
Having learned all he could from the village teacher, George Stephenson
now began to study mensuration and mathematics at home by himself; but
he also found time to make a number of experiments in the hope of
finding out the secret of perpetual motion, and to make shoe-lasts and
shoes, as well as mend them. At the end of 1803 his only son, Robert,
was born; and soon after the family removed to Killingworth, seven miles
from Newcastle, where George got the place of brakesman. They had not
been settled long here when Fanny died--a loss which affected George
deeply, and attached him all the more intensely to the offspring of
their union. At this time everything seemed to go wrong with him. As if
his wife's death was not grief enough, his father met with an accident
which deprived him of his eye-sight, and shattered his frame; George
himself was drawn for the militia, and had to pay a heavy sum of money
for a substitute; and with his father, and mother, and his own boy to
support, at a time when taxes were excessive and food dear, he had only
a salary of £50 or £60 a-year to meet all claims. He was on the verge of
despair, and would have emigrated to America, if, fortunately for our
country, he had not been unable to raise sufficient money for his
passage. So he had to stay in the old country, where a bright and
glorious future awaited him, dark and desperate as the prospect then
appeared.
He still went on making models and experiments, and perfecting his
knowledge of his own engine. To add to his earnings he also took to
clock-cleaning, with the view of saving up enough to give his boy the
best education it was in his power to bestow. "In the earlier period of
my career," he used afterwards to say, "when Robert was a little boy, I
saw how deficient I was in education, and I made up my mind that he
should not labour under the same defect, but that I would put him to a
good school, and give him a liberal training. I was, however, a poor
man, and how do you think I managed? I betook myself to mending my
neighbours' clocks and watches at nights, after my daily labour was
done, and thus I procured the means of educating my son." George began
by teaching his son to work with him; and when the little chap could not
reach so high as to put a clock-hand on, would set him on a chair for
the purpose, and very proud Robert was whenever he could "help father"
in any of his jobs.
About this time a new pit having been sunk in the district where he
worked, the engine fixed for the purpose of pumping the water out of the
shaft was found a failure. This soon reached George's ears. He walked
over to the pit, carefully examined the various parts of the machinery,
and turned the matter over in his mind. One day when he was looking at
it, and almost convinced that he had discovered the cause of the
failure, one of the workmen came up, and asked him if he could tell what
was wrong.
"Yes," said George; "and I think I could alter it, and in a week's time
send you to the bottom."
George offered his services to the engineer. Every expedient had been
tried to repair the engine, and all had failed. There could be no harm,
if no good, in Stephenson trying his hand at it. So he got leave, and
set to work. He took the engine entirely to pieces, and in four days had
repaired it thoroughly, so that the workmen could get to the bottom and
proceed with their labours. George Stephenson's skill as an
engine-doctor began to be noised abroad, and secured him the post of
engine-wright at Killingworth, with a salary of £100 a-year. Robert was
now old enough to go to school, and was sent to one in Newcastle, to
which, dressed in a suit of coarse grey stuff cut out by his father, he
rode every day upon a donkey. Robert spent much of his spare time in the
Literary and Philosophical Institute of Newcastle; and would sometimes
take home a volume from the library, which father and son would eagerly
peruse together. Occasionally they tried chemical experiments together;
and now and then Robert would try his hand by himself. On one occasion
he electrified the cows in an adjacent enclosure by means of an electric
kite, making the bewildered animals dash madly about the field, with
their tails erect on end; and another time he administered a severe
electric shock to his father's Galloway pony, which nearly knocked it
over, and drew down upon him the affected wrath of his father, who,
coming out at the instant, shook his whip at him and called him a
mischievous scoundrel, though pleased all the while at the lad's
ingenuity and enterprise. As an early proof of the former, there still
stands over the cottage door at Killingworth a sun-dial, constructed by
Robert when he was thirteen years old, with some little help from his
father.
The idea of constructing a steam-engine to run on the colliery
tram-roads leading to the shipping-place was now receiving considerable
attention from the engineering community. Several schemes had been
propounded, and engines actually made; but none of them had been brought
into use. A mistaken notion prevailed that the plain round wheels of an
engine would slip round without catching hold of the rails, and that
thus no progress would be made; but George Stephenson soon became
convinced that the weight of the engine would of itself be sufficient to
press the wheels to the rails, so that they could not fail to bite. He
turned the subject over and over in his mind, tested his conceptions by
countless experiments, and at length completed his scheme. Money for the
construction of a locomotive engine on his plan having been supplied by
Lord Ravensworth, one was made after many difficulties, and placed upon
the tram-road at Killingworth, where it drew a load of 30 tons up a
somewhat steep gradient at the rate of four miles an hour. Still there
was very little saving in cost, and little advance in speed as compared
with horse-power; but in a second one, which Stephenson quickly set
about constructing, he turned the waste steam into the chimney to
increase the draught, and thus puff the fuel into a brisker flame, and
create a larger volume of steam to propel the locomotive. The
fundamental principles of the engine thus formed remain in operation to
this day; and it may in truth be termed the progenitor of the great
locomotive family.
In 1821 George Stephenson got the appointment of engineer, with £300 of
salary, to the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company, in the Act of
Parliament for which power was given to use locomotive engines, if
needful, either for the conveyance of goods or passengers. When the line
was opened, it was worked partly by horses and partly by locomotive and
stationary engines. This led to a partnership between Mr. Edward Pease
of Darlington, the chief projector of the line, and Stephenson, in a
locomotive manufactory in Newcastle,--for many years the only one of the
kind in existence.
Meanwhile, young Robert Stephenson, having spent a year or two in
gaining a practical acquaintance with the machinery and working of a
colliery, went to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent a session
in attending the courses of lectures on chemistry, natural philosophy,
and geology. He made the best of his opportunities; and that he might
profit to the utmost by the lectures, he studied short-hand, and took
them all down _verbatim_, transcribing his notes every evening before
he went to bed. Robert brought home the prize for mathematics, and
showed he had made so much progress at college that, though the £80
which the session cost was a large sum to his father at that time,
George never failed, then or afterwards, to declare that it was one of
the best investments he had ever made.
After a year or two in his father's locomotive factory, Robert spent two
or three years in charge of the machinery of a mining company in
Columbia, and returned to England at the close of 1827, to find the
great question, "Whether locomotives can be successfully and profitably
applied to passenger traffic?" hotly agitated, his father, almost alone,
taking the side of the travelling, against that of the fixed engines,
and insisting that the wheel and the rail were clearly and closely part
of one system.
The success of the Darlington line induced the Liverpool merchants to
project a line between that town and Manchester; and George Stephenson
was almost unanimously chosen engineer, though it was still undetermined
whether the new line should be worked by steam or horse power. But,
apart from that question, a great, and, as it appeared to most of the
engineers of the time, an insurmountable difficulty existed in the
quagmire of Chat Moss,--an enormous mass of watery pulp, which rose in
height in wet, and sank in dry weather like a sponge, and over whose
treacherous depths it was pronounced impossible to form a firm road. It
was perfect madness to think of such a thing, said the engineers, and
none of them would support Stephenson's scheme; but he resolved to see
what could be done. Truck-load after truck-load of stuff was emptied
into the moss, and still the insatiable bog kept gaping as though it had
not had half a feed. The directors, alarmed, would have abandoned the
project, had they not been so deeply involved that they were obliged to
let Stephenson continue. But he never doubted himself--not for a moment.
He only pushed on the works more vigorously; and, before six months were
over, the directors found themselves whirling along over the very bog
they expected all their capital was to be fruitlessly sunk to the bottom
of. Still, no decision had been come to as to whether locomotive or
fixed engines were to be adopted; and the Stephensons were still
battling bravely in favour of the locomotive against a host of
opponents. Robert did his father good service by the able and pithy
pamphlets which he wrote on the subject; and at length their
perseverance was rewarded by the directors consenting to employ a
locomotive, if they could get one that would run at the rate of ten
miles an hour, and not weigh more than six tons, including tender; and
offering a reward of £500 for the best engine fulfilling these
conditions. George Stephenson and his son set to work immediately, and
the product of their united skill and ingenuity was the celebrated
_Rocket_, which carried off the prize, and attained a speed of
twenty-nine miles on the opening day. The practicability and success of
the locomotive was now beyond a doubt; from that day forward public
opinion began to turn. Of course, for many a long year afterwards there
were not wanting numbers of bigoted men of the old school who cried down
the new-fangled system, and would hear of no means of transit but the
stage-coach and the canal-boat. But shrewd folk, like the old Duke of
Bridgewater, whose faculties were sharpened by their pockets being in
danger, could not help crying out, "There's mischief in these tram-ways!
I wish the canals mayn't suffer;" and, within ten years of the day when
the _Rocket_ went puffing triumphantly along the Liverpool and
Manchester line, most sensible people had become convinced of the
importance of the locomotive railway, and scarcely a principal town in
the country but was supplied with a line.
The Stephensons had fought a hard fight for their protegé, "rail and
wheel," and now they were to reap the fruits of their enterprise and
foresight. To nearly all the most important of the new lines George
Stephenson acted as engineer; and thus, in the course of two years,
above 321 miles of railway were constructed under his superintendence,
at a cost of £11,000,000 sterling. Robert at first left his father to
attend to the laying out of railways, and directed his attention to the
improvement of the locomotive in all its details, experimenting
incessantly, and trying now one new device, now another. "It was
astonishing," says Mr. Smiles, "to observe the rapidity of the
improvements effected,--every engine turned out of Stephenson's
workshops exhibiting an advance upon its predecessor in point of speed,
power, and working efficiency."
By this time George had taken up his residence at Tapton House, near
Chesterfield, where he continued to reside for the remainder of his
life. Close by were some extensive coal-pits, which he had taken in
lease, and from which he supplied London with the first coals sent by
railway. He was now a man of wealth and fame, known and honoured
throughout his own country, and in many foreign ones, and blessed with
many a staunch, true friend. More than once he was offered knighthood by
Sir Robert Peel, but declined the honour. As he grew up in years, he
gradually abandoned his railway business to the charge of his son, and
settled down into a quiet country gentleman of agricultural tastes. He
was very fond of gardening and farming, and spent many a long day
superintending the operations in the fields. When a boy, he had always
been very fond of taming birds and rabbits, and had once had flocks of
robins, which, in the hard winter, used to come hopping round his feet
for crumbs. And now, in his old age, he had special pets among his dogs
and horses, and was proud of his superior breed of rabbits. There was
scarcely a nest on his estate that he was not acquainted with; and he
used to go round from day to day to look at them, and see that they were
kept uninjured.
The year before his death he visited Sir Robert Peel at Drayton Manor.
Dr. Buckland, the geologist, was of the party. One Sunday, as they were
returning from church, they observed a train speeding along the valley
in the distance.
"Now, Buckland," said Mr. Stephenson, "I have a poser for you. Can you
tell me what is the power that is driving that train?"
"Well," said the other, "I suppose it is one of your big engines."
"But what drives the engine?"
"Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver."
"What do you say to the light of the sun?"
"How can that be?" asked the professor.
"It is nothing else," said the engineer. "It is light bottled up in the
earth for tens of thousands of years--light, absorbed by plants and
vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the
process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form; and now,
after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that
latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in
that locomotive, for great human purposes."
On the 12th of August 1848, this great, good man--one of the truest
heroes that ever lived, and one of the greatest benefactors of our
country--passed from among us, leaving his son, Robert, to develop and
extend the great work of which he had laid the foundation.
Among one of the first railways of any extent of which Robert Stephenson
had the laying out, was the London and Birmingham; and it is related, as
an illustration of his conscientious perseverance in executing the task,
that in the course of the examination of the country he walked over the
whole of the intervening districts upwards of twenty times. Many other
lines, in England and abroad, were executed by him in rapid succession;
and it was stated a few years ago, that the lines of railway constructed
under his superintendence had involved an outlay of £70,000,000
sterling.
The three great works, however, with which his name will always be most
intimately associated, and which are the grandest monuments of his
genius, are the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, the Britannia Bridge
across the Menai Straits, and the Victoria Bridge across the St.
Lawrence at Montreal. The first two are sufficiently well known--the one
springing across the valley of the Tyne, between the busy towns of
Newcastle and Gateshead; the other spanning, in mid air, a wide arm of
the sea, at such a height that vessels of large burden in full sail can
pass beneath. The third great effort of Robert Stephenson's prolific
brain he did not live to see the completion of. The Victoria Bridge at
Montreal is constructed on the same principle as the Britannia Bridge,
but on a much larger scale. "The Victoria Bridge," says Mr. Smiles,
"with its approaches, is only sixty yards short of two miles in length.
In its gigantic strength and majestic proportions, there is no structure
to compare with it in ancient or modern times. It consists of not less
than twenty-five immense tubular bridges joined into one; the great
central span being 332 feet, the others, 242 feet in length. The weight
of the wrought iron on the bridge is about 10,000 tons, and the piers
are of massive stone, containing some 8000 tons each of solid masonry."
After the completion of the Britannia Bridge, and again after the
opening of the High Level Bridge, Robert Stephenson was offered the
honour of knighthood, which, like his father before him, he respectfully
declined. In 1857 he received the title of D.C.L. from the University of
Oxford; and for many years before his death he represented Whitby in
Parliament. He was passionately fond of yachting, and almost immediately
after a trip to Norway in the summer of 1859, he was seized with a
mortal illness, and died in the beginning of October. On the 14th
October he was buried in Westminster, amongst the illustrious dead of
England.
No man could be more beloved than Robert Stephenson was by a wide circle
of friends, and none better deserved it. "In society," writes one who
had opportunities of intercourse with him, "he was simply charming and
fascinating in the highest degree, from his natural goodness of heart
and the genial zest with which he relished life himself and participated
its enjoyment with others. He was generous and even princely in his
expenditure--not upon himself, but on his friends. On board the
_Titania_, or at his house in Gloucester Square, his frequent and
numerous guests found his splendid resources at all times converted to
their gratification with a grace of hospitality which, although
sedulous, was never oppressive. There was nothing of the patron in his
manner, or of the Olympic condescension which is sometimes affected by
much lesser men. A friend (and how many friends he had!) was at once his
equal, and treated with republican freedom, yet with the most high-bred
courtesy and happy considerateness.... His payment of half the debt of
£6000, which weighed like an incubus on an institution at Newcastle, is
generally known; but his private charities were as boundless as his
nature was generous, and as quietly performed as that nature was
unostentatious. Such, then, was Robert Stephenson, as complete a
character in the multifarious relations of life as probably any man has
met or will meet in the course of his experience. Not unlike, or rather
exceedingly _like_, his father in some respects, especially in the easy,
unimposing manner in which he went about his life's work, he was hardly
to be accounted his father's inferior, except perhaps in the heroic
quality of combativeness. Father and son, independently of each other,
and both in conjunction, have left grand and beneficent results to
posterity, and both recall to us Monckton Milnes's men of old, who
"'Went about their gravest tasks
Like noble boys at play.'"
III.--THE GROWTH OF RAILWAYS.
It was about the year 1818 that Thomas Gray of Nottingham, travelling in
the north of England, happened to visit one of the collieries. As he
stood watching a train of loaded waggons being propelled by steam along
the tram-road which led from the mouth of the pit to the wharf where the
coals were shipped, the idea flashed through his mind that the same
system was applicable to the ordinary purposes of locomotion.
"Why!" he exclaimed to the engineer who was showing him over the
place,--"why are there not tram-roads laid down all over England so as
to supersede our common roads, and steam engines employed to drag
waggons full of goods, and carriages full of passengers along them,
instead of horse-power?"
"Propose that to the nation," replied his companion, "and see what you
will get by it. Why, sir, you would be worried to death for your
pains."
Gray was not to be balked, however. The idea took firm possession of his
mind, and became the one great subject of his thoughts and conversation.
He talked about it to everybody whom he met, and who had patience to
listen to him, wrote letters and memorials to public men, and afterwards
appealed to the people at large. He was laughed at as a whimsical,
crochetty fellow, and no one gave any serious attention to his views.
Mr. Jones of Gromford Manor, and Mr. Pease of Darlington, also
distinguished themselves by their agitation in favour of railways, at a
time when they were regarded with suspicion and alarm. The growing trade
of Liverpool and Manchester, and other large towns, however, spoke more
imperatively and forcibly in favour of the new project than any amount
of individual agitation. The means of communication between the various
manufacturing towns had fallen far behind their wants; and it was at
length felt that some new system must be adopted. The railroad and the
locomotive got a trial; and before long the carriers' carts and the
stage coaches were driven off the road for want of custom, although the
conveyance of goods and passengers throughout the country went on
multiplying an hundred-fold. One can fancy the astonishment and awe with
which the country-folk watched the progress of the first railway train
through their peaceful acres,--how old and young left their work and
rushed out to see the marvellous spectacle,--how the "oldest
inhabitants" shook their heads, and muttered about changed times,--how
the horses in the field trembled with fear, and threw up their heels at
their iron rival as it went snorting past--a strange, iron monster, the
handicraft of man, able to drag the heaviest burdens, and yet outstrip
_Flying Childers_ or _Eclipse_, as fresh at the end of a journey as at
the beginning, and never to be tired out by any toil, if only kept in
meat and drink. Just as in the days of Charles the First, honest,
short-sighted folk prophesied the ruin of the empire and a judgment upon
the use of coaches, and bewailed the misfortunes of the hundreds of
able-bodied men who would be thrown out of employment; so in the early
days of the railroad, great fears were entertained that the horses'
occupation would be gone, and that the noble breed would quickly become
extinct. There was no measure to the lamentations over the ruin of that
great institution of English life--the stage-coach, with its gallant
driver and guard, and spanking team.
The extension of the railway system is one of the wonders of our time.
The few score miles of railroad planted in 1825 have put forth offshoots
and branches, till now a mighty net-work of some ten thousand miles in
all, is spread over the three kingdoms, with many fresh shoots in bud.
Up to the end of 1834, when not a hundred miles of railway were open,
the annual average of travellers by coach was some six millions a year;
ten years afterwards there were more than four times that number, and
to-day the annual average is more than a hundred millions! The number of
persons employed upon the working railroads of the United Kingdom amount
to about one hundred and thirty thousand, while nearly half as many find
employment in the construction of new lines.
A few facts, stated by the late Mr. Robert Stephenson, illustrate in a
very striking manner the gigantic proportion of the railway system of
Great Britain:--The railway has pierced the earth with tunnels to the
extent of more than fifty miles, and there are about twelve miles of
viaducts in the vicinity of London alone. The earthworks which have been
thrown up would measure 550,000,000 cubic yards, beside which St. Paul's
would shrink to a pigmy, for it would form a pyramid a mile and a half
high, with a base larger than the whole of St. James's Park. Every
moment four tons of coal flashes into steam twenty tons of water--as
much water as would suffice to supply the domestic and other wants of a
town the size of Liverpool, and as much coal as equals half the
consumption of the metropolis. The wear and tear is so great that twenty
thousand tons of iron have to be replaced annually, and three hundred
thousand trees, or as much as five thousand acres could produce, have to
be felled for sleepers.
When George Stephenson was planning the Liverpool and Manchester line,
the directors entreated him, when they went to Parliament, not to talk
of going at a faster rate than ten miles an hour, or he "would put a
cross on the concern." George was sanguine, however, and spoke of
fifteen miles an hour, to the astonishment of the committee, who began
to think him crazy. The average speed is now twenty-five miles an hour,
and a mile a minute can be done, if need be. The wind is hard pushed to
keep ahead of a good engine at its fullest speed.[C] The express trains
on the "broad gauge" of the Great Western travel at the rate of
fifty-one miles an hour, or forty-three, including stoppages. To attain
this rate, a speed of sixty miles an hour is adopted midway between some
of the stations, and even seventy miles an hour have been reached in
certain experimental trips. The engines on this line can draw a
passenger-train weighing one hundred and twenty tons at a speed of sixty
miles an hour, the engine and tender themselves weighing an additional
fifty-two tons. The ordinary luggage-trains weigh some six hundred tons
each. The locomotive, however, goes on the principle that the labourer
is worthy of his hire; if it works hard, it eats voraciously. At
ordinary mail speed the engine consumes about twenty lbs. of coke per
mile; so that, costing £2500 to begin with, and spending an allowance of
£2000 a year--as much as an under-secretary of state--the locomotive is
rather an extravagant customer--only, it works very hard for the money,
and earns it over and over again. With all its strength and size, the
locomotive is a much more delicate concern than would be supposed; the
5416 different pieces of which it is composed must be put together as
carefully as a watch, and, though guaranteed to go two years without a
doctor, exacts the most devoted attention from its guardians to keep it
in order.
It would fill a volume of huge dimensions to dilate on all the phases of
the social revolution which the modern railway has wrought in our own
and other countries; how it is daily annihilating time and space, and
making the Land's End and John o'Groat's House next door neighbours;
rubbing down old prejudices and jealousies, both national and
provincial, promoting commerce, developing manufacture, transforming
poor little villages into flourishing towns, and industrious towns into
mighty cities; carrying civilization into the heart of the jungle and
the desert, and, with its twin-brother, the steam-ship, joining hands
and hearts in peace and amity all the world over. After the wonders of
the last thirty years, who can doubt that our children, at the close of
the century, will regard us as little less backward than we now do our
fathers at its dawn?
FOOTNOTES:
[C] The wind is calculated to travel at the rate of eighty-two feet in a
second; the pace of a steam-engine, at the rate of sixty miles an hour,
would be rather more.
The Lighthouse.
I.--THE EDDYSTONE.
II.--THE BELL ROCK.
III.--THE SKERRYVORE.
The Lighthouse.
"Far in the bosom of the deep,
O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep:
A ruddy gleam of changeful light,
Bound on the dusky brow of night;
The seaman bids my lustre hail,
And scorns to strike his timorous sail."--SCOTT.
I.--THE EDDYSTONE.
When worthy Mr. Phillips, the Liverpool Quaker, taking thought in what
way he could best benefit his fellow-creatures, built the beacon on the
Smalls Rock in 1772, he could hardly have made a happier selection of "a
great good to serve and save humanity." There are few enterprises more
heroic or beneficent than those connected with the construction and
management of lighthouses. From first to last, from the rearing of the
column on the rock to the monotonous, nightly vigil in attendance on the
lamps--from the setting to the rising of the sun--the valour,
intrepidity, and endurance, of all concerned are called into play, and
the wild perils and stirring adventures they experience impart to the
story of their labours a thrilling and romantic interest. In the case of
the Smalls Lighthouse, for instance, Whiteside, the self-taught
engineer, and his party of Cornish miners had no sooner landed, and got
a long iron shaft worked a few feet into the rock, than a storm arose
that drove away their cutter, and kept them clinging with the tenacity
of despair to the half-fastened rod for three days and two nights, when
the wind fell and the sea calmed, and they were rescued, rather dead
than alive, numbed from their long immersion in the water, which rose
almost to their necks, and exhausted from want of food. And after the
lighthouse had been erected, the engineer and some of his men again
found themselves, as a paper in a bottle they had cast into the sea
revealed to those on shore, in a "most dangerous and distressed
condition on the Smalls," cut off from the mainland by the stormy
weather, without fuel, and almost at the end of their stock of food and
water--in which alarming situation they had to remain some time before
their friends could get out to their relief. Most sea-girt beacons have
their own legends of similar perils and fortitude; and the narratives of
the erection of the three great lighthouses of Eddystone, Inchcape, and
Skerryvore, which may be selected as the types of the rest, are full of
incidents as exciting as any "hair breadth 'scapes i' the imminent
deadly breach."
