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THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
TRIUMPHS' OF 
 
 INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 
 
 IN ART AND SCIENCE. 
 
GEORGE STEPHENSON'S HOME. 
 
TRIUMPHS OF 
 
 INVENTION AND DISCOVERY 
 
 IN ART AND S'CIENCE. 
 
 J. HAMILTON FYFE. 
 
 I'EACE HATH HER VICTORIES NO LESS THAN WAR. 
 
 LONDON: 
 T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW; 
 
 EDINBURGH ; AND NEW YOKK. 
 1871. 
 
/ IS' 
 
 r c f a t c. 
 
 ''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." 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 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 imper- 
 ceptible, 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 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 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 sym- 
 pathy and association, in the other the desperate 
 pioneers had to face a world of foes, "alone, un- 
 friended, solitary, slow." 
 
 The following pages contain sketches of some of 
 tne 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 per- 
 sons, and that only a few of a representative charac- 
 ter 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. 
 
n t c it 1 
 
 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 
 
 TUB 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 A*D THE LOCOMOTIVE 
 
 1. "The Flying Coach," .. .. .. .. .. m 
 
 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 Skerry vore, .. .. .. .. .. 160 
 
 STEAM NAVIGATION 
 
 1. James Symington, .. .. .. .. .. 171 
 
 2. Robert Fulton, .. .. .. .. .. 175 
 
 3. Henry Bell, .. .. .. .. .. .. 133 
 
 4. Ocean Steamers, .. .. .. 186 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 IRON MANUFACTURE 
 
 Henry Cort, . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 
 
 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH 
 
 3. 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 Delia 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 Eowland Hill, .. .. .. .. .. 279 
 
 2. New Departments of the Postal System, .. .. .. 292 
 
 THE OVERLAND ROUTE 
 
 1. Lieutenant Waghorn, . . . . . . . . . . 299 
 
 2, The Suez Canal, 309 
 
f ^printing. 
 
 I. JOHN GUTENBERG. 
 II.WILLIAM CAXTON. 
 III. THE PRINTING MACHINE. 
 
of D rinfrag. 
 
 " 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 GUTENBEEG. 
 
 )ME Dutch writers, inspired by a not un- 
 natural feeling of patriotism, have endeav- 
 oured 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 
 
14 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 neigh- 
 bouring 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 imagina- 
 tive : " 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 dis- 
 covery." 
 
 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 15 
 
 been also twelve years dead when his book was 
 published. His information, or rather the informa- 
 tion 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 typo- 
 graphy 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 pre- 
 sently, 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." 
 
16 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 be- 
 lieve 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 kartenmadier, 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. Christo- 
 pher 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 Mem- 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 17 
 
 mingen. 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 intro- 
 duced, 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, 
 Ilia nerape 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." 
 
 2 
 
18 THE ART OF PRINTING. , 
 
 Passing over some other woodcuts of great an- 
 tiquity, 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 His- 
 toria 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 revela- 
 tions 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 illus- 
 trate 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, sup- 
 posing the drawing to have been made by an- 
 other person, would be the cutting of the letters, 
 which, in several of the subjects, must have 
 occupied a considerable portion of time, and have 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 19 
 
 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 Gram- 
 matical 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 impres- 
 sion 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 impres- 
 sions, 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 Gsensfleisch, or Guten- 
 berg, was born at Menfcz. 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 
 
20 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 con- 
 ceived 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 characteriz- 
 ing books was invented and devised by John Guten- 
 berger, citizen of Mentz, who, having expended most 
 of his property in the invention of this art, on ac- 
 count 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 vocabu- 
 lary 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 21 
 
 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 pres- 
 sure, 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 genera- 
 tions. 
 
 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 to- 
 gether, in the order of words and sentences, upon a 
 piece of wire. By means of these he succeeded in 
 
22 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 producing upon parchment a very satisfactory im- 
 pression. 
 
 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 foi 
 mirrors, which he afterwards mounted in frames 
 of metal and carved wood. These avowed labours 
 he openly practised, along with a couple of assist- 
 ants, 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. 
 
GUTENBERG IN THE OLD MONASTERY. 
 
 Page: 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 23 
 
 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 
 a ad to debase his art would give to wicked men, and 
 
24 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 per- 
 sisted 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 Schoefier, 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 Guten- 
 berg's steps, and he had but a brief taste of pro- 
 sperity. 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 25 
 
 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 sacri- 
 fice foi 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 num- 
 ber 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 Litera- 
 
26 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 ture," " 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 dis- 
 covered 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 pro- 
 duced 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 27 
 
 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 suc- 
 cessive 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 pro- 
 geny 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 pro- 
 
28 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 bable that from this time he abandoned the practice 
 of his new invention. The date of his death is 
 uncertain; but there is documentary evidence ex- 
 tant 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 : 
 
 "3- 0. Jft. . 
 
 " Joanni Gesnyfleisch, artis impressoriae repertori, de 
 omni natione et lingua optime merito, in nominis sui me- 
 moriam 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 sub- 
 stance 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 
 
THE AKT OF PRINTING. 29 
 
 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 my- 
 self, 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 
 
30 THE ART OF FEINTING. 
 
 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 pre- 
 cincts of Westminster Abbey ; had given to the 
 world the three first books ever printed in England, 
 " The Game and Play of the Chesse " (March 
 1 474) ; "A boke of the hoole Lyf of Jason" (1 475) ; 
 and " The Dictes and Notable Wyse Sayenges of the 
 
WILLIAM CAXTON. 
 
THE AET OF FEINTING. 31 
 
 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. 
 
 Caxton published between sixty and seventy diffe- 
 rent 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, 
 
32 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 improve- 
 ment suggested after another at long intervals, 
 and by various minds. With the perfection of the 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 33 
 
 printing press, the name of Earl Stanhope is chiefly 
 associated ; but, although when he had put the 
 finishing touches to its construction, immensely supe- 
 rior to all former machines, it was unavailable for 
 rapid printing. In relation to the demand for litera- 
 ture and the means of supplying it, the world had, 
 half a century ago, reached much the same dead- 
 lock 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 intro- 
 duction 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 
 
 (24) 3 
 
34 THE ART OF FEINTING. 
 
 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 develop- 
 ment 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 perse- 
 verance, 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 disappoint- 
 ments he had to endure, while engaged in this enter' 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 35 
 
 prise, 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 com- 
 positor, named Thomas Martyn, had invented a self- 
 acting machine for working the press, and had pro- 
 duced a model which satisfied Mr. Walter of the 
 feasibility of the scheme. Being assisted by Mr. 
 Walter with the necessary funds, he made consider- 
 able progress towards the completion of his work, 
 in the course of which he was exposed to much per- 
 sonal 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 per- 
 mitted to reap the fruits of his enterprise. On the 
 very eve of success he. was doomed to bitter dis- 
 appointment. He had exhausted his own funds in 
 the attempt, and his father, who hacl 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 
 
36 THE ART OF FEINTING. 
 
 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 ex- 
 periment ; and, accordingly, the machinery of the 
 amiable and ingenious Kcenig, 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, how- 
 ever, of about three days, the same gentleman dis- 
 covered 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 37 
 
 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 withdraw- 
 ing the form for a fresh coat of ink, which itself 
 again distributes, to meet the ensuing sheet, now 
 
38 THE AET OF FEINTING. 
 
 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." 
 
 Kcenig's machine was, however, very complicated, 
 and before long, it was supplanted by that of Apple- 
 gath and Cowper, which was much simpler in con- 
 struction, 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 subse- 
 quently invented, far excelled his former achieve- 
 ment ; 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 pro- 
 prietors 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 improve- 
 ments, 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 39 
 
 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 
 
40 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 columns of equal length. An ordinary Times news- 
 paper, 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 composi- 
 tion of brown paper, by means of which a " stereo- 
 type" 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 sent to 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 
 
THE ART OF FEINTING. 41 
 
 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 alwaj^s 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 
 
42 THE AKT OF PRINTING. 
 
 eide 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 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 43 
 
 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 impos- 
 sible. If stereotyping had not >been invented, the 
 printer would require to "set up" as many "forms" 
 of type as there are cylinders in the machines 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 inven- 
 tion of printing, and the plan then adopted was the 
 expensive and cumbrous one of setting up the whole 
 
44 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 of the book in request, and to keep the type stand- 
 ing 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 acci- 
 dents. As early as the eighteenth century attempts 
 seem to have been made to remedy these incon- 
 veniences by cementing the types together at the 
 bottom with lead or solder to effect their greater 
 preservation. Canius, a French historian of print- 
 ing, 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-sirnile. 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 45 
 
 The inventor of this ingenious process of casting 
 plates from pages of type was William Ged, a gold- 
 smith 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 apply- 
 ing 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 appear- 
 ance 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 ignor- 
 ant, 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, dis- 
 turbed the type, and introduced false letters and 
 
46 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 cor- 
 rected 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 six- 
 teen leaves, twelve, eight, four, or two for IGmo, 
 12 mo, 8vo, quarto, or folio. 
 
THE ART OF PRINTING. 47 
 
 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 rect- 
 angular 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 tempera- 
 ture of about 400. This occupies about two hours. 
 A good workman, it is said, will mould ten octavo 
 
48 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 sheets, or one hundred and sixty pages in a day: 
 each mould generally contains a couple of octavo 
 pages. 
 
 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 down- 
 wards 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 un- 
 like a copying machine. This pan having beeii 
 heated to 400, it is plunged into an iron pot con- 
 taining the melted alloy, which hangs over a fur- 
 nace, 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 to- 
 gether 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 ART OF FEINTING. 49 
 
 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 accom- 
 panies 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 in- 
 teresting processes by informing us that an experi- 
 enced 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 
 
 (24) 4 
 
50 THE ART OF PRINTING. 
 
 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 intro- 
 duced, but not one has attained to the popularity of 
 the method we have just described. 
 
Steam (Engine. 
 
 I. THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER. 
 II.^TAMES WATT. 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 53 
 
 (Singhue. 
 
 It Is said that ideas produce revolutions: and truly they do not spiritual ideas 
 only, but even mechanical." CARL YLE. 
 
 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 cha- 
 racter, 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." 
 
54 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 jug- 
 gleries 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 discourage- 
 ments, successfully made this attempt, it will be 
 advisable we should say something as to the prin- 
 ciple 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 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 55 
 
 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, tra- 
 
56 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 versed 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 inven- 
 tions of Papin, the Marquis of Worcester, Newcomen, 
 and James Watt have been based. 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 57 
 
 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 combus- 
 tion 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 Huy- 
 ghens, 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. 
 
 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 pro- 
 duced was too imperfect. Evidently gunpowder 
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLE OF THE 
 STEAM ENGINE. 
 
58 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 was not the right agent. "What was ? Denis Papin 
 answered, Steam. And the first Steam Engine ever 
 invented was invented by this ingenious French- 
 man. 
 
 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 adver- 
 sity and persecution. A Protestant, and devoutly 
 loyal to his creed, he fled from France with thou- 
 sands of his co-religionists, when Louis XI Y. un- 
 wisely 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 170 7 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 
 Miinden 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 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 59 
 
 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, New- 
 comen, a native of Dartmouth in Devonshire, con- 
 ceived the idea of employing the same source of 
 power. 
 
 But, previously, the value of steam, if em- 
 ployed 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 sit- 
 ting 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 pub- 
 lished his project " An Admirable and Most Forcible 
 Way to Drive up Water by Fire " he was abused 
 
60 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 and laughed at as being either a madman or an im- 
 postor. 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 stupen- 
 dous work in the whole world." There is a fer- 
 vent " 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 use- 
 ful 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, 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 61 
 
 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 Atmos- 
 pheric 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 
 
62 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 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 con- 
 stantly 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 fasten- 
 ing the handles with pieces of string to some of the 
 cranks and levers. Subsequently, Beighton, an en- 
 gineer, 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 
 
THE. STEAM ENGINE. 63 
 
 had been made as complete as its capabilities ad- 
 mitted 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 
 
64 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 with other places, and what did exist were little 
 used, except for goods, which were conveyed on the 
 backs of pack-horses. The caravan then took two 
 days to go to Edinburgh you can run through now 
 between the two cities in little more than an hour. 
 There is hardly any trade that Glasgow does not 
 prosecute vigorously and successfully. You may see 
 any day you walk down to the Broomielaw, vessels 
 of a thousand tons' burden at anchor there, and the 
 custom duties which were in 1796 little over 100, 
 have now reached an amount exceeding one million! 
 
 Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the 
 gigantic strides which it has made, to the genius, 
 patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his 
 boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, 
 used to be scolded by his aunt for wasting his 
 time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it on 
 again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over 
 the steam as it rose from the spout, and catching 
 and counting the drops of water it fell into. James 
 Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in 
 that science, his practical application of which in 
 after life was to revolutionize the whole system of 
 mechanical movement, and place an almost unlimited 
 power at the disposal of the industrial classes. 
 
 When a boy, James Watt was delicate and sickly, 
 and so shy and sensitive that his school-days were a 
 misery to him, and he profited but little by his 
 attendance. At home, though, he was a great reader, 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 65 
 
 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, how- 
 ever, he managed to learn nearly all that the mem- 
 bers of the trade there could teach, and soon showed 
 himself a quick and skilful workman. 
 
 (24) 5 
 
66 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 In 1757 we find the sign of "James Watt, Mathe- 
 matical Instrument Maker to the College," stuck up 
 over the entrance to one of the stairs in the quad- 
 rangle 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 manu- 
 facture 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. 
 
 Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experi- 
 mented a little in the powers of steam ; but it was 
 not till the winter of 1 763-4, when a model of New- 
 comen'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 pro- 
 
JAMES WATT. 
 
 Page 67. 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 67 
 
 ducing 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 ex- 
 hausted, 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 evapo- 
 rated 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 ascer- 
 tained the steam heated six times its weight of well 
 water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212). 
 After various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to 
 the conclusion that, to make a perfect steam engine, 
 two apparently incompatible conditions must be ful- 
 filled the cylinder must always be as hot as the 
 steam that came rushing into it, and yet, at each 
 
68 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 descent of the piston, the cylinder must become suffi- 
 ciently 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 communica- 
 tion 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 opera- 
 tion. 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 succes- 
 sion, 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 specu- 
 lation and experiment, to carry out the idea, with 
 little hope to buoy him up, for to the last he used 
 fco say " his fear was always equal to his hope," 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 69 
 
 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 dis- 
 tressed and harassed the shy, sensitive, and retiring 
 Watt seemed only to have commenced. To give 
 the invention a fair practical trial required an out- 
 lay of at least 1000 ; and one capitalist, who had 
 agreed to join him in the undertaking, had to give 
 it up through some business losses. Still Watt toiled 
 on, always keeping the great object in view, earn- 
 ing 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 be- 
 coming 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 pla- 
 giarizing the great invention he had brought forth 
 in such sore and protracted travail. " Of all things 
 
70 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 m the world," cried poor Watt, sick with "hope de- 
 ferred, 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 fortu- 
 nate 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 OD 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 71 
 
 the face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, 
 Watt's improved engines were dispersed all over the 
 country, especially in Cornwall the firm receiving 
 the value of a third 'part of the coal saved by the 
 use of the new machine. In one mine, where there 
 were three pumps at work, the proprietors thought 
 it worth while, it is said, to purchase the rights of 
 the inventors, at the price of 2500 yearly for each 
 engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, 
 in fuel alone, must have been at least 7500 a year. 
 
 In the first year of the present century, Watt 
 withdrew himself entirely from business ; but though 
 he lived in retirement, he did not let his busy mind 
 get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one 
 time he took it into his head that his faculties were 
 declining, and though upwards of seventy years of age, 
 he resolved to test his mental powers by taking up 
 some new subject of study. It was no easy matter 
 to find one quite new to him, so wide and comprehen- 
 sive had been his range of study ; but at length the 
 Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he imme- 
 diately 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 
 
72 THE STEAM ENGINE. 
 
 name is chiefly associated, he was not a man of one 
 idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject 
 Syhich came under his notice which he did not master; 
 and, as was said of him, " it seemed as if every sub- 
 ject 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 un- 
 assuming. 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 militarv men, artists, ladies, and even 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE. 73 
 
 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 diversi- 
 fied. 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 ima- 
 gination, 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. 
 
Jtoufttcture of Cotton- 
 
 I. KAY AND HARGREAVES. 
 
 II. SIR RICHARD ARK WRIGHT. 
 III. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 
 IV. DR. CARTWRIGHT. 
 
 V. SIR ROBERT PEEL. 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 77 
 
 of 
 
 'Arc 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 mythio 
 men." CAKLYLE. 
 
 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 remark- 
 able 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 gar- 
 ments, 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 misfor- 
 tunes 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 
 
78 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 becom- 
 ing the principal seat of the cotton manufacture ; 
 and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil in- 
 duced the people to resort to spinning and weaving 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 79 
 
 to make up for the unprofitableness of their agricul- 
 tural labours. 
 
 A nobler monument of human skill, enterprise, 
 and perseverance, than the invention of cotton-spin- 
 ning 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 humi- 
 liating 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 for- 
 tunes, 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 alter- 
 nately. 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 con- 
 trivance was due to the ingenuity of John Kay, a 
 loom-maker at Colchester, and proved his ruin. The 
 
80 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 sug- 
 gested to him the principle of the spinning-jenny. 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 81 
 
 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 com- 
 pelled him to fly for the safety of his life to Notting- 
 ham. 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 
 
 (24) 6 
 
82 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 : 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 83 
 
 COME TO THE 
 
 SUBTERRANEOUS BARBER! 
 
 HE SHAVES FOE 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 in- 
 dignant the fraternity were at the unprincipled con- 
 duct of one of their number ; how they denounced 
 the reprobate, and prophesied his speedy ruin, over 
 their pipes and beer in the parlous of the " Duke of 
 Maryborough," 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 1 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 ; 
 
84 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 and as he was the youngest of a family of thirteen, 
 it may be readily supposed that all the school learn- 
 ing 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 spend- 
 ing 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 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 85 
 
 of perpetual motion. No doubt lie 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 deserip- 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 tions 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 be- 
 tween 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 dis- 
 tressed 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 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 87 
 
 outrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and 
 they separated. 
 
 In 1-768, 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,* large stocking-weavers in the 
 
 * The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled. 
 
88 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 Der- 
 byshire, 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 ma- 
 chinery. 
 
 In a year or two the success of Arkwright's in- 
 ventions 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 per- 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON, cU 
 
 sistent 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 mono- 
 poly ; 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 incon- 
 sistency, 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 
 
90 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 soon after lowered, in spite of the strenuous opposi- 
 tion of the manufacturers, turned out a very profit- 
 able 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. 
 
 III. SAMUEL CROMPTON. 
 
 Excellent as was the yarn produced by the spin- 
 ning-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 ehil- 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 91 
 
 dren 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 after- 
 wards, 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 amuse- 
 ment 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 
 
92 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 Is. 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 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 93 
 
 1779, when the "mule-jenny" with its spindle car- 
 riage 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 ma- 
 chine 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 espion- 
 age. " Why couldn't folk let him enjoy his machine 
 by himself V 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 com- 
 
94 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 umnity at large. Save me from my friends, Cromp- 
 ton 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 pro- 
 mised, and overwhelmed with abuse the man by the 
 fruit of whose brain they were making their fortunes. 
 When all the money was collected, it amounted to 
 only 60, just as much as built Crompton a new 
 machine, with no more than four spindles. 
 
 Shy, simple, confiding, innocent of the cunning 
 ways of the world, sadly backward in the study of 
 mankind, and perhaps somewhat ungenial and un- 
 practised 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 con- 
 struction of the mule, he grew morbid and distrustful 
 of every one. He would have no more workmen ; 
 and as the production of his machines was thus re- 
 stricted to the labours of his own hands, he could 
 
THE MANUFACTTJKE OP COTTON. 95 
 
 not compete with the large factories, who drew all 
 the customers away from him. Peel, the father of 
 fche 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 
 p. 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, farm- 
 ing, 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 gentle- 
 men. 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 will- 
 ing to befriend him ; but Crompton's ill luck was at 
 his heels. On the llth of May 1812, Crompton 
 
96 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 was talking with Peel and another gentleman in the 
 lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval 
 walked up to them, saying, " You will be glad to 
 know we mean to propose 20,000 for Crompton. 
 Do you think it will be satisfactory ? " Crompton 
 walked away out of delicacy not to hear the answer. 
 An instant afterwards there was a great shout, and 
 a rush of people in alarm. Perceval lay bathed in 
 his own blood, slain by the bullet of the assassin 
 Bellingham. Crompton had lost his friend. 
 
 When the subject of a grant to the inventor cf 
 the spinning-mule was brought up in the House a 
 few days afterwards by Lord Stanley (now Lord 
 Derby), only 5000 was proposed. No one thought 
 of increasing it. "Let's give the man a 1 00 a-year," 
 said an honourable member ; " it's as much as he 
 can drink/' So the vote was agreed to ; though at 
 that very time the duty accruing to the revenue from 
 the cotton wool imported to be spun upon the mule 
 was 300,000 a-year, or more than 1000 a work- 
 ing 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 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 97 
 
 his pattern, were in use. At the present time it is 
 calculated that there are upwards of 30,000,000 
 in use in Great Britain ; and the increase goes on at 
 the rate of above 1,000,000 a-year. In France 
 there were in 1850 about 3,000,000 spindles on 
 Crompton's principle ; and one firm of mule makers 
 (Hibbert, Platt, and Company, of Oldham), make 
 mules at the rate of 500,000 spindles a-year. The 
 immense impetus given to trade, money, civilization, 
 and comfort by this invention is almost incalculable. 
 
 The grant of 5000 was soon swallowed up in 
 the payment of his debts, and in meeting the losses 
 of his business. " Nothing more was ever done for 
 him. The king, who was fond of patronizing merit, 
 took no notice of him ; his eldest son was promised 
 a commission, which he did not get ; and some time 
 after, when struggling through life on only 100 
 a-year, the post of sub-inspector of the factories in 
 Bolton became vacant ; though he applied for the 
 office, for which he was eminently qualified, he was 
 passed over in favour of the natural son of one of 
 the ex-secretaries of state a man who did not know 
 a mule from a spinning-jenny/'* 
 
 Crompton spent his last days in poverty and 
 privation, and died at the age of seventy-four, in 
 1827. 
 
 * Athenaeum. 
 
