Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science
by J. Hamilton Fyfe · English · Gutenberg #36768 · 424,794 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science
Author: J. Hamilton Fyfe
Release date: July 17, 2011 [eBook #36768]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36768
Credits: Produced by Sharon Joiner, Jana Srna, Bill Keir, Erica
Pfister-Altschul and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIUMPHS OF INVENTION AND DISCOVERY IN ART AND SCIENCE ***
Produced by Sharon Joiner, Jana Srna, Bill Keir, Erica
Pfister-Altschul and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)
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 Gaensfleisch, 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 deg..
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 deg., 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 Muenden 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 L100, 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 deg.). 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
L1000; 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 L2500 yearly for each
engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must
have been at least L7500 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 L60, 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 L20,000 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 L5000 was proposed. No one thought of increasing it. "Let's
give the man a L100 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 L300,000 a-year, or more than L1000 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 L5000 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 L100 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] Athenaeum.
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 L30,000 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 L10,000.
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 L50 or L60 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 L100 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 L300 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 L80
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 L500 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 protege, "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 L11,000,000 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 L70,000,000
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
L6000, 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 L2500 to begin with, and spending an allowance of
L2000 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 a
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/36768