About fourteen miles south from Plymouth, and ten from the Ram's Head,
on the Cornish coast, lies a perilous reef of rocks, against which the
long rolling swell of the Atlantic waves dashes with appalling force,
and breaks up into those swirling eddies from which the reef is
named--the Eddystone. Upon these treacherous crags many a gallant vessel
has foundered and gone down within sight of the shore it had scarcely
quitted or was just about to reach; and situated in the midst of a much
frequented track, the rapid succession of calamities at the Eddystone
was not long in awakening men's minds to the necessity of some warning
light. The exposure of the reef to the wild fury of the Atlantic, and
the small extent of the surface of the chief rock, however, rendered the
construction of a lighthouse in such a situation a work of great and (as
it was long considered) insuperable difficulty. The project was long
talked of before any one was found daring enough to attempt the task;
and when at length in 1696 Henry Winstanley stepped forward to undertake
it, he might have been thought of all others the very last from whose
brain so serious a conception would have emanated. The great hobby of
his life had been to fill his house at Littlebury, in Essex, with
mechanical devices of the most absurd and fantastic kind. If a visitor,
retiring to his bedroom, kicked aside an old slipper on the floor,
purposely thrown in his way, up started a ghost of hideous form. If,
startled at the sight, he fell back into an arm chair placed temptingly
at hand, a pair of gigantic arms would instantly spring forth and clasp
him a prisoner in their rude embrace. Tired of these disagreeable
surprises, the astonished guest perhaps took refuge in the garden, and
sought repose in a pleasant arbour by the side of a canal; but he had
scarcely seated himself, when he found himself suddenly set adrift on
the water, where he floated about till his whimsical host came to his
relief. Such was the man who now entered upon one of the most formidable
engineering enterprises in the world.
Although Winstanley's lighthouse was but a slight affair compared with
its successors, it occupied six years in the erection--the frequent
rising of the sea over the rock, and the difficulty and danger of
passing to and from it greatly retarding the operations, and rendering
them practicable only during a short summer season. For ten or fourteen
days after a storm had passed, and when all was calm elsewhere, the
ground-swell from the Atlantic was often so heavy among these rocks that
the waves sprang two hundred feet, and more, in the air, burying the
works from sight. The first summer was spent in boring twelve holes in
the rock, and fixing therein twelve large irons as a holdfast for the
works that were to be reared. The next season saw the commencement of a
round pillar, which was to form the steeple of the tower, as well as
afford protection to the workmen while at their labours. When Winstanley
bade farewell to the rock for that year, the tower had risen to the
height of twelve feet; and resuming operations next spring, he built at
it till it reached the height of eighty feet. Having got the apartments
fit for occupation, and the lantern set up, Winstanley determined to
take up his abode there with his men, in order that no time might be
lost in going to and from the rock. The first night they spent on the
rock a great storm arose, and for eleven days it was impossible to hold
any communication with the shore. "Not being acquainted with the height
of the sea's rising," writes the architect, "we were almost drowned with
wet, and our provisions in as bad a condition, though we worked night
and day as much as possible to make shelter for ourselves." The storm
abating, they went on shore for a little repose; but soon returning, set
to work again with undiminished energy.
On the 14th November of the same year (1698), Winstanley lighted his
lantern for the first time. A long spell of boisterous weather followed,
and it was not till three days before Christmas that they were able to
quit their desolate abode, being "almost at the last extremity for want
of provisions; but by good Providence then two boats came with
provisions and the family that was to take care of the light; and so
ended this year's work."
It was soon found that the sea rose to a much greater height than had
been anticipated, the lantern, although sixty feet above the rock, being
often "buried under water." Winstanley was, therefore, under the
necessity of enlarging the tower and carrying it to a greater
elevation. The fourth season, accordingly, was spent in encasing the
tower with fresh outworks, and adding forty feet to its height. This
proved too high for its strength to bear; and in the course of three
years the winds and waves had made sad havoc in the unstable fabric.
In November 1703, Winstanley went out to the rock himself, accompanied
by his workmen, to institute the repairs. As he was putting off in the
boat from Plymouth, a friend who had for some time before been watching
the condition of the lighthouse with much anxiety, mentioned to him his
suspicion that it was in a bad way, and could not last long. Winstanley,
full of faith in the stability of his work, replied that "he only wished
to be there in the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of the
heavens, that he might see what effect it would have on his structure."
And with these words he shoved off from the beach, and made for the
rock.
With the last gleams of daylight, before the night fell and shrouded it
from view, the tower was seen rising proudly from the midst of the
waters. Before the dawn it had disappeared for ever, and the waves were
lashing fiercely round the bare bleak ledge of the fatal rock. Poor
Winstanley had had his presumptuous wish only too fully realized. The
storm of the 26th November was one of the most fearful that ever ravaged
our shores. The whole coast suffered severely from its fury, and when
the morning came, not a sign remained of the lighthouse, architect, or
workmen, save a fragment of chain-cable wedged firmly into a crevice of
the rock. The disappearance of the warning light was quickly followed by
the wreck of a large homeward-bound man-of-war, and the loss of nearly
all her crew, upon the rocks.
This first Eddystone lighthouse was a strange, fantastic looking
structure, deficient in every element of stability, and the wonder was
not that it fell in pieces as it did, but that it was able to withstand
so long the boisterous weather of the Channel. But if of little merit as
an architect, Winstanley at least deserves respect, as Smeaton remarks,
for the heroism he displayed in undertaking "a piece of work that before
had been looked on as impossible."
For four years the Eddystone remained bare and untenanted, till, in the
summer of 1706, the erection of a new lighthouse was commenced under the
superintendence of John Rudyerd, by profession a silk-mercer in Ludgate
Hill, but by natural genius an engineer of considerable merit. With such
skill and energy did he apply himself to the work, that before two
summers were over his tower was completed, and its friendly light beamed
over the troubled waters and sunken crags. Rudyerd's lighthouse was
entirely of wood, weighted at the base by a few courses of mason work,
and 92 feet in height. In form, it was a smooth, solid cone of elegant
simplicity, unbroken by any of those ornamental outworks, which offered
the wind and sea so many points to lay hold of, in Winstanley's
whimsical pagoda. Smeaton speaks of Rudyerd's tower as a masterly
performance; and had it not been destroyed by fire, forty-six years
after its erection, there seems little reason to suppose it might not
have been standing to this day,--although no doubt the ravages of the
worm in the wood would have demanded frequent repairs. On the 2d
December 1755, some fishermen who happened to be on the beach very early
in the morning preparing their nets, were startled by the sight of
volumes of smoke issuing from the lighthouse. They instantly gave the
alarm, and a boat was quickly manned for the relief of the sufferers. It
did not reach the rock till about ten o'clock, and the fire had then
been raging for eight hours. It was first discovered by the light-keeper
upon watch who, going into the lantern about two o'clock in the morning
to snuff the candles, found the place filled with smoke. He opened the
door of the lantern into the balcony, and a mass of flame immediately
burst from the inside of the cupola. He lost no time in seizing the
buckets of water kept at hand, and dashing them over the fire, but
without effect. His two companions were asleep, and it was some time
before they heard his shouts for assistance. When at length they did
bestir themselves, all the water in the house was exhausted. The
light-keeper--an old man in his ninety-fourth year--urged them to
replenish the buckets from the sea; but the difficulty of lowering the
buckets to such a depth, and their confusion and terror at the sudden
catastrophe and their impending fate, destroyed their presence of mind,
and rendered them quite powerless. The old man did his best to prevent
the advance of the flames; but, exhausted by the unavailing labour, and
severely injured by the melting lead from the roof, he had to desist. As
the fire spread from point to point, with rapid strides descending from
the summit to the base, the poor wretches fled before it, retreating
from room to room, till at last they were driven to seek shelter from
the blazing timbers and red hot bars, in a cleft of the rock. There they
were found by their preservers, crouching together half dead with
suffering and fright. It was with the greatest difficulty that they were
got into the boat; and they had no sooner reached the shore than one of
them, crazed by the terrors he had undergone, ran away, and was never
heard of more. The old man lingered on for a few days in great agony,
and died from the injuries he had received.
Such was the fate of the second lighthouse on the Eddystone,--one
element revenging, as it were, the conquest over another.
In spite of the fatality which seemed to attend these lighthouses,
the lessees of the Eddystone--for it was then in private hands, and
did not come into the hands of the Trinity House till many years
after--resolved to make another attempt; and this time they selected as
the architect one of the ablest professional men of the day, and with
sagacious liberality, adopted his advice to build it of stone and
granite.
Smeaton truly belonged to the class of heaven-born engineers. From his
earliest years the bent of his genius unmistakably revealed itself.
Before he was six years old, he one day terrified his parents by
climbing to the top of a barn to fix up some contrivance he had put
together, after the fashion of a windmill; and another time he
constructed a pump that raised water, after watching some workmen
sinking one. And as he grew older, his efforts took a more ambitious
range, and were all equally remarkable for their originality and
success. His father destined him for the bar; but his inclination for
engineering was so irresistible, that he allowed him to resign all
chance of the woolsack, and set up in business as a mathematical
instrument maker. He gradually advanced to the profession of civil
engineering,--which he was the first man in England to pursue, and which
he may be said to have created.
It was in 1756 he commenced the construction of the great work which may
be regarded as the monument of his fame. Having decided that his
lighthouse should be of stone, the next point to be settled was its
form. His thoughts, he tells us in his book, instinctively reverted to
the analogy between a lighthouse shaft and the trunk of a stately oak.
He remarked the spreading roots taking a broad, firm grip of the soil,
the rise of the swelling base, gradually lessening in girth in a
graceful curve, till a preparation being required for the support of the
spreading boughs, a renewed swelling of diameter takes place; and he
held that cutting off the branches we have, in the trunk of an oak, a
type of such a lighthouse column as is best adapted to resist the
influence of the winds and waves. Whether or not Smeaton arrived at the
form of his lighthouse, which has since become the model for all others,
from this fanciful analogy, its appearance rising from the rock presents
a strong resemblance to a noble tree stripped of its boughs and foliage.
Smeaton commenced the undertaking by visiting the rock in the spring of
1756, accurately measuring its very irregular surface, and in order to
ensure exactness in his plans, making a model of it. In the summer of
the same year he prepared the foundation by cutting the surface of the
rock in regular steps or trenches, into which the blocks of stone were
to be dovetailed. The first stone was laid in June 1757, and the last in
August 1759. Of that period there were only 431 days when it was
possible to stand on the rock, and so small a portion even of these was
available for carrying on the work, that it is calculated the building
in reality occupied but six weeks. The whole was completed without the
slightest accident to any one; and so well were all the arrangements
made, that not a minute was lost by confusion or delay amongst the
workmen.
The tower measures 86 feet in height, and 26 feet in diameter at the
level of the first entire course, the diameter under the cornice being
only 15 feet. The first twelve feet of the structure form a solid mass
of masonry,--the blocks of stone being held together by means of stone
joggles, dovetailed joints, and oaken tree-nails. All the floors of the
edifice are arched; to counteract the possible outburst of which,
Smeaton bound the courses of his stone work together by belts of iron
chain, which, being set in grooves while in a heated state, by the
application of hot lead, on cooling, of course, tightened their clasp on
the tower. Throughout the whole work the greatest ingenuity is displayed
in obtaining the greatest amount of resistance, and combining the two
great principles of strength and weight,--technically speaking, cohesion
and inertia.
On the 16th October 1759, the warning light once more, after an interval
of four years, shone forth over the troubled waters from the dangerous
rock; but it was but a feeble illumination at the best, for it came from
only a group of tallow candles. It was better than nothing, certainly;
but the exhibition of a few glimmering candles was but a paltry
conclusion to so stupendous an undertaking. For many years, however, no
stronger light gleamed from the tower, till, in 1807, when it passed
from the hands of private proprietors into the charge of the Trinity
House, the mutton dips were supplanted by Argand burners, with silvered
copper reflectors.
Imperfect, however, as used to be the lighting apparatus, the Eddystone
Beacon has always been a great boon to all those "that go down to the
sea in great ships," and has robbed these perilous waters of much of
their terror. We can readily sympathize with the exultation of the great
engineer who reared it, when standing on the Hoe at Plymouth, he spent
many an hour, with his telescope, watching the great swollen waves, in
powerless fury, dash against his tower, and "fly up in a white column,
enwrapping it like a sheet, rising at the least to double the height of
the tower, and totally intercepting it from sight." It is now more than
a hundred years since Smeaton's Lighthouse first rose upon the
Eddystone; but, in spite of the many furious storms which have put its
stability to rude and searching proof, it still lifts its head proudly
over the waves, and shows no signs of failing strength.
II.--THE BELL ROCK.
The Inch Cape, or Bell Rock, is a long, narrow reef on the east coast of
Scotland, at the mouth of the Frith of Tay, and some dozen of miles from
the nearest land. At high water the whole ledge is buried out of sight;
and even at the ebb the highest part of it is only three or four feet
out of the water. In the days of old, as the tradition goes, one of the
abbots of Arbroath, among many good works, exhibited his piety and
humanity by placing upon a float attached to the perilous reef a large
bell, so suspended as to be tolled by the rising and falling of the
waves.
"On a buoy, in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung."
Many a storm-tossed mariner heard the friendly knell that warned him of
the nearness of the fatal rock, and changed his course before it was too
late, with blessings on the good old monk who had hung up the bell; but
after some years, one of the pirates who infested the coast cut it down
in wanton cruelty, and was one of the first who suffered from the loss.
Not long after, he perished upon this very rock, which a dense fog
shrouded from sight, and no bell gave timely warning of.
"And even in his dying fear,
One dreadful sound did the rover hear;
A sound as if with the Inch Cape Bell,
The devil below was ringing his knell."
After the lapse of many years, two attempts were made to raise a beacon
of spars upon the rock; but one after the other they fell a prey to the
angry waves, and were hardly set up before they disappeared. It was not
till the beginning of the century that the Commissioners of Northern
Lighthouses took up the idea of erecting a lighthouse on this reef, the
most dangerous on all the coast. Several years elapsed before they got
the sanction of Parliament to the undertaking, and 1807 arrived before
it was actually entered upon.
Mr. Robert Stevenson, to whom the work was intrusted as engineer, had
from a very early age been employed in connection with lighthouses. He
went almost directly from school to the office of Mr. Thomas Smith of
Edinburgh, and when that gentleman was appointed engineer to the
Northern Lighthouse Commissioners, became his assistant, and afterwards
successor. When only nineteen, Mr. Stevenson superintended the
construction of the lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbray; and
during the time he was engineer to the Commissioners, which post he held
till 1842, he erected no fewer than forty-two lighthouses, and
introduced a great many valuable improvements into the system. His
reputation, however, will be chiefly perpetuated as the architect of the
Bell Rock Lighthouse.
On the 17th August 1807, Mr. Stevenson and his men landed on the rock,
to the astonishment and discomposure of the seals who had, from time
immemorial, been in undisturbed possession of it, and now floundered off
into the water on the approach of the usurpers. The workmen at once set
about preparing the rock for the erection of a temporary pyramid on
which a barrack-house was to be placed for the reception of the workmen.
They could only work on the rock for a few hours at spring-tide. As soon
as the flood-tide began to rise around them, putting out the fire of the
smith's forge, and gradually covering the rock, they had to gather up
their tools and retreat to a floating barrack moored at a considerable
distance, in order to reach which they had to row in small boats to the
tender, by which they were then conveyed to their quarters. The
operations of this first season were particularly trying to the men, on
account of their having to row backwards and forwards between the rock
and the tender at every tide, which in rough weather was a very heavy
pull, and having often after that to work on the rock knee deep in
water, only quitting it for the boats when absolutely compelled by the
swelling waves. Sometimes the sea would be so fierce for days together
that no boat could live in it, and the men had, therefore, to remain
cooped up wearily on board the floating barrack.
One day in September, when the engineer and thirty-one men were on the
rock, the tender broke from its moorings, and began to drift away from
the rock, just as the tide was rising. Mr. Stevenson, perched on an
eminence above the rest, surveying them at their labours, was the first,
and for a while, the men being all intent on their work, the only one,
who observed what had happened. He said nothing, but went to the
highest point of the rock, and kept an anxious watch on the progress of
the vessel and the rising of the sea. First the men on the lower tier of
the works, then by degrees those above them, struck work on the approach
of the water. They gathered up their tools and made towards the spot
where the boats were moored, to get their jackets and stockings and
prepare for quitting the rock. What their feelings were when they found
only a couple of boats there, and the tender drifting off with the other
in tow, may be conceived. All the peril of their situation must have
flashed across their minds as they looked across the raging sea, and saw
the distance between the tender and the rock increasing every moment,
while all around them the water rose higher and higher. In another hour,
the waves would be rolling twelve feet and more above the crag on which
they stood, and all hope of the tender being able to work round to them
was being quickly dissipated. They watched the fleeting vessel and the
rising tide, and their hearts sank within them, but not a word was
uttered. They stood silently counting their numbers and calculating the
capacity of the boats; and then they turned their eyes upon their
trusted leader, as if their last hope lay in his counsel. Stevenson
never forgot the appalling solemnity of the moment. One chance, and but
a slender one, of escape alone occurred to him. It was that, stripping
themselves of their clothes, and divesting the two boats, as much as
possible, of everything that weighted and encumbered them, so many men
should take their seats in the boats, while the others hung on by the
gunwales; and that they should then work their way, as best they could,
towards either the tender or the floating barrack. Stevenson was about
to explain this to his men, but found that all power of speech had left
him. The anxiety of that dreadful moment had parched his throat, and his
tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He stooped to one of the little
pools at his feet to moisten his fevered lips with the salt water.
Suddenly a shout was raised, "A boat! A boat!" and through the haze a
large pilot boat could dimly be discerned making towards the rock. The
pilot had observed the _Smeaton_ drifting off, and, guessing at once the
critical position of the workmen on the rock, had hastened to their
relief.
Next morning when the bell sounded on board the barrack for the return
to the rock, only eight out of the twenty-six workmen, beside the
foreman and seamen, made their appearance on deck to accompany their
leader. Mr. Stevenson saw it would be useless to argue with them then.
So he made no remark, and proceeded with the eight willing workmen to
the rock, where they spent four hours at work. On returning to the
barrack, the eighteen men who had remained on board appeared quite
ashamed of their cowardice; and without a word being said to them, were
the first to take their places in the boats when the bell rang again in
the afternoon.
At length the barrack was completed, and the men were then relieved from
the toil of rowing backwards and forwards between the tender and the
rock, as well as from the constant sickness which tormented them on
board the floating barrack. They were now able to prolong their labours,
when the tide permitted, into the night. At such times the rock assumed
a singularly picturesque and romantic aspect--its surface crowded with
men in all variety of attitudes, the two forges and numerous torches
lighting up the scene, and throwing a lurid gleam across the waters, and
the loud dong of the anvils mingling with the dashing of the breakers.
On the 18th July 1808, the site having been properly excavated, the
first stone of the lighthouse was laid by the Duke of Argyle; and by the
end of the second season some five or six feet of building had been
erected, and were left to the mercy of the waves till the ensuing
spring. The third season's operations raised the masonry to a height of
thirty feet above the sea, and the fourth season saw the completion of
the tower. On the first night in February of the succeeding year (1811)
the lamp was lit, and beamed forth across the waters.
The Bell Rock Tower is 100 feet in height, 42 feet in diameter at the
base, and 15 feet at the top. The door is 30 feet from the base, and the
ascent is by a massive bronze ladder. The "light" is revolving, and
presents a white and red light alternately, by means of shades of red
glass arranged in a frame. The machinery which causes the revolution of
the lamp is also applied to the tolling of two large bells, in order to
give warning to the mariner of his approach to the rock in foggy
weather, thus reviving the traditional practice from which the rock
takes its name.
III.--THE SKERRYVORE.
"Having crept upon deck about four in the morning, I find we are beating
to windward off the Isle of Tyree, with the determination on the part of
Mr. Stevenson that his constituents should visit a reef of rocks called
Skerry Vhor, where he thought it would be essential to have a
lighthouse. Loud remonstrances on the part of the commissioners, who one
and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion, whatever it may be,
rather than continue this dreadful buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the
part of Mr. Stevenson, and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon
that of the yacht, who seems to like the idea of Skerry Vhor as little
as the commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, came in sight of
this long range of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the tide breaks
in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low broad rocks at one
end of the reef which is about a mile in length. These are never
entirely under water, though the surf dashes over them. We took
possession of it in the name of the commissioners, and generously
bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was
carefully measured by Mr. Stevenson. It will be a most desolate position
for a lighthouse--the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the
nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at 14 miles distance."
Such is an entry in the diary of Sir Walter Scott's Yacht Tour, on the
27th August 1814; but although the necessity of a lighthouse on the
Skerry Vhor, or, as it is now generally called, Skerryvore, was fully
acknowledged by the authorities, it was not till twenty-four years
afterwards that the undertaking was actually commenced, under the
superintendence of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the son of the eminent engineer
who erected the Bell Rock Lighthouse.
In the execution of this great work, if the son had, as compared with
his father, certain advantages in his favour, he had also various
disadvantages to contend with at Skerryvore from which the engineer of
the Bell Rock was free. Mr. Alan Stevenson had steam power at his
command, and the benefit of all the experience derived from the
experiments of his predecessors in similar operations; but at the same
time, the rock on which he had to work was at a greater distance from
the land, and separated from it by a more dangerous passage than that of
either the Bell or the Eddystone; and the geological formation of which
the rock is composed, was much more difficult to work upon. The
Skerryvore is distant from Tyree, the nearest inhabited island, about 11
miles; even in fine weather the intervening passage is a trying one, and
in rough weather no ship can live in such a sea, studded as it is with
treacherous rocks. The sandstone of the Bell Rock is worn into rugged
inequalities, which favoured the operations of the engineer; but the
action of the waves on the igneous formation of the Skerryvore has given
it all the smoothness and slippery polish of a mass of dark coloured
glass. Indeed, the foreman of the masons, on first visiting the rock,
not unjustly compared the operation of ascending it to that of "climbing
up the neck of a bottle."
The 7th August 1838 was the first day of entire work on the rock, and
with succeeding ones was spent in the erection of a temporary barrack of
wood, for the men to lodge in on the rock. It was completed before the
season closed; but one of the first heavy gales in November wrenched it
from its holdings, and swept it into the sea, leaving nothing to mark
the site but a few broken and twisted stanchions, attached to one of
which was a portion of a great beam which had been shaken and rent, by
dashing against the rocks, into a bundle of ribands. Thus in one night
were obliterated the results of a whole season's toil, and with them,
the hopes the men cherished of having a dwelling on the rock, instead of
on board the brig, where they suffered intensely from the miseries of
constant sickness.
The excavation of the foundations occupied the whole of the summer
season of 1839, from the 6th May to the 3d September. The hard,
nitrified rock held out stoutly against the assaults of both iron and
gunpowder; and much time was spent in hollowing out the basin in which
the lighthouse was to be fixed. From the limited extent of the rock and
the absence of any place of shelter, the blasting was an operation of
considerable danger, as the men had no place to run to, and it had to be
managed with great caution. Only a small portion of the rock could be
blown up at a time, and care had to be taken to cover the part over with
mats and nettings made of old rope to check the flight of the stones.
The excavation of the flinty mass occupied nearly two summers.
The operations of 1840 included, much to the delight of the workmen, the
reconstruction of the barrack, to which they were glad to remove from
the tossing vessel. The second edifice was more substantial than the
first, and proved more enduring. Rude and narrow as it was, it offered,
after the discomforts of the vessel, almost a luxurious lodging to its
hardy inmates.