 34 7 
 
98 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 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 inven- 
 tions 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 impossi- 
 bility 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 MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 99 
 
 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. " Yon 
 might as well bid Arkwright grow the cloth ready 
 made. Weaving by machinery is utterly impossible. 
 You must remember how much more complex a pro- 
 cess it is than spinning, and what a variety of move- 
 ments 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 auto- 
 maton 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 
 
100 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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, throw- 
 ing 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 hundred- 
 weight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were 
 strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 101 
 
 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 con- 
 descended to see how other people wove ; and you 
 will guess my astonishment when I compared their 
 easy modes of operation with mine. Availing my- 
 self 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 inven- 
 tion/' 
 
 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, 
 arid devoted himself to the promotion of his inven- 
 tion. 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. 
 
102 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 pro- 
 spects assumed a brighter aspect, when a large Man- 
 chester firm contracted for the use of four hundred 
 looms. A few days after they were at work, the 
 mill that had been built to receive them stood a 
 heap of blackened ruins. 
 
 Still, he would not give up till all his resources 
 were exhausted, and surely and not slowly that 
 event drew nigh. The fortune of 30,000 with 
 which he started in the enterprise melted rapidly 
 away ; and at length the day came when, with an 
 empty purse, a frame shattered with anxiety arid 
 toil, but with a brave, stout heart still beating in his 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 103 
 
 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 in- 
 satiable. 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 ma- 
 chines, 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- 
 
104 THE MANUFACTUEE OF COTTON. 
 
 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 Eussell. 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 bath man a way of 
 pumping up the water that saved him the wages of 
 two men ; and almost the day before his death, he 
 wrote an elaborate statement of a new mode he had 
 discovered of working the steam-engine. Moved by 
 an irresistible impulse to promote the " public weal/' 
 he truly fulfilled the resolution he expressed in verse, 
 
 " With mind unwearied, still will I engage, 
 In spite of failing vigour and of age, 
 Nor quit the combat till I quit the stage." 
 
 In 1808 he was rewarded by Parliament for his 
 invention of the power-loom, and the losses it brought 
 upon him, by a grant of 10,000. He died in 
 October 1823. 
 
 V. SIR ROBERT PEEL. 
 
 Cartwright's power-loom was afterwards taken in 
 hand and greatly improved by other ingenious persona 
 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 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 105 
 
 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 Eadcliffe, a manufacturer at Mellor, near 
 Manchester, whose invention of the dressing-machine 
 was an important step in advance. With the assist- 
 ance of an ingenious young weaver in his employ- 
 ment, 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, how- 
 ever, 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 Man- 
 chester 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 Black- 
 burn, 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 
 
106 THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 
 
 of the plate, and placing a piece of calico over it, be 
 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 con- 
 sequent increase in the consumption of the various 
 
THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON. 107 
 
 necessaries and luxuries of life, have given a stimulus 
 bo 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 insig- 
 nificant 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 genuiH 
 and enterprise. 
 
fUitoag anb the 
 
 I "THE FLYING COACH." 
 II. THE STEPHENSONS : FATHER AND SON. 
 III. THE GKOWTH OF RAILWAYS. 
 
THE RAILWAY AND TIIE LOCOMOTIVE. Ill 
 
 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 Uni- 
 versity, 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 presump- 
 tion 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 pre- 
 
112 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 sence. 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 he," 
 
 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 Wor- 
 cester 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 halluci- 
 nation 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 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 113 
 
 steam locomotive, and having lines of iron railways 
 instead of the common highways, was regarded for 
 many years after the beginning of the present cen- 
 tury. Even after the practicability of the project had 
 been proved, and steam-engines had been seen puff- 
 ing 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 them- 
 selves 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 loco- 
 motive steam-engine made its appearance. Watt 
 himself took out a patent for a locomotive in 1784, 
 
 (24) 8 
 
114 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 fore- 
 stalled him. The stories of these two men afford a 
 most instructive lesson. A man of undoubted talent 
 and ingenuity, with influential friends both in Corn- 
 wall 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 him- 
 self 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 ab- 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 115 
 
 sorbed 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 him- 
 self. " He always went wrong with the world," said 
 more truly those who knew him. His haste, im- 
 patience, 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 in- 
 vention, 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 Kailway. The humble 
 engine-man, without education, without friends, with- 
 out money, with countless obstacles in his way, and 
 not a single advantage, save his native genius and re- 
 solution, 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 rail- 
 way. 
 
11C THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 117 
 
 fireman on his own account; and "now," said he, 
 when his wages were advanced to twelve shillings a- 
 vveek li 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 at- 
 tended 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, arid 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 Vith 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. 
 
 O 
 
 Eighteen years old by this time, George Stephen- 
 son 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 deficien- 
 cies in that respect. His duties occupied him twelve 
 hours a-day, so that he had but little leisure to him- 
 self; but he was bent on improving himself, 
 
118 THE EA1LWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 arith- 
 metic, 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 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 119 
 
 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 arid 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 com- 
 fortably, though, of course, very humbly; and in the 
 winter of 1802, Fanny, now Mrs. George Stephen- 
 son, rode home from church 011 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 experi- 
 
120 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 ments in the hope of finding out the secret of per- 
 petual 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 New- 
 castle, where George got the place of brakesman. 
 They had not been settled long here when Fanny 
 died a loss which affected George deeply, and at- 
 tached 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 substi- 
 tute; and with his father, and mother, and his own 
 boy to support, at a time when taxes were excessive 
 and food dear, he had only a salary of 50 or 60 
 a-year to meet all claims. He was on the verge of 
 despair, and would have emigrated to America, 
 if, fortunately for our country, he had not been 
 unable to raise sufficient money for his passage. So 
 he had to stay in the old country, where a bright 
 and glorious future awaited him, dark and desperate 
 as the prospect then appeared. 
 
 He still went on making models and experi- 
 ments, 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 
 
THE KAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 121 
 
 fco 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 educa- 
 tion, 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 neigh- 
 bours' 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 dis- 
 covered 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." 
 
122 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 en- 
 tirely to pieces, and in four days had repaired it tho- 
 roughly, so that the workmen could get to the bottom 
 and proceed with their labours. George Stephen- 
 son's skill as an engine-doctor began to be noised 
 abroad, and secured him the post of engine-wright 
 at KiUingworth, with a salary of 100 a-year. 
 Robert was now old enough to go to school, and was 
 sent to one in Newcastle, to which, dressed in a suit 
 of coarse grey stuff cut out by his father, he rode 
 every day upon a donkey. Robert spent much of 
 his spare time in the Literary and Philosophical 
 Institute of Newcastle; and would sometimes take 
 home a volume from the library, which father and 
 son would eagerly peruse together. Occasionally 
 they tried chemical experiments together; and now 
 and then Robert would try his hand by himself. On 
 one occasion he electrified the cows in an adjacent 
 enclosure by means of an electric kite, making the 
 bewildered animals dash madly about the field, with 
 their tails erect on end; and another time he ad- 
 ministered 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 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 123 
 
 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 count- 
 less 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 
 
124 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 opera- 
 tion to this day ; and it may in truth be termed the 
 progenitor of the great locomotive family. 
 
 In 1821 George Stephenson got the appointment 
 of engineer, with 300 of salary, to the Stockton, and 
 Darlington Railway Company, in the Act of Parlia- 
 ment 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 
 
THE KAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 125 
 
 every evening before he went to bed. Robert brought 
 home the prize for mathematics, and showed he had 
 made so much progress at college that, though the 
 80 which the session cost was a large sum to his 
 father at that time, George never failed, then or after- 
 wards, to declare that it was one of the best invest- 
 ments 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 Colum- 
 bia, 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 V' 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 diffi- 
 culty 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 
 
126 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 over whose treacherous depths it was pronounced 
 impossible to form a firm road. It was perfect mad- 
 ness 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 de- 
 cision had been come to as to whether locomotive or 
 fixed engines were to be adopted ; and the Stephen- 
 sons were still battling bravely in favour of the loco- 
 motive against a host of opponents. Kobert 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 consent- 
 ing to employ a locomotive, if they could get one 
 that would run at the rate of ten miles an hour, and 
 not weigh more than six tons, including tender ; and " 
 offering a reward of 500 for the best engine fulfil- 
 ling these conditions. George Stephenson and his 
 son set to work immediately, and the product of their 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 127 
 
 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 prac- 
 ticability 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 Liver- 
 pool 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 Stephen- 
 son acted as engineer ; and thus, in the course of two 
 years, above 321 miles of railway were constructed 
 under his superintendence, at a cost of 11,000,000 
 sterling. Robert at first left his father to attend to 
 the laying out of railways, arid directed his attention 
 
128 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 to the improvement of the locomotive in all its de- 
 tails, experimenting incessantly, and trying now one 
 new device, now another. " It was astonishing/' 
 says Mr. Smiles, " to observe the rapidity of the im- 
 provements 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 garden- 
 ing and farming, and spent many a long day super- 
 intending 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 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 129 
 
 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 Dray ton Manor. Dr. Buckland, the geo- 
 logist, was of the party. One Sunday, as they were 
 returning from church, they observed a train speed- 
 ing 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 
 
 (24) 9 
 
130 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 one of the greatest benefactors of our country 
 passed from among us, leaving his son, Kobert, 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 Kobert 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 examina- 
 tion of the country he walked over the whole of the 
 intervening districts upwards of twenty times. Many 
 other lines, in England and abroad, were executed 
 by him in rapid succession ; and it was stated a few 
 years ago, that the lines of railway constructed 
 under his superintendence had involved an outlay 
 of 70,000,000 sterling. 
 
 The three great works, however, with which his 
 name will always be most intimately associated, and 
 which are the grandest monuments of his genius, are 
 the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, the Britannia 
 Bridge across the Menai Straits, and the Victoria 
 Bridge across the St. Lawrence at Montreal. The 
 first two are sufficiently well known the one 
 springing across the valley of the Tyne, between the 
 busy towns of Newcastle and Gateshead ; the other 
 spanning, in mid air, a wide arm of the sea, at such 
 a height that vessels of large burden in full sail can 
 pass beneath. The third great effort of Robert 
 Stephenson's prolific brain he did not live to see the 
 
THE KAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 131 
 
 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 knight- 
 hood, which, like his father before him, he respect- 
 fully 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 yacht- 
 ing, 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 
 
132 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 condescen- 
 sion which is sometimes affected by much lesser men. 
 A friend (and how many friends he had !) was at 
 once his equal, and treated with republican freedom, 
 yet with the most high-bred courtesy and happy 
 
 considerateness His payment of half the 
 
 debt of 6000, which weighed like an incubus on 
 an institution at Newcastle, is generally known ; but 
 his private charities were as boundless as his nature 
 was generous, and as quietly performed as that nature 
 was unostentatious. Such, then, was Robert Stephen- 
 son, as complete a character in the multifarious rela- 
 tions 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 
 
THE EAIL WAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 133 
 
 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 car- 
 riages full of passengers along them, instead of horse- 
 power?" 
 
 " Propose that to the nation," replied his com- 
 panion, " and see what you will get by it. Why, 
 sir, you would be worried to death for your pains." 
 
134 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 whim- 
 sical, 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, 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 135 
 
 Low 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 enter- 
 tained that the horses' occupation would be gone, 
 and that the noble breed would quickly become 
 extinct. There was no measure to the lamenta- 
 tions over the ruin of that great institution of Eng- 
 lish 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 rail- 
 road 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 king- 
 doms, with many fresh shoots in bud. Up to the end 
 of 1 834, when not a hundred miles of railway were 
 open, the annual average of travellers by coach was 
 
136 THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 Borne 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 Stephen- 
 son, illustrate in a very striking manner the gigantic 
 porportion 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 coals 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 hun- 
 dred 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 en- 
 
THE RAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 137 
 
 treated 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.* 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 cer- 
 tain 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, how- 
 ever, goes on the principle that the labourer is 
 worthy of his hire ; if it works hard, it eats vor- 
 aciously. At ordinary mail speed the engine con- 
 sumes about twenty Ibs. of coke per mile ; so that, 
 costing 2500 to begin with, and spending an 
 allowance of 2000 a year as much as an under- 
 
 * 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. 
 
138 THE HAILWAY AND THE LOCOMOTIVE. 
 
 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 
 nourishing 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 ? 
 
I. THE EDDYSTONE. 
 II. THE BELL ROCK. 
 III. THE SKERRYVORE. 
 
THE LIGH THOUSE. 141 
 
 " 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 con- 
 struction 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, 
 
142 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 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 Kam's Head, on the Cornish coast, lies 
 a perilous reef of rocks, against which the long roll- 
 ing swell of the Atlantic waves dashes with appalling 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 143 
 
 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, how- 
 ever, 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 under- 
 take it, he might have been thought of all others 
 the very last from whose brain so serious a concep- 
 tion 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 disagree- 
 
144 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 able surprises, the astonished guest perhaps took 
 refuge in the garden, and sought repose in a plea- 
 sant arbour by the side of a canal ; but he had 
 scarcely seated himself, when he found himself sud- 
 denly 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 com- 
 mencement 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 LIGHTHOUSE. 145 
 
 the height of eighty feet Having got the apart- 
 ments 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 communi- 
 cation 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 pro- 
 visions 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 
 riot 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 
 
 (-24) 10 
 
146 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 greater elevation. The fourth season, accordingly, 
 <vas 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 insti- 
 tute 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 pre- 
 sumptuous 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 mom- 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 1 47 
 
 ing 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 dis- 
 appearance of the warning light was quickly fol- 
 lowed 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 super- 
 intendence 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 ^n height. In 
 form, it was a smooth, solid cone of elegant simpK- 
 
148 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 city, unbroken by any of those ornamental outwork^ 
 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 light- 
 house. 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 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 140 
 
 an old man in his ninety-fourth year urged them 
 to replenish the buckets from the sea ; but the diffi- 
 culty 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, retreat- 
 ing 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 diffi- 
 culty 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 fox 
 it was then in private hands, and did not come into 
 
1-30 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 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 con- 
 trivance 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 remark- 
 able 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 Eng- 
 land 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 monu- 
 ment of his fame. Having decided that his light- 
 house should be of stone, the next point to be settled 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 15] 
 
 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, gradu- 
 ally lessening in girth in a graceful curve, till a pre- 
 paration being required for the support of the spread- 
 ing 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 founda- 
 tion 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 
 
152 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 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 speak- 
 ing, cohesion and inertia. 
 
 On the 16th October 1759, the warning light 
 once more, after an interval of four years, shone 
 forth OAer 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 ex- 
 hibition of a few glimmering candles was but a 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 153 
 
 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 appa- 
 ratus, 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 Eock, 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 
 
154: THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 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, ex- 
 hibited 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 disap- 
 peared. It was not till the beginning of the century 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 155 
 
 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 gentle- 
 man was appointed engineer to the Northern Light- 
 house 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 Commis- 
 sioners, 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 im- 
 memorial, 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 
 
156 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 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 gradu- 
 ally 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 try- 
 ing 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, 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 157 
 
 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 dis- 
 tance 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 
 
158 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 clothes, and divesting the two boats, as much as 
 possible, of everything that weighted and encum- 
 bered 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 sea- 
 men, 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, 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 159 
 
 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 tor- 
 mented 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 light- 
 ing up the scene, and throwing a lurid gleam across 
 the waters, and the loud dong of the anvils mingling 
 with the dashing of the breakers. 
 
 On the 18th July 1808, the site having been 
 properly excavated, the first stone of the lighthouse 
 was laid by the Duke of Argyle ; and by the end of 
 the second season some five or six feet of building 
 had been erected, and were left to the mercy of the 
 waves till the ensuing spring. The third season's 
 operations raised the masonry to a height of thirty 
 feet above the sea, and the fourth season saw the 
 completion of the tower. On the first night in 
 February of the succeeding year (1811) the lamp 
 was lit, and beamed forth across the waters. 
 
 The Bell Rock Tower is 100 feet in height, 42 feet 
 in diameter at the base, and 1 5 feet at the top. The 
 door is 30 feet from the base, and the ascent is by 
 
1 60 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 a massive bronze ladder. The " light " is revolving, 
 and presents a white and red light alternately, by 
 means of shades of red glass arranged in a frame. 
 The machinery which causes the revolution of the 
 lamp is also applied to the tolling of two large bells, 
 in order to give warning to the mariner of his 
 approach to the rock in foggy weather, thus reviving 
 the traditional practice from which the rock takes 
 its name. 
 
 III. THE SKERRYVORE. 
 
 " Having crept upon deck about four in the 
 morning, I find we are beating to windward off the 
 Isle of Tyree, with the determination on the part of 
 Mr. Stevenson that his constituents should visit a 
 reef of rocks called Skerry Vhor, where he thought 
 it would be essential to have a lighthouse. Loud 
 remonstrances on the part of the commissioners, who 
 one and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion, 
 whatever it may be, rather than continue this dreadful 
 buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. 
 Stevenson, and great kicking, bouncing, and squab- 
 bling upon that of the yacht, who seems to like the 
 idea of Skerry Vhor as little as the commissioners. 
 At length, by dint of exertion, came in sight of this 
 long range of rocks (chiefly under water), on which 
 the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There 
 appear a few low broad rocks at one end of the reef 
 which is about a mile in length. These are never 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 1 6 1 
 
 entirely under water, though the surf dashes over 
 them. We took possession of it in the name of the 
 commissioners, and generously bestowed our own 
 great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was 
 carefully measured by Mr. Stevenson. It will be a 
 most desolate position for a lighthouse the Bell 
 Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land 
 is the wild island of Tyree, at 1 4 miles distance/' 
 
 Such is an entry in the diary of Sir Walter Scott's 
 Yacht Tour, on the 27th August 181 4; but although 
 the necessity of a lighthouse on the Skerry Vhor, or, 
 as it is now generally called, Skerryvore, was fully 
 acknowledged by the authorities, it was not till 
 twenty-four years afterwards that the undertaking 
 was actually commenced, under the superintendence 
 of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the son of the eminent engi- 
 neer who erected the Bell Rock Lighthouse. 
 
 In the execution of this great work, if the son 
 had, as compared with his father, certain advantages 
 in his favour, he had also various disadvantages to 
 contend with at Skerryvore from which the engineer 
 of the Bell Rock was free. Mr. Alan Stevenson 
 had steam power at his command, and the benefit 
 of all the experience derived from the experiments 
 of his predecessors in similar operations ; but at 
 the same time, the rock on which he had to work 
 was at a greater distance from the land, and separated 
 from it by a more dangerous passage than that of 
 either the Bell or the Eddystone ; and the geological 
 
 (24) 
 
162 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 formation of which the rock is composed, was much 
 more difficult to work upon. The Skerryvore ia 
 distant from Tyree, the nearest inhabited island, 
 about 1 1 miles ; even in fine weather the intervening 
 passage is a trying one, and in rough weather no 
 ship can live in such a sea, studded as it is with 
 treacherous rocks. The sandstone of the Bell Rock 
 is worn into rugged inequalities, which favoured the 
 operations of the engineer ; but the action of the 
 waves on the igneous formation of the Skerryvore 
 has given it all the smoothness and: slippery polish 
 of a mass of dark coloured glass. Indeed, the fore- 
 man of the masons, on first visiting the rock, not 
 unjustly compared the operation of ascending it to 
 that of " climbing up the neck of a bottle." 
 
 The 7th August 1838 was the first day of entire 
 work on the rock, and with succeeding ones was 
 spent in the erection of a temporary barrack of wood, 
 for the men to lodge in on the rock. It was com- 
 pleted before the season closed ; but one of the first 
 heavy gales in November wrenched it from its hold- 
 
 J o 
 
 ings, and swept it into the sea, leaving nothing to 
 mark the site but a few broken and twisted stanchions, 
 attached to one of which was a portion of a great beam 
 which had been shaken and rent, by dashing against 
 the rocks, into a bundle of ribands. Thus in one night 
 were obliterated the results of a whole season's toil, 
 and with them, the hopes the men cherished of 
 having a dwelling on the rock, instead of on board 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. . 163 
 
 the brig, where they suffered intensely from the 
 miseries of constant sickness. 
 
 The excavation of the foundations occupied the 
 whole of the summer season of 1839, from the 6th 
 May to the 3d September. The hard, nitrified rock 
 held out stoutly against the assaults of both iron 
 and gunpowder ; and much time was spent in hol- 
 lowing out the basin in which the lighthouse was to 
 be fixed. From the limited extent of the rock and 
 the absence of any place of shelter, the blasting was 
 an operation of considerable danger, as the men had 
 no place to run to, and it had to be managed with 
 great caution. Only a small portion of the rock 
 could be blown up at a time, and care had to be 
 taken to cover the part over with mats and nettings 
 made of old rope to check the flight of the stones. 
 The excavation of the flinty mass occupied nearly 
 two summers. 
 
 The operations of 1840 included, much to the 
 delight of the workmen, the reconstruction of the 
 barrack, to which they were glad to remove from 
 the tossing vessel. The second edifice was more 
 substantial than the first, and proved more enduring. 
 Rude and narrow as it was, it offered, after the dis- 
 comforts of the vessel, almost a luxurious lodging to 
 its hardy inmates. 
 