"Packed 40 feet above the weather-beaten rock, in this singular abode,"
writes the engineer, Mr. Alan Stevenson, "with a goodly company of
thirty men, I have spent many a weary day and night, at those times
when the sea prevented any one going down to the rock, anxiously looking
for supplies from the shore, and earnestly longing for a change of
weather favourable to the recommencement of the works. For miles around
nothing could be seen but white foaming breakers, and nothing heard but
howling winds and lashing waves. Our slumbers, too, were at times
fearfully interrupted by the sudden pouring of the sea over the roof,
the rocking of the house on its pillars, and the spurting of water
through the seams of the doors and windows; symptoms which, to one
suddenly aroused from sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate of the
former barrack, which had been engulphed in the foam not twenty yards
from our dwelling, and for a moment seemed to summon us to a similar
fate. On two occasions in particular, these sensations were so vivid as
to cause almost every one to spring out of bed; and some of the men fled
from the barrack by a temporary gangway to the more stable, but less
comfortable shelter afforded by the bare walls of the lighthouse tower,
then unfinished, where they spent the remainder of the night in the
darkness and the cold."
In spite of their anxiety to get on with the work, and their intrepidity
in availing themselves of every opportunity, these gallant men were
often forced by stress of weather into an inactivity which we may be
sure they felt sadly irksome and against the grain. "At such seasons,"
says Mr. Stevenson, "much of our time was spent in bed, for there alone
we had effectual shelter from the winds and the spray which reached
every cranny in the walls of our barrack." On one occasion they were for
fourteen days without communication with the shore, and when at length
the seas subsided, and they were able to make the signal to Tyree that a
landing at the rock was practicable, scarcely twenty-four hours' stock
of provisions remained on the rock. In spite of hardships and perils,
however, the engineer declares that "life on the Skerryvore Rock was by
no means destitute of its peculiar pleasures. The grandeur of the
ocean's rage--the deep murmur of the waves--the hoarse cry of the sea
birds, which wheeled continually over us, especially at our meals--the
low moaning of the wind--or the gorgeous brightness of a glossy sea and
a cloudless sky--and the solemn stillness of a deep blue vault, studded
with stars, or cheered by the splendours of the full moon,--were the
phases of external things that often arrested our thoughts in a
situation where, with all the bustle that sometimes prevailed, there was
necessarily so much time for reflection. Those changes, together with
the continual succession of hopes and fears connected with the important
work in which we were engaged, and the oft recurring calls for advice or
direction, as well as occasional hours devoted to reading and
correspondence, and the pleasures of news from home, were more than
sufficient to reconcile me to--nay, to make me really enjoy--an
uninterrupted residence, on one occasion, of not less than five weeks on
that desert rock."
The Skerryvore Lighthouse was at length successfully completed. The
height of the tower is 138 feet 6 inches, of which the first 26 feet is
solid. It contains a mass of stone work of more than double the quantity
of the Bell Rock, and nearly five times that of the Eddystone. The
entire cost, including steam tug and the building of a small harbour at
Hynish for the reception of the little vessel that now attends the
lighthouse, was £86,977. The light is revolving, and reaches its
brightest state once every minute. It is produced by the revolution of
eight great annular lenses around a central light, with four wicks, and
can be seen from the deck of a vessel at the distance of 18 miles. Mr.
Alan Stevenson sums up his deeply interesting narrative in the following
words: "In such a situation as the Skerryvore, innumerable delays and
disappointments were to be expected by those engaged in the work; and
the entire loss of the fruit of the first season's labour in the course
of a few hours, was a good lesson in the school of patience, and of
trust in something better than an arm of flesh. During our progress,
also, cranes and other materials were swept away by the waves; vessels
were driven by sudden gales to seek shelter at a distance from the rocky
shores of Mull and Tyree; and the workmen were left on the rock
desponding and idle, and destitute of many of the comforts with which a
more roomy and sheltered dwelling, in the neighbourhood of friends, is
generally connected. Daily risks were run in landing on the rock in a
heavy surf, in blasting the splintery gneiss, or by the falling of heavy
bodies from the tower on a narrow space below, to which so many persons
were necessarily confined. Yet had we not any loss of either life or
limb; and although our labours were prolonged from dawn to night, and
our provisions were chiefly salt, the health of the people, with the
exception of a few slight cases of dysentery, was generally good
throughout the six successive summers of our sojourn on the rock. The
close of the work was welcomed with thankfulness by all engaged in it;
and our remarkable preservation was viewed, even by many of the most
thoughtless, as, in a peculiar manner, the gracious work of Him by whom
the very hairs of our heads are all numbered!"
Steam Navigation.
I.--JAMES SYMINGTON.
II.--ROBERT FULTON.
III.--HENRY BELL.
IV.--OCEAN STEAMERS.
Steam Navigation.
I.--JAMES SYMINGTON.
Of the many triumphs of enterprise achieved by the agency of that
tremendous power which James Watt tamed and put in harness for his race,
perhaps the greatest and most momentous is that which has reversed the
old proverb, that "time and tide wait for no man," given ten-fold
meaning to the truth that "seas but join the regions they divide," and
enabled our ships to dash across the trackless deep in spite of opposing
elements,--
"Against wind, against tide,
Steadying with upright keel,"
in a fraction of the time, and with a fraction of the cost and peril of
the old mode of naval locomotion. How amply realized has been James
Bell's prediction more than half a century ago, "I will venture to
affirm that history does not afford an instance of such rapid
improvement in commerce and civilization, as that which will be effected
by steam vessels!"
Towards the close of the last century, a number of ingenious minds were
in travail with the scheme of steam navigation. The Marquis de Jouffroy
in France, and Fitch and Rumsey in America, were successful in
experiments of its feasibility; but it is to the efforts of Miller and
Symington in Scotland, followed up by those of Fulton and Bell, that we
are chiefly and more immediately indebted for the practical development
of the project.
Having a natural bent for mechanical contrivances, and abundance of
leisure and money to indulge his tastes, Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, in
Dumfriesshire, somewhere about the year 1785, was full of schemes for
driving ships by means of paddle-wheels,--by no means a novel idea, for
it was known to the Romans, if not to the Egyptians, and had often been
tried before.
All he aimed at originally was, to turn the wheels by the power of men
or horses; and this he managed to do successfully enough. Single,
double, and treble boats were often to be seen driving along Dalswinton
Lake, moved by paddle-wheels instead of oars. On one occasion, at Leith,
one of the double boats, sixty feet long, propelled by two wheels, each
of which was turned by a couple of men, was matched against a
Custom-house boat, which was reckoned a fast sailer. The paddle-wheels
did duty very well; but the men were soon knocked up with turning them,
and the want of some other motive power was strongly felt. A young man
named Taylor, who was tutor to Mr. Miller's boys, is said to have
suggested the use of steam; but whether this be so or not, it was not
till Miller met with James Symington that the idea assumed a practical
form.
In 1786 James Symington, then joint-engineer with his brother George, to
the Wanlockhead Mines, was struck with the idea which, as we have seen,
several other ingenious minds were also busy with about the same
time,--of rendering the steam-engine available for locomotion both on
land and sea. After much study and reflection, he succeeded in embodying
the idea in a working model. It was supported on four wheels, which were
moved in any direction by means of a small steam-engine, and could carry
16 cwt., besides coals, water, &c. It was exhibited in Edinburgh in the
summer of 1786, and made a considerable sensation. Mr. Miller, fond of
all such inventions, did not fail to get a sight of Symington's
locomotive engine, the first time he was in town. He was delighted with
its ingenuity and completeness, and procured an interview with the
author. Of course, Miller was full of his own experiments, and told
Symington the whole story of his efforts to propel vessels by
paddle-wheels, and the want of some stronger, and more constant power
than that of men to turn the capstan, upon which the motion of the
wheels depended. Symington at once expressed the opinion he had
formed,--that steam was equally available for vessels as for carriages,
and showed him how the steam-engine which he had devised for his
locomotive could be applied to the paddle-wheels. Miller was so much
struck by his statements, which he illustrated by reference to the
model, that he determined to have an engine made on the same plan, and
fitted into one of his double boats. Accordingly, an engine was built
under Symington's directions and superintendence, sent to Dalswinton,
and put together in October 1788. The engine, in a strong oak frame, was
placed in the one half of a double pleasure-boat, the boiler occupying
the other half, and the paddle-wheels being fixed in the middle.
The autumn was withering into winter, the yellow leaves were swirling to
the ground with every little breath of wind, and the boughs were
beginning to show forth bare and grim, when the little boat was launched
upon the bosom of Dalswinton Loch. At length all the preparations were
finished, and on the 14th November Mr. Miller had the delight of seeing
the vessel gliding over the mimic waves of the lake at the rate of five
miles an hour. The company on board the boat on that memorable occasion
were--Mr. Miller himself, of course, nervous with pleasure and
exultation; Taylor, the tutor; Alexander Nasmyth (the well-known
landscape painter, and father of the man who, in the next generation,
was to invent the wonderful steam-hammer, that knocks masses of iron
about like putty, and can yet so moderate its force as to crack a nut
without bruising the kernel); a brisk stripling with strongly marked
features, by name Harry Brougham, afterwards to be Lord Chancellor of
England, and perhaps the most many-sided genius of his time; and--last
and greatest of the group--there was one of Mr. Miller's tenants, the
farmer of Ellisland,--Robert Burns, the great bard of Scotland, enjoying
to the full, no doubt, the novelty of the expedition, but, we must
suppose, unconscious of its import and grand future consequences, since
he has accorded it no commemorative verse. "Many a time," says Mr. James
Nasmyth, son of the distinguished painter, "I have heard my father
describe the delight which this first and successful essay at steam
navigation yielded the party in question. I only wish Burns had
immortalized it in fit, clinking rhyme, for, indeed, it was a subject
worthy of his highest muse."
The experiment was next tried on a large scale with a canal boat, on the
Forth and Clyde Canal, but one of the wheels broke. Not to be balked,
Symington had stronger wheels made, and the next time the steam was put
on, the vessel went off at the rate of seven miles an hour. The
experiment was several times repeated with success. The vessel, however,
was so slight, that many more trips would have knocked it to pieces; and
it was therefore dismantled. The fitting up of these vessels, and the
working of them, formed a heavy drain upon Mr. Miller's purse; and
having laid satisfactory proof before the world that the thing could be
done, he relinquished the enterprise, and left it to be worked out by
others. Just then, however, no one came forward to fill his place; and
for some years the idea slumbered.
In 1801 Symington could not afford to indulge in further efforts at his
own expense, but he found a patron in Lord Dundas, who commissioned him
to construct a steam-tug for dragging canal boats. A stout, serviceable
tug was built; and a series of experiments entered upon to test her
efficiency, which cost upwards of £3000. One bleak, stormy spring-day in
1802, the people on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal might have
been seen staring with wonder, at the short, stumpy little tug pushing
gallantly on at the rate of three or four miles an hour, with a strong
wind right in her teeth, that no other vessel could make head against,
and two loaded vessels (each of more than 70 tons burden) in tow. By
itself, the tug could do six miles an hour without any great strain. The
company made some objection, however, about the banks of the canal being
injured, and the tug fell into disuse. It served an important end,
though, in giving both Fulton and Bell a basis for their operations, and
must be considered the parent of our modern steam-craft.
II.--ROBERT FULTON.
After Dr. Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom, had retired
penniless from his manufacturing enterprises, and had taken up his abode
in London, one of the constant visitors at his modest residence in
Marylebone Fields, was a thin, sharp-featured American, about
twenty-eight years of age, an artist by profession, and formerly student
of Benjamin West, who, however, was now much more interested in the art
of engineering than the art of painting. From an early age he had shown
a taste for mechanics, and was fond of spending his play-hours at school
loitering about workshops and factories, watching the men at their work,
and studying the machines and instruments they used. This sojourn in
England had brought him into contact with the Duke of Bridgewater, the
great canal projector, and Lord Stanhope, well known for his
improvements in the printing press and other contrivances, in whose
company his boyish bent towards mechanics was revived, and became quite
a passion with him. He threw aside his brushes and palette, and applied
himself to his favourite pursuit with heart and soul. Having formed the
acquaintance of Cartwright, he became a daily visitor at his house, and
the enthusiastic, good-natured doctor and he would sit debating for
hours the great problem: "Whether it were practicable to move vessels by
steam?" Fulton, eager, restless, vivacious, with pencil in hand, was
perpetually sketching plans of paddle-wheels; while the doctor, calm,
dignified, and earnest, equally engrossed in the subject, was contriving
various modes of bringing steam to act upon them. Neither of them had
any doubt that the thing could be done, but the "how" long baffled them;
and even though the doctor constructed "the model of a boat, which,
being wound up like a clock, moved on the water in a highly satisfactory
manner," nothing practical came of their cogitations till some years
after.
While on a visit to Paris, Fulton was struck with the injury which
standing navies of men-of-war inflicted on the mercantile marine, and
gave his whole attention, as he says, "to find out the means of
destroying such engines of oppression, by some method which would put it
out of the power of any nation to maintain such a system, and compel
every government to adopt the simple principles of education, industry,
and a free circulation of its produce." The means presented itself to
his mind in the shape of an explosive shell, called the torpedo, by
which any ship of war could be blown to pieces; and for six or seven
years he occupied himself in fruitless attempts to get first the
government of France, and then that of England, to take up his project.
He did not abandon his schemes with regard to steam-vessels, however;
but, under the auspices of Mr. Livingstone, the American ambassador,
made several experiments. One vessel of considerable size broke through
the middle when the engines were placed on board, but a second one was
rather more successful, though but a slow rate of movement was attained.
His project came under the notice of Napoleon, then First Consul, who
did not fail to appreciate its value. "It was," he said, "capable of
changing the face of the world;" and he directed a commission to inquire
into its merits. Nothing came of it, however.
Shortly after, Fulton visited Scotland, and got an introduction to
Symington, whom he pressed for a sight of his boat. Symington generously
consented, and gave him a short sail on board the steam-tug. Fulton made
no concealment of his intention of starting steamboats in his own
country, whither he was about to return, and asked Symington to allow
him to make a few notes of his observations on board. Symington had no
objections; and, therefore, he says, "Fulton pulled out a memorandum
book, and after putting several pointed questions respecting the general
construction and effect of the machine, which I answered in a most
explicit manner, he jotted down particularly everything then described,
with his own remarks upon the boat while moving with him on board along
the canal." Fulton was very liberal in his promises not to forget his
assistance, if he got steamboats established in America; but Symington
never heard anything more of him.
Fulton was at New York in 1806, and busy getting a steamboat put
together. It was a costly undertaking, and he had little spare cash of
his own; so he offered shares in the concern to his friends, but no one
would have anything to do with so ridiculous a scheme, as they thought.
"My friends," says Fulton, "were civil, but shy. They listened with
patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast of incredulity on
their countenances. I felt the full force of the lamentation of the
poet,--
'Truths would you teach, to save a sinking land,
All shun, none aid you, and few understand.'
As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building-yard while my
boat was in progress, I have often loitered, unknown, near the idle
groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various
inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was
uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh rose at my
expense, the dry jest, the wise calculation of losses and expenditure,
the dull, but endless repetition of 'the Fulton Folly.' Never did a
single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish, cross my
path."
Let them laugh that win. The success which shortly attended Fulton's
scheme turned the tables upon those who had mocked at him. The
_Clermont_ was completed in August 1807, and the day arrived when the
trial was to be made on the Hudson river. "To me," wrote Fulton, "it was
a most trying and interesting occasion. I wanted some friends to go on
board to witness the first successful trip. Many of them did me the
favour to attend as a mark of personal respect; but it was manifest they
did it with reluctance, fearing to be partners of my mortification, and
not of my triumph. The moment arrived in which the word was to be given
for the vessel to move. My friends were in groups on the deck. There was
anxiety mixed with fear among them. They were silent, sad, and weary. I
read in their looks nothing but disaster, and almost repented of my
efforts. The signal was given, and the boat moved on a short distance,
and then stopped and became immovable. To the silence of the preceding
moment now succeeded murmurs of discontent and agitation, and whispers
and shrugs. I could hear distinctly repeated--'I told you so; it is a
foolish scheme; I wish we were well out of it.' I elevated myself on a
platform, and stated that I knew not what was the matter; but if they
would be quiet, and indulge me for half an hour, I would either go on or
abandon the voyage. I went below, and discovered that a slight
misadjustment was the cause. It was obviated. The boat went on; we left
New York; we passed through the Highlands; we reached Albany! Yet even
their imagination superseded the force of fact. It was doubted if it
could be done again, or if it could be made, in any case, of any great
value."
The simple-minded country folk on the banks of the Hudson were almost
frightened out of their wits at the awful apparition which they saw
gliding along the river, and which, especially when seen indistinctly
looming through the night, looked to their bewildered eyes, "a monster
moving on the water, defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames
and smoke." Pine-wood was used for fuel, and whenever the fire was
stirred, a great burst of sparks issued from the chimney. "This uncommon
light," says Colden, the biographer of Fulton, "first attracted the
attention of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the wind and
tide were adverse to its approach, they saw with astonishment that it
was rapidly coming towards them; and when it came so near that the noise
of the machinery and paddles were heard, the crews in some instances
shrunk beneath their decks from the terrific sight, and others left
their vessels to go on shore; while others, again, prostrated
themselves, and besought Providence to protect them from the approach of
the horrible monster which was marching on the tides, and lighting its
path by the fires which it vomited."
With the novelty of the spectacle its terror died away, and people soon
got tired of rushing out to see the remarkable machine that had once
seemed so miraculous to them. The _Clermont_ soon began to travel
regularly as a passage-boat between Albany and New York, other
steam-vessels were constructed on its model, and by degrees the steam
marine of America grew into the host it is at present. Thirty years
after the first experiment on the Hudson, it was calculated 1300
steamboats had been built in the States.
Fulton did not live long to enjoy his triumphs. He died in 1815, having
been actively engaged in promoting steam navigation to his last hours.
III.--HENRY BELL.
The honour which in America attached to Fulton as the man who first
brought the steamboat into use, and to the River Hudson as being the
scene of the experiment, in our own country fell (in a somewhat less
degree, being subsequent), to Henry Bell, and the River Clyde.
Brought up as a millwright, Bell, from want of funds to start in
business, was obliged for many years to gain his living as a common
carpenter in Glasgow, where he was noted among the trade as being very
fond of "schemes," and suspected on that account by narrow-minded folk
of being not very reliable in the lower branches of his craft. Scheme
after scheme issued from his fertile mind; but he was rash and hasty in
working them out, and few proved of much worth. Steam navigation being
one of the vexed problems of the time, had every fascination for his
peculiar genius; and he seems to have been brooding over it as the last
century was closing, and the present opening upon the world. When Fulton
visited Symington's invention, Bell appears to have accompanied him, and
to have afterwards corresponded with him on the subject. "This," he
says, "led me to think of the absurdity of writing my opinions to other
countries, and not putting it in practice myself in my own country; and
from these considerations I was roused to set on foot a steamboat, for
which I made a number of different models before I was satisfied."
Having removed to the little village of Helensburgh, on the banks of the
Clyde, and there established a hotel and bath-house, which his wife
managed, he endeavoured to work the passage-boats by which visitors were
brought to the place, by means of paddle-wheels worked by the hand,
instead of oars; but the plan did not succeed very well, for the same
reason that led to Mr. Miller's abandonment of it--the inefficiency of
manual power, which could not be applied with sufficiently sustained and
continuous force. He therefore gave it up, and turned his attention to
the employment of steam power for the same purpose. Of course, he was
laughed at for his pains; and Henry Bell's project for having steamers
on the Clyde became a standing joke among the frequenters of the
watering-place. Even after the permanent success of Fulton's scheme was
known, people would not moderate their incredulity; but Bell's faith,
which had never wavered, was now confirmed, and he set about the work
with redoubled energy.
In 1811, Bell, having procured the necessary funds, had a steam-boat
built of twenty-five tons and four horse power. He named it the _Comet_,
because a comet had just then appeared in the north-west of Scotland.
The _Comet_ began to run regularly between Glasgow and Helensburgh in
January 1812, and continued to ply successfully during the summer of
that year. At first, however, she brought rather loss than gain to her
projector. People were shy of trusting themselves on board, and parties
interested in the stage-coaches and sailing vessels, spread all sorts of
absurd reports about her. It was not till she had gone for some time
without accident, that tourists began to think they might as well save
their money and their time by patronizing the new mode of conveyance. In
the second year Bell took the _Comet_ off the Clyde, and sent her on a
tour round the open coasts of the three kingdoms. Before long the safety
and utility of steam navigation was admitted on all hands, and numerous
rival enterprises were on foot. In 1820 the _Comet_ was lost between
Glasgow and Fort William; and in the following year another of Bell's
vessels was burnt to the water-edge--two misfortunes that carried £3000
out of his pocket. His rivals, with abundant capital, soon drove him out
of the field, and Bell sank into poverty and neglect. A small annuity
from the Clyde trustees, and a subscription among his friends, to keep
him from starving, were all the rewards he ever received for his
enterprise and perseverance. He died in 1830 in the sixty-fourth year of
his age.
IV.--OCEAN STEAMERS.
In the quarter of a century which elapsed between 1812, when the _Comet_
first began to churn the waters of the Clyde, and 1837, steam navigation
progressed steadily and surely. At first, content with plying along
rivers and quiet bays, steamers by-and-by ventured out upon the open
sea. We owe the regular establishment of deep-sea packets to the courage
and enterprise of Mr. David Napier of Glasgow, "who," says Mr. Scott
Russell, "has effected more for the improvement of steam navigation than
any other man." He was quick to appreciate the capabilities of
steam-vessels, and saw that they were fit for something more than mere
inland voyages. Before starting one of them upon the open sea, however,
he carefully estimated the danger to be encountered and the difficulties
to be overcome. He took passage at the worst season of the year in one
of the sailing vessels which formerly plied between Glasgow and Belfast,
and which often required a week to perform a journey that is now done by
steam in a few hours.
Stationing himself on an elevated part of the deck, he kept a close
watch on the movements of the vessel, observing the tossing to which she
was subjected by the waves, the extent of the dip when she sank into a
trough, the height of elevation when lifted on the summit of a wave, and
calculating in his mind how all this would tell on the paddle-wheels.
Through the roughest of the storm, when the vessel was pitching worst,
and the wind blowing at its fiercest, he kept his place on deck,
regardless of the drenching spray and the blast that almost carried him
off his legs. When at length he had satisfied himself by the observation
of his own eyes and inquiries of the captain and crew, that there was
nothing in the voyage which a steamer could not encounter, he retired
contentedly to his cabin, leaving everybody astonished at his strange
curiosity respecting the effect of rough weather on the ship.
Not long after David Napier started the _Rob Roy_ steam-packet between
Greenock and Belfast, and afterwards between Dover and Calais. In the
course of two or three years more he had established steam communication
between Holyhead and Dublin, Liverpool and Greenock, and various other
parts. The length of each unbroken passage was then considered the great
difficulty; but as steamers got improved both in form and machinery,
passages of greater length were successfully accomplished. Steamers
traversed in all directions the German Ocean, the Mediterranean, the
Baltic, and, in short, all the waters on the eastern side of the
Atlantic; and were in use upon all the rivers and lakes of any size in
Europe.
At length, in 1836, the startling project was set on foot of superseding
the far-famed New York and Liverpool packet ships by a fleet of
steam-ships. Before this the _Savannah_, a steam vessel of 300 tons,
had, in 1819, crossed from New York to Liverpool in twenty-six days,
partly with sails and partly with steam; and another steam vessel had,
in 1825, made the voyage from England to Calcutta; but one swallow does
not make a summer, and many learned folks, on both sides of the
Atlantic, shook their heads doubtfully at the daring scheme of regular
steam communication across 13,000 miles of ocean. The experiment was to
be made, however; and on the 4th April 1838, the _Sirius_, of 700 tons
and 320 horse power, sailed from Cork for the far West. Four days after
the _Great Western_ followed in her wake from Bristol.
Great was the excitement in New York as the time drew nigh when the
_Sirius_ was considered due. For days together the Battery was crowded
with anxious watchers, from the first breaking of the cold, grey dawn
till night dropped its dark curtain on the scene. At that time a
telescope was a thing to be begged, borrowed, or stolen,--to be got,
somehow or other, if only for a minute,--and a man who possessed one was
to be looked up to, made much of, and, if possible, coaxed out of the
loan of it. All day long a hundred telescopes swept the sea. The ocean
steamer was the great topic of the hour, and "any appearance of her?"
the constant question when two people met. On St. George's day, the 23d
April, a dim, dusky speck on the far horizon grew under the eye of the
thousands of breathless watchers into a long train of smoke, beneath
which, as the hours wore on, appeared the black prow of a huge
steam-boat. There she was, long looked for come at last; and with the
American colours at the fore, and the flag of Old England rustling at
the stern, the _Sirius_ swept into the harbour amidst the cheers of the
multitude, the ringing of the city bells, and the firing of salutes. The
excitement reached its climax, and the shouting and firing grew
deafening, when, some few hours later on the same auspicious day, the
_Great Western_ came to anchor alongside of her rival.
Twenty-two years have passed since then, and the marvel of 1838 has
become a mere everyday affair. There are some fourteen different lines
of steamers, comprising more than fifty vessels, running between the
United States and Europe, to say nothing of the magnificent steam fleets
of the Peninsular and Oriental, the Royal West India, British and North
American, Pacific, Australian, South Western, and other companies.
The employment of iron in the construction of ships, thus securing at
once lightness and strength, and the invention of the screw propeller,
in 1836, by Mr. J. P. Smith, a farmer at Hendon, by means of which a
vessel can combine all the qualities of a first-rate sailing ship with
the use of steam power, gave a great impulse to steam navigation, which
is still making steady and continuous progress. From one steam vessel
in 1812 the number in the kingdom has risen successively to 20 in 1820,
824 in 1840, and over 2000 in 1860. During 1858, 153 steamers were built
in the United Kingdom, of which 112 were of iron. It is interesting to
observe the advance in size of the steam vessels from their first
introduction on the Clyde.
Length. Breadth.
1812. Comet 40 feet 10-1/2 feet.
1825. Enterprise (built expressly to go to
India, coaling at intermediate
stations) 122 " 27 "
1835. Tagus (for Mediterranean) 182 " 28 "
1838. Great Western (the first ship built
expressly for Transatlantic service) 236 " 35-1/2 "
1844. Great Britain (the first large screw
ship, and largest iron ship up to that
time) 322 " 51 "
1853. Himalaya (iron) 370 " 43-1/2 "
1856. Persia (do.) 390 " 45 "
1859. Great Eastern (do.) 680 " 83 "
In the interval between 1812 and 1870 the number of steamers in the
United Kingdom has increased from one to nearly three thousand; and the
ocean-going steamer of 1870 is nearly six times the length of that of
1825, and seventeen times the length of the _Comet_, while the
difference in tonnage is still greater. How Fulton or Bell would open
their eyes at the sight of a vast moving city, such as the Big Ship, an
eighth of a mile in length, propelled by both paddle-wheels and screw,
each worked by four huge engines!
Iron Manufacture.
HENRY CORT.
Iron Manufacture.
HENRY CORT.
The multifarious use of iron in our day has given its name to the age.
We have got far beyond the primitive applications of that metal--every
day it is supplanting some other substance, and there is no saying where
the wide-spread and varied service we exact from it will stop. The
invention of the steam-engine, and the improvement of manufacturing
machines, would be comparatively valueless, unless we had at command a
cheap and abundant supply of iron for their construction. The land is
covered with a net-work of iron rails, traversed by iron steeds--gulfs
and valleys are spanned by iron arches and iron tubes--huge ships of
iron ride upon the deep. Even stones and bricks are being discarded for
this all-useful substance, and of iron we are building houses, palaces,
theatres, churches, and spacious domes. There is no end to its uses.
And yet, it is only between seventy and eighty years ago since Britain,
the richest of all countries in native ore, was dependent upon others
for her supply of the manufactured metal. We wanted but little iron in
those days, compared with the present demand, and yet that little we
could not furnish ourselves with. As much as a million and a half
a-year went out of our pockets to purchase wrought iron from Sweden
alone, and we were good customers to Russia as well. All the iron that
our country could then produce was some 17,000 tons. The man who showed
us how to turn our own ore to account, who rendered us independent of
all other countries for our supply, and made us the great purveyors of
wrought iron to the world, who opened up to us this great source of
national wealth, was Henry Cort of Gosport.
The great difficulty which he solved was how to get wrought iron out of
the crude iron as it came from the smelting furnace, without using
charcoal. With but a small tract of country, densely peopled, we had but
a scant supply of wood at our command. The great forests which once
overspread the land were gradually vanishing, partly before the spread
of population and the growth of towns, and partly from the inroads made
on them by the demand for timber. Formerly, the first transformation of
the ore into pig iron (the crude form of the manufactured metal) was
effected by means of wood; and the consumption was so great that an Act
was passed in 1581 restraining its use. Soon afterwards Lord Dudley
discovered that coal would answer the purpose just as well, and obtained
a patent of monopoly. He reaped but little profit from his invention,
however, for his iron-works were destroyed by a mob; and it was not till
a century afterwards, when people got more alarmed at the growing
scarcity of timber, and the increased demand for it, that the plan was
generally adopted. This was one step in the right direction, but another
yet remained to be made, for the manufacture was still hampered in our
country by the want of wood for the second process--the conversion of
crude into malleable iron, in which state alone it is fit for service.
About the year 1785, Henry Cort, iron-master, of Gosport, after many
years of patient and wearisome research, of anxious thought, and
indefatigable experiment, in which he spent a private fortune of some
£20,000, perfected a couple of inventions of priceless value. The first
was the process of converting pig iron into wrought iron by the flame of
pit coal in a puddling furnace, thus dispensing with the use of
charcoal,--the cost and scarcity of which had before formed such a dead
weight on the trade, and placed us at such a disadvantage compared with
Sweden and Russia. The second was a further process for drawing the iron
into bars by means of grooved rollers. Till then, this operation had to
be performed with hammer and anvil, and was very tedious and laborious.
The new system not only reduced the cost and labour of producing iron to
one-twentieth of what they were previously, but greatly improved the
quality of the article produced.
It is not easy to estimate all that Henry Cort's inventions have done
for this country. Without them we should have lost an overflowing and
inexhaustible source of national wealth, and, moreover, large sums would
have been taken out of the country in the purchase of wrought metal; we
should never have been able to give full scope to the great mechanical
inventions brought forth towards the close of the last, and the opening
of the present century; we should have been debarred from taking rank as
the great engineers and engine-makers for the rest of the world. The
direct gain to this country from the inventions of Henry Cort, which
enabled us to work up our own iron, has been calculated as equal by this
time to not less than a hundred millions; and it is hardly possible to
exaggerate the benefits which it has conferred. Lord Sheffield's
prophecy, that the adoption of these processes would be worth more to
Britain than a dozen colonies, may be said to have been fulfilled.
Like many another benefactor of his country, Cort got little good out of
his invention for himself. He took out a patent for his process, and
arranged with the leading iron-masters to accept a royalty of ten
shillings a ton for the use of them. With a large fortune in prospect,
his purse was just then exhausted by the expenses he had incurred in
experiments and researches; and he had to look out for a capitalist to
aid him in working the patent on his own account. As ill luck would
have it, he entered into partnership with a certain Adam Jellicoe, then
deputy-paymaster of the navy. Jellicoe was considered a man of
substance, and a "thoroughly respectable" character. He was to advance
the ready money, and to receive in return half of the profits of the
trade, Cort assigning to him, by way of collateral security, his patent
rights. For a year or two all went well. The patent was everywhere
adopted, and Cort's own iron works drove a lucrative and growing trade.
He seemed in a fair way of getting back the fortune he had spent in
bringing out the inventions, doubled or trebled, as he well deserved.
The respectable Jellicoe was seized with a mortal sickness: at his death
his desk was filled by another, his books were examined, and it turned
out that he had been robbing the government for many a year back, and
was a large defaulter. Cort, of course, had nothing to do with this
villany, but he had to pay the penalty of it. As Jellicoe's partner he
was responsible, in those days of unlimited liability, for all
Jellicoe's debts; but that was not the worst of it. The treasurer of the
navy was not content to exact only the payment of Jellicoe's
defalcations, as he had no doubt a right to do, but confiscated the
whole of Cort's patent rights, business, and property, which would have
paid the debt seven or eight times over, had it been fairly valued.
This incident has never been properly cleared up, but what glimpses of
its secret passages have been obtained, seem to indicate clearly enough
that poor Cort was the victim, not of one, but of two or more swindlers.
To the day of his death he never could obtain a distinct account of the
proceedings; and when, after his death, a Royal Commission was appointed
to inquire into the matter, the treasurer of the navy and his deputy
took care, a week or two before the Commission met, to indemnify each
other by a joint release, and to burn their accounts for upwards of a
million and a half of public money, for the application of which they
were responsible, as well as all papers relating to Cort's case. When
the Commission met, and the treasurer and his deputy were called before
it, they refused to answer questions which would criminate themselves.
His connection with Jellicoe was, of course, the ruin of Henry Cort. He
had no means of re-establishing himself in business; he was robbed of
all income from his patents; and he died ruined and broken-hearted ten
years after, leaving a family of nine children, without a sixpence in
the world. Four of these children now survive--old, infirm, and
indigent--only saved from being dependent upon parish bounty by
pensions, amounting in the aggregate to £90 per annum. Well may it be
said, "There should be more gratitude in our Iron Age to the children of
HENRY CORT."
The Electric Telegraph.
I.--MR. COOKE.
II.--PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE.
III.--THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH.
The Electric Telegraph.
"Speak the word and think the thought,
Quick 'tis as with lightning caught--
Over, under lands or seas,
To the far antipodes;
Here again, as soon as gone,
Making all the earth as one;
Moscow speaks at twelve o'clock,--
London reads ere noon the shock."
I.--MR. COOKE.
Of all the marvels of our time, the most marvellous is the subjugation
of the electric fluid, that potent elemental force,--twin brother of the
fatal lightning,--to be our submissive courier, to bear our messages
from land to land, and "put a girdle round about the earth in forty
minutes." The Prospero that tamed this Ariel was no individual genius,
but "two single gentlemen rolled into one." The idea of employing the
electric current for the conveyance of signals between distant points,
can be traced pretty far back in date; but to Mr. Cooke and Professor
Wheatstone is undoubtedly due the credit of having made the electric
telegraph an actual and accomplished fact, and rendered it practicable
for everyday uses.
Having served for a number of years as an officer in our Indian army,
Mr. Cooke came back to Europe to recruit his health in the beginning of
1836, and took up his abode at Heidelberg. He found agreeable
occupation for his leisure in the study of anatomy, and in the
construction of anatomical models for his father's museum at Durham,
where he was a professor in the university. Entirely self-taught in this
delicate art, Mr. Cooke applied himself to it with characteristic
ardour, and attained remarkable skill. One day he happened to witness
some experiments which were made by Professor Möncke, to illustrate the
feasibility of electric signalling. A current of electricity was passed
through a long wire, and set a magnetic needle at the end quivering
under its influence. The experiment was a very simple one, and not at
all novel; but Cooke had never paid any attention to the subject before,
and was much struck with what he saw. He became strongly impressed with
the possibility of employing electricity in the transmission of
telegraphic intelligence between distant places. From the day he
witnessed the experiments in Professor Möncke's classroom, he forsook
the dissecting knife, threw aside his modelling tools, and applied
himself to the realization of his conception. With such ardour and
devotion did he labour, and such skill and ingenuity did he bring to the
work, that within three weeks he had constructed a telegraph with six
wires, forming three complete metallic currents, and influencing three
needles, by the varied inclination of which twenty-six different signals
were designated. In that short time he had also invented the detector,
by which injuries to the wires, whether from water, fracture, or
contact with substances capable of diverting the current, were readily
traced, and the alarum, by which notice is given at one end of the wire
that a message is coming from the other. Both these contrivances were of
the utmost value,--indeed, without them electric telegraphy would be
impracticable,--and are still in use. Possessing more of a mechanical
than a scientific genius, Mr. Cooke bestowed more of his time and
ingenuity on the perfection of a telegraph to be worked by clock
mechanism, set in action by the withdrawal of a detent by an electro
magnet than in the completion of the electric telegraph pure and simple.
Soon after having invented his telegraph, he came over to London, and
spent the rest of the year in making a variety of instruments, and in
efforts to get his telegraph introduced on the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway. He found an obstacle to the complete success of his mechanical
telegraph, in the difficulty of transmitting to a distance sufficient
electric power to work the electro magnet upon which its action
depended. A friend advised him to consult Professor Wheatstone, then
known to be deeply engaged in electrical experiments, with a view to
telegraphy; and accordingly, an interview between them took place in
February 1837.
II.--PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE.
Mr. Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S., and Professor of Experimental Philosophy
in King's College at the time of that interview, had made considerable
advances in the scientific part of the enterprise. At the commencement
of his career as a maker and seller of musical instruments in London, he
was led to investigate the science of sound; and from his researches in
that direction, he was led--much as Herschel was led--to devote himself
to optics, and to study the philosophy of light. He was the first to
point out the peculiarity of binocular vision, and to describe the
stereoscope, which has since become so popular an instrument. Gradually,
however, his thoughts and researches came to be steadfastly directed to
the application of electricity to the communication of signals. In
determining the rate at which the electric current travels through a
wire he had laid down, he made an important stride towards the end in
view. He proved by a series of most ingenious experiments, that one
spark of electricity leaps on before another, and that its progress is a
question of time. He found that electricity travels through a _copper_
wire as fast as, if not faster, than light, that is, at the rate of
200,000 miles in a second; but through an _iron_ wire, electricity moves
at the rate of only 15,400 miles in a second. In 1836 Mr. Wheatstone had
begun experiments in the vaults of King's College, with four miles of
wire, properly insulated, and was working out the details of a
telegraph, the scientific principles of which he had already laid down.
He had discovered an original method of converting a few wires into a
considerable number of circuits, so that the greatest number of signals
could be transmitted by a limited number of wires, by the deflection of
magnetic needles. Mr. Wheatstone, however, was somewhat backward in the
mechanical parts of the scheme, and the meeting between him and Cooke
was therefore of the greatest benefit to both, and an admirable
illustration of the old proverb, that two heads are better than one. Had
they never been brought together,--had they kept on working out their
own ideas apart--each would, no doubt, have been able to produce an
electric telegraph; but a great deal of time would have been lost, and
their respective efforts less complete and valuable than the one they
effected in conjunction. Cooke wanted sound, scientific knowledge;
Wheatstone wanted mechanical ingenuity; and their union supplied mutual
deficiencies. A partnership was immediately formed between them. Before
their combined genius all difficulties vanished; and in the June of the
same year they were able to take out a patent for a telegraph with five
wires and five needles. Their respective shares in its invention are
clearly marked out by Sir J. Brunel and Professor Daniell, who, as
arbiters between the two upon that delicate question, gave the
following award in 1841:--
"Whilst Mr. Cooke is entitled to stand alone as the gentleman to whom
this country is indebted for having practically introduced and carried
out the electric telegraph as a useful undertaking, promising to be a
work of national importance; and Professor Wheatstone is acknowledged as
the scientific man whose profound and successful researches had already
prepared the public to receive it as a project capable of practical
application,--it is to the united labours of two gentlemen so well
qualified for mutual assistance, that we must attribute the rapid
progress which this important invention has made during the five years
since they have been associated."
Shortly after the taking out of a patent, wires were laid down between
Euston Square Terminus and Camden Town Station, on the North-Western
Railway; and the new telegraph was subjected to trial. Late in the
evening of the 25th July 1837, in a dingy little room in one of the
Euston Square offices, Professor Wheatstone sat alone, with a hand on
each handle of the signal instrument, and an anxious eye upon the dial,
with its needles as yet in motionless repose. In another little room at
the Camden Town Station, Mr. Cooke was seated in a similar position
before the instrument at the other end of the wires, along with Mr., now
Sir Charles Fox, Robert Stephenson, and some other gentlemen. It was a
trying, agitating moment for the two inventors,--how Wheatstone's pulse
must have throbbed, and his heart beat, as he jerked the handle, broke
the electric current, and sent the needles quivering on the dial; in
what suspense he must have spent the next few minutes, holding his
breath as though to hear his fellow's voice, and almost afraid to look
at the dial lest no answer should be made; with what a thrill of joy
must each have seen the needles wag knowingly and spell out their
precious message,--the "All's well; thank God," that flashed from heart
to heart, along the line of senseless wire. "Never," said Wheatstone,
"did I feel such a tumultuous sensation before, as when all alone in the
still room I heard the needles click; and as I spelled the words, I felt
all the magnitude of the invention now proved to be practicable beyond
cavil or dispute."
A few days before this trial of the telegraph in London, Steinheil, of
Munich, is said to have had one of his own invention at work there; and
it is a difficult question to decide whether he or Cooke and Wheatstone
were the first inventors. It is, however, a question of no consequence,
as each worked independently. Since the first English electric telegraph
was patented, there have been a thousand and one other contrivances of a
similar kind taken out; but it may be doubted whether, for practical
purposes, the original apparatus, with the improvements which its own
inventors have made on it, is not still the best of them all.
From being used merely to carry railway messages, the telegraph was
brought into the service of the general public; the advantages of such
almost instantaneous communication were readily appreciated; and eight
years after Messrs. Cooke and Wheatstone took out their patent, lines of
telegraph to the extent of 500 miles were in operation in England upon
the original plan. In 1855 telegraphic correspondence had become so
general, that the Electric Telegraph Company was started to supply the
demand. In that establishment the Needle Telegraph of Wheatstone and
Cooke is the one generally used, with the Chemical Recording Telegraph
of Bain for special occasions. By means of the latter, blue lines of
various lengths, according to an alphabet, are drawn upon a ribbon of
paper, and as many as 20,000 words can be sent in an hour, though the
ordinary rate is 100 per minute. In the purchase of patent rights alone,
the Company have spent £170,000, and they are every year adding to the
length of their wires. In June 1850 they had 6730 miles of wires, and
despatched 29,245 messages a year. In December 1853 they had 24,340
miles of wires, and despatched 212,440 messages a-year. Their lines now
extend over a much larger mileage, and convey a greatly increased number
of messages. The Magnetic Telegraph Company have also a large extent of
wires, and do a considerable business.
III.--THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH.
The land telegraph having had such success, the next step was to carry
the wires across the deep, and link continent to continent,--an
all-important step for an island kingdom such as ours, with its legion
of distant colonies. The success of a submerged cable between Gosport
and Portsmouth, and of one across the docks at Hull, proved the
feasibility of a water telegraph, at least on a small scale, and it was
not long before more ambitious attempts were made. On the 28th of August
1850, a cable, 30 miles long, in a gutta percha sheathing, was stretched
at the bottom of the straits between Dover and Cape Grisnez, near
Calais. Messages of congratulation sped along this wire between England
and France; and although a ridge of rocks filed the cable asunder on the
French coast, the suspension of communication was only temporary. The
link has once more been established, and is in daily use. The first news
sent by the wire to England was of the celebrated _coup d'etat_ of the
2d December, which cleared the way for Louis Napoleon's ascent of the
throne. Numerous other cables have since been sunk beneath the waters;
complete telegraphic communication has just been established between
England and India, and will, no doubt, before long be extended to
Australia.
The greatest enterprise of this kind, however, still remains
unaccomplished--that is, the laying of the Atlantic cable. A company was
started in 1856 to carry out this great enterprise, the governments of
Great Britain and the United States engaging to assist them, not only
with an annual subsidy of £10,000 a-year for twenty-five years, but to
furnish the men and ships required for laying the cable from one side of
the Atlantic to the other. The chief difficulty which engaged the
attention of Mr. Wildman Whitehouse and the other agents of the notable
enterprise was the enormous size of the cable which, it was thought,
would be necessary. The general belief at that time was, that the
greater the distance to be traversed, the larger must be the wire along
which the electric current was to pass, and that the rate of speed would
be in proportion to the size of the conductor. Mr. Whitehouse, however,
thought it would be as well to begin by making sure that this was really
the case, and that a monster cable was essential; and after some three
thousand separate observations and experiments, was delighted to find
that the difficulty which stared them in the face was imaginary. Instead
of a large cable transmitting the current faster than a small one, he
ascertained beyond a doubt, that the bigger the wire, the slower was the
passage of the electricity. It would be needful, therefore, to make the
cable only strong enough to stand the strain of its own weight, and
heavy enough to sink to the bottom. A single wire would have been quite
sufficient, but a strand of seven wires of the finest copper was used
for the cable, so that the fracture of one of them might not interfere
with the communication,--as long as one wire was left intact the current
would proceed. A triple coating of gutta percha, to keep the sea from
sucking out the electricity, and a thick coating of iron wire, to sink
the cable to the bottom and give it strength, were added to the copper
rope, and then the cable was complete. No less than 325,000 miles of
iron and copper wire were woven into this great cable,--as much as might
be wound thirteen times round the globe; and its weight was about a ton
per mile. The length of the cable was 18,947 miles--some 600 miles being
allowed to come and go upon, in case of accidents.
The end of July 1857 was selected for the sailing of the ships that were
to lay the cable, as fogs and gales were then out of season, and no
icebergs to be met with. On the 8th of August, the _Agamemnon_ (English)
and _Niagara_ (American), with four smaller steamers to attend them, and
each with half of the mighty cable in her hold, got up their steam and
left Valentia Harbour. One end of the cable was carried by a number of
boats from the _Niagara_ on shore, where the Lord-Lieutenant was in
waiting to receive it, and place it in contact with the batteries, which
were arranged in a little tent upon the beach. A slight accident to the
cable for a little while delayed the departure of the ships; but by the
10th they had got 200 miles out to sea, and so far the cable had been
laid successfully. Messages passed and repassed between the ships and
the shore. The next day the engineer discovering that too much cable was
being paid out, telegraphed to the people on board to put a greater grip
on it; the operation was clumsily managed, and the cable snapped,
sinking to a depth of 12,000 feet.
Not disheartened, however, the Company replaced the lost portion of the
cable; the Government again furnished ships and men, and the cable was
actually laid at the bottom of the Atlantic from Valentia Bay to Trinity
Harbour.
Addresses of congratulation passed between the Queen and the President
of the States, and numerous messages were transmitted. But gradually the
signals grew fainter and more faint, till they ceased altogether. The
cable was stricken dumb. A little to the north of the fiftieth parallel
of latitude, at the bottom of the Atlantic, where the plateau is
unbroken by any great depression, some 1500 miles of the disabled cable
were lying, on a soft bed of mud, which was constantly thickening, at a
depth of from 10,000 to 15,000 feet.
The importance of telegraphic communication between England and the
United States was, however, so obvious that its projectors were not to
be daunted by the failure they had sustained. Nor was it altogether a
failure. They had proved that a cable _could_ be laid, and messages
flashed through it. What was wanted was evidently a stronger cable,
which should be less liable to injury, and more perfect in its
insulation of the telegraphic wires.