 "Packed 40 feet above the weather-beaten rock, 
 in this singular abode/' writes the engineer, Mr. 
 AJan Stevenson, " with a goodly company of thirty 
 
164 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 men, I have spent many a weary day and night, at 
 those times when the sea prevented anyone going down 
 to the rock, anxiously looking for supplies from the 
 shore, and earnestly longing for a change of weather 
 favourable to the recommencement of the works. For 
 miles around nothing could be seen but white foaming 
 breakers, and nothing heard but howling winds and 
 lashing waves. Our slumbers, too, were at times fear- 
 fully interrupted by the sudden pouring of the sea 
 over the roof, the rocking of the house on its pillars, 
 and the spurting of water through the seams of the 
 doors and windows ; symptoms which, to one suddenly 
 aroused from sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate 
 of the former barrack, which had been engulphed in 
 the foam not twenty yards from our dwelling, and 
 for a moment seemed to summon us to a similar 
 fate. On two occasions in particular, these sensa- 
 tions were so vivid as to cause almost every one to 
 spring out of bed ; and some of the men fled from 
 the barrack by a temporary gangway to the more 
 stable, but less comfortable shelter afforded by the 
 bare walls of the lighthouse tower, then unfinished, 
 where they spent the remainder of the night in the 
 darkness and the cold/' 
 
 In spite of their anxiety to get on with the work, 
 and their intrepidity in availing themselves of every 
 opportunity, these gallant men were often forced by 
 stress of weather into an inactivity which we may 
 be sure they felt sadly irksome and against the 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 165 
 
 grain. " At such seasons," says Mr. Stevenson, 
 " much of our time was spent in bed, for there alone 
 we had effectual shelter from the winds and the 
 spray which reached every cranny in the walls of 
 our barrack." On one occasion they were for fourteen 
 days without communication with the shore, and 
 when at length the seas subsided, and they were 
 able to make the signal to Tyree that a landing at 
 the rock was practicable, scarcely twenty-four hours' 
 stock of provisions remained on the rock. In spite 
 of hardships and perils, however, the engineer declares 
 that "life on the Skerry vore Kock was by no means 
 destitute of its peculiar pleasures. The grandeur of 
 the ocean's rage the deep murmur of the waves 
 the hoarse cry of the sea birds, which wheeled con- 
 tinually over us, especially at our meals the low 
 moaning of the wind or the gorgeous brightness of 
 a glossy sea and a cloudless sky and the solemn 
 stillness of a deep blue vault, studded with stars, or 
 cheered by the splendours of the full moon, were 
 the phases of external things that often arrested our 
 thoughts in a situation where, with all the bustle 
 that sometimes prevailed, there was necessarily so 
 much time for reflection. Those changes, together 
 with the continual succession of hopes and fears con- 
 nected with the important work in which we were 
 engaged, and the oft recurring calls for advice or 
 direction, as well as occasional hours devoted to 
 reading and correspondence, and the pleasures of 
 
166 THE LIGHTHOUSE. 
 
 news from home, were more than sufficient to recon- 
 cile me to nay, to make me really enjoy an unin- 
 terrupted residence, on one occasion, of not less than 
 five weeks on that desert rock." 
 
 The Skerryvore Lighthouse was at length success- 
 fully completed. The height of the tower is 138 
 feet 6 inches, of which the first 2 6 feet is solid. It 
 contains a mass of stone work of more than double 
 the quantity of the Bell Rock, and nearly five times 
 that of the Eddystone. The entire cost, including 
 steam tug and the building of a small harbour at 
 Hynish for the reception of the little vessel that 
 now attends the lighthouse, was 86,977, The 
 light is revolving, and reaches its brightest state once 
 every minute. It is produced by the revolution of 
 eight great annular lenses around a central light, with 
 four wicks, and can be seen from the deck of a vessel 
 at the distance of 18 miles. Mr. Alan Stevenson 
 sums up his deeply interesting narrative in the fol- 
 lowing words : " In such a situation as the Skerry- 
 vore, innumerable delays and disappointments were 
 to be expected by those engaged in the work ; and 
 the entire loss of the fruit of the first season's labour 
 in the course of a few hours, was a good lesson in 
 the school of patience, and of trust in something 
 better then an aim of flesh. During our progress, 
 also, cranes and other materials were swept away 
 by the waves ; vessels were driven by sudden gales 
 to seek shelter at a distance from the rocky shores 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE. 167 
 
 of Mull and Tyree ; and the workmen were left on 
 the rock desponding and idle, and destitute of many 
 of the comforts with which a more roomy and 
 sheltered dwelling, in the neighbourhood of friends, 
 is generally connected. Daily risks were run in 
 landing on the rock in a heavy surf, in blasting the 
 splintery gneiss, or by the falling of heavy bodies 
 from the tower on a narrow space below, to which 
 so many persons were necessarily confined. Yet had 
 we not any loss of either life or limb ; and although 
 our labours were prolonged from dawn to night, and 
 our provisions were chiefly salt x the health of the 
 people, with the exception of a few slight cases of 
 dysentery, was generally good throughout the six 
 successive summers of our sojourn on the rock. The 
 close of the work was welcomed with thankfulness 
 by all engaged in it ; and our remarkable preserva- 
 tion was viewed, even by many of the most thought- 
 less, as, in a peculiar manner, the gracious work of 
 Him by whom the very hairs of our heads are 
 all numbered!" 
 
Steam 
 
 I. JAMES SYMINGTON. 
 II. EOBEET FULTON. 
 III. HENEY BELL. 
 IV. OCEAN STEAMEKS. 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 171 
 
 Stem 
 
 I. - JAMES SYMINGTON. 
 
 OF the many triumphs of enterprise achieved by the 
 agency of that tremendous power which James Watt 
 tamed and put in harness for his race, perhaps the 
 greatest and most momentous is that which has re- 
 versed the old proverb, that " time and tide wait for 
 no man," given ten-fold meaning to the truth that 
 " seas but join the regions they divide," and enabled 
 our ships to dash across the trackless deep in spite 
 of opposing elements, 
 
 " Against wind, against tide, 
 Steadying with upright keel," 
 
 in a fraction of the time, and with a fraction of the 
 cost and peril of the old mode of naval locomotion. 
 How amply realized has been James Bell's prediction 
 more than half a century ago, " I will venture to 
 affirm that history does not afford an instance of 
 such rapid improvement in commerce and civiliza- 
 tion, as that which will be effected by steam vessels!" 
 Towards the close of the last century, a number 
 of ingenious minds were in travail with the scheme 
 of steam navigation. The Marquis de Jouffroy in 
 France, and Fitch and Rumsey in America, were 
 successful in experiments of its feasibility ; but it is 
 
1 72 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 to the efforts of Miller and Symington in Scotland, 
 followed up by those of Fulton and Bell, that we are 
 chiefly and more immediately indebted for the prac- 
 tical development of the project. 
 
 Having a natural bent for mechanical contrivances, 
 and abundance of leisure and money to indulge his 
 tastes, Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire, 
 somewhere about the year 1785, was full of schemes 
 for driving ships by means of paddle-wheels, by no 
 means a novel idea, for it was known to the Romans, 
 if not to the Egyptians, and had often been tried 
 before. 
 
 All he aimed at originally was, to turn the wheels 
 by the power of men or horses ; and this he managed 
 to do successfully enough. Single, double, and treble 
 boats were often to be seen driving along Dalswinton 
 Lake, moved by paddle-wheels instead of oars. On 
 one occasion, at Leith, one of the double boats, sixty 
 feet long, propelled by two wheels, each of which 
 was turned by a couple of men, was matched against 
 a Custom-house boat, which was reckoned a fast 
 sailer. The paddle-wheels did duty very well ; 
 but the men were soon knocked up with turning 
 them, and the want of some other motive power 
 was strongly felt. A young man named Taylor, 
 who was tutor to Mr. Miller's boys, is said to have 
 suggested the use of steam ; but whether this be so 
 or not, it was not till Miller met with James 
 Symington that the idea assumed a practical form. 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 173 
 
 In 1786 James Symington, then joint-engineer 
 with his brother George, to the Wanlockhead Mines, 
 was struck with the idea which, as we have seen, 
 several other ingenious minds were also busy with 
 about the same time, of rendering the steam-engine 
 available for locomotion both on land and sea. 
 After much study and reflection, he succeeded in 
 embodying the idea in a working model. It was 
 supported on four wheels, which were moved in any 
 direction by means of a small steam-engine, and 
 could carry 16 cwt., besides coals, water, &c. It 
 was exhibited in Edinburgh in the summer of 1 786, 
 and made a considerable sensation. Mr. Miller, fond 
 of all such inventions, did not fail to get a sight of 
 Symington's locomotive engine, the first time he 
 was in town. He was delighted with its ingenuity 
 and completeness, and procured an interview with 
 the author. Of course, Miller was full of his 
 own experiments, and told Symington the whole 
 story of his efforts to propel vessels by paddle-wheels, 
 and the want of some stronger, and more constant 
 power than that of men to turn the capstan, upon 
 which the motion of the wheels depended. Syming- 
 ton at once expressed the opinion he had formed, 
 that steam was equally available for vessels as for 
 carriages, and showed him how the steam-engine 
 which he had devised for his locomotive could be 
 applied to the paddle-wheels. Miller was so much 
 struck by his statements, which he illustrated by 
 
174 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 reference to the model, that he determined to have 
 an engine made on the same plan, and fitted into 
 one of his double boats. Accordingly, an engine 
 was built under Symington's directions and super- 
 intendence, sent to Dalswinton, and put together in 
 October 1788. The engine, in a strong oak frame, 
 was placed in the one half of a double pleasure- 
 boat, the boiler occupying the other half, and the 
 paddle-wheels being fixed in the middle. 
 
 The autumn was withering into winter, the yellow 
 leaves were swirling to the ground with every little 
 breath of wind, and the boughs were beginning to 
 show forth bare and grim, when the little boat was 
 launched upon the bosom of Dalswinton Loch. At 
 length all the preparations were finished, and on the 
 1 4th November Mr. Miller had the delight of seeing 
 the vessel gliding over the mimic waves of the lake 
 at the rate of five miles an hour. The company on 
 board the boat on that memorable occasion were 
 Mr. Miller himself, of course, nervous with pleasure 
 and exultation ; Taylor, the tutor ; Alexander Na- 
 smyth (the well-known landscape painter, and father 
 of the man who, in the next generation, was to 
 invent the wonderful steam-hammer, that knocks 
 masses of iron about like putty, and can yet so 
 moderate its force as to crack a nut without bruising 
 the kernel) ; a brisk stripling with strongly marked 
 features, by name Harry Brougham, afterwards to 
 be Lord Chancellor of England, and perhaps the most 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 175 
 
 many-sided genius of his time ; and last and 
 greatest of the group there was one of Mr. Miller's 
 tenants, the farmer of Ellisland, Robert Burns, the 
 great bard of Scotland, enjoying to the full, no 
 doubt, the novelty of the expedition, but, we must 
 suppose, unconscious of its import and grand future 
 consequences, since he has accorded it no commemo- 
 rative verse. " Many a time," says Mr. James 
 Nasmyth, son of the distinguished painter, " I have 
 heard my father describe the delight which this first 
 and successful essay at steam navigation yielded the 
 party in question. I only wish Burns had immor- 
 talized it in fit, clinking rhyme, for, indeed, it was a 
 subject worthy of his highest muse." 
 
 The experiment was next tried on a large scale 
 with a canal boat, on the Forth and Clyde Canal, 
 but one of the wheels broke. Not to be balked, 
 Symington had stronger wheels made, and the next 
 time the steam was put on, the vessel went off at the 
 rate of seven miles an hour. The experiment was 
 several times repeated with success. The vessel, 
 however, was so slight, that many more trips would 
 have knocked it to pieces ; and it was therefore 
 dismantled. The fitting up of these vessels, and the 
 working of them, formed a heavy drain upon Mr. 
 Miller's purse ; and having laid satisfactory proof 
 before the world that the thing could be done, 
 he relinquished the enterprise, and left it to be 
 worked out by others. Just then, however, no one 
 
176 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 came forward to fill his place ; and for some yeffra 
 the idea slumbered. 
 
 In 1801 Symington could not afford to indulge 
 in further efforts at his own expense, but he found 
 a patron in Lord Dundas, who commissioned him to 
 construct a steam-tug for dragging canal boats. A 
 stout, serviceable tug was built; and a series of 
 experiments entered upon to test her efficiency, 
 which cost upwards of ^3000. One bleak, stormy 
 spring-day in 1802, the people on the banks of the 
 Forth and Clyde Canal might have been seen 
 staring with wonder, at the short, stumpy little 
 tug pushing gallantly on at the rate of three or 
 four miles an hour, with a strong wind right in her 
 teeth, that no other vessel could make head against, 
 and two loaded vessels (each of more than 70 
 tons burden) in tow. By itself, the tug could do 
 six miles an hour without any great strain. The 
 company made some objection, however, about the 
 banks of the canal being injured, and the tug fell 
 into disuse. It served an important end, though, in 
 giving both Fulton, and Bell a basis for their opera- 
 tions, and must be considered the parent of our 
 modern steam-craft. 
 
 II. ROBERT FULTON. 
 
 After Dr. Cartwright, the inventor of the power- 
 loom, had retired penniless from his manufacturing 
 enterprises, and had taken up his abode in London, 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 177 
 
 one of the constant visitors at his modest residence 
 in Marylebone Fields, was a thin, sharp-featured 
 American, about twenty-eight years of age, an artist 
 by profession, and formerly student of Benjamin 
 West, who, however, was now much more interested 
 in the art of engineering than the art of painting. 
 From an early age he had shown a taste for 
 mechanics, and was fond of spending his play-hours 
 at school loitering about workshops and factories, 
 watching the men at their work, and studying the 
 machines and instruments they used. This sojourn 
 in England had brought him into contact with the 
 Duke of Bridge water, the great canal projector, and 
 Lord Stanhope, well known for his improvements in 
 the printing press and other contrivances, in whose 
 company his boyish bent towards mechanics was 
 revived, and became quite a passion with him. He 
 threw aside his brushes and palette, and applied him- 
 self to his favourite pursuit with heart and soul. 
 Having formed the acquaintance of Cartwright, he 
 became a daily visitor at his house, and the enthu- 
 siastic, good-natured doctor and he would sit debating 
 for hours the great problem : " Whether it were 
 practicable to move vessels by steam ?" Fulton, 
 eager, restless, vivacious, with pencil in hand, was per- 
 petually sketching plans of paddle-wheels ; while the 
 doctor, calm, dignified, and earnest, equally engrossed 
 in the subject, was contriving various modes of 
 bringing steam to act upon them. Neither of them 
 
 (24) 12 
 
178 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 had any doubt that the thing could be done, but the 
 "how" long baffled them ; and even though the 
 doctor constructed " the model of a boat, which, 
 being wound up like a clock, moved on the water in 
 a highly satisfactory manner/' nothing practical 
 came of their cogitations till some years after. 
 
 While on a visit to Paris, Fulton was struck with 
 the injury which standing navies of men-of-war in- 
 flicted on the mercantile marine, and gave his whole 
 attention, as he says, "to find out the means of 
 destroying such engines of oppression, by some method 
 which would put it out of the power of any nation 
 to maintain such a system, and compel every govern- 
 ment to adopt the simple principles of education, 
 industry, and a free circulation of its produce." The 
 means presented itself to his mind in the shape of 
 an explosive shell, called the torpedo, by which any 
 ship of war could be blown to pieces ; and for six 
 or seven years he occupied himself in fruitless 
 attempts to get first the government of France, and 
 then that of England, to take up his project. He 
 did not abandon his schemes with regard to steam- 
 vessels, however ; but, under the auspices of Mr. 
 Livingstone, the American ambassador, made several 
 experiments. One vessel of considerable size broke 
 through the middle when the engines were placed 
 on board, but a second one was rather more success- 
 ful, though but a slow rate of movement was 
 attained. His project came under the notice of 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 179 
 
 Napoleon, then First Consul, who did not fail to 
 appreciate its value. " It was," he said, " capable 
 of changing the face of the world \" and he directed 
 a commission to inquire into its merits. Nothing 
 came of it, however. 
 
 Shortly after, Fulton visited Scotland, and got an 
 introduction to Symington, whom he pressed for a 
 sight of his boat. Symington generously consented, 
 and gave him a short sail on board the steam-tug. 
 Fulton made no concealment of his intention of start- 
 ing steamboats in his own country, whither he was 
 about to return, and asked Symington to allow him 
 to make a few notes of his observations on board. 
 Symington had no objections ; and, therefore, he 
 says, " Fulton pulled out a memorandum book, and 
 after putting several pointed questions respecting 
 the general construction and effect of the machine, 
 which I answered in a most explicit manner, he 
 jotted down particularly everything then described, 
 with his own remarks upon the boat while moving 
 with him on board along the canal/' Fulton was 
 very liberal in his promises not to forget his assist- 
 ance, if he got steamboats established in America ; 
 but Symington never heard anything more of him. 
 
 Fulton was at New York in 1806, and busy 
 getting a steamboat put together. It was a costly 
 undertaking, and he had little spare cash of his own ; 
 so he offered shares in the concern to his friends, but 
 no one would have anything to do with so ridiculous 
 
180 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 a scheme, as they thought. " My friends/' says 
 Fulton, " were civil, but shy. They listened with 
 patience to my explanations, but with a settled cast 
 of incredulity on their countenances. I felt the full 
 force of the lamentation of the poet, 
 
 ' Truths would you teach, to save a sinking land, 
 All shun, none aid you, and few understand.' 
 
 As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the build- 
 ing-yard while my boat was in progress, I have often 
 loitered, unknown, near the idle groups of strangers, 
 gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries 
 as to the object of this new vehicle. The language 
 was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The 
 loud laugh rose at my expense, the dry jest, the wise 
 calculation of losses and expenditure, the dull, but 
 endless repetition of ' the Fulton Folly/ Never did 
 a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a 
 warm wish, cross my path." 
 
 Let them laugh that win. The success which 
 shortly attended Fulton's scheme turned the tables 
 upon those who had mocked at him. The Cler- 
 mont was completed in August 1807, and the 
 day arrived when the trial was to be made on the 
 Hudson river. " To me/' wrote Fulton, " it was a 
 most trying and interesting occasion. I wanted 
 some friends to go on board to witness the first 
 successful trip. Many of them did me the favour 
 to attend as a mark of personal respect ; but it was 
 manifest they did it with reluctance, fearing to be 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 181 
 
 partners of my mortification, and not of my triumph. 
 The moment arrived in which the word was to be 
 given for the vessel to move. My friends were in 
 groups on the deck. There was anxiety mixed with 
 fear among them. They were silent, sad, and weary. 
 I read in their looks nothing but disaster, and almost 
 repented of my efforts. The signal was given, and 
 the boat moved on a short distance, and then stopped 
 and became immovable. To the silence of the pre- 
 ceding moment now succeeded murmurs of discontent 
 and agitation, and whispers and shrugs. I could 
 hear distinctly repeated ' I told you so ; it is a 
 foolish scheme ; I wish we were well out of it.' I 
 elevated myself on a platform, and stated that I 
 knew not what was the matter ; but if they would 
 be quiet, and indulge me for half an hour, I would 
 either go on or abandon the voyage. I went below, 
 and discovered that a slight misadjustment was the 
 cause. It was obviated. The boat went on ; we 
 left New York ; we passed through the Highlands ; 
 we reached Albany ! Yet even their imagination 
 superseded the force of fact. It was doubted if it 
 could be done again, or if it could be made, in any 
 case, of any great value." 
 
 The simple-minded country folk on the banks of 
 the Hudson were almost frightened out of their wits 
 at the awful apparition which they saw gliding along 
 the river, and which, especially when seen indistinctly 
 looming through the night, looked to their bewildered 
 
182 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 eyes, " a monster moving on the water, defying the 
 winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke/' 
 Pine-wood was used for fuel, and whenever the fire 
 was stirred, a great burst of sparks issued from the 
 chimney. " This uncommon light," says Golden, the 
 biographer of Fulton, " first attracted the attention 
 of the crews of other vessels. Notwithstanding the 
 wind and tide were adverse to its approach, they 
 saw with astonishment that it was rapidly coming 
 towards them ; and when it came so near that the 
 noise of the machinery and paddles were heard, the 
 crews in some instances shrunk beneath their decks 
 from the terrific sight, and others left their vessels to 
 go on shore ; while others, again, prostrated them- 
 selves, and besought Providence to protect them from 
 the approach of the horrible monster which was 
 marching on the tides, and lighting its path by the 
 fires which it vomited." 
 
 With the novelty of the spectacle its terror died 
 away, and people soon got tired of rushing out to 
 see the remarkable machine that had once seemed so 
 miraculous to them. The Glermont soon began to 
 travel regularly as a passage-boat between Albany 
 and New York, other steam- vessels were constructed 
 on its model, and by degrees the steam marine of 
 America grew into the host it is at present. Thirty 
 years after the first experiment on the Hudson, it 
 was calculated 1300 steamboats had been built in 
 the States. 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 183 
 
 Fulton did not live long to enjoy his triumphs, 
 He died in 1815, having been actively engaged in 
 promoting steam navigation to his last hours. 
 
 III. HENKY BELL. 
 
 The honour which in America attached to Fulton 
 as the man who first brought the steamboat into 
 use, and to the River Hudson as being the scene of 
 the experiment, in our own country fell (in a some- 
 what less degree, being subsequent), to Henry Bell, 
 and the River Clyde. 
 
 Brought up as a millwright, Bell, from want of 
 funds to start in business, was obliged for many 
 years to gain his living as a common carpenter in 
 Glasgow, where he was noted among the trade as 
 being very fond of " schemes," and suspected on that 
 account by narrow-minded folk of being not very 
 reliable in the lower branches of his craft. Scheme 
 after scheme issued from his fertile mind ; but he 
 was rash and hasty in working them out, and few 
 proved of much worth. Steam navigation being one 
 of the vexed problems of the time, had every fascina- 
 tion for his peculiar genius ; and he seems to have 
 been brooding over it as the last century was closing, 
 and the present opening upon the world. When 
 Fulton visited Symington's invention, Bell appears 
 to have accompanied him, and to have afterwards 
 corresponded with him on the subject. "This/ 5 he 
 says, " led me to think of the absurdity of writing 
 
184 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 my opinions to other countries, and not putting it 
 in practice myself in my own country ; and from 
 these considerations I was roused to set on foot a 
 steamboat, for which I made a number of different 
 models before I was satisfied." Having removed to 
 the little village of Helensburgh, on the banks of the 
 Clyde, and there established a hotel and bath-house, 
 which his wife managed, he endeavoured to work 
 the passage-boats by which visitors were brought to 
 the place, by means of paddle-wheels worked by the 
 hand, instead of oars ; but the plan did not succeed 
 very well, for the same reason that led to Mr. Miller's 
 abandonment of it the inefficiency of manual power, 
 which could not be applied with sufficiently sus- 
 tained and continuous force. He therefore gave it 
 up, and turned his attention to the employment of 
 steam power for the same purpose. Of course, he 
 was laughed at for his pains ; and Henry Bell's pro- 
 ject for having steamers on the Clyde became a 
 standing joke among the frequenters of the watering- 
 place. Even after the permanent success of Fulton's 
 scheme was known, people would not moderate their 
 incredulity; but Bell's faith, which had never wavered, 
 was now confirmed, and he set about the work with 
 redoubled energy. 
 
 In 1811, Bell, having procured the necessary 
 funds, had a steam-boat built of twenty-five tons 
 and four horse power. He named it the Comet, 
 because a comet had just then appeared in the 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 185 
 
 north-west of Scotland. The Comet began to run 
 regularly between Glasgow and Helensburgh in 
 January 1812, and continued to ply successfully 
 during the summer of that year. At first, how- 
 ever, she brought rather loss than gain to her pro- 
 jector. People were shy of trusting themselves 
 on board, and parties interested in the stage- 
 coaches and sailing vessels, spread all sorts of 
 absurd reports about her. It was not till she had 
 gone for some time without accident, that tourists be- 
 gan to think they might as well save their money 
 and their time by patronizing the new mode of con- 
 veyance. In the second year Bell took the Comet 
 off the Clyde, and sent her on a tour round the open 
 coasts of the three kingdoms. Before long the safety 
 and utility of steam navigation was admitted on 
 all hands, and numerous rival enterprises were on 
 foot. In 1820 the Comet was lost between Glas- 
 gow and Fort William; and in the following year 
 another of Bell's vessels was burnt to the water- 
 edge two misfortunes that carried 3000 out of 
 his pocket. His rivals, with abundant capital, soon 
 drove him out of the field, and Bell sank into poverty 
 and neglect. A small annuity from the Clyde trus- 
 tees, and a subscription among his friends, to keep 
 him from starving, were all the rewards he ever re- 
 ceived for his enterprise and perseverance. He died 
 in 1830 in the sixty-fourth year of his age. 
 
186 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 IV. OCEAN STEAMERS. 
 
 In the quarter of a century which elapsed between 
 1812, when the Comet first began to churn the 
 waters of the Clyde, and 1837, steam navigation 
 progressed steadily and surely. At first, content 
 with plying along rivers and quiet bays, steamers 
 by-and-by ventured out upon the open sea. We 
 owe the regular establishment of deep-sea packets to 
 the courage and enterprise of Mr. David Napier of 
 Glasgow, " who," says Mr. Scott Russell, " has effected 
 more for the improvement of steam navigation than 
 any other man/' He was quick to appreciate the 
 capabilities of steam- vessels, and saw that they were 
 fit for something more than mere inland voyages. 
 Before starting one of them upon the open sea, how- 
 ever, he carefully estimated the danger to be en- 
 countered and the difficulties to be overcome. He 
 took passage at the worst season of the year in one 
 of the sailing vessels which formerly plied between 
 Glasgow and Belfast, and which often required a 
 week to perform a journey that is now done by 
 steam in a few hours. 
 
 Stationing himself on an elevated part of the deck, 
 he kept a close watch on the movements of the ves- 
 sel, observing the tossing to which she was subjected 
 by the waves, the extent of the dip when she sank 
 into a trough, the height of elevation when lifted on 
 the summit of a wave, and calculating in his mind 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION. 187 
 
 how all this would tell on the paddle-wheels. 
 Through the roughest of the storm, when the vessel 
 was pitching worst, and the wind blowing at its 
 fiercest, he kept his place on deck, regardless of the 
 drenching spray and the blast that almost carried 
 him off his legs. When at length he had satis- 
 fied himself by the observation of his own eyes and 
 inquiries of the captain and crew, that there was no- 
 thing in the voyage which a steamer could not en- 
 counter, he retired contentedly to his cabin, leaving 
 everybody astonished at his strange curiosity respect- 
 ing the effect of rough weather on the ship. 
 
 Not long after David Napier started the Rob 
 Roy steam-packet between Greenock and Belfast, 
 and afterwards between Dover and Calais. In the 
 course of two or three years more he had established 
 steam communication between Holyhead and Dublin, 
 Liverpool and Greenock, and various other parts. 
 The length of each unbroken passage was then con- 
 sidered the great difficulty; but as steamers got 
 improved both in form and machinery, passages 
 of greater length were successfully accomplished. 
 Steamers traversed in all directions the German 
 Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and, in short, 
 all the waters on the eastern side of the Atlantic ; 
 and were in use upon all the rivers and lakes of any 
 size in Europe. 
 
 At length, in 1836, the startling project was set 
 on foot of superseding the far-famed New York and 
 
188 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 Liverpool packet ships by a fleet of steam-shipa, 
 Before this the Savannah, a steam vessel of 300 tons, 
 had, in 1819, crossed from New York to Liverpool 
 in twenty-six days, partly with sails and partly with 
 steam; and another steam vessel had, in 1825, made 
 the voyage from England to Calcutta; but one 
 swallow does not make a summer, and many learned 
 folks, on both sides of the Atlantic, shook their heads 
 doubtfully at the daring scheme of regular steam 
 communication across 13,000 miles of ocean. The 
 experiment was to be made, however; and on the 
 4th April 1838, the Sirius, of 700 tons and 320 
 horse power, sailed from Cork for the far West. 
 Four days after the Great Western followed in her 
 wake from Bristol. 
 
 Great was the excitement in New York as the 
 time drew nigh when the Sirius was considered due. 
 For days together the Battery was crowded with 
 anxious watchers, from the first breaking of the cold, 
 grey dawn till night dropped its dark curtain on the 
 scene. At that time a telescope was a thing to be 
 begged, borrowed, or stolen, to be got, somehow or 
 other, if only for a minute, and a man who possessed 
 one was to be looked up to, made much of, and, if 
 possible, coaxed out of the loan of it. All day long 
 a hundred telescopes swept the sea. The ocean 
 steamer was the great topic of the hour, and " any 
 appearance of her?" the constant question when two 
 people met. On St. George's day, the 23d April, a 
 
STEAM NAVIGATION". 189 
 
 dim, dusky speck on the far horizon grew under the 
 eye of the thousands of breathless watchers into a 
 long train of smoke, beneath which, as the hours wore 
 on, appeared the black prow of a huge steam-boat. 
 There she was, long looked for come at last ; and with 
 the American colours at the fore, and the flag of Old 
 England rustling at the stern, the Sirius swept into 
 the harbour amidst the cheers of the multitude, the 
 ringing of the city bells, and the firing of salutes. 
 The excitement reached its climax, and the shouting 
 and firing grew deafening, when, some few hours later 
 on the same auspicious day, the Great Western came 
 to anchor alongside of her rival. 
 
 Twenty-two years have passed since then, and the 
 marvel of 1838 has become a mere everyday affair. 
 There are some fourteen different lines of steamers, 
 comprising more than fifty vessels, running between 
 the United States and Europe, to say nothing of 
 the magnificent steam fleets of the Peninsular and 
 Oriental, the Royal West India, British and North 
 American, Pacific, Australian, South Western, and 
 other companies. 
 
 The employment of iron in the construction of 
 ships, thus securing at once lightness and strength, 
 and the invention of the screw propeller, in 1836, 
 by Mr. J. P. Smith, a farmer at Hendon, by means 
 of which a vessel can combine all the qualities of a 
 first-rate sailing ship with the use of steam power, 
 gave a great impulse to steam navigation, which is 
 
190 STEAM NAVIGATION. 
 
 still making steady and continuous progress. From 
 one steam vessel in 1812 the number in the king- 
 dom has risen successively to 20 in 1820, 824? in 
 1840, and over 2000 in 1860. During 1858, 153 
 steamers were built in the United Kingdom, of which 
 112 were of iron. It is interesting to observe the 
 advance in size of the steam vessels from their first 
 introduction on the Clyde. 
 
 length . Breadth. 
 
 1812. Comet 40 feet 10$ feet 
 
 1825. Enterprise, (built expressly to go to India, coaling 
 
 at intermediate stations) 122 27 
 
 1835. Tagus (for Mediterranean) 182 28 
 
 1838. Great Western (the first ship built expressly for 
 
 Transatlantic service) 236 35J 
 
 1844. Great Britain (the first large screw ship, and largest 
 
 iron ship up to that time) 322 51 
 
 1853. Himalaya (iron) 370 43 
 
 1856. Persia (do.) 390 45 
 
 1859. Great Eastern (do.) 680 83 
 
 In the interval between 1812 and 1870 the num- 
 ber of steamers in the United Kingdom has increased 
 from one to nearly three thousand ; and the ocean- 
 going steamer of 1870 is nearly six times the length 
 of that of 1825, and seventeen times the length 
 of the Comet, while the difference in tonnage is still 
 greater. How Fulton or Bell would open their eyes 
 at the sight of a vast moving city, such as the Big 
 Ship, an eighth of a mile in length, propelled by both 
 paddle-wheels and screw, each worked by four huge 
 
It0tt J-tanttfetate. 
 
 HENRY COST. 
 
IRON MANUFACTURE. 193 
 
 HENRY CORT. 
 
 THE multifarious use of iron in our day has given 
 its name to the age. We have got far beyond the 
 primitive applications of that metal every day it 
 is supplanting some other substance, and there is no 
 saying where the wide-spread and varied service we 
 exact from it will stop. The invention of the steam- 
 engine, and the improvement of manufacturing 
 machines, would be comparatively valueless, unless 
 we had at command a cheap and abundant supply 
 of iron for their construction. The land is covered 
 with a net-work of iron rails, traversed by iron 
 steeds gulfs and valleys are spanned by iron arches 
 and iron tubes huge ships of iron ride upon the 
 deep. Even stones and bricks are being discarded 
 for this all-useful substance, and of iron we are build- 
 ing houses, palaces, theatres, churches, and spacious 
 domes. There is no end to its uses. 
 
 And yet, it is only between seventy and eighty 
 years ago since Britain, the richest of all countries 
 in native ore, was dependent upon others for her 
 supply of the manufactured metal. We wanted but 
 little iron in those days, compared with the present 
 demand, and yet that little we could not furnish 
 
 (24) 1 3 
 
194 IKON MANUFACTURE. 
 
 ourselves with. As much as a million and a half 
 a-year went out of our pockets to purchase wrought 
 iron from Sweden alone, and we were good customers 
 to Russia as well. All the iron that our country 
 could then produce was some 1*7,000 tons. The 
 man who showed us how to turn our own ore to 
 account, who rendered us independent of all other 
 countries for our supply, and made us the great pur- 
 veyors of wrought iron to the world, who opened up 
 to us this great source of national wealth, was 
 Henry Cort of Gosport. 
 
 The great difficulty which he solved was how to 
 get wrought iron out of the crude iron as it came 
 from the smelting furnace, without using charcoal. 
 With but a small tract of country, densely peopled, 
 we had but a scant supply of wood at our command. 
 The great forests which once overspread the land were 
 gradually vanishing, partly before the spread of popu- 
 lation and the growth of towns, and partly from the 
 inroads made on them by the demand for timber. 
 Formerly, the first transformation of the ore into pig 
 iron (the crude form of the manufactured metal) was 
 effected by means of wood ; and the consumption was 
 so great that an Act was passed in 1581 restraining 
 its use. Soon afterwards Lord Dudley discovered 
 that coal would answer the purpose just as well, and 
 obtained a patent of monopoly. He reaped but little 
 profit from his invention, however, for his iron-works 
 were destroyed by a mob ; and it was not till a 
 
IRON MANUFACTURE. 195 
 
 century afterwards, when people got more alarmed 
 at the growing scarcity of timber, and the increased 
 demand for it, that the plan was generally adopted. 
 This was one step in the right direction, but another 
 yet remained to be made, for the manufacture was 
 still hampered in our country by the want of wood 
 for the second process the conversion of crude 
 into malleable iron, in which state alone it is fit for 
 .service. 
 
 About the year 1785, Henry Cort, iron-master, 
 of Gosport, after many years of patient and weari- 
 some research, of anxious thought, and indefatigable 
 experiment, in which he spent a private fortune 
 of some 20,000, perfected a couple of inven- 
 tions of priceless value. The first was the process 
 of converting pig iron into wrought iron by the 
 flame of pit coal in a puddling furnace, thus dis- 
 pensing with the use of charcoal, the cost and 
 scarcity of which had before formed such a dead 
 weight on the trade, and placed us at such a disad- 
 vantage compared with Sweden and Eussia. The 
 second was a further process for drawing the iron 
 into bars by means of grooved rollers. Till then, 
 this operation had to be performed with hammer 
 and anvil, and was very tedious and laborious. The 
 new system not only reduced the cost and labour of 
 producing iron to one-twentieth of what they were 
 previously, but greatly improved the quality of the 
 article produced 
 
196 IRON MANUFACTURE. 
 
 It is not easy to estimate all that Henry Cort's 
 inventions have done for this country. Without 
 them we should have lost an overflowing and inex- 
 haustible source of national wealth, and, moreover, 
 large sums would have been taken out of the country 
 in the purchase of wrought metal ; we should never 
 have been able to give full scope to the great me- 
 chanical inventions brought forth towards the close 
 of the last, and the opening of the present century ; 
 we should have been debarred from taking rank as 
 the great engineers and engine-makers for the rest 
 of the world. The direct gain to this country from 
 the inventions of Henry Cort, which enabled us to 
 work up our own iron, has been calculated as equal 
 by this time to not less than a hundred millions ; 
 and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the benefits 
 which it has conferred. Lord Sheffield's prophecy, 
 that the adoption of these processes would be worth 
 more to Britain than a dozen colonies, may be said 
 to have been fulfilled. 
 
 Like many another benefactor of his country, Corfc 
 got little good out of his invention for himself. He 
 took out a patent for his process, and arranged with 
 the leading iron-masters to accept a royalty of ten 
 shillings a ton for the use of them. With a large 
 fortune in prospect, his purse was- just then exhausted 
 by the expenses he had incurred in experiments and 
 researches ; and he had to look out for a capitalist 
 to aid him in working the patent on his own account. 
 
IRON MANUFACTURE. 197 
 
 As ill luck would have it, he entered into partnership 
 with a certain Adam Jellicoe, then deputy-paymaster 
 of the navy. Jellicoe was considered a man of sub- 
 stance, and a " thoroughly respectable " character. 
 He was to advance the ready money, and to receive 
 in return half of the profits of the trade, Cort assign- 
 ing to him, by way of collateral security, his patent 
 rights. For a year or two all went well. The 
 patent was everywhere adopted, and Cort's own iron 
 works drove a lucrative and growing trade. He 
 seemed in a fair way of getting back the fortune he 
 had spent in bringing out the inventions, doubled or 
 trebled, as he well deserved. The respectable Jellicoe 
 was seized with a mortal sickness : at his death his 
 desk was filled by another, his books were examined, 
 and it turned out that he had been robbing the 
 government for many a year back, and was a large 
 defaulter. Cort, of course, had nothing to do with 
 this villany, but he had to pay the penalty of it. 
 As Jellicoe's partner he was responsible, in those 
 days of unlimited liability, for all Jellicoe's debts ; 
 but that was not the worst of it. The treasurer of 
 the navy was not content to exact only the payment 
 of Jellicoe's defalcations, as he had no doubt a right 
 to do, but confiscated the whole of Cort's patent 
 rights, business, and property, which would have paid 
 the debt seven or eight times over, had it been fairly 
 valued. 
 
 This incident has never been properly cleared up, 
 
198 IKON MANUFACTURE. 
 
 but what glimpses of its secret passages have been 
 obtained, seem to indicate clearly enough that poor 
 Cort was the victim, not of one, but of two or more 
 swindlers. To the day of his death he never could 
 obtain a distinct account of the proceedings ; and 
 when, after his death, a Royal Commission was ap- 
 pointed to inquire into the matter, the treasurer of 
 the navy and his deputy took care, a week or two 
 before the Commission met, to indemnify each other 
 by a joint release, and to burn their accounts for 
 upwards of a million and a half of public money, for 
 the application of which they were responsible, as 
 well as all papers relating to Cort's case. When the 
 Commission met, and the treasurer and his deputy 
 were called before it, they refused to answer questions 
 which would criminate themselves. 
 
 His connection with Jellicoe was, of course, the 
 ruin of Henry Cort. He had no means of re-estab- 
 lishing himself in business; he was robbed of all 
 income from his patents ; and he died ruined and 
 broken-hearted ten years after, leaving a family of 
 nine children, without a sixpence in the world. Four 
 of these children now survive old, infirm, and indi- 
 gent only saved from being dependent upon parish 
 bounty by pensions, amounting in the aggregate to 
 90 per annum. Well may it be said, "There 
 should be more gratitude in our Iron Age to the 
 children of HENRY CORT." 
 
(Electric 
 
 I. MR. COOKE. 
 
 II. PROFESSOR WHEATSTONE. 
 III. THE SUBMAEINE TELEGRAPH. 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGHAPH, 201 
 
 " Speak the word and think the thought, 
 Quick 'tis as with lightning caught 
 Over, under lands or seas, 
 To the far antipodes ; 
 Here again, as soon as gone, 
 Making all the earth as one ; 
 Moscow speaks at twelve o'clock, 
 London reads ere noon the shock." 
 
 I. MR. COOKE. 
 
 OF all the marvels of our time, the most marvellous is 
 the subjugation of the electric fluid, that potent ele- 
 mental force, twin brother of the fatal lightning, 
 to be our submissive courier, to bear our messages from 
 land to land, and " put a girdle round about the earth 
 in forty minutes." The Prospero that tamed this Ariel 
 was no individual genius, but " two single gentlemen 
 rolled into one." The idea of. employing the electric 
 current for the conveyance of signals between distant 
 points, can be traced pretty far back in date ; but 
 to Mr. Cooke and Professor Wheatstone is un- 
 doubtedly due the credit of having made the electric 
 telegraph an actual and accomplished fact, and ren- 
 dered it practicable for everyday uses. 
 
 Having served for a number of years as an officer 
 in our Indian army, Mr. Cooke came back to Europe 
 to recruit his health in the beginning of 1836, and 
 took up his abode at Heidelberg. He found agree- 
 
202 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 able occupation for his leisure in the study of 
 anatomy, and in the construction of anatomical 
 models for his father's museum at Durham, where he 
 was a professor in the university. Entirely self- 
 taught in this delicate art, Mr. Cooke applied himself 
 to it with characteristic ardour, and attained remark- 
 able skill. One day he happened to witness some 
 experiments which were made by Professor Moncke, 
 to illustrate the feasibility of electric signalling. 
 A current of electricity was passed through a long 
 wire, and set a magnetic needle at the end quivering 
 under its influence. The experiment was a very 
 simple one, and not at all novel ; but Cooke had 
 never paid any attention to the subject before, and 
 was much struck with what he saw. He became 
 strongly impressed with the possibility of employing 
 electricity in the transmission of telegraphic intelli- 
 gence between distant places. From the day he 
 witnessed the experiments in Professor Moncke's class- 
 room, he forsook the dissecting knife, threw aside 
 his modelling tools, and applied himself to the reali- 
 zation of his conception. With such ardour and 
 devotion did he labour, and such skill and ingenuity 
 did he bring to the work, that within three weeks 
 he had constructed a telegraph with six wires, form- 
 ing three complete metallic currents, and influencing 
 three needles, by the varied inclination of which 
 twenty-six different signals were designated. In 
 that short time he had also invented the detector, by 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 203 
 
 which injuries to the wires, whether from water, 
 fracture, or contact with substances capable of divert- 
 ing the current, were readily traced, and the alarum, 
 by which notice is given at one end of the wire that 
 a message is coming from the other. Both these 
 contrivances were of the utmost value, indeed, 
 without them electric telegraphy would be imprac- 
 ticable, and are still in use. Possessing more of a 
 mechanical than a scientific genius, Mr. Cooke be- 
 stowed more of his time and ingenuity on the per- 
 fection of a telegraph to be worked by clock 
 mechanism, set in action by the withdrawal of a 
 detent by an electro magnet than in the completion 
 of the electric telegraph pure and simple. 
 
 Soon after having invented his telegraph, he 
 came over to London, and spent the rest of the year 
 in making a variety of instruments, and in efforts to 
 get his telegraph introduced on the Liverpool and 
 Manchester Railway. He found an obstacle to the 
 complete success of his mechanical telegraph, in the 
 difficulty of transmitting to a distance sufficient 
 electric power to work the electro magnet upon 
 which its action depended, A friend advised him 
 to consult Professor Wheatstone, then known to be 
 deeply engaged in electrical experiments, with a 
 view to telegraphy ; and accordingly, an interview 
 between them took place in February 1837. 
 
204 
 
 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 II. PROFESSOK WHEATSTONE. 
 
 Mr. Charles Wheatstone, F.RS., and Professor of 
 Experimental Philosophy in King's College at the 
 time of that interview, had made considerable ad- 
 vances in the scientific part of the enterprise. At 
 the commencement of his career as a maker and 
 seller of musical instruments in London, he was led 
 to investigate the science of sound ; and from his 
 researches in that direction, he was led much as 
 Herschel was led to devote himself to optics, and to 
 study the philosophy of light. He was the first to 
 point out the peculiarity of binocular vision, and to 
 describe the stereoscope, which has since become so 
 popular an instrument. Gradually, however, his 
 thoughts and researches came to be steadfastly 
 directed to the application of electricity to the com- 
 munication of signals. In determining the rate at 
 which the electric current travels through a wire he 
 had laid down, he made an important stride towards 
 the end in view. He proved by a series of most 
 ingenious experiments, that one spark of electricity 
 leaps on before another, and that its progress is a 
 question of time. He found that electricity travels 
 through a copper wire as fast as, if not faster, than 
 light, that is, at the rate of 200,000 miles in a 
 second ; but through an iron wire, electricity 
 moves at the rate of only 15,400 miles in a second. 
 In 1836 Mr. Wheatstone had begun experiments in 
 
THE ELECTKIC TELEGRAPH. 205 
 
 the vaults of King's College, with four miles of wire, 
 properly insulated, and was working out the details 
 of a telegraph, the scientific principles of which he 
 had already laid down. He had discovered an 
 original method of converting a few wires into a 
 considerable number of circuits, so that the greatest 
 number of signals could be transmitted by a limited 
 number of wires, by the deflection of magnetic 
 needles. Mr. Wheatstone, however, was somewhat 
 backward in the mechanical parts of the scheme, and 
 the meeting between him and Cooke was therefore of 
 the greatest benefit to both, and an admirable illus- 
 tration of the old proverb, that two heads are better 
 than one. Had they never been brought together, 
 had they kept on working out their own ideas 
 apart each would, no doubt, have been able to pro- 
 duce an electric telegraph ; but a great deal of time 
 would have been lost, and their respective efforts 
 less complete and valuable than the one they effected 
 in conjunction. Cooke wanted sound, scientific 
 knowledge ; Wheatstone wanted mechanical inge- 
 nuity ; and their union supplied mutual deficiencies. 
 A partnership was immediately formed between 
 them. Before their combined genius all difficulties 
 vanished ; and in the June of the same year they 
 were able to take out a patent for a telegraph with 
 five wires and five needles. Their respective shares 
 in its invention are clearly marked out by Sir J. 
 Brunei and Professor Daniell, who, as arbiters be- 
 
206 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 fcween the two upon that delicate question, gave the 
 following award in 1841 : 
 
 " Whilst Mr. Cooke is entitled to stand alone as 
 the gentleman to whom this country is indebted for 
 having practically introduced and carried out the 
 electric telegraph as a useful undertaking, promising 
 to be a work of national importance ; and Professor 
 Wheatstone is acknowledged as the scientific man 
 whose profound and successful researches had al- 
 ready prepared the public to receive it as a project 
 capable of practical application, it is to the 
 united labours of two gentlemen so well qualified 
 for mutual assistance, that we must attribute the 
 rapid progress which this important invention has 
 made during the five years since they have been 
 associated." 
 