From 1858 to 1864, the Company were engaged in the difficult task of
raising fresh funds, and in endeavouring to secure grants from the
British and American Governments. Their men of science, meanwhile, were
devising improvements in the form of cable, and contriving fresh
apparatus to facilitate its submersion. Eventually the Telegraph
Construction and Maintenance Company, an union of the Gutta Percha
Company with the celebrated firm of Glass and Elliott, constructed an
entirely new cable, which was not only costlier, but thicker and
stronger than the preceding one. The conductor, three hundred pounds per
mile, and one-seventh of an inch thick, consisted of seven No. 18 copper
wires, each one-twentieth of an inch in thickness. The core or heart of
the cable, says a writer in "Chambers's Encyclopædia," was formed of
four layers of gutta percha alternating with four of Chatterton's
compound (a solution of gutta percha in Stockholm tar); the wire and
conductor being seven hundred pounds per mile, and nine-twentieths of an
inch thick. Outside this was a coating of hemp or jute yarn, saturated
with a preservative composition; while the sheath consisted of ten iron
wires, each previously covered with five tarred Manilla yarns. The whole
cable was an inch and one eighth thick, weighed thirty-five and
three-quarter hundredweights per mile, and was strong enough to endure a
breaking strain of seven tons and three-quarters. During the various
processes of manufacture, the electrical quality of the cable was tested
to an unusual extent. The portions of finished core were tested by
immersion in water at various temperatures; next submitted to a pressure
of six hundred pounds to the square inch, to imitate the ocean pressure
at so great depth; then the conducting power of the copper wire was
tested by a galvanometer; and various experiments were also made on the
insulating property of the gutta percha. The various pieces having been
thus severely put to the proof, they were spliced end to end, and the
joints or splicings tested. In a word, nothing was left undone that
could insure the success or guarantee the stability of the new cable.
When completed, the cable measured two thousand three hundred miles, and
weighed upwards of four thousand tons. It was felt that such a burden
could only be intrusted to Brunel's "big ship," the _Great Eastern_. For
this purpose three huge iron tanks were built, in the fore, middle, and
aft holds of the vessel, each from fifty to sixty feet in diameter, and
each twenty and a half feet in depth; and in these the cable was
deposited in three vast coils.
On the 23rd of July 1865, the _Great Eastern_ left Valentia, the
submarine cable being joined end to end to a more massive shore cable,
which was hauled up the cliff at Foilhummerum Bay, to a telegraph-house
at the top. The electric condition of the cable was continually tested
during the ship's voyage across the Atlantic; and more than once its
efficiency was disturbed by fragments of wire piercing the gutta percha
and destroying the insulation. At length on August 2nd, the cable
snapped by overstraining, and the end sank to the bottom in two thousand
fathoms water, at a distance of one thousand and sixty-four miles from
the Irish coast. Attempts were made to recover it by dredging. A
five-armed grapnel, suspended to the end of a stout iron-wire rope five
miles long, was flung overboard; and when it reached the bottom, the
_Great Eastern_ steamed to and fro in the direction where the lost cable
was supposed to be lying; but failure followed upon failure, and the
cable was never once hooked. There remained nothing to be done but for
the _Great Eastern_ to return to England with the news of her
non-success, and leaving (including the failure of 1857-8) nearly four
thousand tons of electric cable at the bottom of the ocean.
The promoters of ocean telegraphy, however, were determined to be
resolute to the end. A new Company was formed, new capital was raised,
and a third cable manufactured, differing in some respects from the
former. The outside jacket was made of hemp instead of jute; the iron
wires of the sheath were galvanized, and the Manilla hemp which covered
them was not tarred. Chiefly through the absence of the tar, the weight
of the cable was diminished five hundred pounds per mile; while its
strength or breaking strain was increased. A sufficient quantity of this
improved cable was made to cross the Atlantic, with all due allowance
for slack; and also a sufficient quantity of the 1865 cable to remedy
the disaster of that year.
On July 13th, 1866, the _Great Eastern_ once more set forth on her
interesting voyage, accompanied by the steamers _Terrible_, _Medway_,
and _Albany_, to assist in the submersion of the cable, and to act as
auxiliaries whenever needed. The line of route chosen lay about midway
between those of the 1858 and 1865 cables, but at no great distance from
either. The _Great Eastern_ exchanged telegrams almost continuously with
Valentia as she steamed towards the American continent; and great were
the congratulations when she safely arrived in the harbour of Heart's
Content, Newfoundland, on the 27th.
Operations were next commenced to recover the end of the 1865 cable, and
complete its submergence. The _Albany_, _Medway_, and _Terrible_ were
despatched on the 1st of August, to the point where, "deep down beneath
the darkling waves," the cable was supposed to be lying, and on the 9th
or 10th they were joined by the _Great Eastern_, when grappling was
commenced, and carried on through the remainder of the month. The cable
was repeatedly caught, and raised to a greater or less height from the
ocean bed; but something or other snapped or slipped every time, and
down went the cable again. At last, after much trial of patience, the
end of the cable was safely fished up on September 1st; and electric
messages were at once sent through to Valentia, just as well as if the
cable had not had twelve months' soaking in the Atlantic. An additional
length having been spliced to it, the laying recommenced; and on the 8th
the squadron entered Heart's Content, having thus succeeded in laying a
second line of cable from Ireland to America.
The two cables, the old and the new, continued to work very smoothly
during the winter of 1866 and 1867; but in May 1867, the new cable was
damaged by an iceberg, which drifted across it at a distance of about
three miles from the Newfoundland shore. The injury was soon repaired;
but again, in July 1867, the same cable broke at about fifty miles from
Newfoundland.
The earlier cable continued to work for several years, but both cables
gave way towards the close of the autumn of 1870. No special
inconvenience was felt, however, as two years ago a French line of
cable was laid down between Europe and America; the _Great Eastern_
being again employed, and the operations being conducted under the
superintendence of English electricians. The two British cables will
probably be repaired in the spring of the present year (1871).
Submarine cables have multiplied recently, and almost every ocean flows
over the mysterious wires which flash intelligence beneath the rolling
waters from point to point of the civilized world. By a telegraph-cable,
which is partly submarine, the India Office in Westminster is united
with the Governor-General and his Council at Calcutta. There is also
communication between Singapore and Australia, and the network of ocean
telegraphy is being so rapidly extended that, before long, the British
Government in the metropolis will be enabled to convey its instructions
in a few hours to the administrative authorities in every British
colony. And thus the words which the poet puts into the mouth of "Puck"
will be nearly realized in a sense the poet never dreamed of--"I'll put
a girdle round about the world in forty minutes."
The Silk Manufacture.
I.--JOHN LOMBE.
II.--WILLIAM LEE.
III.--JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD.
The Silk Manufacture.
I.--JOHN LOMBE.
In the reign of the Emperor Justinian, a couple of Persian monks, on a
religious mission to China, brought away with them a quantity of
silkworms' eggs concealed in a piece of hollow cane, which they carried
to Constantinople. There they hatched the eggs, reared the worms, and
spun the silk,--for the first time introducing that manufacture into
Europe, and destroying the close monopoly which China had hitherto
enjoyed. From Constantinople the knowledge and the practice of the art
gradually extended to Greece, thence to Italy, and next to Spain. Each
country, as in turn it gained possession of the secret, strove to
preserve it with jealous care; but to little purpose. A secret that so
many thousands already shared in common, could not long remain so,
although its passage to other countries might be for a time deferred.
France and England were behind most of the other states of Europe in
obtaining a knowledge of the "craft and mystery." The manufacture of
silk did not take root in France till the reign of Francis I.; and was
hardly known in England till the persecutions of the Duke of Parma in
1585 drove a great number of the manufacturers of Antwerp to seek
refuge in our land. James I. was very anxious to promote the breed of
silkworms, and the production of silken fabrics. During his reign a
great many mulberry-trees were planted in various parts of the
country--among others, that celebrated one in Shakspeare's garden
at Stratford-on-Avon--and an attempt was made to rear the worm
in our country, which, however, the ungenial climate frustrated.
Silk-throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought over from the
Continent; and the manufacture made such progress that, by 1629, the
silk-throwsters of London were incorporated, and thirty years after
employed no fewer than 40,000 hands. The emigration from France
consequent on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) added not
only to the numbers engaged in the trade, but to the taste, skill, and
enterprise with which it was conducted. It is not easy to estimate how
deeply France wounded herself by the iniquitous persecution of the
Protestants, or how largely the emigrants repaid by their industry the
shelter which Britain afforded them.
Although the manufacture had now become fairly naturalized in England,
it was restricted by our ignorance of the first process to which the
silk was subjected. Up till 1718, the whole of the silk used in England,
for whatever purpose, was imported "thrown," that is, formed into
threads of various kinds and twists. A young Englishman named John
Lombe, impressed with the idea that our dependence on other countries
for a supply of thrown silk prevented us from reaping the full benefit
of the manufacture, and from competing with foreign traders, conceived
the project of visiting Italy, and discovering the secret of the
operation. He accordingly went over to Piedmont in 1715, but found the
difficulties greater than he had anticipated. He applied for admittance
at several factories, but was told that an examination of the machinery
was strictly prohibited. Not to be balked, he resolved, as a last
resort, to try if he could accomplish by stratagem what he had failed to
do openly. Disguising himself in the dress of a common labourer, he
bribed a couple of the workmen connected with one of the factories, and
with their connivance obtained access in secret to the works. His visits
were few and short; but he made the best use of his time. He carefully
examined the various parts of the machinery, ascertained the principle
of its operation, and made himself completely master of the whole
process of throwing. Each night before he went to bed he noted down
everything he had seen, and drew sketches of parts of the machinery.
This plot, however, was discovered by the Italians. He and his
accomplices had to fly for their lives, and not without great difficulty
escaped to a ship which conveyed them to England.
Lombe had not forgotten to carry off with him his note-book, sketches,
and a chest full of machinery, and on his return home lost no time in
practising the art of "throwing" silk. On a swampy island in the river
Derwent, at Derby, he built a magnificent mill, yet standing, called the
"Old Silk Mill." Its erection occupied four years, and cost £30,000. It
was five storeys in height, and an eighth of a mile in length. The grand
machine numbered no fewer than 13,384 wheels. It was said that it could
produce 318,504,960 yards of organzine silk thread daily; but the
estimate is no doubt exaggerated.
While the mill was building, Lombe, in order to save time and earn money
to carry on the works, opened a manufactory in the Town Hall of Derby.
His machinery more than fulfilled his expectations, and enabled him to
sell thrown silk at much lower prices than were charged by the Italians.
A thriving trade was thus established, and England relieved from all
dependence on other countries for "thrown" silk.
The Italians conceived a bitter hatred against Lombe for having broken
in upon their monopoly and diminished their trade. In revenge,
therefore, according to William Hutton, the historian of Derby, they
"determined _his_ destruction, and hoped that of his works would
follow." An Italian woman was despatched to corrupt her two countrymen
who assisted Lombe in the management of the works. She obtained
employment in the factory, and gained over one of the Italians to her
iniquitous design. They prepared a slow poison, and administered it in
small doses to Lombe, who, after lingering three or four years in agony,
died at the early age of twenty-nine. The Italian fled; the woman was
seized and subjected to a close examination, but no definite proof could
be elicited that Lombe had been poisoned. Lombe was buried in great
state, as a mark of respect on the part of his townsmen. "He was," says
Hutton, "a man of quiet deportment, who had brought a beneficial
manufactory into the place, employed the poor, and at advanced
wages,--and thus could not fail to meet with respect; and his melancholy
end excited much sympathy."
II.--WILLIAM LEE.
In the Stocking Weavers' Hall, in Redcross Street, London, there used to
hang a picture, representing a man in collegiate costume in the act of
pointing to an iron stocking-frame, and addressing a woman busily
knitting with needles by hand. Underneath the picture appeared the
following inscription: "In the year 1589, the ingenious William Lee,
A.M., of St. John's College, Cambridge, devised this profitable art for
stockings (but, being despised, went to France), yet of iron to himself,
but to us and to others of gold; in memory of whom this is here
painted." As to who this William Lee was, and the way in which he came
to invent the stocking-frame, there are conflicting stories, but the
one most generally received and best authenticated is as follows:--
William Lee, a native of Woodborough, near Nottingham, was a fellow of
one of the Cambridge Colleges. He fell in love with a young country
lass, married her, and consequently forfeited his fellowship. A poor
scholar, with much learning, but without money or the knowledge of any
trade, he found himself in very embarrassed circumstances. Like many
another "poor scholar," he might exclaim:--
"All the arts I have skill in,
Divine and humane;
Yet all's not worth a shilling;
Alas! poor scholar, whither wilt thou go?"
His wife, however, was a very industrious woman, and by her knitting
contributed to their joint support. It is said--but the story lacks
authentic confirmation--that when Lee was courting her, she always
appeared so much more occupied with her knitting than with the soft
speeches he was whispering in her ear, that her lover thought of
inventing a machine that would "facilitate and forward the operation of
knitting," and so leave the object of his love more leisure to converse
with him. "Love, indeed," says Beckmann, "is fertile in invention, and
gave rise, it is said, to the art of painting; but a machine so complex
in its parts, and so wonderful in its effects, would seem to require
longer and greater reflection, more judgment, and more time and patience
than could be expected of a lover." But afterwards, when Lee, in his
painfully enforced idleness, sat many a long hour watching his wife's
nimble fingers toiling to support him, his mind again recurred to the
idea of a machine that would give rest to her weary fingers. His
cogitations resulted in the contrivance of a stocking-frame, which
imitated the movements of the fingers in knitting.
[Illustration: WILLIAM LEE, THE INVENTOR OF THE STOCKING-FRAME. Page
226.]
Although the invention of this loom gave a great impulse to the
manufacture of silk stockings in England, and placed our productions in
advance of those of other countries, Lee reaped but little profit from
it. He met with neglect both from Queen Elizabeth and James I.; and, not
succeeding as a manufacturer on his own account, went to France, where
he did very well until after the assassination of Henri IV., when he
shared the persecutions of the Protestants, and died in great distress
in Paris.
III.--JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD.
Joseph Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the loom which bears his name,
and to whom the extent and prosperity of the silk manufacture of our
time is mainly due, was born at Lyons in 1752, of humble parents, both
of whom were weavers. His father taught him to ply the shuttle; but for
education of any other sort, he was left to his own devices. He managed
to pick up some knowledge of reading and writing for himself; but his
favourite occupation was the construction of little models of houses,
towers, articles of furniture, and so on, which he executed with much
taste and accuracy. On being apprenticed to a type-founder, he exhibited
his aptitude for mechanical contrivances by inventing a number of
improved tools for the use of the workmen. On his father's death he set
up as a manufacturer of figured fabrics; but although a skilful workman,
he was a bad manager, and the end of the undertaking was, that he had to
sell his looms to pay his debts. He married, but did not receive the
dowry with his wife which he expected, and to support his family had to
sell the house his father had left him,--the last remnant of his little
heritage. The invention of numerous ingenious machines for weaving,
type-founding, &c., proved the activity of his genius, but produced not
a farthing for the maintenance of his wife and child. He took service
with a lime-maker at Brest, while his wife made and sold straw hats in a
little shop at Lyons. He solaced himself for the drudgery of his labours
by spending his leisure in the study of machines for figure-weaving. The
idea of the beautiful apparatus which he afterwards perfected began to
dawn on him, but for the time it was driven out of his mind by the
stirring transactions of the time. The whirlwind of the Revolution was
sweeping through the land. Jacquard ardently embraced the cause of the
people, took part in the gallant defence of Lyons in 1793, fled for his
life on the reduction of the city, and with his son--a lad of
sixteen--joined the army of the Rhine. His boy fell by his side on the
field of battle, and Jacquard, destitute and broken-hearted, returned to
Lyons. His house had been burned down; his wife was nowhere to be heard
of. At length he discovered her in a miserable garret, earning a bare
subsistence by plaiting straw. For want of other employment he shared
her labours, till Lyons began to rise from its ruins, to recover its
scattered population, and revive its industry. Jacquard applied himself
with renewed energy to the completion of the machine of which he had,
before the Revolution, conceived the idea; exhibited it at the National
Exposition of the Products of Industry in 1801; and obtained a bronze
medal and a ten years' patent.
During the peace of Amiens, Jacquard happened to take up a newspaper in
a _cabaret_ which he frequented, and his eye fell on a translated
extract from an English journal, stating that a prize was offered by a
society in London for the construction of a machine for weaving nets. As
a mere amusement he turned his thoughts to the subject, contrived a
number of models, and at last solved the problem. He made a machine and
wove a little net with it. One day he met a friend who had read the
paragraph from the English paper. Jacquard drew the net from his pocket
saying, "Oh! I've got over the difficulty! see, there is a net I've
made." After that he took no more thought about the matter, and had
quite forgotten it, when he was startled by a summons to appear at the
Prefectal Palace. The prefect received him very kindly, and expressed
his astonishment that his mechanical genius should so long have remained
in obscurity. Jacquard could not imagine how the prefect had discovered
his mechanical experiments, and began vaguely to dread that he had got
into some shocking scrape. He stammered out a sort of apology. The
prefect was surprised he should deny his own talent, and said he had
been informed that he had invented a machine for weaving nets. Jacquard
owned that he had.
"Well, then, you're the right man, after all," said the prefect. "I have
orders from the emperor to send the machine to Paris."
"Yes, but you must give me time to make it," replied Jacquard.
In a week or two Jacquard again presented himself at the palace with his
machine and a half manufactured net. The prefect was eager to see how it
worked.
"Count the number of loops in that net," said Jacquard, "and then strike
the bar with your foot."
The prefect did so, and was surprised and delighted to see another loop
added to the number.
"Capital!" cried he. "I have his majesty's orders, M. Jacquard, to send
you and your machine to Paris."
"To Paris! How can that be? How can I leave my business here?"
"There is no help for it; and not only must you go to Paris, but you
must start at once, without an hour's delay."
"If it must be, it must. I will go home and pack up a little bundle, and
tell my wife about my journey, I shall be ready to start to-morrow."
"To-morrow won't do; you must go to-day. A carriage is waiting to take
you to Paris; and you must not go home. I will send to your house for
any things you want, and convey any message to your wife. I will provide
you with money for the journey."
There was no help for it, so Jacquard got into the carriage, along with
a gendarme who was to take charge of him, and wondered, all the way to
Paris, what it all meant. On reaching the capital he was taken before
Napoleon, who received him in a very condescending manner. Carnot, who
was also present, could not at first comprehend the machine, and turning
to the inventor, exclaimed roughly, "What, do you pretend to do what is
beyond the power of man? Can you tie a knot in a stretched string?"
Jacquard, not at all disconcerted, explained the construction of his
machine so simply and clearly, as to convince the incredulous minister
that it accomplished what he had hitherto deemed an impossibility.
Jacquard was now employed in the Conservatory of Arts and Manufactures
to repair and keep in order the models and machines. At this time a
magnificent shawl was being woven in one of the government works for the
Empress Josephine. Very costly and complicated machinery was employed,
and nearly £1000 had already been spent on it. It appeared to Jacquard
that the shawl might be manufactured in a much simpler and less
expensive manner. He thought that the principle of a machine of
Vaucousin's might be applied to the operation, but found it too complex
and slow. He brooded over the subject, made a great many experiments,
and at last succeeded in contriving an improved apparatus.
He returned to Lyons to superintend the introduction of his machine for
figure-weaving and the manufacture of nets. The former invention was
purchased for the use of the people, and was brought into use very
slowly. The weavers of Lyons denounced Jacquard as the enemy of the
people, who was striving to destroy their trade, and starve themselves
and families, and used every effort to prevent the introduction of his
machine. They wilfully spoiled their work in order to bring the new
process into discredit. The machine was ordered to be destroyed in one
of the public squares. It was broken to pieces,--the iron-work was sold
for old metal, and the wood-work for faggots. Jacquard himself had on
one occasion to be rescued from the hands of a mob who were going to
throw him into the Rhone.
Before Jacquard's death in 1835, his apparatus had not only made its way
into every manufactory in France, but was used in England, Switzerland,
Germany, Italy, and America. Even the Chinese condescended to avail
themselves of this invention of a "barbarian."
Jacquard's apparatus is, strictly speaking, not a loom, but an appendage
to one. It is intended to elevate or depress, by bars, the warp threads
for the reception of the shuttle, the patterns being regulated by means
of bands of punched cards acting on needles with loops and eyes. At
first applied to silk weaving only, the use of this machine has since
been extended to the bobbin net, carpets, and other fancy manufactures.
By its agency the richest and most complex designs, which could formerly
be achieved only by the most skilful labourers, with a painful degree of
labour, and at an exorbitant cost, are now produced with facility by the
most ordinary workmen, and at the most moderate price.
Of late years the silk manufacture has greatly improved, both in
character and extent. The products of British looms exhibited at the
Great Exhibition of 1862 vied with those of the Continent. Every year
upwards of £2,300,000 worth of silk is brought to England; and the silk
manufacture engages some £55,000,000 of capital, and employs eleven to
twelve hundred thousand of our population.
The Potter's Art.
I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA.
II.--BERNARD PALISSY.
III.--JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
The Potter's Art.
I.--LUCA DELLA ROBBIA.
There can be little doubt as to the antiquity of the pottery
manufacture. It probably had its origin in that of bricks, which at a
very early date men made for purposes of construction; but it is not
impossible that he had previously contrived to fabricate the commoner
articles of domestic economy, such as pans and dishes, of sun-dried
clay.
Bricks, as everybody knows, are fashioned out of a coarse clay, such as
we meet with in very numerous localities. After mixing up with water a
kind of paste out of these clayey earths, the moulder works up the paste
into the shape of bricks, and they are then exposed to the heat of the
kiln. Sometimes it was thought sufficient to dry these bricks in the
rays of a burning sun; but, so dried, their solidity is very
inconsiderable. Baked bricks owe their redness of colour to the oxide of
iron which they contain. They are either moulded with the hand or cast
in rectangular frames of wood, dusted with sand. To bake them, they are
piled up in huge stacks, in which intervals are left for storing and
kindling the fuel. They are also baked in kilns.
The commoner pottery wares are manufactured with the coarse impure
clays, which are allowed to rot in trenches for several years to render
them more plastic. Flower-pots, sugar-pans, vases, and other and more
graceful articles, are moulded on the potter's wheel.
Now, this potter's wheel is one of the most ancient instruments of human
industry, one of the earliest inventions by which man utilized and
economized his labour. It consists of a large disc of wood, to which a
rotatory motion is given by the workman's foot. A second and smaller
disc, on which is placed the paste for working, is fixed upon the upper
extremity of the vertical axis to which the larger and inferior disc is
attached. Seated on his bench, the workman places in the centre of the
disc a certain quantity of soft moist clay, and turning the wheel with
his foot, moulds the said paste with both hands, until it assumes the
desired shape. You can imagine no prettier spectacle than that of a
skilful potter causing the clay, under his nimble fingers, to assume the
most varied forms. It seems as if by miracle the vase was created
suddenly, and the rude clay sprang into a life and beauty of its own.
The Campanian potteries, improperly but commonly called the Etruscan,
and the ancient Greek wares, belong to the class of soft and lustrous
potteries which are no longer manufactured. The Etruscan vases are the
most remarkable specimens of the ancient potter's art; pure, simple, and
elegant in form, they cannot be surpassed by any efforts of the modern
potter. The paste of which they are made is very fine and homogeneous,
coated with a peculiar glassy lustre, which is thin but tenacious, red
or black, and formed of silica rendered fusible by an alkali. They were
baked at a low temperature. In this ware, which was in vogue between 500
and 320 B.C., the Aretine and Roman pottery originated. The former was
manufactured at Arezzo or Arretium.