 Shortly after the taking out of a patent, wires 
 were laid down between Euston Square Terminus 
 and Camden Town Station, on the North-Western 
 Railway ; and the new telegraph was subjected to 
 trial. Late in the evening of the 25th July 1837, 
 in a dingy little room in one of the Euston Square 
 offices, Professor Wheatstone sat alone, with a hand 
 on each handle of the signal instrument, and an 
 anxious eye upon the dial, with its needles as yet in 
 motionless repose. In another little room at the 
 Camden Town Station, Mr. Cooke was seated in a 
 similar position before the instrument at the other 
 end of the wires, along with Mr., now Sir Charles 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 207 
 
 Fox, Robert Stephenson, and some other gentlemen. 
 It was a trying, agitating moment for the two in- 
 ventors, how Wheatstone's pulse must have throbbed, 
 and his heart beat, as he jerked the handle, broke 
 the electric current, and sent the needles quivering 
 on the dial ; in what suspense he must have spent 
 the next few minutes, holding his breath as though 
 to hear his fellow's voice, and almost afraid to 
 look at the dial lest no answer should be made ; with 
 what a thrill of joy must each have seen the needles 
 wag knowingly and spell out their precious message, 
 the " All's weU ; thank God," that flashed from 
 heart to heart, along the line of senseless wire. 
 " Never," said Wheatstone, " did I feel such a tumul- 
 tuous sensation before, as when all alone in the still 
 room 1 heard the needles click ; and as I spelled 
 the words, I felt all the magnitude of the inven- 
 tion now proved to be practicable beyond cavil or 
 dispute." 
 
 A few days before this trial of the telegraph in 
 London, Steinheil, of Munich, is said to have had 
 one of his own invention at work there ; and it is a 
 difficult question to decide whether he or Cooke and 
 Wheatstone were the first inventors. It is, however, 
 a question of no consequence, as each worked inde- 
 pendently. Since the first English electric telegraph 
 was patented, there have been a thousand and one 
 other contrivances of a similar kind taken out ; but 
 it may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, 
 
208 THE ELECTKIC TELEGKAPH, 
 
 the original apparatus, with the improvements which 
 its own inventors have made on it, is not still the 
 best of them all. 
 
 From being used merely to carry railway messages, 
 the telegraph was brought into the service of the 
 general public ; the advantages of such almost in- 
 stantaneous communication were readily appreciated ; 
 and eight years after Messrs. Cooke and Wheatstone 
 took out their patent, lines of telegraph to the extent 
 of 500 miles were in operation in England upon the 
 original plan. In 1855 telegraphic correspondence 
 had become so general, that the Electric Telegraph 
 Company was started to supply the demand. In 
 that establishment the Needle Telegraph of Wheat- 
 stone and Cooke is the one generally used, with the 
 Chemical Recording Telegraph of Bain for special 
 occasions. By means of the latter, blue lines of 
 various lengths, according to an alphabet, are drawn 
 upon a ribbon of paper, and as many as 20,000 
 words can be sent in an hour, though the ordinary 
 rate is 100 per minute. In the purchase of patent 
 rights alone, the Company have spent 170,000, 
 and they are every year adding to the length of 
 their wires. In June 1850 they had 6730 miles 
 of wires, and despatched 29,245 messages a year. 
 In December 1853 they had 24,340 miles of wires, 
 and despatched 212,440 messages a-year. Their 
 lines now extend over a much larger mileage, and 
 convey a greatly increased number of messages. The 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 209 
 
 Magnetic Telegraph Company have also a large ex- 
 tent of wires, and do a considerable business. 
 
 III. THE SUBMARINE TELEGRAPH. 
 
 The land telegraph having had such success, the 
 next step was to carry the wires across the deep, and 
 link continent to continent, an all-important step 
 for an island kingdom such as ours, with its legion of 
 distant colonies. The success of a submerged cable 
 between Gosport and Portsmouth, and of one across 
 the docks at Hull, proved the feasibility of a water 
 telegraph, at least on a small scale, and it was not 
 long before more ambitious attempts were made. 
 On the 28th of August 1850, a cable, 30 miles long, 
 in a gutta percha sheathing, was stretched at the 
 bottom of the straits between Dover and Cape 
 Grisnez, near Calais. Messages of congratulation 
 sped along this wire between England and France ; 
 and although a ridge of rocks filed the cable asunder 
 on the French coast, the suspension of communication 
 was only temporary. The link has once more been 
 established, and is in daily use. The first news sent 
 by the wire to England was of the celebrated coup 
 d'etat of the 2d December, which cleared the way 
 for Louis Napoleon's ascent of the throne. Numerous 
 other cables have since been sunk beneath the 
 waters ; complete telegraphic communication has just 
 been established between England and India, and 
 will, no doubt, before long be extended to Australia. 
 
 (24) 14 
 
210 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 The greatest enterprise of this kind, however, still 
 remains unaccomplished that is, the laying of the 
 Atlantic cable. A company was started in 1856 to 
 carry out this great enterprise, the governments of 
 Great Britain and the United States engaging to assist 
 them, not only with an annual subsidy of 10,000 
 a-year for twenty-five years, but to furnish the men 
 and ships required for laying the cable from one side 
 of the Atlantic to the other. The chief difficulty 
 which engaged the attention of Mr. Wildman White- 
 house and the other agents of the notable enterprise 
 was the enormous size of the cable which, it was 
 thought, would be necessary. The general belief at 
 that time was, that the greater the distance to be tra- 
 versed, the larger must be the wire along which the 
 electric current was to pass, and that the rate of speed 
 would be in proportion to the size of the conductor. 
 Mr. Whitehouse, however, thought it would be as well 
 to begin by making sure that this was really the 
 case, and that a monster cable was essential; and 
 after some three thousand separate observations and 
 experiments, was delighted to find that the difficulty 
 which stared them in the face was imaginary. In- 
 stead of a large cable transmitting the current faster 
 than a small one, he ascertained beyond a doubt, 
 that the bigger the wire, the slower was the passage 
 of the electricity. It would be needful, therefore, 
 fco make the cable only strong enough to stand the 
 strain of its own weight, and heavy enough to sink 
 
THE ELECTEIG TELEGRAPH. 211 
 
 to the bottom. A single wire would have been 
 quite sufficient, but a strand of seven wires of the 
 finest copper was used for the cable, so that the 
 fracture of one of them might not interfere with the 
 communication, as long as one wire was left intact 
 the current would proceed. A triple coating of 
 gutta percha, to keep the sea from sucking out the 
 electricity, and a thick coating of iron wire, to sink 
 the cable to the bottom and give it strength, were 
 added to the copper rope, and then the cable was 
 complete. No less than 325,000 miles of iron and 
 copper wire were woven into this great cable, as 
 much as might be wound thirteen times round the 
 globe; and its weight was about a ton per mile. 
 The length of the cable was 18,947 miles some 
 600 miles being allowed to come and go upon, in 
 case of accidents. 
 
 The end of July 1857 was selected for the sailing 
 of the ships that were to lay the cable, as fogs arid 
 gales were then out of season, and no icebergs to be 
 met with. On the 8th of August, the Agamemnon 
 (English) and Niagara (American), with four smaller 
 steamers to attend them, and each with half of the 
 mighty cable in her hold, got up their steam and 
 .left Yalentia Harbour. One end of the cable was 
 carried by a number of boats from the Niagara on 
 shore, where the Lord-Lieutenant was in waiting 
 to receive it, and place it in contact with the bat- 
 teries, which were arranged in a little tent upon the 
 
212 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 beach. A slight accident to the cable for a little 
 while delayed the departure of the ships; but by the 
 10th they had got 200 miles out to sea, and so far 
 the cable had been laid successfully. Messages passed 
 and repassed between the ships and the shore. The 
 next day the engineer discovering that too much 
 cable was being paid out, telegraphed to the people 
 on board to put a greater grip on it ; the operation 
 was clumsily managed, and the cable snapped, sink- 
 ing to a depth of 12,000 feet. 
 
 Not disheartened, however, the Company replaced 
 the lost portion of the cable ; the Government again 
 furnished ships and men, and the cable was actually 
 laid at the bottom of the Atlantic from Valentia Bay 
 to Trinity Harbour. 
 
 Addresses of congratulation passed between the 
 Queen and the President of the States, and numerous 
 messages were transmitted. But gradually the sig- 
 nals grew fainter and more faint, till they ceased 
 altogether. The cable was stricken dumb. A little 
 to the north of the fiftieth parallel of latitude, at the 
 bottom of the Atlantic, where the plateau is unbroken 
 by any great depression, some 1500 miles of the dis- 
 abled cable were lying, on a soft bed of mud, which 
 was constantly thickening, at a depth of from 10,000 
 to 15,000 feet. 
 
 The importance of telegraphic communication be- 
 tween England and the United States was, how- 
 ever, so obvious that its projectors were not to be 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 213 
 
 daunted by the failure they had sustained. Nor 
 was it altogether a failure. They had proved that 
 a cable could be laid, and messages flashed through 
 it. What was wanted was evidently a stronger 
 cable, which should be less liable to injury, and more 
 perfect in its insulation of the telegraphic wires. 
 
 From 1858 to 1864, the Company were engaged 
 in the difficult task of raising fresh funds, and in 
 endeavouring to secure grants from the British and 
 American Governments. Their men of science, 
 meanwhile, were devising improvements in the form 
 of cable, and contriving fresh apparatus to facilitate 
 its submersion. Eventually the Telegraph Con- 
 struction and Maintenance Company, an union of 
 the Gutta Percha Company with the celebrated firm 
 of Glass and Elliott, constructed an entirely new 
 cable, which was not only costlier, but thicker and 
 stronger than the preceding one. The conductor, 
 three hundred pounds per mile, and one-seventh of 
 an inch thick, consisted of seven No. 18 copper 
 wires, each one-twentieth of an inch in thickness. 
 The core or heart of the cable, says a writer in 
 " Chambers' s Encyclopaedia," was formed of four 
 layers of gutta percha alternating with four of 
 Chatterton's compound (a solution of gutta percha in 
 Stockholm tar) ; the wire and conductor being seven 
 hundred pounds per mile, and nine-twentieths of 
 an inch thick. Outside this was a coating of hemp 
 or jute yarn, saturated with a preservative com- 
 
214. THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 position ; while the sheath consisted of ten iron 
 wires, each previously covered with five tarred 
 Manilla yarns. The whole cable was an inch and 
 one eighth thick, weighed thirty-five and three-quar- 
 ter hundredweights per mile, and was strong enough 
 to endure a breaking strain of seven tons and three- 
 quarters. During the various processes of manufac- 
 ture, the electrical quality of the cable was tested to 
 an unusual extent. The portions of finished core 
 were tested by immersion in water at various tem- 
 peratures ; next submitted to a pressure of six hun- 
 dred pounds to the square inch, to imitate the ocean 
 pressure at so great depth ; then the conducting 
 power of the copper wire was tested by a galvano- 
 meter ; and various experiments were also made on 
 the insulating property of the gutta percha. The 
 various pieces having been thus severely put to the 
 proof, they were spliced end to end, and the joints 
 or splicings tested. In a word, nothing was left 
 undone that could insure the success or guarantee 
 the stability of the new cable. 
 
 When completed, the cable measured two thou- 
 sand three hundred miles, and weighed upwards of 
 four thousand tons. It was felt that such a burden 
 could only be intrusted to Brunei's "big ship," the 
 Great Eastern. For this purpose three huge iron 
 tanks were built, iu the fore, middle, and aft holds 
 of the vessel, each from fifty to sixty feet in dia- 
 meter, and each twenty and a half feet in depth ; 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 215 
 
 and in these the cable was deposited in three vast 
 coils. 
 
 On the 23rd of July 1865, the Great Eastern left 
 Valentia, the submarine cable being joined end to 
 end to a more massive shore cable, which was hauled 
 up the cliff at Foilhummerum Bay, to a telegraph- 
 house at the top. The electric condition of the 
 cable was continually tested during the ship's voy- 
 age across the Atlantic ; and more than once its 
 efficiency was disturbed by fragments of wire pierc- 
 ing the gutta percha and destroying the insulation. 
 At length on August 2nd, the cable snapped by 
 overstraining, and the end sank to the bottom in 
 two thousand fathoms water, at a distance of one 
 thousand and sixty-four miles from the Irish coast. 
 Attempts were made to recover it by dredging. A 
 five-armed grapnel, suspended to the end of a stout 
 iron-wire rope five miles long, was flung overboard ; 
 and when it reached the bottom, the Great Eastern 
 steamed to and fro in the direction where the lost 
 cable was supposed to be lying; but failure followed 
 upon failure, and the cable was never once hooked. 
 There remained nothing to be done but for the Great 
 Eastern to return to England with the news of her 
 non-success, and leaving (including the failure of 
 1857-8) nearly four thousand tons of electric cable 
 at the bottom of the ocean. 
 
 The promoters of ocean telegraphy, however, were 
 determined to be resolute to the end. A new Com- 
 
216 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 pany was formed, new capital was raised, and a 
 third cable manufactured, differing in some respects 
 from the former. The outside jacket was made of 
 hemp instead of jute ; the iron wires of the sheath 
 were galvanized, and the Manilla hemp which 
 covered them was not tarred. Chiefly through the 
 absence of the tar, the weight of the cable was 
 diminished five hundred pounds per mile ; while its 
 strength or breaking strain was increased. A suffi- 
 cient quantity of this improved cable was made to 
 cross the Atlantic, with all due allowance for slack ; 
 and also a sufficient quantity of the 1865 cable to 
 remedy the disaster of that year. 
 
 On July 13th, 1866, the Great Eastern once 
 more set forth on her interesting voyage, accom- 
 panied by the steamers Terrible, Medway, and 
 Albany, to assist in the submersion of the cable, 
 and to act as auxiliaries whenever needed. The 
 line of route chosen lay about midway between those 
 of the 1858 and 1865 cables, but at no great dis- 
 tance from either. The Great Eastern exchanged 
 telegrams almost continuously with Valentia as she 
 steamed towards the American continent ; and great 
 were the congratulations when she safely arrived in 
 the harbour of Heart's Content, Newfoundland, on 
 the 27th. 
 
 Operations were next commenced to recover the 
 end of the 1865 cable, and complete its submergence. 
 The Albany, Medivay, and Terrible were despatched 
 
THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 217 
 
 on the 1st of August, to the point where, " deep 
 down beneath the darkling waves," the cable was 
 supposed to be lying, and on the 9th or 10th they 
 were joined by the Great Eastern, when grappling 
 was commenced, and carried on through the remain- 
 der of the month. The cable was repeatedly 
 caught, and raised to a greater or less height from 
 the ocean bed ; but something or other snapped or 
 slipped every time, and down went the cable again. 
 At last, after much trial of patience, the end of the 
 cable was safely fished up on September 1st ; and 
 electric messages were at once sent through to 
 Valentia, just as well as if the cable had not had 
 twelve months' soaking in the Atlantic. An addi- 
 tional length having been spliced to it, the laying 
 recommenced ; and on the 8th the squadron entered 
 Heart's Content, having thus succeeded in laying a 
 second line of cable from Ireland to America. 
 
 The two cables, the old and the new, continued 
 to work very smoothly during the winter of 1866 
 and 1867 ; but in May 1867, the new cable was 
 damaged by an iceberg, which drifted across it at a 
 distance of about three miles from the Newfoundland 
 shore. The injury was soon repaired ; but again, in 
 July 1867, the same cable broke at about fifty miles 
 from Newfoundland. 
 
 The earlier cable continued to work for several 
 years, but both cables gave way towards the close of 
 the autumn of 1870. No special inconvenience was 
 
218 THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 
 
 felt, however, as two years ago a French line of 
 cable was laid down between Europe and America ; 
 the Great Eastern being again employed, and the 
 operations being conducted under the superintend- 
 ence of English electricians. The two British cables 
 will probably be repaired in the spring of the pre- 
 sent year (1871). 
 
 Submarine cables have multiplied recently, and 
 almost every ocean flows over the mysterious wires 
 which flash intelligence beneath the rolling waters 
 from point to point of the civilized world. By a 
 telegraph- cable, which is partly submarine, the 
 India Office in Westminster is united with the 
 Governor-General and his Council at Calcutta. 
 There is also communication between Singapore and 
 Australia, and the network of ocean telegraphy is 
 being so rapidly extended that, before long, the 
 British Government in the metropolis will be enabled 
 to convey its instructions in a few hours to the 
 administrative authorities in every British colony. 
 And thus the words which the poet puts into the 
 mouth of " Puck " will be nearly realized in a sense 
 the poet never dreamed of " I'll put a girdle round 
 about the world in forty minutes." 
 
Silk 
 
 I. JOHN LOMBE. 
 II. WILLIAM LEE. 
 III. JOSEPH MAKIE JACQUAHD. 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 221 
 
 Sift 
 
 I. - JOHN LOMBE. 
 
 TN the reign of the Emperor Justinian, a couple of 
 Persian monks, on a religious mission to China, 
 brought away with them a quantity of silkworms' 
 eggs concealed in a piece of hollow cane, which they 
 carried to Constantinople. There they hatched the 
 eggs, reared the worms, and spun the silk, for the 
 first time introducing that manufacture into Europe, 
 and destroying the close monopoly which China had 
 hitherto enjoyed. From Constantinople the know- 
 ledge and the practice of the art gradually extended 
 to Greece, thence to Italy, and next to Spain. Each 
 country, as in turn it gained possession of the secret, 
 strove to preserve it with jealous care ; but to little 
 purpose. A secret that so many thousands already 
 shared in common, could not long remain so, although 
 its passage to other countries might be for a time 
 deferred. France and England were behind most of 
 the other states of Europe in obtaining a knowledge 
 of the " craft and mystery." The manufacture of 
 silk did not take root in France till the reign of 
 Francis I. ; and was hardly known in England till 
 the persecutions of the Duke of Parma in 1585 
 drove a great number of the manufacturers of 
 
222 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 Antwerp to seek refuge in our land. James I. was 
 very anxious to promote the breed of silkworms, and 
 the production of silken fabrics. During his reign a 
 great many mulberry-trees were planted in various 
 parts of the country among others, that celebrated 
 one in Shakspeare's garden at Stratford-on-Avon 
 and an attempt was made to rear the worm in our 
 country, which, however, the ungenial climate frus- 
 trated. Silk-throwsters, dyers, and weavers were 
 brought over from the Continent ; and the manufac- 
 ture made such progress that, by 1629, the silk- 
 throwsters of London were incorporated, and thirty 
 years after employed no fewer than 40,000 hands. 
 The emigration from France consequent on the 
 revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) added not 
 only to the numbers engaged in the trade, but 
 to the taste, skill, and enterprise with which it was 
 conducted. It is not easy to estimate how deeply 
 France wounded herself by the iniquitous persecution 
 of the Protestants, or how largely the emigrants 
 repaid by their industry the shelter which Britain 
 afforded them. 
 
 Although the manufacture had now become fairly 
 naturalized in England, it was restricted by our 
 ignorance of the first process to which the silk was 
 subjected. Up till 1718, the whole of the silk used 
 in England, for whatever purpose, was imported 
 " thrown/' that is, formed into threads of various 
 kinds and twists. A young Englishman named 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTUKE. 223 
 
 John Lombe, impressed with the idea that our 
 dependence on other countries for a supply of thrown 
 silk prevented us from reaping the full benefit of the 
 manufacture, and from competing with foreign 
 traders, conceived the project of visiting Italy, and 
 discovering the secret of the operation. He accord- 
 ingly went over to Piedmont in 1715, but found 
 the difficulties greater than he had anticipated. He 
 applied for admittance at several factories, buKwas 
 told that an examination of the machinery was 
 strictly prohibited. Not to be balked, he resolved, 
 as a last resort, to try if he could accomplish by 
 stratagem what he had failed to do openly. Dis- 
 guising himself in the dress of a common labourer, 
 he bribed a couple of the workmen connected with 
 one of the factories, and with their connivance 
 obtained access in secret to the works. His visits 
 were few and short ; but he made the best use of his 
 time. He carefully examined the various parts of the 
 machinery, ascertained the principle of its operation, 
 and made himself completely master of the whole 
 process of throwing. Each night before he went 
 to bed he noted down everything he had seen, and 
 drew sketches of parts of the machinery. This plot, 
 however, was discovered by the Italians. He and 
 his accomplices had to fly for their lives, and not 
 without great difficulty escaped to a ship which con- 
 veyed them to England. 
 
 Lombe had not forgotten to carry off with him 
 
224 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 his note-book, sketches, and a chest full of machinery, 
 and on his return home lost no time in practising the 
 art of " throwing" silk. On a swampy island in the 
 river Derwent, at Derby, he built a magnificent mill, 
 yet standing, called the " Old Silk Mill" Its erec- 
 tion occupied four years, and cost. 30,000. It was 
 five storeys in height, and an eighth of a mile in 
 length. The grand machine numbered no fewer 
 than 13,384 wheels. It was said that it could 
 produce 318,504,960 yards of organzine silk thread 
 daily ; but the estimate is no doubt exaggerated. 
 
 While the mill was building, Lombe, in order to 
 save time and earn money to carry on the works, 
 opened a manufactory in the Town Hall of Derby. 
 His machinery more than fulfilled his expectations, 
 and enabled him to sell thrown silk at much lower 
 prices than were charged by the Italians. A thriv- 
 ing trade was thus established, and England relieved 
 from all dependence on other countries for " thrown" 
 silk. 
 