The knowledge of glazes, which was acquired by the Egyptians and
Assyrians, seems to have been handed down to the Persians, Moors, and
Arabs. Fayences, and enamelled bricks and plaques, were commonly used
among them in the twelfth century, and among the Hindus in the
fourteenth. The celebrated glazed tiles, or _azulejos_, which contribute
so much to the beauty of the Alhambra, were introduced into Spain by the
Moors about 711 A.D. In Italy, it is supposed, they were made known as
early as the conquest of Majorca by the Pisans, in 1115 A.D. But
Brongniart places their introduction three centuries later, or in 1415,
and says this peculiar kind of ware was called _Majolica_, from Majorica
or Majorca. This, however, seems to have been the Italian enamelled
fayence, which was used for subjects in relief by the celebrated
Florentine sculptor, Luca della Robbia.
Robbia had been bred to the trade of a goldsmith--in those days a trade
of great distinction and opulence--but his artistic tastes could not be
controlled, and he abandoned it to become a sculptor. A man of a
singularly enthusiastic and ardent nature, he applied himself arduously
to his new work. He worked all day with his chisel, and sat up, even
through the night, to study. "Often," says Vasari, "when his feet were
frozen with cold in the night time, he kept them in a basket of shavings
to warm them, that he might not be compelled to discontinue his
drawings." Such devotion could hardly fail to secure success. Luca was
recognised as one of the first sculptors of the day, and executed a
number of great works in bronze and marble. On the conclusion of some
important commissions, he was struck with the disproportion between the
payment he received and the time and labour he had expended; and,
abandoning marble and bronze, resolved to work in clay. Before he could
do that, however, it was necessary to discover some means of rendering
durable the works which he executed in that material. Applying himself
to the task with characteristic zeal and perseverance, he at length
succeeded in discovering a mode of protecting such productions from the
injuries of time, by means of a glaze or enamel, which conferred not
only an almost eternal durability, but additional beauty on his works in
terra cotta. At first this enamel was of a pure white, but he afterwards
added the further invention of colouring it. The fame of these
productions spread over Europe, and Luca found abundant and profitable
employment during the rest of his days, the work being carried on, after
his death, by brothers and descendants.
II.--BERNARD PALISSY.
The next great master in the art was Bernard Palissy,--a man
distinguished not only for his artistic genius, but for his
philosophical attainments, his noble, manly character, and zealous
piety. Born of poor parents about the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Bernard Palissy was taken as apprentice by a land-surveyor, who
had been much struck with the boy's quickness and ingenuity.
Land-surveying, of course, involved some knowledge of drawing; and thus
a taste for painting was developed. From drawing lines and diagrams he
went on to copy from the great masters. As this new talent became known
he obtained employment in painting designs on glass. He received
commissions in various parts of the country, and in his travels employed
his mind in the study of natural objects. He examined the character of
the soils and minerals upon his route, and the better to grapple with
the subject, devoted his attention to chemistry. At length he settled
and married at Staines, and for a time lived thriftily as a painter.
One day he was shown an elegant cup of Italian manufacture, beautifully
enamelled. The art of enamelling was then entirely unknown in France,
and Palissy was at once seized with the idea, that if he could but
discover the secret it would enable him to place his wife and family in
greater comfort. "So, therefore," he writes, "regardless of the fact
that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for these enamels as a
man gropes in the dark. I reflected that God had gifted me with some
knowledge of drawing, and I took courage in my heart, and besought him
to give me wisdom and skill."
[Illustration: PALISSY THE POTTER. Page 242.]
He lost no time in commencing his experiments. He bought a quantity of
earthen pots, broke them into fragments, and covering them with various
chemical compounds, baked them in a little furnace of his own
construction, in the hope of discovering the white enamel, which he had
been told was the key to all the rest. Again and again he varied the
ingredients of the compositions, the proportions in which they were
mixed, the quality of the clay on which they were spread, the heat of
the furnace to which they were subjected; but the white enamel was still
as great a mystery as ever. Instead of discouraging, each new defeat
seemed to confirm his hope of ultimate success and to increase his
perseverance. Painting and surveying he no longer practised, except when
sheer necessity compelled him to resort to them to provide bread for his
family. The discovery of the enamel had become the great mission of his
life, and to that all other occupations must be sacrificed. "Thus
having blundered several times at great expense and through much
trouble, with sorrows and sighs, I was every day pounding and grinding
new materials and constructing new furnaces, which cost much money, and
consumed my wood and my time." Two years had passed now in fruitless
effort. Food was becoming scarce in the little household, his wife worn
and shrewish, the children thin and sickly. But then came the thought to
cheer him,--when the enamel was found his fortune would be made, there
would then be an end to all his privations, anxieties, and domestic
unhappiness, Lisette would live at ease, and his children lack no
comfort. No, the work must not be given up yet. His own furnace was
clumsy and imperfect,--perhaps his compositions would turn out better in
a regular kiln. So more pots were bought and broken into fragments,
which, covered with chemical preparations, were fired at a pottery in
the neighbourhood. Batch after batch was prepared and despatched to the
kiln, but all proved disheartening failures. Still with "great cost,
loss of time, confusion, and sorrow," he persevered, the wife growing
more shrewish, the children more pinched and haggard. By good luck at
this time came the royal commissioners to establish the gabelle or tax
in the district of Saintonge, and Palissy was employed to survey the
salt marshes. It was a very profitable job, and Palissy's affairs began
to look more flourishing. But the work was no sooner concluded, than
the "will o' the wisp," as his wife and neighbours held it, was dancing
again before his eyes, and he was back, with redoubled energy, to his
favourite occupation, "diving into the secret of enamels."
Two years of unremitting, anxious toil, of grinding and mixing, of
innumerable visits to the kiln, sanguine of success, with ever new
preparations; of invariable journeys home again, sad and weary, for the
moment utterly discouraged; of domestic bickerings; of mockery and
censure among neighbours, and still the enamel was a mystery,--still
Palissy, seemingly as far from the end as ever, was eager to prosecute
the search. He appeared to have an inward conviction that he would
succeed; but meanwhile the remonstrances of his wife, the pale, thin
faces of his bairns, warned him he must desist, and resume the
employments that at least brought food and clothing. There should be one
more trial on a grand scale,--if that failed, then there should be an
end of his experiments. "God willed," he says, "that when I had begun to
lose my courage, and was gone for the last time to a glass-furnace,
having a man with me carrying more than three hundred pieces, there was
one among those pieces which was melted within four hours after it had
been placed in the furnace, which trial turned out white and polished,
in a way that caused me such joy as made me think I was become a new
creature." He rushed home, burst into his wife's chamber, shouting, "I
have found it!"
From that moment he was more enthusiastic than ever in his search. He
had discovered the white enamel. The next thing to be done was to apply
it. He must now work at home and in secret. He set about moulding
vessels of clay after designs of his own, and baked them in a furnace
which he had built in imitation of the one at the pottery. The grinding
and compounding of the ingredients of the enamel cost him the labour,
day and night, of another month. Then all was ready for the final
process.
The vessels, coated with the precious mixture, are ranged in the
furnace, the fire is lit and blazes fiercely. To stint the supply of
fuel would be to cheat himself of a fortune for the sake of a few pence,
so he does not spare wood. All that day he diligently feeds the fire,
nor lets it slacken through the night. The excitement will not let him
sleep even if he would. The prize he has striven for through these weary
years, for which he has borne mockery and privation, is now all but
within his grasp; in another hour or two he will have possessed it.
The grey dawn comes, but still the enamel melts not. His boy brings him
a portion of the scanty family meal. There shall soon be an end to that
miserable fare! More faggots are cast on the fire. The night falls, and
the sun rises on the third day of his tending and watching at the
furnace door, but still the powder shows no signs of melting. Pale,
haggard, sick at heart with anxiety and dread, worn with watching,
parched and fevered with the heat of the fire, through another, and yet
another and another day and night, through six days and six nights in
all, Bernard Palissy watches by the glaring furnace, feeds it
continually with wood, and still the enamel is unmelted. "Seeing it was
not possible to make the said enamel melt, I was like a man in
desperation; and although quite stupified with labour, I counselled to
myself that in my mixture there might be some fault. Therefore I began
once more to pound and grind more materials, all the time without
letting my furnace cool. In this way I had double labour, to pound,
grind, and maintain the fire. I was also forced to go again and purchase
pots in order to prove the said compound, seeing that I had lost all the
vessels which I had made myself. And having covered the new pieces with
the said enamel, I put them into the furnace, keeping the fire still at
its height."
By this time it was no easy matter to "keep the fire at its height." His
stock of fuel was exhausted; he had no money to buy any more, and yet
fuel must be had. On the very eve of success--alas! an eve that so
seldom has a dawn--it would never do to lose it all for want of wood,
not while wood of any kind was procurable. He rushed into the garden,
tore up the palings, the trellis work that supported the vines, gathered
every scrap of wood he could find, and cast them on the fire. But soon
again the deep red glow of the furnace began to fade, and still it had
not done its work. Suddenly a crashing noise was heard; his wife, the
children clinging to her gown, rushed in. Palissy had seized the chairs
and table, had torn the door from its hinges, wrenched the window frames
from their sockets, and broken them in pieces to serve as fuel for the
all-devouring fire. Now he was busy breaking up the very flooring of the
house. And all in vain! The composition would not melt.
"I suffered an anguish that I cannot speak, for I was quite exhausted
and dried up by the heat of the furnace. Further to console me, I was
the object of mockery; even those from whom solace was due, ran, crying
through the town that I was burning my floors. In this way my credit was
taken from me, and I was regarded as a madman," if not, as he tells us
elsewhere, as one seeking ill-gotten gains, and sold to the evil one for
filthy lucre.
He made another effort, engaged a potter to assist him, giving the
clothes off his own back to pay him, and afterwards receiving aid from a
friendly neighbour, and this time proved that his mixture was of the
right kind. But the furnace having been built with mortar which was full
of flints, burst with the heat, and the splinters adhered to the
pottery. Sooner than allow such imperfect specimens of his art to go
forth to the world, Palissy destroyed them, "although some would have
bought them at a mean price."
Better days, however, were at hand for himself and family. His next
efforts were successful. An introduction to the Duke of Montmorency
procured him the patronage of that nobleman, as well as of the king. He
now found profitable employment for himself and food for his family.
"During the space of fifteen or sixteen years in all," he said
afterwards, "I have blundered on at my business. When I had learned to
guard against one danger, there came another on which I had not
reckoned. All this caused me such labour and heaviness of spirit, that
before I could render my enamels fusible at the same degrees of heat, I
verily thought I should be at the door of my sepulchre.... But I have
found nothing better than to observe the counsel of God, his edicts,
statutes, and ordinances; and in regard to his will, I have seen that he
has commanded his followers to eat bread by the labour of their bodies,
and to multiply their talents which he has committed to them."
When the Reformation came, Palissy was an earnest reformer, on Sunday
mornings assembling a number of simple, unlearned men for religious
worship, and exhorting them to good works. Court favour exempted him
from edicts against Protestants, but could not shield him from popular
prejudice. His workshops at Saintes were destroyed; and to save his
life and preserve the art he had invented, the king called him to Paris
as a servant of his own. Thus he escaped the massacre of St.
Bartholomew. Besides being a skilful potter, Palissy was a naturalist of
no little eminence. "I have had no other book than heaven and earth,
which are open to all," he used to say; but he read the wondrous volume
well, while others knew it chiefly at second-hand, and hence his
superiority to most of the naturalists of the day. He was in the habit
of lecturing to the learned men of the capital on natural history and
chemistry. When more than eighty years of age he was accused of heresy,
and shut up in the Bastille. The king, visiting him in prison, said, "My
good man, if you do not renounce your views upon religious matters, I
shall be constrained to leave you in the hands of my enemies." "Sire,"
replied Palissy, "those who constrain you, a king, can never have power
over me, because I know how to die." Palissy died in prison, aged and
exhausted, in 1590, at the age of eighty.
Before his death his wares had become famous, and were greatly prized.
The enamel, which he went through so much toil and suffering to
discover, was the foundation of a flourishing national manufacture.
III.--JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
Josiah Wedgwood, whose name in connection with pottery-ware has become a
household word amongst us, was the younger son of a potter at Burslem,
in Staffordshire, who had also a little patch of ground which he farmed.
When Josiah was only eleven years old, his father died, and he was thus
left dependent upon his elder brother, who employed him as a "thrower"
at his own wheel. An attack of smallpox, in its most malignant form,
soon after endangered his life, and he survived only by the sacrifice of
his left leg, in which the dregs of the disease had settled, and which
had to be cut off. Weak and disabled, he was now thrown upon the world
to seek his own fortune. At first it was very uphill work with him, and
he found it no easy matter to provide even the most frugal fare. He was
gifted, however, with a very fine taste in devising patterns for
articles of earthenware, and found ready custom for plates,
knife-handles, and jugs of fanciful shape. He worked away industriously
himself, and was able by degrees to employ assistance and enlarge his
establishment. The pottery manufactures of this country were then in a
very primitive condition. Only the coarsest sort of articles were made,
and any attempt to give elegance to the designs was very rare indeed.
All the more ornamental and finer class of goods came from the
Continent. Wedgwood saw no reason why we should not emulate foreigners
in the beauty of the forms into which the clay was thrown, and made a
point of sending out of his own shop articles of as elegant a shape as
possible. This feature in his productions was not overlooked by
customers, and he found a growing demand for them. The coarseness of the
material was, however, a great drawback to the extension of the trade in
native pottery; and it seemed almost like throwing good designs away to
apply them to such rude wares. Wedgwood saw clearly that if earthenware
was ever to become a profitable English manufacture, something must be
done to improve the quality of the clay. He brooded over the subject,
tested all the different sorts of earth in the district, and at length
discovered one, containing silica, which, black in colour before it went
into the oven, came out of it a pure and beautiful white. This fact
ascertained, he was not long in turning it to practical account, by
mixing flint powder with the red earth of the potteries, and thus
obtaining a material which became white when exposed to the heat of a
furnace. The next step was to cover this material with a transparent
glaze; and he could then turn out earthenware as pure in quality as that
from the Continent. This was the foundation not only of his own fortune,
but of a manufacture which has since provided profitable employment for
thousands of his countrymen, besides placing within the reach of even
the humblest of them good serviceable earthenware for household use.
The success of his white stoneware was such, that he was able to quit
the little thatched house he had formerly occupied, and open shop in
larger and more imposing premises. He increased the number of his hands,
and drove an extensive and growing trade. He was not content to halt
after the discovery of the white stoneware. On the contrary, the success
he had already attained only impelled him to further efforts to improve
the trade he had taken up, and which now became quite a passion with
him. When he devoted himself to any particular effort in connection with
it, his first thought was always how to turn out the very best article
that could be made--his last thought was whether it would pay him or
not. He stuck up for the honour of old England, and maintained that
whatever enterprise could be achieved, that English skill and enterprise
was competent to do. Although he had never had any education himself
worth speaking of, his natural shrewdness and keen faculty of
observation supplied his deficiencies in that respect; and when he
applied himself, as he now did, to the study of chemistry, with a view
to the improvement of the pottery art, he made rapid and substantial
progress, and passed muster creditably even in the company of men of
science and learning. He contributed many valuable communications to the
Royal Society, and invented a thermometer for measuring the higher
degrees of heat employed in the various arts of pottery.
Again his premises proved too confined for his expanding trade, and he
removed to a larger establishment, and there perfected that
cream-coloured ware with which Queen Charlotte was so delighted, that
she ordered a whole service of it, and commanding that it should be
called after her--the Queen's Ware, and that its inventor should receive
the title of the "Royal Potter."
A royal potter Wedgwood truly was; the very king of earthenware
manufactures, resolute in his determination to attain the highest degree
of perfection in his productions, indefatigable in his labours, and
unstinting in his outlay to secure that end. He invented altogether
seven or eight different kinds of ware; and succeeded in combining the
greatest delicacy and purity of material, and utmost elegance of design,
with strength, durability, and cheapness. The effect of the improvements
he successively introduced into the manufacture of earthenware is thus
described by a foreign writer about this period: "Its excellent
workmanship, its solidity, the advantage which it possesses of
sustaining the action of fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids,
the beauty and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its price,
have given rise to a commerce so active and so universal, that in
travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest port
of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the south of France,
one is served at every inn with Wedgwood ware. Spain, Portugal, and
Italy are supplied with it, and vessels are loaded with it for the East
Indies, the West Indies, and the continent of America." Wedgwood
himself, when examined before a committee of the House of Commons in
1785, some thirty years after he had begun his operations, stated that
from providing only casual employment to a small number of inefficient
and badly remunerated workmen, the manufacture had increased to an
extent that gave direct employment to about twenty thousand persons,
without taking into account the increased numbers who earned a
livelihood by digging coals for the use of the potteries, by carrying
the productions from one quarter to another, and in many other ways.
Wedgwood did not confine himself to the manufacture of useful articles,
though such, of course, formed the bulk of his trade, but published
beautiful imitations of Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan vases, copies of
cameos, medallions, tablets, and so on. Valuable sets of old porcelain
were frequently intrusted to him for imitation, in which he succeeded so
well that it was difficult to tell the original from the counterfeit,
except sometimes from the superior excellence and beauty of the latter.
When the celebrated Barberini Vase was for sale, Wedgwood, bent upon
making copies of it, made heavy bids against the Duchess of Portland
for it; and was only induced to desist by the promise, that he should
have the loan of it in order that he might copy it. Accordingly, the
duchess had the vase knocked down to her at eighteen hundred guineas,
and Wedgwood made fifty copies of it, which he sold at fifty guineas
each, and was thus considerably out of pocket by the transaction. He did
it, however, not for the sake of profit, but to show what an English
pottery could accomplish.
Besides copying from antique objects, Wedgwood tried to rival them in
the taste and elegance of original productions. He found out Flaxman
when he was an unknown student, and employed him, upon very liberal
terms, to design for him; and thus the articles of earthenware which he
manufactured proved of the greatest value in the art education of the
people. We owe not a little of the improved taste and popular
appreciation and enjoyment of the fine arts in our own day to the
generous enterprise of Josiah Wedgwood, and his talented designs.
In order to secure every access from the potteries to the eastern and
western coasts of the island, Wedgwood proposed, and, with the aid of
others whom he induced to join him, carried out the Grand Trunk Canal
between the Trent and the Mersey. He himself constructed a turnpike road
ten miles in length through the potteries, and built a village for his
work-people, which he called Etruria, and where he established his
works. He died there in 1795, at the age of sixty-five, leaving a large
fortune and an honoured name, which he had acquired by his own industry,
enterprise, and generosity.
A remarkable memorial to the genius and artistic labours of Wedgwood was
erected in 1863, and some reference to it should undoubtedly be made in
these pages.
It is a twofold memorial: a bronze statue at Stoke-upon-Trent, and a
memorial institute, erected close to the birth-place of the Great Potter
at Burslem. The foundation-stone was laid on the 26th of October by the
Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in
the presence of a very large and enthusiastic assemblage. The Chancellor
delivered a public address, which in eloquent terms did homage to
Wedgwood's great mental qualities and his services to his country.
He described as his most signal and characteristic merit, the firmness
and fulness of his perception of the true law of what we term industrial
art, or, in other words, of the application of the higher art to
industry--the law which teaches us to aim first at giving to every
object the greatest possible degree of fitness and convenience for its
purpose, and next at making it the article of the highest degree of
beauty, which compatibly with that fitness and convenience it will
bear--which does not substitute the secondary for the primary end, but
recognizes as part of the business the study to harmonize the two.
Mr. Gladstone observed, that to have a strong grasp of this principle,
and to work it out to its results in the details of a vast and varied
manufacture, was a praise high enough for any man, at any time and in
any place. But he thought it was higher and more peculiar in the case of
Wedgwood than it could be in almost any other case. For that truth of
art which he saw so clearly, and which lies at the root of excellence,
is one of which England, his country, has not usually had a perception
at all corresponding in strength and fulness with her other rare
endowments. She has long taken a lead among the European nations for the
cheapness of her manufactures, not so for their beauty. And if the day
should arrive when she shall be as eminent for purity of taste as she is
now for economy of production, the result will probably be due to no
other single man in so remarkable a degree as to Josiah Wedgwood.
* * * * *
We conclude with a lively extract from the Chancellor's exhaustive and
interesting address:--
"Wedgwood," he says, "in his pursuit of beauty, did not overlook
exchangeable value or practical usefulness. The first he could not
overlook, for he had to live by his trade; and it was by the profit
derived from the extended sale of his humbler productions that he was
enabled to bear the risks and charges of his higher works. Commerce did
for him what the King of France did for Sèvres, and the Duke of
Cumberland for Chelsea, it found him in funds. And I would venture to
say that the lower works of Wedgwood are every whit as much
distinguished by the fineness and accuracy of their adaptation to their
uses as his higher ones by their successful exhibition of the finest
arts. Take, for instance, his common plates, of the value of, I know not
how few, but certainly of a very few pence each. They fit one another as
closely as cards in a pack. At least, I for one have never seen plates
that fit like the plates of Wedgwood, and become one solid mass. Such
accuracy of form must, I apprehend, render them much more safe in
carriage....
"Again, take such a jug as he would manufacture for the wash-stand table
of a garret. I have seen these made apparently of the commonest material
used in the trade. But instead of being built up, like the usual and
much more fashionable jugs of modern manufacture, in such a shape that a
crane could not easily get his neck to bend into them, and the water can
hardly be poured out without risk of spraining the wrist, they are
constructed in a simple capacious form, of flowing curves, broad at the
top, and so well poised that a slight and easy movement of the hand
discharges the water. A round cheese-holder or dish, again, generally
presents in its upper part a flat space surrounded by a curved rim; but
the cheese-holder of Wedgwood will make itself known by this--that the
flat is so dead a flat, and the curve so marked and bold a curve; thus
at once furnishing the eye with a line agreeable and well-defined, and
affording the utmost available space for the cheese. I feel persuaded
that a Wiltshire cheese, if it could speak, would declare itself more
comfortable in a dish of Wedgwood's than in any other dish."
* * * * *
The worthiest successor to Wedgwood whom England has known was the late
Herbert Minton, who was scarcely less distinguished than his predecessor
for perseverance, patient effort, and artistic sentiment. We owe to him
in a great measure the revival of the elegant art of manufacturing
encaustic tiles.
The principal varieties of ceramic ware now in use are:--1. Porcelain,
which is composed, in England, of sand, calcined bones, china-clay,
and potash; and, at Dresden, of kaolin, felspar, and broken
biscuit-porcelain; 2. Parian, which is used in a liquid state, and
poured into plaster-of-paris moulds; 3. Earthenware, the _Fayence_ of
the Italians, and the _Delft_ of the Dutch, made of various kinds of
clay, with a mixture of powdered calcined flint; and, 4. Stoneware,
composed of several kinds of plastic clay, mixed with felspar and sand,
and occasionally a little lime.
It is estimated that our English potteries not only supply the demand
of the United Kingdom, but export ware to the value of nearly a million
and a half annually. The establishments are about 190 in number; employ
75,000 to 80,000 operatives; and export 90,000,000 pieces.
The Miner's Safety Lamp.
SIR HUMPHREY DAVY.
The Miner's Safety Lamp.
SIR HUMPHREY DAVY.
"What's that? Is the house coming down?" cried Mr. Borlase, the
surgeon-apothecary of Penzance, jumping out of his cozy arm-chair, as a
tremendous explosion shook the house from top to bottom, making a great
jingle among the gallipots in the shop below, and rousing him from a
comfortable nap.
"Please, sir," said Betty, the housemaid, putting her head into the
room, "here's that boy Davy been a-blowing of hisself up agen. Drat him,
he's always up to some trick or other! He'll be the death of all of us
some day, that boy will, as sure as my name's Betty."
"Bring him here directly," replied her master, knitting his brow, and
screwing his mild countenance into an elaborate imitation of that of a
judge he once saw at the assizes, with the black cap on, sentencing some
poor wretch to be hanged. "Really, this sort of thing won't do at all."
Only, it must be owned, Mr. Borlase had said that many times before, and
put on the terrible judicial look too, and yet "that boy Davy" was at
his tricks again as much as ever.
"I'll bring as much as I can find of him, sir," said Betty, gathering up
her apron, as if she fully expected to discover the object of her search
in a fragmentary condition.
Presently there was heard a shuffling in the passage, and a somewhat
ungainly youth, about sixteen years of age, was thrust into the room,
with the due complement of legs, arms, and other members, and only
somewhat the grimier about the face for the explosion. His fingers were
all yellow with acids, and his clothes plentifully variegated with
stains from the same compounds. At first sight he looked rather a dull,
loutish boy, but his sharp, clear eyes somewhat redeemed his expression
on a second glance.
"Here he is, sir," cried Betty triumphantly, as though she really had
found him in pieces, and took credit for having put him cleverly
together again.
"Well, Humphrey," said Mr. Borlase, "what have you been up to now?
You'll never rest, I'm afraid, till you have the house on fire."
"Oh! if you please, sir, I was only experimenting in the garret, and
there's no harm done."
"No harm done!" echoed Betty; "and if there isn't it's no fault of
yours, you nasty monkey. I declare that blow up gave me such a turn you
could ha' knocked me down with a feather, and there's a smell all over
the house enough to pison any one."
"That'll do, Betty," said her master, finding the grim judicial
countenance rather difficult to keep up, and anxious to pronounce
sentence before it quite wore off. "I'll tell you what it is, young
Davy, this sort of thing won't do at all. I must speak to Mr. Tonkine
about you; and if I catch you at it again, you'll have to take yourself
and your experiments somewhere else. So I warn you. You had much better
attend to your work. It was only the other day you gave old Goody Jones
a paperful of cayenne instead of cinnamon; and there's Joe Grimsly, the
beadle, been here half a dozen times this day for those pills I told you
to make up, and they're not ready yet. So just you take yourself off,
mind your business, and don't let me have any more nonsense, or it'll be
the worse for you."
And so the culprit gladly backed out of the room, not a whit abashed by
the reprimand, for it was no novelty, to begin his experiments again and
again, and one day, by way of compensation for keeping his master's
household in constant terror of being blown up, to make his name
familiar as a household word, by the invention of a little instrument
that would save thousands and thousands from the fearful consequences of
coal-pit explosions.
The Mr. Tonkine that his master referred to was the self-constituted
protector of the Davy family. Old Davy had been a carver in the town,
and dying, left his widow in very distressed circumstances, when this
generous friend came forward and took upon himself the charge of the
widow and her children. Young Humphrey, on leaving school, had been
placed with Mr. Borlase to be brought up as an apothecary; but he was
much fonder of rambling about the country, or experimenting in the
garret which he had constituted his laboratory, than compounding drugs
behind his master's counter. As a boy he was not particularly smart,
although he was distinguished for the facility with which he gleaned the
substance of any book that happened to take his fancy, and for an early
predilection for poetry. As he grew up, the ardent, inquisitive turn of
his mind displayed itself more strongly. He was very fond of spending
what leisure time he had in strolling along the rocky coast searching
for sea-drift and minerals, or reading some favourite book.
"There along the beach he wandered, nourishing a youth sublime,
With the fairy-tales of science, and the long result of time."
In after life he used often to tell how when tired he would sit down on
the crags and exercise his fancy in anticipations of future renown, for
already the ambition of distinguishing himself in his favourite science
had seized him. "I have neither riches, nor power, nor birth," he wrote
in his memorandum-book, "to recommend me; yet if I live, I trust I shall
not be of less service to mankind and my friends than if I had been born
with all these advantages." He read a great deal, and though without
much method, managed, in a wonderfully short time, to master the
rudiments of natural philosophy and chemistry, to say nothing of
considerable acquaintance with botany, anatomy, and geometry; so that
though the pestle and mortar might have a quieter time of it than suited
his master's notions, Humphrey was busy enough in other ways.
[Illustration: HUMPHREY'S EXPERIMENTS ON THE DIFFUSION OF HEAT. Page
267.]
In his walk along the beach, the nature of the air contained in the
bladders of sea-weed was a constant subject of speculation with him; and
he used to sigh over the limited laboratory at his command, which
prevented him from thoroughly investigating the matter. But one day, as
good luck would have it, the waves threw up a case of surgical
instruments from some wrecked vessel, somewhat rusty and sand clogged,
but in Davy's ingenious hands capable of being turned to good account.
Out of an old syringe, which was contained in the case, he managed to
construct a very tolerable air pump; and with an old shade lamp, and a
couple of small metal tubes, he set himself to work to discover the
causes of the diffusion of heat. At first sight the want of proper
instruments for carrying on his researches might appear rather a
hindrance to his progress in the paths of scientific discovery; but, in
truth, his subsequent success as an experimentalist has been very
properly attributed, in no small degree, to that necessity which is the
parent of invention, and which forced him to exercise his skill and
ingenuity in making the most of the scanty materials at his command.
"Had he," says one of his biographers, "in the commencement of his
career been furnished with all those appliances which he enjoyed at a
later period, it is more than probable that he might never have acquired
that wonderful tact of manipulation, that ability of suggesting
expedients, and of contriving apparatus, so as to meet and surmount the
difficulties which must constantly arise during the progress of the
philosopher through the unbeaten track and unexplored regions of
science!"
While Davy was thus busily engaged qualifying himself for the
distinguished career that awaited him, Gregory Watt, the son of the
celebrated James Watt, being in delicate health, came to Penzance for
change of air, and lodged with Mrs. Davy. At first he and Humphrey did
not get on very well together, for the latter had just been reading some
metaphysical works, and was very fond of indulging in crude and flippant
speculations on such subjects, which rather displeased the shy invalid.
But one day some chance remark of Davy's gave token of his extensive
knowledge of natural history and chemistry, and thenceforth a close
intimacy sprang up between them, greatly to the lad's advantage, for
Watt's scientific knowledge set him in a more systematic groove of
study, and encouraged him to concentrate his energies on his favourite
pursuit.
Another useful friend Davy also found in Mr. Gilbert, afterwards
President of the Royal Society. Passing along one day, Mr. Gilbert
observed a youth making strange contortions of face as he hung over the
hutch gate of Borlase's house; and being told by a companion that he was
"the son of Davy the carver," and very fond of making chemical
experiments, he had a talk with the lad, and discovering his talents,
was ever afterwards his staunch friend and patron.
Through his two friends, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Watt, Davy formed the
acquaintance of Dr. Beddoes, who was just setting up at Bristol, under
the title of Pneumatic Institution, an establishment for investigating
the medical properties of different gases; and who, appreciating his
abilities, gave him the superintendence of the new institution.
Although only twenty years of age at this time, Davy was well abreast of
the science of the day, and soon applied his vigorous and searching
intellect to several successful investigations. His first scientific
discovery was the detection of siliceous earth in the outer coating of
reeds and grasses. A child was rubbing two pieces of bonnet cane
together, and he noticed that a faint light was emitted; and on striking
them sharply together, vivid sparks were produced just as if they had
been flint and steel. The fact that when the outer skin was peeled off
this property was destroyed, showed that it was confined to the skin,
and on subjecting it to analysis silex was obtained, and still more in
reeds and grasses.
As superintendent of Dr. Beddoe's institution, his attention was, of
course, chiefly directed to the subject of gases, and with the
enthusiasm of youth, he applied himself ardently to the investigation of
their elements and effects, attempting several very dangerous
experiments in breathing gases, and more than once nearly sacrificing
his life. In the course of these experiments he found out the peculiar
properties of nitrous oxide, or, as it has since been popularly called,
"laughing gas," which impels any one who inhales it to go through some
characteristic action,--a droll fellow to laugh, a dismal one to weep
and sigh, a pugnacious man to fight and wrestle, or a musical one to
sing.
At twenty-two years of age, such was the reputation he had acquired,
that he got the appointment of lecturer at the Royal Institution, which
was just then established, and found himself in a little while not only
a man of mark in the scientific, but a "lion" in the fashionable world.
Natural philosophy and chemistry had begun to attract a good deal of
attention at that time; and Davy's enthusiasm, his clear and vivid
explanations of the mysteries of science, and the poetry and imagination
with which he invested the dry bones of scientific facts, caught the
popular taste exactly. His lecture-room became a fashionable lounge, and
was crowded with all sorts of distinguished people. The young lecturer
became quite the rage, and was petted and feted as the lion of the day.
It was only six years back that he was the druggist's boy in a little
country town, alarming and annoying the household with his indefatigable
experiments. He could hardly have imagined, as one of his day-dreams at
the sea-side, that his fame would be acquired so quickly.
In spite of all the flatteries and attentions which were showered upon
him, Davy stuck manfully to his profession; and if his reputation was
somewhat artificial and exaggerated at the commencement, he amply earned
and consolidated it by his valuable contributions to science during the
rest of his career.
The name of Humphrey Davy will always be best known from its association
with the ingenious safety lamp which he invented, and which well
entitles him to rank as one of the benefactors of mankind. It was in the
year 1815 that Davy first turned his attention to this subject. Of
frequent occurrence from the very first commencement of coal-mining, the
number of accidents from fire-damp had been sadly multiplied by the
increase of mining operations consequent on the introduction of the
steam engine. The dreadful character of some of the explosions which
occurred about this time, the appalling number of lives lost, and the
wide-spread desolation in some of the colliery districts which they had
occasioned, weighed heavily on the minds of all connected with such
matters. Not merely were the feelings of humanity wounded by the
terrible and constant danger to which the intrepid miners were exposed,
but it began to be gravely questioned whether the high rate of wage
which the collier required to pay him not only for his labour, but for
the risk he ran, would admit of the mines being profitably worked. It
was felt that some strenuous effort must be made to preserve the miners
from their awful foe. Davy was then in the plenitude of his reputation,
and a committee of coal-owners besought him to investigate the subject,
and if possible provide some preventative against explosions. Davy at
once went to the north of England, visited a number of the principal
pits, obtained specimens of fire-damp, analyzed them carefully, and
having discovered the peculiarities of this element of destruction,
after numerous experiments devised the safety-lamp as its antagonist.
The principles upon which this contrivance rests, are the modification
of the explosive tendencies of fire-damp (the inflammable gas in mines)
when mixed with carbonic acid and nitrogen; and the obstacle presented
to the passage of an explosion, if it should occur, through a hole less
than the seventh of an inch in diameter; and accordingly, while the
small oil lamp in burning itself mixes the surrounding gas with carbonic
acid and nitrogen, the cylinder of wire-gauze which surrounds it
prevents the escape of any explosion. It is curious that George
Stephenson, the celebrated engineer, about the same time, hit on much
the same expedient.
To control a "power that in its tremendous effects seems to emulate the
lightning and the earthquake," and to enclose it in a net of the most
slender texture, was indeed a grand achievement; and when we consider
the many thousand lives which it has been the means of saving from a
sudden and cruel death, it must be acknowledged to be one of the noblest
triumphs, not only of science, but of humanity, which the world has ever
seen. Honours were showered upon Davy, from the miners and coal-owners,
from scientific associations, from crowned heads; but all must agree
with Playfair in thinking that "it is little that the highest praise,
and that even the voice of national gratitude when most strongly
expressed, can add to the happiness of one who is conscious of having
done such a service to his fellow-men." Davy himself said he "valued it
more than anything he ever did." When urged by his friends to take out a
patent for the invention, he replied,--"No, I never thought of such a
thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have
succeeded, I am amply rewarded by the gratifying reflection of having
done so."
The honours of knighthood and baronetage were successively conferred on
Davy as a reward for his scientific labours; and the esteem of his
professional brethren was shown in his election to the President-ship
of the Royal Institution, in which, oddly enough, he was succeeded by
his old friend Mr. Gilbert, who had first taken him by the hand, and
whom he had got ahead of in the race of life.
Davy died at Geneva before he had completed his fifty-first year, no
doubt from over-exertion and the unhealthy character of the researches
he prosecuted so recklessly. Assiduous as he was in his devotion to his
favourite science, he found time also to master several continental
languages; to keep himself well acquainted with, and also to contribute
to the literature of the day; and to indulge his passion for
fly-fishing, at which he was a keen and practised adept.
Eminent as were the talents of Sir Humphrey Davy, and valuable as his
discovery of the safety-lamp has proved, it is but fair to own that his
credit to the latter has been very openly denied. Two persons of
scientific celebrity have been put forward as the real inventors of the
safety-lamp--namely, Dr. Reid Clanny of Newcastle, and the great
railway-engineer, George Stephenson. Of Clanny's safety-lamp a
description appeared in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1813--that
is, ten years before Sir Humphrey made his communication to the Royal
Society. However, it was a complicated affair, which required the whole
attention of a boy to work it, and was based on the principle of forcing
in air through water by the agency of bellows.
Stephenson's was a very different apparatus. In its general principle it
resembled Davy's, the chief difference being, that he inserted a glass
cylinder inside the wire-gauze cylinder, and inside the top of the glass
cylinder a perforated metallic chimney--the supply of air being kept up
through a triple circle of small holes in the bottom.
Stephenson's claim has, of course, been disputed by the friends and
admirers of Sir Humphrey Davy; but Mr. Smile has conclusively proved
that his lamp, the "Geordy," was in use at the Killingworth collieries
at the very time that Davy was conducting the experiments which led to
his invention. It is not to be inferred, however, that Davy knew aught
of what Stephenson had accomplished. It seems to be one of those rare
cases in which two minds, working independently, and unknown each to the
other, have both arrived simultaneously at the same result.
Penny Postage.
SIR ROWLAND HILL.
Penny Postage.
"He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
News from all nations lumb'ring at his back,--
Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks;
Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
Fast as the periods of his fluent quill;
Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains,
Or nymphs responsive."
COWPER.
The growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of
industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of
civilization; and there is no more striking illustration to be found of
the strides which our country has made in that direction since the
century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of
letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented.
Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the
Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even of the
Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of
these times and of our own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us,
we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our appetite for them
is so ravenous, that we wonder how people got on in the days when the
postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty
was so badly served that, as one old postmaster[D] wrote in
self-exculpation of some delay, "when placards are sent (to order the
immediate forwarding of some state despatches) the constables many times
be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes, wherein," he
gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the
country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) found it worth while to
establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the
post office for £10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were
doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to the throne, and more than
doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country
has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his
clothes, and at different times has had new ones made to its measure.
Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount
his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post-boys and
post-horses; and, in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by
sturdy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance
the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of
stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great
advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer originated
the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the
outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and
observing the routes, here, there, and everywhere all over England, and
thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None
but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the
House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could
have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried
out such a system."
Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's scheme was
declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out
of like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every
way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence,--no unimportant
artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the
mode of delivery too slow, and the consequence was, that people either
repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some
cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who
recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single
letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern Babylon, only one
solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis
of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now,"
writes Miss Martineau, "with a sort of amazed compassion to the old
crusading times, when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed
parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be
months or years before they could hear of one another's existence. We
wonder how they bore the depth of silence! And we feel the same now
about the families of Polar voyagers. But, till a dozen years ago, it
did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest
class in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free
epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the
command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who
did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and
if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount
at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast
multitudes of the lower orders who suffered like the crusading families
of old, and the geographical discoverers of all times. When once their
families parted off from home it was a separation almost like that of
death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of
governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as
if seas or deserts lay between them and home. If the shilling for each
letter could be saved by the economy of weeks or months at first, the
rarity of correspondence went on to increase the rarity; new interests
hastened the dying out of old ones; and the ancient domestic affections
were but too apt to wither away, till the wish for intercourse was gone.
The young girl could not ease her heart by pouring out her cares and
difficulties to her mother before she slept, as she can now, when
the penny and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the
correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter home was a serious
and formal matter, when it must cost his parents more than any
indulgence they ever thought of for themselves; and the old fun and
light-heartedness were dropped off from such domestic intercourse as
there was. The effect upon the morals of this kind of restraint is
proved beyond a doubt by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a
well-known fact, that in regiments where the commanding officer was kind
and courteous about franking letters for the privates, and encouraged
them to write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more sober and
manly, more virtuous and domestic in their affections, than where
difficulty was made by the indolence or stiffness of the franking
officer."
Under the costly postal system, the revenue of the post office did not,
as it had hitherto done, and should have continued to do, keep pace with
the progress of the country. The appetite for communication between
distant friends or men of business was evidently either decaying, or
finding vent in an unlawful way. The latter was chiefly the case. There
were vast numbers of people separated from each other by long weary
miles, too many to permit of visits, who could not resist writing to
each other,--the doating parent to the child, the lover to his
mistress, the merchant to his agents, the lawyer to his clients. Those
who could not afford postage, were the very class who could not get
franks; for the principle was, that those who could best afford postage
money should have plenty of franks, which were, of course, quite out of
the way of poor, humble folks,--the fat sow had his ear well greased,
the lean, starving one had to consume his own fat, like the bear, or go
without. The consequence was, that those who were eager to write and
could not get letters through the post, found other means of forwarding
them to the evasion of the law. There was no limit to the exercise of
ingenuity in this direction. Three or four letters were written on one
piece of paper, to be cut up and distributed separately by one of the
recipients; newspapers were turned into letters by underscoring or
pricking with a pin the letters required to form the various words of
the communication; some peculiarity in the style of address on the
outside was arranged between correspondents, the sight of which was
enough to indicate a message, and the letter was then rejected, having
served its purpose; and so on, in a hundred other ways, fraudulent means
were found of evading the law. Some carriers had a large and profitable
business in smuggling letters. In many populous districts the number of
letters conveyed by carriers at a penny each in an illegal way far
exceeded those sent through the post. In Manchester, for every letter
that went by the postman, six went by the carrier; and in Glasgow the
proportion was as one to ten. All this was notorious. The most
honourable people saw no great harm in cheating the post to send a word
of comfort or encouragement to an absent friend,--it was a vice that
leaned to virtue's side. But it was a bad thing for the country that
people should be driven to such devices, in obeying a natural and proper
impulse. The man who began by smuggling letters, might end by smuggling
tobacco or brandy; and the system was morally pernicious. All felt the
evil, but remedy seemed impossible. As the urgency for a change grew to
a head, the man came to effect it,--a man "of open heart, who could
enter into family impulses; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who could
devise a remedial scheme; a man of business, who could fortify such a
scheme with impregnable accuracy"--that man was Rowland Hill.
When quite a young man, on a pedestrian excursion through the lake
district, Rowland Hill, passing a cottage door, observed the postman
deliver a letter to a woman, and overheard her, after looking anxiously
at the envelope, and then returning it, say she had no money to pay the
postage. The man was about to put it back in his wallet and pass on, for
it was an every-day thing for him to receive such a reply from the poor
countryfolk, when Mr. Hill in his goodness of heart, out of compassion
for the woman, stepped forward and paid the shilling, regardless of
many shakes of the head, and hints of remonstrance from her, which he
interpreted as merely unwillingness to trespass on a stranger's bounty.
As soon as the postman was out of sight she broke the seal, and showed
him why she did not want him to pay for the letter. The sheet was a
blank, and the envelope had served as a means of communication between
her and her correspondent. It appeared that she had arranged with her
brother, that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank
sheet in that way once a quarter, and thus she had tidings of him
without paying the postage.
As he pursued his walk, Mr. Hill could not help meditating on the
incident, which had made a deep impression on his mind. He could not
blame the poor woman and her brother for the trick they had played upon
the post office in order to correspond with each other; and yet he felt
there must be something wrong in a system which put it out of their
reach, and of others similarly circumstanced, to do so in a lawful
manner. Every country post-master had a budget of touching stories of
poor folk who were tantalized with the sight of a letter from some dear
one, full, perhaps, of kind words and cheering news, or asking sympathy
and condolence in misfortune, or transmitting money to help them in
their straits; as well as of countless little frauds of the sort
described, which they could not always harden themselves to circumvent
and punish, so piteously eager did the poor souls appear to be to get
word of their friends. And yet, in spite of all sorts of frauds, to
people in humble life letters came like "angels' visits, few and far
between."
Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means of lessening the cost
of postage, whether the government could not afford to charge a lower
rate, or manage to get the work done more cheaply? Keeping his ears and
eyes open, always on the alert to pick up a fact as regarded the
present, or a hint for the future, examining the mode of carriage and
delivery, the routes chosen, and the time occupied, Mr. Hill, after a
while, arrived at the conviction, that the postage rates might not only
be reduced, but that the transmission of letters might be more quickly
performed by a remodelling of the system. He ascertained that the cost
of mere transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to Edinburgh, a
distance of 400 miles, was not more than a thirty-sixth part of a penny,
and that, therefore, there was a margin, under the existing charge, of
11-35/36d. for extra expenses and profit. He observed that the twopenny
posts of London and other large towns were found to answer very well,
although people, being within easy distances of each other, did not need
so much as in the country to correspond in writing, and that the
carriers, in spite of the illegality of the traffic, had loads of
letters to deliver at a penny each, and that penny paid them for their
trouble, as well as their risk of detection. He therefore came to the
conclusion, that what was wanted, and what it was quite possible to
establish, was a uniform penny postage rate over the whole of the United
Kingdom. He calculated that if that were adopted, the number of people
then in the habit of writing letters would write a great many more than
ever; that others, who had been precluded by the expense from
corresponding, would come into the field; and that hundreds of letters
forwarded illegally would now pass through the post, so that the number
of letters sent by post would be increased fourfold, and the revenue, at
first, perhaps a trifle curtailed, would soon mount up again.
The post-office authorities were greatly shocked and disgusted at so
audacious and utopian a proposal. But the public were greatly delighted
with it, only doubting whether it was not too good news to be true.
First by means of an anonymous pamphlet, then by direct and personal
application to the government, Mr. Hill endeavoured to get his plans
taken into consideration--no easy matter, for circumlocution officials
had passed from contemptuous indifference to active hostility, as they
gradually discovered how formidable an antagonist in the truth and
accuracy of his calculations, the sincerity and earnestness of his
purpose, they had to deal with. It was a great national cause Mr. Hill
was fighting, and he was not to be put down. The people took his side,
Parliament granted an inquiry, and the result was a report in favour of
his scheme. On the 17th of August 1839--why is not the anniversary kept
with rejoicings?--penny postage became the law of the land.
During the last weeks of the year a uniform fourpenny rate was charged
by way of accustoming people to the cheap system, and saving official
feelings from the rude shock of a sudden descent from the respectable
rate of a shilling, to the vulgar one of a penny. On the 10th January
1840 the penny system came into force. At first Mr. Hill availed himself
of a suggestion thrown out some years before by Mr. Charles Knight, that
the best way of collecting the penny postage on newspapers would be to
have stamped covers; but subsequently stamped envelopes were done away
with, and queen's heads introduced. The franking privilege, of course,
died with the dear postage.