 The Italians conceived a bitter hatred against 
 Lombe for having broken in upon their monopoly 
 and diminished their trade. In revenge, therefore, 
 according to William Hutton, the historian of Derby, 
 they " determined his destruction, and hoped that of 
 his works would follow/' An Italian woman was 
 despatched to corrupt her two countrymen who 
 assisted Lombe in the management of the works. 
 She obtained employment in the factory, and gained 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 225 
 
 over one of the Italians to her iniquitous design. 
 They prepared a slow poison, and administered it in 
 small doses to Lombe, who, after lingering three or 
 four years in agony, died at the early age of twenty- 
 nine. The Italian fled ; the woman was seized and 
 subjected to a close examination, but no definite 
 proof could be elicited that Lombe had been poisoned. 
 Lombe was buried in great state, as a mark of respect 
 on the part of his townsmen. " He was," says 
 Hutton, " a man of quiet deportment, who had 
 brought a beneficial manufactory into the place, 
 employed the poor, and at advanced wages, and 
 thus could not fail to meet with respect ; and his 
 melancholy end excited much sympathy/' 
 
 II. WILLIAM LEE. 
 
 In the Stocking Weavers' Hall, in Redcross Street, 
 London, there used to hang a picture, representing a 
 man in collegiate costume in the act of pointing to 
 an iron stocking-frame, and addressing a woman 
 busily knitting with needles by hand. Underneath 
 the picture appeared the following inscription : " In 
 the year 1589, the ingenious William Lee, A.M., of 
 St. John's College, Cambridge, devised this profitable 
 art for stockings (but, being despised, went to 
 France), yet of iron to himself, but to us and to 
 others of gold ; in memory of whom this is here 
 painted/' As to who this William Lee was, and 
 the way in which he came to invent the stocking- 
 
 (24, 15 
 
226 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 frame, there are conflicting stories, but the one most 
 generally received and best authenticated is as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 William Lee, a native of Woodborough, near Not- 
 tingham, was a fellow of one of the Cambridge Colleges. 
 He fell in love with a young country lass, married 
 her, and consequently forfeited his fellowship. A 
 poor scholar, with much learning, but without money 
 or the knowledge of any trade, he found himself in 
 very embarrassed circumstances. Like many another 
 " poor scholar," he might exclaim : 
 
 " All the arts I have skill/in, 
 
 Divine and humane ; 
 Yet all's not worth a shilling; 
 
 Alas! poor scholar, whither wilt thougo?" 
 
 His wife, however, was a very industrious woman, and 
 by her knitting contributed to their joint support. It 
 is said but the story lacks authentic confirmation 
 that when Lee was courting her, she always appeared 
 so much more occupied with her knitting than with 
 the soft speeches he was whispering in her ear, that 
 her lover thought of inventing a machine that would 
 "facilitate and forward the operation of knitting," and 
 so leave the object of his love more leisure to con- 
 verse with him. "Love, indeed," says Beckmann, 
 " is fertile in invention, and gave rise, it is said, to the 
 art of painting ; but a machine so complex in its 
 parts, and so wonderful in its effects, would seem to 
 require longer and greater reflection, more judgment, 
 and more time and patience than could be expected 
 
WILLIAM LEE, THE INVENTOR OF THE STOCKING-FRAME. 
 
 Page 226. 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTUKE. 227 
 
 of a, lover. " But afterwards, when Lee, in his pain- 
 fully enforced idleness, sat many a long hour watch- 
 ing his wife's nimble fingers toiling to support him, 
 his mind again recurred to the idea of a machine 
 that would give rest to her weary fingers. His 
 cogitations resulted in the contrivance of a stocking- 
 frame, which imitated the movements of the fingers 
 in knitting. 
 
 Although ihe invention of this loom gave a great 
 impulse to the manufacture of silk stockings in 
 England, and placed our productions in advance of 
 those of other countries, Lee reaped but little profit 
 from it. He met with neglect both from Queen 
 Elizabeth and James I.; and, not succeeding as a 
 manufacturer on his own account, went to France, 
 where he did very well until after the assassination 
 of Henri IV., when he shared the persecutions of the 
 Protestants, and died in great distress in Paris. 
 
 III. JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD. 
 
 Joseph Marie Jacquard, the inventor of the loom 
 which bears his name, and to whom the extent and 
 prosperity of the silk manufacture of our time is 
 mainly due, was born at Lyons in 1752, of humble 
 parents, both of whom were weavers. His father 
 taught him to ply the shuttle ; but for education of 
 any other sort, he was left to his own devices. He 
 managed to pick up some knowledge of reading and 
 writing for himself; but his favourite occupation 
 
228 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 was the construction of little models of houses, 
 towers, articles of furniture, and so on, which he 
 executed with much taste and accuracy. On being 
 apprenticed to a type-founder, he exhibited his apti- 
 tude for mechanical contrivances by inventing a 
 number of improved tools for the use of the work- 
 men. On his father's death he set up as a manu- 
 facturer of figured fabrics ; but although a skilful 
 workman, he was a bad manager, and the end of the 
 undertaking was, that he had to sell his looms to pay 
 his debts. He married, but did not receive the dowry 
 with his wife which he expected, and to support his 
 family had to sell the house his father had left him, 
 the last remnant of his little heritage. The in- 
 vention of numerous ingenious machines for weaving, 
 type-founding, &c., proved the activity of his genius, 
 but produced not a farthing for the maintenance of 
 his wife and child. He took service with a lime- 
 maker at Brest, while his wife made and sold straw 
 hats in a little shop at Lyons. He solaced himself 
 for the drudgery of his labours by spending his 
 leisure in the study of machines for figure-weaving. 
 The idea of the beautiful apparatus which he after- 
 wards perfected began to dawn on him, but for the 
 time it was driven out of his mind by the stirring 
 transactions of the time. The whirlwind of the 
 Revolution was sweeping through the land. Jacquard 
 ardently embraced the cause of the people, took part 
 in the gallant defence of Lyons in 1793, fled for his 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 229 
 
 life on the reduction of the city, and with his son 
 a lad of sixteen joined the army of the Rhine. 
 His boy fell by his side on the field of battle, and 
 Jacquard, destitute and broken-hearted, returned to 
 Lyons. His house had been burned down ; his wife 
 was nowhere to be heard of. At length he dis- 
 covered her in a miserable garret, earning a bare 
 subsistence by plaiting straw. For want of other 
 employment he shared her labours, till Lyons began 
 fco rise from its ruins, to recover its scattered popu- 
 lation, and revive its industry. Jacquard applied 
 himself with renewed energy to the completion of 
 the machine of which he had, before the Revolution, 
 conceived the idea ; exhibited it at the National Ex- 
 position of the Products of Industry in 1801 ; and 
 obtained a bronze medal and a ten years' patent. 
 
 During the peace of Amiens, Jacquard happened 
 to take up a newspaper in a cabaret which he fre- 
 quented, and his eye fell on a translated extract from 
 an English journal, stating that a prize was offered 
 by a society in London for the construction of a 
 machine for weaving nets. As a mere amusement 
 he turned his thoughts to the subject, contrived a 
 number of models, and at last solved the problem. 
 He made a machine and wove a little net with it. 
 One day he met a friend who had read the paragraph 
 from the English paper. Jacquard drew the net 
 from his pocket saying, " Oh! I've got over the 
 difficulty ! see, there is a net I've made/' After that 
 
230 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 he took no more thought about the matter, and had 
 quite forgotten it, when he was startled by a summons 
 to appear at the Prefectal Palace. The prefect re- 
 ceived him very kindly, and expressed his astonish- 
 ment that his mechanical genius should so long have 
 remained in obscurity. Jacquard could not imagine 
 how the prefect had discovered his mechanical ex- 
 periments, and began vaguely to dread that he had 
 got into some shocking scrape. He stammered out 
 a sort of apology. The prefect was surprised he 
 should deny his own talent, and said he had been 
 informed that he had invented a machine for weav- 
 ing nets. Jacquard owned that he had. 
 
 "Well, then, you're the right man, after all," said 
 the prefect. " I have orders from the emperor tc 
 send the machine to Paris." 
 
 " Yes, but you must give me time to make it/' 
 replied Jacquard. 
 
 In a week or -two Jacquard again presented him- 
 self at the palace with his machine and a half manu- 
 factured net. The prefect was eager to see how it 
 worked. 
 
 " Count the number of loops in that net," said 
 Jacquard, " and then strike the bar with your foot." 
 
 The prefect did so, and was surprised and delighted 
 to see another loop added to the number. 
 
 "Capital!" cried he. "I have his majesty's 
 orders, M. Jacquard, to send you and your machine 
 bo Paris/' 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 23] 
 
 " To Paris ! How can that be ? How can 1 
 leave iny business here ?" 
 
 " There is no help for it ; and not only must you 
 go to Paris, but you must start at once, without an 
 hour's delay," 
 
 " If it must be, it must. I will go home and 
 pack up a little bundle, and tell my wife about my 
 journey. I shall be ready to start to-morrow." 
 
 " To-morrow won't do ; you must go to-day. A 
 carriage is waiting to take you to Paris ; and you 
 must not go home. I will send to your house for 
 any things you want, and convey any message to your 
 wife. I will provide you with money for the journey." 
 
 There was no help for it, so Jacquard got into the 
 carriage, along with a gendarme who was to take 
 charge of him, and wondered, all the way to Paris, 
 what it all meant. On reaching the capital he was 
 taken before Napoleon, who received him in a very 
 condescending manner. Carnot, who was also pre- 
 sent, could not at first comprehend the machine, and 
 turning to the inventor, exclaimed roughly, " What, 
 do you pretend to do what is beyond the power of 
 man? Can you tie a knot in a stretched string V 
 Jacquard, not at all disconcerted, explained the con- 
 struction of his machine so simply and clearly, as to con- 
 vince the incredulous minister that it accomplished 
 what he had hitherto deemed an impossibility. 
 
 Jacquard was now employed in the Conservatory 
 of Arts and Manufactures to repair and keep in order 
 
232 THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 
 
 the models and machines. At this time a magnifi- 
 cent shawl was being woven in one of the govern- 
 ment works for the Empress Josephine. Very 
 costly and complicated machinery was employed, and 
 nearly 1000 had already been spent on it. It 
 appeared to Jacquard that the shawl might be 
 manufactured in a much simpler and less expensive 
 manner. He thought that the principle of a machine 
 of Vaucousin's might be applied to the operation, 
 but found it too complex and slow. He brooded over 
 the subject, made a great many experiments, and at 
 last succeeded in contriving an improved apparatus. 
 
 He returned to Lyons to superintend the intro- 
 duction of his machine for figure-weaving and the 
 manufacture of nets. The former invention was 
 purchased for the use of the people, and was brought 
 into use very slowly. The weavers of Lyons de- 
 nounced Jacquard as the enemy of the people, who 
 was striving to destroy their trade, and starve them- 
 selves and families, and used every effort to prevent 
 the introduction of his machine. They wilfully 
 spoiled their work in order to bring the new process 
 into discredit. The machine was ordered to be 
 destroyed in one of the public squares. It was 
 broken to pieces, the iron-work was sold for old 
 metal, and the wood- work for faggots. Jacquard 
 himself had on one occasion to be rescued from the 
 hands of a mob who were going to throw him into 
 the Rhone. 
 
THE SILK MANUFACTURE. 233 
 
 Before JacquarcTs death in 1835, his apparatus 
 had not only made its way into every manufactory 
 in France, but was used in England, Switzerland, 
 Germany, Italy, and America. Even the Chinese 
 condescended to avail themselves of this invention of 
 a "barbarian/' 
 
 Jacquard's apparatus is, strictly speaking, not a 
 loom, but an appendage to one. It is intended to 
 elevate or depress, by bars, the warp threads for the 
 reception of the shuttle, the patterns being regulated 
 by means of bands of punched cards acting on needles 
 with loops and eyes. At first applied to silk weav- 
 ing only, the use of this machine has since been 
 extended to the bobbin-net, carpets, and other fancy 
 manufactures. By its agency the richest and most 
 complex designs, which could formerly be achieved 
 only by the most skilful labourers, with a painful 
 degree of labour, and at an exorbitant cost, are now 
 produced with facility by the most ordinary work- 
 men, and at the most moderate price. 
 
 Of late years the silk manufacture has greatly 
 improved, both in character and extent. The pro- 
 ducts of British looms exhibited at the Great Ex- 
 hibition of 1862 vied with those of the Continent. 
 Every year upwards of 2,300,000 worth of silk is 
 brought to England ; and the silk manufacture 
 engages some 55,000,000 of capital, and employs 
 eleven to twelve hundred thousand of our population. 
 
Potter** 3lrt 
 
 I. LUC A DELL A ROBBIA. 
 II. BERNAKD PALISSY. 
 III. JOSIAH WEDGWOOD. 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 237 
 
 foite's %d. 
 
 I. LUC A BELLA EOBBIA. 
 
 THERE can be little doubt as to the antiquity of 
 the pottery manufacture. It probably had its origin 
 in that of bricks, which at a very early date men 
 made for purposes of construction ; but it is not im- 
 possible that he had previously contrived to fabricate 
 the commoner articles of domestic economy, such as 
 pans and dishes, of sun-dried clay. 
 
 Bricks, as everybody knows, are fashioned out of 
 a coarse clay, such as we meet with in very numer- 
 ous localities. After mixing up with water a kind of 
 paste out of these clayey earths, the moulder works 
 up the paste into the shape of bricks, and they are 
 then exposed to the heat of the kiln. Sometimes 
 it was thought sufficient to dry these bricks in the 
 rays of a burning sun; but, so dried, their solidity is 
 very inconsiderable. Baked bricks owe their red- 
 ness of colour to the oxide of iron which they con- 
 tain. They are either moulded with the hand or 
 cast in rectangular frames of wood, dusted with sand. 
 To bake them, they are piled up in huge stacks, in 
 which intervals are left for storing and kindling the 
 fuel. They are also baked in kilns. 
 
 The commoner pottery wares are manufactured 
 
238 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 with the coarse impure clays, which are allowed to 
 rot in trenches for several years to render them more 
 plastic. Flower-pots, sugar-pans, vases, and other 
 and more graceful articles, are moulded on the 
 potter's wheel. 
 
 Now, this potter's wheel is one of the most 
 ancient instruments of human industry, one of the 
 earliest inventions by which man utilized and econo- 
 mized his labour. It consists of a large disc of 
 wood, to which a rotatory motion is given by the 
 workman's foot. A second and smaller disc, on 
 which is placed the paste for working, is fixed upon 
 the upper extremity of the vertical axis to which the 
 larger and inferior disc is attached. Seated on his 
 bench, the workman places in the centre of the disc 
 a certain quantity of soft moist clay, and turning 
 the wheel with his foot, moulds the said paste with 
 both hands, until it assumes the desired shape. You 
 can imagine no prettier spectacle than that of a skil- 
 ful potter causing the clay, under his nimble fingers, 
 to assume the most varied forms. It seems as if by 
 miracle the vase was created suddenly, and the rude 
 clay sprang into a life and beauty of its own. 
 
 The Campanian potteries, improperly but com- 
 monly called the Etruscan, and the ancient Greek 
 wares, belong to the class of soft and lustrous pot- 
 teries which are no longer manufactured. The 
 Etruscan vases are the most remarkable specimens 
 of the ancient potter's art ; pure, simple, and elegant 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 239 
 
 in form, they cannot be surpassed by any efforts of 
 the modern potter. The paste of which they are 
 made is very fine and homogeneous, coated with a 
 peculiar glassy lustre, which is thin but tenacious, 
 red or black, and formed of silica rendered fusible 
 by an alkali. They were baked at a low tem- 
 perature. In this ware, which was in vogue be- 
 tween 500 and 320 B.C., the Are tine and Roman 
 pottery originated. The former was manufactured 
 at Arezzo or Arretium. 
 
 The knowledge of glazes, which was acquired by 
 the Egyptians and Assyrians, seems to have been 
 handed down to the Persians, Moors, and Arabs. 
 Fayences, and enamelled bricks and plaques, were 
 commonly used among them in the twelfth century, 
 and among the Hindus in the fourteenth. The cele- 
 brated glazed tiles, or azulejos, which contribute so 
 much to the beauty of the Alhambra, were intro- 
 duced into Spain by the Moors about 711 A.D. In 
 Italy, it is supposed, they were made known as early 
 as the conquest of Majorca by the Pisans, in 
 1115 A.D. But Brongniart places their introduc- 
 tion three centuries later, or in 1415, and says this 
 peculiar kind of ware was called Majolica, from Ma- 
 jorica or Majorca. This, however, seems to have 
 been the Italian enamelled fayence, which was used 
 for subjects in relief by the celebrated Florentine 
 sculptor, Luca della Robbia. 
 
 Robbia had been bred to the trade of a goldsmith 
 
240 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 in those days a trade of great distinction and opul- 
 ence but his artistic tastes could not be controlled, 
 and he abandoned it to become a sculptor. A man of 
 a singularly enthusiastic and ardent nature, he ap- 
 plied himself arduously to his new work. He worked 
 all day with his chisel, and sat up, even through the 
 night, to study. " Often," says Yasari, " when his 
 feet were frozen with cold in the night time, he kept 
 them in a basket of shavings to warm them, that he 
 might not be compelled to discontinue his drawings." 
 Such devotion could hardly fail to secure success. 
 Luca was recognised as one of the first sculptors of the 
 day, and executed a number of great works in bronze 
 and marble. On the conclusion of some important 
 commissions, he was struck with the disproportion 
 between the payment he received and the time and 
 labour he had expended ; and, abandoning marble 
 and bronze, resolved to work in clay. Before he 
 could do that, however, it was necessary to discover 
 some means of rendering durable the works which 
 he executed in that material Applying himself to 
 the task with characteristic zeal and perseverance, 
 he at length succeeded in discovering a mode of pro- 
 tecting such productions from the injuries of time, by 
 means of a glaze or enamel, which conferred not only 
 an almost eternal durability, but additional beauty on 
 his works in terra cotta. At first this enamel was 
 of a pure white, but he afterwards added the further 
 invention of colouring it. The fame of these produo 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 241 
 
 tions spread over Europe, and Luca found abundant 
 and profitable employment during the rest of his 
 days, the work being carried on, after his death, by 
 brothers and descendants. 
 
 II. BERNARD PALISSY. 
 
 The next great master in the art was Bernard 
 Palissy, a man distinguished not only for his 
 artistic genius, but for his philosophical attainments, 
 his noble, manly character, and zealous piety. Born 
 of poor parents about the beginning of the sixteenth 
 century, Bernard Palissy was taken as apprentice by 
 a land-surveyor, who had been much struck with the 
 boy's quickness and ingenuity. Land-surveying, of 
 course, involved some knowledge of drawing ; and thus 
 a taste for painting was developed. From drawing 
 lines and diagrams he went on to copy from the 
 great masters. As this new talent became known 
 he obtained employment in painting designs on glass. 
 He received commissions in various parts of the 
 country, and in his travels employed his mind in the 
 study of natural objects. He examined the character 
 of the soils and minerals upon his route, and the 
 better to grapple with the subject, devoted his atten- 
 tion to chemistry. At length he settled and mar- 
 ried at Staines, and for a time lived thriftily as a 
 painter. 
 
 One day he was shown an elegant cup of Italian 
 manufacture, beautifully enamelled. The art of 
 
 (21) 16 
 
242 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 enamelling was then entirely unknown in France, 
 and Palissy was at once seized with the idea, that if 
 he could but discover the secret it would enable him 
 to place his wife and family in greater comfort. " So, 
 therefore," he writes, " regardless of the fact that I 
 had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for these 
 enamels as a man gropes in the dark. I reflected 
 that God had gifted me with some knowledge of 
 drawing, and I took courage in my heart, and be- 
 sought him to give me wisdom and skill." 
 
 He lost no time in commencing his experiments. 
 He bought a quantity of earthen pots, broke them 
 into fragments, and covering them with various 
 chemical compounds, baked them in a little furnace 
 of his own construction, in the hope of discovering 
 the white enamel, which he had been told was the 
 key to all the rest. Again and again he varied the 
 ingredients of the compositions, the proportions in 
 which they were mixed, the quality of the clay on 
 which they were spread, the heat of the furnace to 
 which they were subjected; but the white enamel 
 was still as great a mystery as ever. Instead of 
 discouraging, each new defeat seemed to confirm his 
 hope of ultimate success and to increase his persever- 
 ance. Painting and surveying he no longer practised, 
 except when sheer necessity compelled him to resort 
 to them to provide bread for his family. The dis- 
 covery of the enamel had become the great mission 
 of his life, and to that all other occupations must be 
 
PALISSY THE POTTER. 
 
 Page 242. 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 243 
 
 sacrificed. " Thus having blundered several times at 
 great expense and through much trouble, with sorrows 
 and sighs, I was every day pounding and grinding 
 new materials and constructing new furnaces, which 
 cost much money, and consumed my wood and my 
 time." Two years had passed now in fruitless effort. 
 Food was becoming scarce in the little household, his 
 wife worn and shrewish, the children thin and sickly. 
 But then came the thought to cheer him, when the 
 enamel was found his fortune would be made, there 
 would then be an end to all his privations, anxieties, 
 and domestic unhappiness, Lisette would live at ease, 
 and his children lack no comfort. No, the work 
 must not be given up yet. His own furnace was 
 clumsy and imperfect, perhaps his compositions 
 would turn out better in a regular kiln. So more 
 pots were bought and broken into fragments, which, 
 covered with chemical preparations, were fired at a 
 pottery in the neighbourhood. Batch after batch 
 was prepared and despatched to the kiln, but all 
 proved disheartening failures. Still with "great 
 cost, loss of time, confusion, and sorrow/' he perse- 
 vered, the wife growing more shrewish, the children 
 more pinched and haggard. By good luck at this 
 time came the royal commissioners to establish the 
 gabelle or tax in the district of Saintonge, and 
 Palissy was employed to survey the salt marshes. 
 It was a very profitable job, and Palissy 's affairs 
 began to look more flourishing. But the work was 
 
 
244 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 no sooner concluded, than the " will o' the wisp," asf 
 his wife and neighbours held it, was dancing again 
 before his eyes, and he was back, with redoubled 
 energy, to his favourite occupation, " diving into the 
 secret of enamels." 
 
 Two years of unremitting, anxious toil, of grinding 
 and mixing, of innumerable visits to the kiln, 
 sanguine of success, with ever new preparations ; of 
 invariable journeys home again, sad and weary, for 
 the moment utterly discouraged ; of domestic bicker- 
 ings ; of mockery and censure among neighbours, and 
 still the enamel was a mystery, still Palissy, seem- 
 ingly as far from the end as ever, was eager to prosecute 
 the search. He appeared to have an inward con- 
 viction that he would succeed ; but meanwhile the 
 remonstrances of his wife, the pale, thin faces of his 
 bairns, warned him he must desist, and resume the 
 employments that at least brought food and clothing. 
 There should be one more trial on a grand scale, if 
 that failed, then there should be an end of his 
 experiments. " God willed/' he says, " that when I 
 had begun to lose my courage, and was gone for the 
 last time to a glass-furnace, having a man with me 
 carrying more than three hundred pieces, there was 
 one among those pieces which was melted within 
 four hours after it had been placed in the furnace, 
 which trial turned out white and polished, in a way 
 that caused me such joy as made me think I was 
 become a new creature." He rushed home, burst 
 
- THE POTTER'S ART. 245 
 
 into his wife's chamber, shouting, "I have found 
 it!" 
 