Upon the adoption of the scheme, Mr. Hill received an appointment in the
post office in order to superintend its working; but he had an uneasy
berth of it. His plan was adopted only in part,--the postage rate was
lowered, while the other compensating and essential features were thrown
aside; official jealousy of reform showed itself in various attempts to
thwart his efforts, and to fulfil its prediction of failure to the
scheme. The consequence was, that the immediate results were not so
satisfactory as could have been wished. The increase in the number of
letters was certainly very great. During the last month of the old
system the total number of letters passing through the post office was
little more than two millions and a half, of which only a fifth were
paid letters; while a twelvemonth after the introduction of the new
system the total number of letters had risen to nearly six millions per
month, of which the unpaid letters formed less than a twelfth part. Very
heavy expenses, however, not connected with the new plan, had been
incurred; and the consequence was, that the profits of the post office
were only a fourth of what they had been. Advantage was taken of this to
get Mr. Hill ousted from his post; but, after he had transferred his
services for some years to the management of the London and Brighton
Railway, the authorities were glad to receive him back again, to place
the remodelling of the system in his hands, and to allow him to
introduce the other parts of his scheme which had before been neglected.
In this work Mr. Hill was busily engaged for a number of years, and most
of his plans were gradually carried out with great advantage to the
public. In 1846 a public testimonial of £13,360 was presented to Mr.
Hill in acknowledgment of his distinguished services to the country; and
at a later date he was made a Knight of the Bath.
Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and must be pronounced a grand
success. It has become part and parcel of our national life, and has
been found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We should miss the
loss of cheap and rapid correspondence with our friends and
acquaintances almost as much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight.
The postman has now to find his way to the humblest, poorest districts,
where twenty years back his knock was never heard; and what was once a
rare luxury, has now come to be considered a common necessary of life.
Instead of only seventy-six millions of letters passing through the post
in a year, as in 1838, the number has risen to between seven and eight
hundred millions. On the average every individual in England receives
twenty-eight letters a-year (in London the individual average is
forty-six), in Scotland eighteen, and in Ireland nine.
The gross revenue derived from these sources is over four millions; and
some of the railway companies each make more money out of the conveyance
of the mails in a year, than the annual revenue of the whole kingdom in
the days of William and Mary.
The moral and social effects of the cheap postage are incalculable. It
has tended to strengthen and perpetuate domestic ties, to bring the most
scattered and distant members of a family under the benign influences of
home, and to foster feelings of friendship and sympathy between man and
man. Upon the education and intelligence of the people, too, it has
had, concurrently with other causes, a marked effect. Many who looked
upon the art of writing as only a temptation to forgery, were induced to
take pen in hand and master the science of pot-hooks and hangers, for
the sake of corresponding with their friends, and of being able to read
the letters they received. In 1839 a third of the men and half of the
women who were married, according to the registrar's returns, could not
sign their own names; in 1857 that was the case with only a seventh of
the men, and a fifth of the women; and not a little of this advanced
education may be attributed to the impulse given by the introduction of
cheap postage.
Nor have the advantages derived from the post office by the great body
of the public ended here. It has shown itself the most progressive
department of the government, and has undertaken many benevolent
branches of work which were never contemplated by Sir Rowland Hill. Thus
it carries on an extensive savings-bank system, worked out by Mr. Frank
Ives Scudamore, adopted by Mr. Gladstone when Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and established by Act of Parliament in 1861. This valuable
department, whose operations are now of a very extensive character,
keeps a separate account for every depositor, acknowledges the receipt,
and, on the requisite notice being furnished, sends out warrants
authorizing post-masters to pay such sums as depositors may wish to
withdraw. The deposits are handed over to the Commissioners for the
reduction of the National Debt, and repaid to the depositors through the
post office. The rate of interest payable to depositors is two and a
half per cent. Each depositor has his savings-bank book, which is sent
to him yearly for examination, and the increasing interest calculated
and allowed.
The post office now acts, too, as a life-insurance society, offering
advantages to the operative which no other society can offer, and which
the public are beginning to appreciate.
In 1869 the entire telegraphic system of the United Kingdom passed into
the hands of the post office, whose administrators have shown themselves
anxious to offer increased facilities to the public for the transaction
of business. The number of telegraphic stations has been greatly
increased, and the rate reduced at which messages are flashed from one
part of the island to the other.
Finally, a recent innovation, made entirely in the interest of the
public weal, is the introduction of _Halfpenny Post Cards_. On one side
of these missives the sender writes the name and address of his
correspondent; on the other, the communication intended for him. The
card already bears a halfpenny stamp impressed, and nothing more remains
to be done but to deposit it in the nearest office or pillar-post. We
think, then, it may fairly be said that the post office has shown itself
anxious to "keep abreast" with the ever-increasing wants of the
commercial classes of Great Britain.
* * * * *
While these pages are passing through the press, the following
particulars, apparently issued under official direction, have attracted
our attention. We append them here, as they cannot fail to interest the
reader:--"It appears that there are in the United Kingdom 6 miles 712
yards of _pneumatic tubes_ in connection with the postal telegraphic
system (1871). Of these, 4 miles 638 yards exist in London, and 2 miles
74 yards in the provinces--the latter being confined to Liverpool,
Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Of the total length of tubes now
existing, only 2 miles 1324 yards existed prior to the transfer of the
telegraphs to the post office; so that no less than 3 miles 1148 yards
have been laid since that date; or, in other words, the system has been
considerably more than doubled in less than a year. The total length of
new tubes ordered and in progress exceeds 3 miles, and when these are
completed, the system will be nearly 10 miles in length. All of the
tubes in the provinces, and all but two of those in London, are worked
on Clark's system. The two which form an exception are those between
Telegraph Street and St. Martin's-le-Grand, which are worked on Siemens'
system. The former are made of lead, with a diameter varying from 1-1/4
to 2-1/4 inches--the more frequent size being 1-1/2 inches. The latter
are made of iron, and have a diameter of 3 inches. The idea of iron
tubes worked on Siemens' principle is derived, we believe, from Berlin,
where the system is entirely of this description; and of the new tubes
in progress, that from St. Martin's-le-Grand to Temple Bar will be of
this kind. All of the tubes now in existence are worked in both
directions by means of alternate pressure and vacuum; the motive power,
in the shape of a steam-engine, being stationed at the central office,
with which the out-stations have communication by this means. It is
interesting to note the difference of time occupied by the different
tubes in London in passing the 'carriers' through from one end to the
other--the speed being governed by the length and diameter of the tube,
and by the circumstance whether it is carried in a straight line, or has
to encounter sharp curves and bends on its way. The great advantage of
this means of communication, for short distance, over the electric is,
that the tubes are not liable to sudden blocks of work as the wires are,
and that a dozen or more messages may be sent through, at one blow, if
desired. For local telegraphs in great towns the pneumatic system is
invaluable, and is certain to be greatly extended under the postal
administration."
FOOTNOTES:
[D] Brian Tuke, master of the post to King Henry VIII.
The Overland Route.
LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.
The Overland Route.
LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.
Worthy to stand on a par with, or at lowest, in the very next rank to,
the men who originate great inventions, are those whose foresight and
energy discover the means of extending their utility; and in shortening
the journey between Europe and India, by the establishment of the
overland route, Lieutenant Waghorn practically achieved as great a
triumph over time and space, as if he had invented a machine for the
purpose that would have traversed the old route in the same time.
It was in 1827 that Thomas Waghorn first promulgated the idea of steam
communication between our Eastern possessions and the mother country. He
was then twenty-seven years of age, and had just returned to Calcutta
from rough and arduous service in the Arracan war. When a midshipman of
barely seventeen, he had passed the "navigation" examination for
lieutenant,--the youngest, it appears, who ever did so; but although,
consequently, eligible for that rank, he had never reached it up to this
time, in spite of the distinction he had acquired in various actions.
His health had been so much shattered by a fever caught in Arracan, that
he had to return to England; but he did not leave Calcutta without
communicating his design to the government there, and obtaining a letter
of credence from Lord Combermere (then vice-president in council) to the
East India Company, recommending him, in consequence of his meritorious
conduct in the recent war, "as a fit and proper person to open steam
navigation with India, _via_ the Cape of Good Hope."
The idea, however, was just then in advance of the time, and all
Waghorn's agitation in its favour proved of no avail. In the meantime,
the idea of saving the time spent in "doubling the Cape," by means of a
route through the Mediterranean, across the Isthmus of Suez, and down
the Red Sea, had occurred to him; and in 1829 he procured a commission
from the East India Directory to report on the probability of Red Sea
navigation, and at the same time to convey certain despatches to Sir
John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay.
He got notice of this mission on the 24th October, and was desired to be
at Suez by the 8th December, in order to catch the steamer _Enterprise_,
and proceed in her to India. He took only four days to make ready for
the journey, and on the 28th left London on the top of the _Eagle_
stage-coach from Gracechurch Street. Circumstances were anything but
propitious all through this expedition of his; and yet he defied and
disregarded them all. Bridges broke down at central points, falling
avalanches had to be kept clear of, an accident disabled the steamer,
and he had to go some hundred and thirty miles out of his way in
consequence. In spite of all that, he dashed through five kingdoms, and
reached Trieste in nine days, or little more than half the time occupied
by the post-office mails on the same journey. Impatient of delay, he
learned that an Austrian brig had left for Alexandria the night before,
but the breeze had fallen, and she was still to be caught a glimpse of
from the hill-tops. A fresh posting carriage was got out, and off he
went in chase of the vessel, hoping to make up to her at Pesano, twenty
miles down the Gulf of Venice. The calm still prevailed; and as he went
dashing along he could catch sight, now and then, as the carriage passed
some open part of the road and disclosed the sea, of the brig creeping
lazily along. Every hour he gained on her; instead of a dull, black
speck upon the horizon, he began to make out her hull, her sails, and
rigging. He urged the post-boys with redoubled vehemence--kept them
going at a furious pace. He was within three miles of the vessel--it was
crawling, he was flying--another half hour would see him safe on board,
and then heigh for India. But stay, surely that was the wind among the
trees; could the breeze have risen? It had indeed. A strong northerly
wind sprang up; gradually the sails of the brig swelled out before
it, and poor Waghorn, with his panting, jaded horses, was left far
behind. The chase was hopeless now--so he went back mournfully to
Trieste--"exhausted in body with fatigue, and racked by disappointment
after the previous excitement."
The next ship, a Spanish one, was not to sail for three days. That was
more than Waghorn could endure; he went to the captain, urged him,
bribed him with fifty dollars to make it two days, instead of three, and
succeeded. In eight and forty hours he was somewhat consoled for his
former discouragement, to find himself at length at sea. In sixteen days
he was at Alexandria, and after a rest of only five hours there, hired
donkeys and was off to Rosetta. The donkeys were in the conspiracy
against him, as well as the wind and the avalanches. The first day they
trotted and walked along as brisk as may be, and our indefatigable
traveller worked them well. It is well known that the donkey of the east
is a paragon of wisdom, compared with his dunce of a brother in Europe;
and upon a night's reflection, Mr. Waghorn's donkeys seem to have
clearly perceived that he had no notion of easy stages, and was bent on
keeping them going as fast as he could, and as long as daylight
suffered. So the second day they managed to stumble, and limp, and fall
down intentionally four or five times, and to put on a pitiful
affectation of fatigue and weariness,--a common dodge, the drivers said,
of those knowing animals.
Fortunately he was soon able to dispense with the deceitful donkeys; and
embarking on the Nile, undertook to navigate the boat himself, in order
to take soundings and make observations in regard to the route. After
brief repose at Rosetta, he set out for Cairo on a _cangé_, a sort of
boat of fifteen tons burthen, with two large latteen sails. The captain
undertook to land him at Cairo in three days and four nights; but the
boat went aground on a shoal, and after tacking for five days and
nights, Waghorn lost all patience, and proceeded to his destination upon
donkeys. He crossed the desert from Cairo to Suez in four days, on two
of which he travelled seventy-four miles. He was thus able to keep his
appointment and be at Suez by the 8th December, but there was no sign of
the steamer. The wind was blowing right in her teeth; so after waiting
two days, with feverish impatience, Mr. Waghorn determined to sail down
the centre of the Red Sea, in an open boat, in the hope of meeting the
steamer somewhere above Cossier. All the seamen of the locality held up
their hands at the proposal of the mad Englishman, and tried to dissuade
him. It was the opinion, he knew, of nautical authorities at the time,
that the Red Sea was not navigable. But he could not rest quiet at Suez;
he had important despatches to deliver; he was commissioned to inquire
into the navigability of these waters; and out he would go in an open
boat, let folk say what they would, and so he did.
"He embarked," says the narrator of his "Life and Labours," in
_Household Words_,[E] "in an open boat, and without having any personal
knowledge of the navigation of this sea, without chart, without compass,
or even the encouragement of a single precedent for such an
enterprise--his only guide the sun by day, and the north star by
night--he sailed down the centre of the Red Sea. Of this most
interesting and unprecedented voyage Mr. Waghorn gives no detailed
account. All intermediate things are abruptly cut off with these very
characteristic words: '_Suffice it_ to say, _I arrived_ at Juddah, 620
miles in six and a half days, in that boat!' You get nothing more than
the sum total. He kept a sailor's log-journal; but it is only meant for
sailors to read, though now and then you obtain a glimpse of the sort of
work he went through. Thus: '_Sunday, 13th_--Strong, N.W. wind, half a
gale, but scudding under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored for the night.
Jaffateen Islands out of sight to the N. Lost two anchors during the
night,' &c. The rest is equally nautical and technical. In one of the
many scattered papers collected since the death of Mr. Waghorn, we find
a very slight passing allusion to toils, perils, and privations, which,
however, he calmly says, were 'inseparable from such a voyage under such
circumstances,'--but not one touch of description from first to last. A
more extraordinary instance of great practical experience and
knowledge, resolutely and fully carrying out a project which must of
necessity have appeared little short of madness to almost everybody
else, was never recorded. He was perfectly successful, so far as the
navigation was concerned, and in the course he adopted, notwithstanding
that his crew of six Arabs mutinied. It appears (for he tells us only
the bare fact) they were only subdued on the principle known to
philosophers in theory, and to high-couraged men, accustomed to command,
by experience,--namely, that the one man who is braver, stronger, and
firmer than any individual of ten or twenty men, is more than a match
for the ten or twenty put together. He touched at Cossier on the 14th,
not having fallen in with the _Enterprise_. There he was told by the
governor that the steamer was expected every hour. Mr. Waghorn was in no
state of mind to wait very long; so, finding she did not arrive, he
again put to sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did not fall in with
her, to proceed the entire distance to Juddah--a distance of 400 miles
further. Of this further voyage he does not leave any record, even in
his log, beyond the simple declaration that he 'embarked for Juddah--ran
the distance in three days and twenty-one hours and a quarter--and on
the 23d anchored his boat close to one of the East India Company's
cruisers, the _Benares_.' But now comes the most trying part of his
whole undertaking--the part which a man of his vigorously constituted
impulses was least able to bear as the climax of his prolonged and
arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, and fatigue. Repairing on board
the _Benares_ to learn the news, the captain informed him that, in
consequence of being found in a defective state on her arrival at
Bombay, 'the _Enterprise_ was not coming at all.' This intelligence
seems to have felled him like a blow, and he was immediately seized with
a delirious fever. The captain and officers of the _Benares_ felt great
sympathy and interest in this sad result of so many extraordinary
efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every attention on his
malady."
It was six weeks before he could proceed by sailing vessel to Bombay,
where he arrived on the 21st March, having, in spite of all the
drawbacks in his way, accomplished the journey in four months and
twenty-one days--quite an extraordinary rapidity at that time. Had he
escaped the fever at Juddah, and fallen in with the _Enterprise_ at the
right time, nearly two months might have been saved.
He had proved the practicability of the overland route, and he now
devoted himself to its establishment. In an address to the Home
Government and the East India Company, he thus expresses his views:--
"Of myself, I trust I may be excused when I say, that the highest object
of my ambition has ever been an extensive usefulness; and my line of
life--my turn of mind--my disposition, long ago impelled me to give all
my leisure, and all my opportunities of observation, to the introduction
of steam-vessels, and permanently establishing them as the means of
communication between India and England including all the colonies on
the route. The vast importance of three months' earlier information to
his Majesty's government, and to the Honourable Company,--whether
relative to a war or a peace--to abundant or to short crops--to the
sickness or convalescence of a colony or district, and oftentimes even
of an individual; the advantages to the merchant, by enabling him to
regulate his supplies and orders according to circumstances and demands;
the anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in India for accounts,
and further accounts, of their parents, children, and friends at home;
the corresponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this
country;--in a word, the speediest possible transit of letters to the
tens of thousands who at all times in solicitude await them, was, to my
mind, a service of the greatest general importance; and it shall not be
my fault if I do not, and for ever establish it."
The scheme which he thus resolutely and enthusiastically declared his
adoption of, he lived to carry out, but at the cost of years of weary
advocacy, agitation for help, desperate attempts on his own account, or
in conjunction with a few enterprising associates, in the teeth of
constant discouragement, official indifference, jealousy, and disguised
hostility. The East India Company told him there was no need of steam
navigation to the East at all, ordered him to mind his own business and
return to field service, circulated reports of his insanity through
their agents in Egypt when Waghorn went there to enlist the Pasha in his
cause. The overland route, however, was no theory, but an undoubted
fact. Waghorn never for a moment relaxed his grasp of it, or doubted its
value; and in the end, after unheard of difficulties, disappointments,
and opposition, into the long, painful story of which we need not enter,
succeeded in establishing the overland route. When he left Egypt in
1841, he had provided English carriages, vans, and horses, for the
conveyance of passengers across the desert, placed small steamers on the
Nile and Alexandrian Canal, and built the eight halting-places on the
desert between Cairo and Suez. He also set up the three hotels in the
same quarter "in which every comfort, and even some luxuries, were
provided and stored for the passing traveller,--among which should be
mentioned iron tanks with good water, ranged in cellars beneath;--and
all this in a region which was previously a waste of arid sands and
scorching gravel, beset with wandering robbers and their camels. These
wandering robbers he converted into faithful guides, as they are now
found to be by every traveller; and even ladies with their infants are
enabled to cross and re-cross the desert with as much security as if
they were in Europe."
In acknowledgment of his services, Mr. Waghorn received the rank of
lieutenant in the Royal Navy, a grant of £1500, and an annuity of £200
a-year from Government, and another annuity of £200 from the East India
Company; but he did not live long to enjoy his well-earned rewards. The
care, and anxiety, and fatigue he had undergone had shattered his
constitution. Through some misunderstanding or mismanagement on the part
of the East India Company, rivals were allowed to step in and carry off
the chief profits of the overland system, and his last years were
embittered by various disputes with the authorities. He died in the end
of 1849, by years only in the prime of life; but old, and worn by his
labours before his time. Such was the career of the "pioneer of the
Overland Route."
But in connection with England's route to India, the name of Monsieur de
Lesseps must never be forgotten, nor the great enterprise which, at so
much cost, and in spite of so many obstacles, he successfully carried
out--the Suez Canal. When he first projected it he met with most of the
obstacles which are thrown in the way of great inventions. England,
jealous of a scheme which seemed likely to throw into the hands of a
foreign power the nearest route to her beloved India, stood sullenly
aloof, and refused to contribute moral or pecuniary support; while some
of the most eminent English and foreign engineers openly declared that
it could never be carried out. M. de Lesseps, however, was one of those
men who, when they have seized a great idea, can never be thrown off it.
It had taken full possession of his imagination, judgment, and
intellect! he felt that it _could_, and he determined that it _should_
be realized. He conquered every difficulty: he raised funds; he secured
the support of his own government; and in 1856 he obtained from the
Pasha of Egypt the exclusive privilege of constructing a ship-canal from
Tyneh, near the ruins of the ancient Pelusium, to Suez.
M. de Lesseps determined that his canal should be cut in a straight
line, with an average width of 330 feet, and at an uniform depth of 20
feet under low-water mark, while at each end was to be constructed a
sluice-lock, 330 feet long by 70 wide. Further, at each end he proposed
to execute a magnificent harbour; that at the Mediterranean end was to
be extended five miles into the sea, so as to obtain a permanent depth
of water for a ship drawing twenty-three feet, on account of the
enormous quantity of mud annually silted up by the Nile; that at the Red
Sea end was to be three miles long.
In 1865 the great canal was begun. The Mediterranean entrance is at Port
Said, about the middle of the narrow neck of land between Lake Menzaleh
and the sea, in the eastern part of the Delta. Thence it is carried for
about twenty miles across Menzaleh Lake, being 112 yards wide at the
surface, 26 yards at the bottom, and 26 feet deep. On each side an
artificial bank rises some 15 feet high. The distance thence to Abu
Ballah Lake is 11 miles, through ground which varies from 15 to 30 feet
above the level of the sea. This lake being traversed, there is land
again--a troublesome and shifty soil--to Timsah Lake, the canal being
cut at a depth below the sea-level of 50 to 100 feet. On the shore of
Timsah Lake has risen a new and busy town, the central point of the
canal, and named Ismailia, in honour of the present Pasha of Egypt.
A space of eight miles intervenes between the Timsah Lake and the Bitter
Lakes, and in this space the cuttings are very deep and difficult. The
soil being almost purely sand, the constant labour of powerful dredging
machines is constantly required, to prevent the channel from filling up.
The deepest cutting occurs at El Guisr, or Girsch, and is no less than
85 feet below the surface: at the water-level it is 112 yards wide, at
the summit-level 173 yards. In traversing the Bitter Lakes the course of
the canal is marked by embankments. From the southern end of these lakes
to Suez, a distance of about thirteen miles, the cuttings are heavy and
deep.
After many discouraging failures, M. de Lesseps' great work was
completed last year, and the formal opening of the canal took place in
the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and a goodly number of
princes, potentates, and distinguished personages. It is now open to
navigation from end to end, and ships of considerable tonnage have
successfully accomplished the passage. Whether the canal is a
_commercial_ success may still be doubted. The cost of further deepening
and enlarging it, and of maintaining its banks and harbours, amounts to
a sum which, as yet, the traffic charges are not at all likely to
defray. But, in an engineering sense, the Suez Canal is one of the
wonders of this wonderful nineteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[E] August 17, 1850.
* * * * *
Beautifully Illustrated Works.
EARTH AND SEA. From the French of LOUIS FIGUIER. Translated, Edited, and
Enlarged by W. H. DAVENPORT ADAMS, Illustrated with Two Hundred and
Fifty Engravings by FREEMAN, GIACOMELLI, YAN D'ARGENT, PRIOR, FOULQUIER,
RIOU, LAPLANTE, and other Artists. Imperial 8vo. Handsomely bound in
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[Transcriber's Note:
Ligature occurrences of oe have been represented as two separate letters,
such as in "Koenig" and "Phoenicians".
The following alterations have been made to the text as originally
printed:
Page 30: Changed quotes from double to single: 'Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye,'
Page 64: "reader." changed to "reader,"
Page 65: "home," changed to "home."
Page 128: Added closing quote: ... and working efficiency."
Page 131: Added closing quote: ... of solid masonry."
Page 136: "porportion" changed to "proportion"
Page 166: "better then an arm" changed to "better than an arm"
Page 187: "paddle-wheels Through" changed to "paddle-wheels. Through"
Page 197: "a mortal sickness:" changed to "a mortal sickness;"
Page 249: "own, Thus" changed to "own. Thus"
Page 250: "condition Only" changed to "condition. Only"
Page 295: Changed double quotes to single quotes: passing the
'carriers' through
Page 295: Added closing quote: ... under the postal
administration."
Page 315: Added closing quote: ... present day."
Page 316: "Dore" changed to "Doré"
]
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