 From that moment he was more enthusiastic than 
 ever in his search. He had discovered the white 
 enamel. The next thing to be done was to apply it. 
 He must now work at home and in secret. He set 
 about moulding vessels of clay after designs of his 
 own, and baked them in a furnace which he had 
 built in imitation of the one at the pottery. The 
 grinding and compounding of the ingredients of the 
 enamel cost him the labour, day and night, of an- 
 other month. Then all was ready for the final pro- 
 cess. 
 
 The vessels, coated with the precious mixture, are 
 ranged in the furnace, the fire is lit and blazes 
 fiercely. To stint the supply of fuel would be to 
 cheat himself of a fortune for the sake of a few pence, 
 so he does not spare wood. All that day he dili- 
 gently feeds the fire, nor lets it slacken through the 
 night. The excitement will not let him sleep even 
 if he would. The prize he has striven for through 
 these weary years, for which he has borne mockery 
 and privation, is now all but within his grasp; in 
 another hour or two he will have possessed it. 
 
 The grey dawn comes, but still the enamel melts 
 not. His boy brings him a portion of the scanty 
 family meal. There shall soon be an end to that 
 miserable fare ! More faggots are cast on the fire. 
 The night falls, and the sun rises on the third day 
 
24:6 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 of his tending and watching at the furnace door, but 
 still the powder shows no signs of melting. Pale, 
 haggard, sick at heart with anxiety and dread, worn 
 with watching, parched and fevered with the 
 heat of the fire, through another, and yet another 
 and another day and night, through six days and six 
 nights in all, Bernard Palissy watches by the glar- 
 ing furnace, feeds it continually with wood, and still 
 the enamel is unmelted. " Seeing it was not pos- 
 sible to make the said enamel melt, I was like a man 
 in desperation; and although quite stupified with 
 labour, I counselled to myself that in my mixture 
 there might be some fault. Therefore I began 
 once more to pound and grind more materials, all 
 the time without letting my furnace cool. In this 
 way I had double labour, to pound, grind, and main- 
 tain the fire. I was also forced to go again and 
 purchase pots in order to prove the said compound, 
 seeing that I had lost all the vessels which I had 
 made myself. And having covered the new pieces 
 with the said enamel, I put them into the furnace, 
 keeping the fire still at its height/' 
 
 By this time it was no easy matter to " keep the 
 fire at its height/' His stock of fuel was exhausted; 
 he had no money to buy any more, and yet fuel must 
 be had. On the very eve of success alas! an eve 
 that so seldom has a dawn it would never do to 
 lose it all for want of wood, not while wood of any 
 kind was procurable. He rushed into the garden, 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 247 
 
 tore up the palings, the trellis work that supported 
 the vines, gathered every scrap of wood he could find, 
 and cast them on the fire. But soon again the deep 
 red glow of the furnace began to fade, and still it had 
 not done its work. Suddenly a crashing noise was 
 heard; his wife, the children clinging to her gown, 
 rushed in. Palissy had seized the chairs and table, 
 had torn the door from its hinges, wrenched the 
 window frames from their sockets, and broken them 
 in pieces to serve as fuel for the all-devouring fire. 
 Now he was busy breaking up the very flooring of 
 the house. And all in vain ! The composition would 
 not melt. 
 
 " I suffered an anguish that I cannot speak, for I 
 was quite exhausted and dried up by the heat of the 
 furnace. Further to console me, I was the object of 
 mockery; even those from whom solace was due, 
 ran, crying through the town that I was burning 
 my floors. In this way my credit was taken from 
 me, and I was regarded as a madman/' if not, as he 
 tells us elsewhere, as one seeking ill-gotten gains, and 
 sold to the evil one for filthy lucre. 
 
 He made another effort, engaged a potter to assist 
 him, giving the clothes off his own back to pay him, 
 and afterwards receiving aid from a friendly neighbour, 
 and this time proved that his mixture was of the right 
 kind. But the furnace having been built with mor- 
 tar which was full of flints, burst with the heat, and 
 the splinters adhered to the pottery. Sooner than 
 
248 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 allow such imperfect specimens of his art to go forth 
 to the world, Palissy destroyed them, " although some 
 would have bought them at a mean price." 
 
 Better days, however, were at hand for himself 
 and family. His next efforts were successful An 
 introduction to the Duke of Montmorency procured 
 him the patronage of that nobleman, as well as of the 
 king. He now found profitable employment for 
 himself and food for his family. " During the space 
 of fifteen or sixteen years in all," he said afterwards, 
 " I have blundered on at my business. When I 
 had learned to guard against one danger, there came 
 another on which I had not reckoned. All this 
 caused me such labour and heaviness of spirit, that 
 before I could render my enamels fusible at the 
 same degrees of heat, I verily thought I should be at 
 
 the door of my sepulchre But I have found 
 
 nothing better than to observe the counsel of a God, 
 his edicts, statutes, and ordinances ; and in regard to 
 his will, I have seen that he has commanded his fol- 
 lowers to eat bread by the labour of their bodies, 
 and to multiply their talents^ which he has com- 
 mitted to them/' 
 
 When the Reformation came, Palissy was an ear- 
 nest reformer, on Sunday mornings assembling a 
 number of simple, unlearned men for religious wor- 
 ship, and exhorting them to good works. Court 
 favour exempted him from edicts against Protestants, 
 but could not shield him from popular prejudice. 
 
THE POTTBB'S ART. 249 
 
 His workshops at Saintes were destroyed ; and to save 
 his life and preserve the art he had invented, the 
 king called him to Paris as a servant of his own, 
 Thus he escaped the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 
 Besides being a skilful potter, Palissy was a natur- 
 alist of no little eminence. " I have had no other book 
 than heaven and earth, which are open to all/' he 
 used to say; but he read the wondrous volume well, 
 while others knew it chiefly at second-hand, and 
 hence his superiority to most of the naturalists of 
 the day. He was in the habit of lecturing to the 
 learned men of the capital on natural history and 
 chemistry. When more than eighty years of age he 
 was accused of heresy, and shut up in the Bastille. 
 The king, visiting him in prison, said, " My good 
 man, if you do not renounce your views upon re- 
 ligious matters, I shall be constrained to leave you 
 in the hands of my enemies." "Sire," replied 
 Palissy, " those who constrain you, a king, can never 
 have power over me, because I know how to die." 
 Palissy died in prison, aged and exhausted, in 1590, 
 at the age of eighty. 
 
 Before his death his wares had become famous, 
 and were greatly prized, The enamel, which he 
 went through so much toil and suffering to discover, 
 was the foundation of a flourishing national manu- 
 facture. 
 
250 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 III. JOSIAH WEDGWOOD. 
 
 Josiah Wedgwood, whose name in connection with 
 pottery-ware has become a household word amongst 
 us, was the younger son of a potter at Burslem, in 
 Staffordshire, who had also a little patch of ground 
 which he farmed. When Josiah was only eleven 
 years old, his father died, and he was thus left de- 
 pendent upon his elder brother, who employed him 
 as a "thrower " at his own wheel. An attack of small- 
 pox, in its most malignant form, soon after endan- 
 gered his life, and he survived only by the sacrifice 
 of his left leg, in which the dregs of the disease had 
 settled, and which had to be cut off. Weak and 
 disabled, he was now thrown upon the world to seek 
 his own fortune. At first it was very upliill work 
 with him, and he found it no easy matter to provide 
 even the most frugal fare. He was gifted, however, 
 with a very fine taste in devising patterns for articles 
 of earthenware, and found ready custom for plates, 
 knife-handles, and jugs of fanciful shape. He worked 
 away industriously himself, and was able by degrees 
 to employ assistance and enlarge his establishment. 
 The pottery manufactures of this country were then 
 in a very primitive condition Only the coarsest 
 sort of articles were made, and any attempt to give 
 elegance to the designs was very rare indeed. All 
 the more ornamental and finer class of goods came 
 from the Continent. Wedgwood saw no reason why 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 251 
 
 we should not emulate foreigners in the beaut} 1 - of 
 the forms into which the clay was thrown, and 
 made a point of sending out of his own shop articles 
 of as elegant a shape as possible. This feature in 
 his productions was not overlooked by customers, 
 and he found a growing demand for them. The 
 coarseness of the material was, however, a great 
 drawback to the extension of the trade in native 
 pottery ; and it seemed almost like throwing good 
 designs away to apply them to such rude wares. 
 Wedgwood saw clearly that if earthenware was ever 
 to become a profitable English manufacture, some- 
 thing must be done to improve the quality of the 
 clay. He brooded over the subject, tested all the 
 different sorts of earth in the district, and at length 
 discovered one, containing silica, which, black in 
 colour before it went into the oven, same out of it a 
 pure and beautiful white. This fact ascertained, he 
 was not long in turning it to practical account, by 
 mixing flint powder with the red earth of the potte- 
 ries, and thus obtaining a material which became 
 white when exposed to the heat of a furnace. The 
 next step was to cover this material with a trans- 
 parent glaze ; and he could then turn out earthen- 
 ware as pure in quality as that from the Continent. 
 This was the foundation not only of his own fortune, 
 but of a manufacture which has since provided pro- 
 fitable employment for thousands of his countrymen, 
 besides placing within the reach of even the humblest 
 
252 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 of them good serviceable earthenware for household 
 use. 
 
 The success of his white stoneware was such, that 
 he was able to quit the little thatched house he had 
 formerly occupied, and open shop in larger and more 
 imposing premises. He increased the number of his 
 hands, and drove an extensive and growing trade. 
 He was not content to halt after the discovery of the 
 white stoneware. On the contrary, the success he 
 had already attained only impelled him to further 
 efforts to improve the trade he had taken up, and 
 which now became quite a passion with him. When 
 he devoted himself to any particular effort in con- 
 nection with it, his first thought was always how to 
 turn out the very best article that could be made 
 his last thought was whether it would pay him or 
 not. He stuck up for the honour of old England, 
 and maintained that whatever enterprise could be 
 achieved, that English skill and enterprise was com- 
 petent to do. Although he had never had any education 
 himself worth speaking of, his natural shrewdness and 
 keen faculty of observation supplied his deficiencies 
 in that respect ; and when he applied himself, as he 
 now did, to the study of chemistry, with a view to 
 the improvement of the pottery art, he made rapid 
 and substantial progress, and passed muster credit- 
 ably even in the company of men of science and 
 learning. He contributed many valuable communi- 
 cations to the Royal Society, and invented a ther- 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 253 
 
 mometer for measuring the higher degrees of heat 
 employed in the various arts of pottery. 
 
 Again his premises proved too confined for his 
 expanding trade, and he removed to a larger .estab- 
 lishment, and there perfected that cream-coloured 
 ware with which Queen Charlotte was so delighted, 
 that she ordered a whole service of it, and command- 
 ing that it should be called after her the Queen's 
 Ware, and that its inventor should receive the title 
 of the " Koyal Potter." 
 
 A royal potter Wedgwood truly was ; the very 
 king of earthenware manufactures, resolute in his 
 determination to attain the highest degree of perfec- 
 tion in his productions, indefatigable in his labours, 
 and unstinting in his outlay to secure, that end. He 
 invented altogether seven or eight different kinds of 
 ware ; and succeeded in combining the greatest deli- 
 cacy and purity of material, and utmost elegance of 
 design, with strength, durability, and cheapness. 
 The effect of the improvements he successively intro- 
 duced into the manufacture of earthenware is thus 
 described by a foreign writer about this period : 
 " Its excellent workmanship, its solidity, the advan- 
 tage which it possesses of sustaining the action of 
 fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids, the beauty 
 and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its 
 price, have given rise to a commerce so active and so 
 universal, that in travelling from Paris to Peters- 
 burg, from Amsterdam to the furthest port of Sweden, 
 
254 THE POTTER'S AKT. 
 
 and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the south of 
 France, one is served at every inn with Wedgwood 
 ware. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are supplied with 
 it, and vessels are loaded with it for the East Indies, 
 the West Indies, and the continent of America/' 
 Wedgwood himself, when examined before a commit- 
 tee of the House of Commons in l785, some thirty 
 years after he had begun his operations, stated that 
 from providing only casual employment to a small 
 number of inefficient and badly remunerated work- 
 men, the manufacture had increased to an extent that 
 gave direct employment to about twenty thousand 
 persons, without taking into account the increased 
 numbers who earned a livelihood by digging coals for 
 the use of the potteries, by carrying the productions 
 from one quarter to another, and in many other 
 ways. 
 
 Wedgwood did not confine himself to the manu- 
 facture of useful articles, though such, of course, formed 
 the bulk of his trade, but published beautiful imita- 
 tions of Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan vases, copies 
 of cameos, medallions, tablets, and so on. Valuable 
 sets of old porcelain were frequently intrusted to 
 him for imitation, in which he succeeded so weU that 
 it was difficult to tell the original from the counter- 
 feit, except- sometimes from the superior excellence 
 and beauty of the latter. When the celebrated Bar- 
 berini Yase was for sale, Wedgwood, bent upon 
 making copies of it, made heavy bids against the 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 255 
 
 Duchess of Portland for it ; and was only induced to 
 desist by the promise, that he should have the loan of 
 it in order that he might copy it. Accordingly, the 
 duchess had the vase knocked down to her at eighteen 
 hundred guineas, and Wedgwood made fifty copies 
 of it, which he sold at fifty guineas each, and was 
 thus considerably out of pocket by the transaction. 
 He did it, however, not for the sake of profit, but to 
 show what an English pottery could accomplish. 
 
 Besides copying from antique objects, Wedgwood 
 tried to rival them in the taste and elegance of ori- 
 ginal productions. He found out Flaxman when he 
 was an unknown student, and employed him, upon 
 very liberal terms, to design for him ; and thus the 
 articles of earthenware which he manufactured proved 
 of the greatest value in the art education of the 
 people. We owe not a little of the improved taste 
 and popular appreciation and enjoyment of the fine 
 arts in our own day to the generous enterprise of 
 Josiah Wedgwood, and his talented designs. 
 
 In order to secure every access from the potteries 
 to the eastern and western coasts of the island, 
 Wedgwood proposed, and, with the aid of others 
 whom he induced to join him, carried out the Grand 
 Trunk Canal, between the Trent and the Mersey. He 
 himself constructed a turnpike road ten miles in 
 length through the potteries, and built- a village 
 for his work-people, which he called Etruria, and 
 where he established his works. He died there in 
 
256 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 1795, at the age of sixty -five, leaving a large for- 
 tune and an honoured name, which he had acquired 
 by his own industry, enterprise, and generosity. 
 
 A remarkable memorial to the genius and artistic 
 labours of Wedgwood was erected in 1863, and 
 some reference to it should undoubtedly be made 
 in these pages. 
 
 It is a twofold memorial : a bronze statue at 
 Stoke-upon-Trent, and a memorial institute, erected 
 close to the birth-place of the Great Potter at Burslem. 
 The foundation-stone was laid on the 2 6th of October 
 by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., then Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer, in the presence of a very large 
 and enthusiastic assemblage. The Chancellor de- 
 livered a public address, which in eloquent terms did 
 homage to Wedgwood's great mental qualities and 
 his services to his country. 
 
 He described as his most signal and characteristic 
 merit, the firmness and fulness of his perception of 
 the true law of what we term industrial art, or, in 
 other words, of the application of the higher art to 
 industry the law which teaches us to aim first at 
 giving to every object the greatest possible degree 
 of fitness and convenience for its purpose, and next 
 at making it the article of the highest degree of 
 beauty, which compatibly with that fitness and con- 
 venience it will bear which does not substitute the 
 secondary for the primary end, but recognizes as 
 part of the business the study to harmonize the two. 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 257 
 
 Mr. Gladstone observed, that to have a strong 
 grasp of this principle, and to work it out to its re- 
 sults in the details of a vast and varied manufacture, 
 was a praise high enough for any man, at any time 
 and in any place. But he thought it was higher 
 and more peculiar in the case of Wedgwood than it 
 could be in almost any other case. For that truth 
 of art which he saw so clearly, and which lies at the 
 root of excellence, is one of which England, his 
 country, has not usually had a perception at all cor- 
 responding in strength and fulness with her other 
 rare endowments. She has long taken a lead among 
 the European nations for the cheapness of her manu- 
 factures, not so for their beauty. And if the day 
 should arrive when she shall be as eminent for 
 purity of taste as she is now for economy of produc- 
 tion, the result will probably be due to no other 
 single man in so remarkable a degree as to Josiah 
 Wedgwood. 
 
 We conclude with a lively extract from the Chan- 
 cellor's exhaustive and interesting address : 
 
 " Wedgwood," he says, " in his pursuit of beauty, 
 did not overlook exchangeable value or practical use- 
 fulness. The first he could not overlook, for he had 
 to live by his trade : and it was by the profit de- 
 rived from the extended sale of his humbler produc- 
 tions that he was enabled to bear the risks and 
 charges of his higher works. Commerce did for him 
 
 (24) ' 17 
 
258 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 what the King of France did for Sevres, and the Duke 
 of Cumberland for Chelsea, it found him in funds. 
 And I would venture to say that the lower works of 
 Wedgwood are every whit as much distinguished by 
 the fineness and accuracy of their adaptation to their 
 uses as his higher ones by their successful exhibition 
 of the finest arts. Take, for instance, his common 
 plates, of the value of, I know not how few, but 
 certainly of a very few pence each. They fit one 
 another as closely as cards in a pack. At least, I 
 for one have never seen plates that fit like the plates 
 of Wedgwood, and become one solid mass. Such 
 accuracy of form must, I apprehend, render them 
 
 much more safe in carriage 
 
 " Again, take such a jug as he would manufacture 
 for the wash-stand table of a garret. I have seen 
 these made apparently of the commonest material 
 used in the trade. But instead of being built up, 
 like the usual and much more fashionable jugs of 
 modern manufacture, in such a shape that a crane 
 could not easily get his neck to bend into them, and 
 the water can hardly be poured out without risk of 
 spraining the wrist, they are constructed in a simple 
 capacious form, of flowing curves, broad at the top, 
 and so well poised that a slight and easy movement 
 of the hand discharges the water. A round cheese- 
 holder or dish, again, generally presents in its upper 
 part a flat space surrounded by a curved rim; but the 
 cheese-holder of Wedgwood will make itself known 
 
THE POTTER'S ART. 259 
 
 by this that the flat is so dead a flat, and the 
 curve so marked and bold a curve ; thus at once 
 furnishing the eye with a line agreeable and well- 
 defined, and affording the utmost available space for 
 the cheese. I feel persuaded that a Wiltshire cheese, 
 if it could speak, would declare itself more comfort- 
 able in a dish of Wedgwood's than in any other 
 dish." 
 
 The worthiest successor to Wedgwood whom 
 England has known was the late Herbert Minton, 
 who was scarcely less distinguished than his prede- 
 cessor for perseverance, patient effort, and artistic 
 sentiment. We owe to him in a great measure the 
 revival of the elegant art of manufacturing encaustic 
 tiles. 
 
 The principal varieties of ceramic ware now in use 
 are : 1. Porcelain, which is composed, in England, 
 of sand, calcined bones, china-clay, and potash ; and, 
 at Dresden, of kaolin, felspar, and broken biscuit- 
 porcelain ; 2. Parian, which is used in a liquid 
 state, and poured into plaster-of-paris moulds ; 
 
 3. Earthenware, the Fayence of the Italians, and the 
 Delft of the Dutch, made of various kinds of clay, 
 with a mixture of powdered calcined flint ; and, 
 
 4. Stoneware, composed of several kinds of plastic 
 clay, mixed with felspar and sand, and occasionally 
 a little lime. 
 
 It is estimated that our English potteries not only 
 
260 THE POTTER'S ART. 
 
 supply the demand of the United Kingdom, but ex- 
 port ware to the value of nearly a million and a 
 half annually. The establishments are about 190 
 in number; employ 75,000 to 80,000 operatives; 
 and export 90,000,000 pieces. 
 
JS&ntf* Safttg 
 
 SIR HUMPHREY DAVY. 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 263 
 
 mer'fl SaWs f amp. 
 
 SIR HUMPHREY DAVY. 
 
 " WHAT'S that ? Is the house coming down?" cried 
 Mr. Borlase, the surgeon-apothecary of Penzance, 
 jumping out of his cozy arm-chair, as a tremendous 
 explosion shook the house from top to bottom, mak- 
 ing a great jingle among the gallipots in the shop 
 below, and rousing him from a comfortable nap. 
 
 " Please, sir," said Betty, the housemaid, putting 
 her head into the room, " here's that boy Davy been 
 a-blowing of hisself up agen. Drat him, he's 
 always up to some trick or other ! He'll be the death 
 of all of us some day, that boy will, as sure as my 
 name's Betty." 
 
 "Bring him here directly," replied her master, 
 knitting his brow, and screwing his mild countenance 
 into an elaborate imitation of that of a judge he once 
 saw at the assizes, with the black cap on, sentencing 
 some poor wretch to be hanged. " Really, this sort 
 of thing won't do at all." 
 
 Only, it must be owned, Mr. Borlase had said that 
 many times before, and put on the terrible judicial 
 look too, and yet " that boy Davy" was at his tricks 
 again as much as ever. 
 
264 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 " I'll bring as much as I can find of him, sir," 
 said Betty, gathering up her apron, as if she fully 
 expected to discover the object of her search in a 
 fragmentary condition. 
 
 Presently there was heard a shuffling in the pas- 
 sage, and a somewhat ungainly youth, about sixteen 
 years of age, was thrust into the room, with the due 
 complement of legs, arms, and other members, and 
 only somewhat the grimier about the face for the ex- 
 plosion. His fingers were all yellow with acids, and 
 his clothes plentifully variegated with stains from the 
 same compounds. At first sight he looked rather a 
 dull, loutish boy, but his sharp, clear eyes somewhat 
 redeemed his expression on a second glance. 
 
 "Here he is, sir/' cried Betty triumphantly, as 
 though she really had found him in pieces, and took 
 credit for having put him cleverly together again. 
 
 " Well, Humphrey," said Mr. Borlase, " what have 
 you been up to now? You'll never rest, I'm afraid, 
 till you have the house on fire." 
 
 " Oh ! if you please, sir, I was only experimenting 
 in the garret, and there's no harm done." 
 
 "No harm done!" echoed Betty; "and if there 
 isn't it's no fault of yours, you nasty monkey. I 
 declare that blow up gave me such a turn you could 
 ha' knocked me down with a feather, and there's a 
 smell all over the house enough to pison any one." 
 
 " That'll do, Betty," said her master, finding the 
 grim judicial countenance rather difficult to keep up, 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 265 
 
 and anxious to pronounce sentence before it quite 
 wore off. " I'll tell you what it is, young Davy, 
 this sort of thing won't do at all. I must speak to 
 Mr. Tonkine about you; and if I catch you at it 
 again, you'll have to take yourself and your experi- 
 ments somewhere else. So I warn you. You had 
 much better attend to your work. It was only the 
 other day you gave old Goody Jones a paperful of 
 cayenne instead of cinnamon ; and there's Joe Grim- 
 sly, the beadle, been here half a dozen times this day 
 for those pills I told you to make up, and they're 
 not ready yet. So just you take yourself off, mind 
 your business, and don't let me have any more non- 
 sense, or it'll be the worse for you." 
 
 And so the culprit gladly backed out of the room, 
 not a whit abashed by the reprimand, for it was no 
 novelty, to begin his experiments again and again, 
 and one day, by way of compensation for keeping 
 his master's household in constant terror of being 
 blown up. to make his name familiar as a household 
 word, by the invention of a little instrument that 
 would save thousands and thousands from the fear- 
 ful consequences of coal-pit explosions. 
 
 The Mr. Tonkine that his master referred to wag 
 the self-constituted protector of the Davy family. 
 Old Davy had been a carver in the town, and dying, 
 left his widow in very distressed circumstances, when 
 this generous friend came forward and took upon 
 himself the charge of the widow and her children. 
 
266 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 Young Humphrey, on leaving school, had been placed 
 with Mr. Borlase to be brought up as an apothecary ; 
 but he was much fonder of rambling about the coun- 
 try, or experimenting in the garret which he had 
 constituted his laboratory, than compounding drugs 
 behind his master's counter. As a boy he was not 
 particularly smart, although he was distinguished 
 for the facility with which he gleaned the substance 
 of any book that happened to take his fancy, and 
 for an early predilection for poetry. As he grew 
 up, the ardent, inquisitive turn of his mind displayed 
 itself more strongly. He was very fond of spending 
 what leisure time he had in strolling along the rocky 
 coast searching for sea-drift and minerals, or reading 
 some favourite book. 
 
 " There along the beach he wandered, nourishing a youth sublime, 
 With the fairy-tales of science, and the long result of time." 
 
 In after life he used often to tell how when tired 
 he would sit down on the crags and exercise his 
 fancy in anticipations of future renown, for already 
 the ambition of distinguishing himself in his favourite 
 science had seized him. " I have neither riches, nor 
 power, nor birth/' he wrote in his memorandum- 
 book, " to recommend me ; yet if I live, I trust I 
 shall not be of less service to mankind and my 
 friends than if I had been born with all these ad- 
 vantages." He read a great deal, and though with- 
 out much method, managed, in a wonderfully short 
 time, to master the rudiments of natural philosophy 
 
HUMPHREYS EXPERIMENTS ON THE DIFFUSION OF HEAT. 
 
 Page 267 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 267 
 
 and chemistry, to say nothing of considerable ac- 
 quaintance with botany, anatomy, and geometry; so 
 that though the pestle and mortar might' have a 
 quieter time of it than suited his master's notions, 
 Humphrey was busy enough in other ways. 
 
 In his walk along the beach, the nature of the air 
 contained in the bladders of sea-weed was a constant 
 subject of speculation with him; and he used to sigh 
 over the limited laboratory at his command, which 
 prevented him from thoroughly investigating the 
 matter. But one day, as good luck would have it, 
 the waves threw up a case of surgical instruments 
 from some wrecked vessel, somewhat rusty and sand 
 clogged, but in Davy's ingenious hands capable of 
 being turned to good account. Out of an old syringe, 
 which was contained in the case, he managed to con- 
 struct a very tolerable air pump; and with an old 
 shade lamp, and a couple of small metal tubes, he 
 set himself to work to discover the causes of the 
 diffusion of heat. At first sight the want of 
 proper instruments for carrying on his researches 
 might appear rather a hindrance to his progress 
 in the paths of scientific discovery; but, in 
 truth, his subsequent success as an experimen- 
 talist has been very properly attributed, in no 
 small degree, to that necessity which is the parent 
 of invention, and which forced him to exercise his 
 skill and ingenuity in making the most of the 
 scanty materials at his command. " Had he," 
 
268 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 says one of his biographers, "in the commencement 
 of his career been furnished with all those appliances 
 which he enjoyed at a later period, it is more than 
 probable that he might never have acquired that 
 wonderful tact of manipulation, that ability of sug- 
 gesting expedients, and of contriving apparatus, so 
 as- to meet and surmount the difficulties which must 
 constantly arise during the progress of the philo- 
 sopher through the unbeaten track and unexplored 
 regions of science ! " 
 
 While Davy was thus busily engaged qualifying 
 himself for the distinguished career that awaited 
 him, Gregory Watt, the son of the celebrated James 
 Watt, being in delicate health, came to Penzance for 
 change of air, and lodged with Mrs. Davy. At first 
 he and Humphrey did not get on very well together, 
 for the latter had just been reading some metaphysi- 
 cal works, and was very fond of indulging in crude 
 and flippant speculations on such subjects, which 
 rather displeased the shy invalid. But one day 
 some chance remark of Davy's gave token of his ex- 
 tensive knowledge of natural history and chemistry, 
 and thenceforth a close intimacy sprang up between 
 them, greatly to the lad's advantage, for Watt's 
 scientific knowledge set him in a more systematic 
 groove of study, and encouraged him to concentrate 
 his energies on his favourite pursuit. 
 
 Another useful friend Davy also found in Mr. Gil- 
 bert, afterwards President of the Royal Society. 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 269 
 
 Passing along one day, Mr. Gilbert observed a youth 
 making strange contortions of face as he hung over 
 the hutch gate of Borlase's house ; and being told by 
 a companion that he was "the son of Davy the 
 carver/' and very fond of making chemical experi- 
 ments, he had a talk with the lad, and discovering 
 his talents, was ever afterwards his staunch friend 
 and patron. 
 
 Through his two friends, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. 
 Watt, Davy formed the acquaintance of Dr. Beddoes, 
 who was just setting up at Bristol, under the title of 
 Pneumatic Institution, an establishment for investi- 
 gating the medical properties of different gases ; and 
 who, appreciating his abilities; gave him the super- 
 intendence of the new institution. 
 
 Although only twenty years of age at this time, 
 Davy was well abreast of the science of the day, and 
 soon applied his vigorous and searching intellect to 
 several successful investigations. His first scientific 
 discovery was the detection of siliceous earth in the 
 outer coating of reeds and grasses. A child was 
 rubbing two pieces of bonnet cane together, and he 
 noticed that a faint light was emitted; and on 
 striking them sharply together, vivid sparks were 
 produced just as if they had been flint and steel. 
 The fact that when the outer skin was peeled off 
 this property was destroyed, showed that it was con- 
 fined to the skin, and on subjecting it to analysis 
 silex was obtained, and still more in reeds and grasses. 
 
270 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 As superintendent of Dr. Beddoe's institution, his 
 attention was, of course, chiefly directed to the sub- 
 ject of gases, and with the enthusiasm of youth, he 
 applied himself ardently to the investigation of their 
 elements and effects, attempting several very danger- 
 ous experiments in breathing gases, and more than 
 once nearly sacrificing his life. In the course of 
 these experiments he found out the peculiar pro- 
 perties of nitrous oxide, or, as it has since been 
 popularly called, "laughing gas," which impels any 
 one who inhales it to go through some characteristic 
 action, a droll fellow to laugh, a dismal one to weep 
 and sigh, a pugnacious man to fight and wrestle, or a 
 musical one to sing. 
 
 At twenty-two years of age, such was the reputa- 
 tion he had acquired, that he got the appointment of 
 lecturer at the Royal Institution, which was just then 
 established, and found himself in a little while not 
 only a man of mark in the scientific, but a " lion " in 
 the fashionable world. Natural philosophy and 
 chemistry had begun to attract a good deal of atten- 
 tion at that time; and Davy's enthusiasm, his clear 
 and vivid explanations of the mysteries of science, 
 and the poetry and imagination with which he in- 
 vested the dry bones of scientific facts, caught the 
 popular taste exactly. His lecture-room became a 
 fashionable lounge, and was crowded with all sorts 
 of distinguished people. The young lecturer became 
 quite the rage, and was petted and feted as the lion 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 271 
 
 of the day. It was only six years back that he was 
 the druggist's boy in a little country town, alarming 
 and annoying the household with his indefatigable 
 experiments. He could hardly have imagined, as one 
 of his day-dreams at the sea-side, that his fame would 
 be acquired so quickly. 
 
 In spite of all the flatteries and attentions 
 which were showered upon him, Davy stuck man- 
 fully to his profession ; and if his reputation was 
 somewhat artificial and exaggerated at the com- 
 mencement, he amply earned and consolidated it by 
 his valuable contributions to science during the rest 
 of his career. 
 
 The name of Humphrey Davy will always be best 
 known from its association with the ingenious safety 
 lamp which he invented, and which well entitles him 
 to rank as one of the benefactors of mankind. It 
 was in the year 1815 that Davy first turned his 
 attention to this subject. Of frequent occurrence 
 from the very first commencement of coal-mining, 
 the number of accidents from fire-damp had been 
 sadly multiplied by the increase of mining operations 
 consequent on the introduction of the steam engine. 
 The dreadful character of some of the explosions 
 which occurred about this time, the appalling num- 
 ber of lives lost, and the wide-spread desolation in 
 some of the colliery districts which they had occasioned, 
 weighed heavily on the minds of all connected with 
 such matters. Not merely were the feelings of 
 
272 THE MINEE'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 humanity wounded by the terrible and constant 
 danger to which the intrepid miners were exposed, 
 but it began to be gravely questioned whether the 
 high rate of wage which the collier required to pay 
 him not only for his labour, but for the risk he ran, 
 would admit of the mines being profitably worked, 
 It was felt that some strenuous effort must be made 
 to preserve the miners from their awful foe. Davy 
 was then in the plenitude of his reputation, and a 
 committee of coal- owners besought him to investi- 
 gate the subject, and if possible provide some 
 preventative against explosions. Davy at once 
 went to the north of England, visited a number of 
 the principal pits, obtained specimens of fire-damp, 
 analyzed them carefully, and having discovered the 
 peculiarities of this element of destruction, after 
 numerous experiments devised the safety-lamp as its 
 antagonist. 
 
 The principles upon which this contrivance rests, 
 are the modification of the explosive tendencies of. 
 fire-damp (the inflammable gas in mines) when mixed 
 with carbonic acid and nitrogen ; and the obstacle 
 presented to the passage of an explosion, if it should 
 occur, through a hole less than the seventh of an inch 
 in diameter ; and accordingly, while the small oil lamp 
 in burning itself mixes the surrounding gas with car- 
 bonic acid and nitrogen, the cylinder of wire-gauze 
 which surrounds it prevents the escape of any explo- 
 sion. It is curious that George Stephenson, the 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 273 
 
 celebrated engineer, about the same time, hit on 
 much the same expedient. 
 
 To control a " power that in its tremendous effects 
 seems to emulate the lightning and the earthquake," 
 and to enclose it in a net of the most slender texture, 
 was indeed a grand achievement ; and when we 
 consider the many thousand lives which it has been 
 the means of saving from a sudden and cruel death, 
 it must be acknowledged to be one of the noblest 
 triumphs, not only of science, but of humanity, which 
 the world has ever seen. Honours were showered 
 upon Davy, from the miners and coal-owners, from 
 scientific associations, from crowned heads ; but all 
 must agree with Playfair in thinking that "it is 
 little that the highest praise, and that even the voice 
 of national gratitude when most strongly expressed, 
 can add to the happiness of one who is conscious of 
 having done such a service to his fellow-men." 
 Davy himself said he " valued it more than anything 
 he ever did/' When urged by his friends to take 
 out a patent for the invention, he replied, " No, I 
 never thought of such a thing. My sole object was 
 to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have suc- 
 ceeded, I am amply rewarded by the gratifying 
 reflection of having done so." 
 
 The honours of knighthood and baronetage were 
 successively conferred on Davy as a reward for his 
 scientific labours; and the esteem of his professional 
 brethren was shown in his election to the President- 
 
 (24) 
 
274 THE MUSTEK'S SAFETY LAMP. 
 
 ship of the Royal Institution, in which, oddly enough, 
 he was succeeded by his old friend Mr. Gilbert, who 
 had first taken him by the hand, and whom he had 
 got ahead of in the race of life. 
 
 Davy died at Geneva before he had completed his 
 fifty-first year, no doubt from over-exertion and the 
 unhealthy character of the researches he prosecuted 
 so recklessly. Assiduous as he was in his devo- 
 tion to his favourite science, he found time also 
 to master several continental languages; to keep 
 himself well acquainted with, and also to contribute 
 to the literature of the day ; and to indulge his pas- 
 sion for fly-fishing, at which he was a keen and 
 practised adept. 
 
 Eminent as were the talents of Sir Humphrey 
 Davy, and valuable as his discovery of the safety- 
 lamp has proved, it is but fair to own that his credit 
 to the latter has been very openly denied. Two 
 persons of scientific celebrity have been put forward 
 as the real inventors of the safety-lamp namely, 
 Dr. Reid Clanny of Newcastle, and the great railway- 
 engineer, George Stephenson. Of Clanny 's safety- 
 lamp a description appeared in the Philosophical 
 Transactions in 1813 that is, ten years before 
 Sir Humphrey made his communication to the Royal 
 Society. However, it was a complicated affair, which 
 required the whole attention of a boy to work it, 
 and was based on the principle of forcing in air 
 through water by the agency of bellows. 
 
THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP. 275 
 
 Stephenson's was a very different apparatus. In 
 its general principle it resembled Davy's, the chief 
 difference being, that he inserted a glass cylinder 
 inside the wire-gauze cylinder, and inside the top of 
 the glass cylinder a perforated metallic chimney 
 the supply of air being kept up through a triple 
 circle of small holes in the bottom. 
 
 Stephenson's claim has, of course, been disputed 
 by the friends and admirers of Sir Humphrey Davy; 
 but Mr. Smile has conclusively proved that his lamp, 
 the "Geordy," was in use at the Killingworth 
 collieries at the very time that Davy was conducting 
 the experiments which led to his invention. It is not 
 to be inferred, however, that Davy knew aught of 
 what Stephenson had accomplished. It seems to be one 
 of those rare cases in which two minds, working in- 
 dependently, and unknown each to the other, have 
 both arrived simultaneously at the same result. 
 
$ enng 
 
 SIR ROWLAND HILL. 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 279 
 
 " He comes, the herald of a noisy world, 
 News from all nations lumb'ring at his back, 
 Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks ; 
 Births, deaths, and marriages; 'epistles wet 
 With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks 
 Fast as the periods of his fluent quill ; 
 Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains, 
 Or nymphs responsive." COWPER. 
 
 *JC!HE growth of the postal system is a sure measure 
 of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and 
 all that goes to make up the sum of civilization; 
 and there is no more striking illustration to be found 
 of the strides which our country has made in that 
 direction since the century began than the introduc- 
 tion of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and 
 the craving which it has at once satisfied and 
 augmented. Nothing gives us so forcible an idea 
 of the difference between the Britain of the 
 present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even 
 of the Georgian period, than the contrast between 
 the postal communication of these times and of our 
 own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us, 
 we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our 
 appetite for them is so ravenous, that we wonder 
 how people got on in the days when the postman 
 was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when 
 even majesty was so badly served that, as one old 
 
280 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 postmaster* wrote in self-exculpation of some delay, 
 " when placards are sent (to order the immediate 
 forwarding of some state despatches) the constables 
 many times be fayne to take the horses oute of 
 plowes and cartes, wherein," he gravely adds, " can 
 be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that 
 the country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) 
 found it worth while to establish posts for the people 
 at large, and was able to farm out the post office for 
 10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment 
 were doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to 
 the throne, and more than doubled again before the 
 close of the seventeenth century. The country has 
 kept on growing out of system after system, like a 
 ]ad out of his clothes, and at different times has had 
 new ones made to its measure. Brian Tuke's easy 
 plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount 
 his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post- 
 boys and post-horses; and, in course of time, when 
 the robbery of the mails by sturdy highwaymen had 
 become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance 
 the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by 
 a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed 
 guard. This was thought a great advance; and so 
 it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer 
 originated the scheme. Amidst many other avo- 
 cations, he found time to travel on the outside of 
 
 * Brian Tuke, master of the post to King Henry VUL 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 281 
 
 stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coach- 
 men and observing the routes, here, there, and every- 
 where all over England, and thus matured all the 
 details of his plan from personal experience. " None 
 but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of 
 admiration in the House of Commons, " could have 
 conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practi- 
 cally entertained, none but an enthusiast could have 
 carried out such a system." 
 
 Still, in spite of the exactitude with which Palmer's 
 scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, 
 it soon began to be grown out of like the rest. It 
 became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, 
 and impeded the circulation of correspondence, no 
 unimportant artery of our national system. The 
 cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery 
 too slow, and the consequence was, that people 
 either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent 
 them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. 
 Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail 
 from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single 
 letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern 
 Babylon, only one solitary individual had got any- 
 thing to say to anybody in the metropolis of the 
 sister kingdom worth paying postage for. " We 
 look back now," writes Miss Martineau, "with a 
 sort of amazed compassion to the old crusading times, 
 when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed 
 parents and their brave sons, parted with the know- 
 
282 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 ledge that it must be months or years before they 
 could hear of one another's existence. We wonder 
 how they bore the depth of silence ! And we feel 
 the same now about the families of Polar voyagers. 
 But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many 
 of us how like this was the fate of the largest class 
 in our own country. The fact is, there was no full 
 and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except 
 between those who had the command of franks. 
 There were few families in the wide middle class 
 who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in 
 their expenditure; and if the young people sent 
 letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at 
 the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it 
 was the vast multitudes of the lower orders who 
 suffered like the crusading families of old, and the 
 geographical discoverers of all times. When once 
 their families parted off from home it was a separa- 
 tion almost like that of death. The hundreds of 
 thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, 
 of domestic servants, were cut off from family rela- 
 tions as if seas or deserts lay between them and 
 home. If the shilling for each letter could be saved 
 by the economy of weeks or months at first, the 
 rarity of correspondence went on to increase the 
 rarity; new interests hastened the dying out of old 
 ones; and the ancient domestic affections were but 
 too apt to wither away, till the wish for intercourse 
 was gone. The young girl could not ease her heart 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 283 
 
 by pouring out her cares and difficulties to her mother 
 before she slept, as she can now, when the penny 
 and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the 
 correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter 
 home was a serious and formal matter, when it must 
 cost his parents more than any indulgence they ever 
 thought of for themselves; and the old fun and 
 light -heartedness were dropped off from such domestic 
 intercourse as there was. The effect upon the morals 
 of this kind of restraint is proved beyond a doubt 
 by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a 
 well-known fact, that in regiments where the com- 
 manding officer was kind and courteous about frank- 
 ing letters for the privates, and encouraged them to 
 write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more 
 sober and manly, more virtuous and domestic in 
 their affections, than where difficulty was made by 
 the indolence or stiffness of the franking officer/' 
 
 Under the costly postal system, the revenue of the 
 post office did not, as it had hitherto done, and should 
 have continued to do, keep pace with the progress 
 of the country. The appetite for communication 
 between distant friends or men of business was 
 evidently either decaying, or finding vent in an un- 
 lawful way. The latter was chiefly the case. There 
 were vast numbers of people separated from each 
 other by long weary miles, too many to permit of 
 visits, who could not resist writing to each other, 
 the doating parent to the child, the lover to his 
 
284 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 mistress, the merchant to his agents, the lawyer to 
 his clients. Those who could not afford postage, 
 were the very class who could not get franks ; for 
 the principle was, that those who could best afford 
 postage money should have plenty of franks, which 
 were, of course, quite out of the way of poor, humble 
 folks, the fat sow had his ear well greased, the 
 lean, starving one had to consume his own fat, 
 like the bear, or go without. The consequence 
 was, that those who were eager to write and 
 could not get letters through the post, found other 
 means of forwarding them to the evasion of the law. 
 There was no limit to the exercise of ingenuity in 
 this direction. Three or four letters were written 
 on one piece of paper, to be cut up and distributed 
 separately by one of the recipients ; newspapers were 
 turned into letters by underscoring or pricking with 
 a pin the letters required to form the various words 
 of the communication ; some peculiarity in the style 
 of address on the outside was arranged between 
 correspondents, the sight of which was enough to 
 indicate a message, and the letter was then rejected, 
 having served its purpose ; and so on, in a hundred 
 other ways, fraudulent means were found of evading 
 the law. Some carriers had a large and profitable 
 business in smuggling letters. In many populous 
 districts the number of letters conveyed by carriers 
 at a penny each in an illegal way far exceeded those 
 sent through the post. In Manchester, for every 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 285 
 
 letter that went by the postman, six went by the 
 carrier ; and in Glasgow the proportion was as one to 
 ten. All this was notorious. The most honourable 
 people saw no great harm in cheating the post to 
 send a word of comfort or encouragement to an absent 
 friend, it was a vice that leaned to virtue's side. But 
 it was a bad thing for the country that people should 
 be driven to such devices, in obeying a natural and 
 proper impulse. The man who began by smuggling 
 letters, might end by smuggling tobacco or brandy; and 
 the system was morally pernicious. All felt the evil, 
 but remedy seemed impossible. As the urgency for 
 a change grew to a head, the man came to effect it, 
 a man " of open heart, who could enter into family 
 impulses ; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who 
 could devise a remedial scheme ; a man of business, 
 who could fortify such a scheme with impregnable 
 accuracy " that man was Rowland Hill. 
 
 When quite a young man, on a pedestrian excur- 
 sion through the lake district, Rowland Hill, passing 
 a cottage door, observed the postman deliver a letter 
 to a woman, and overheard her, after looking anxiously 
 at the envelope, and then returning it, say she had 
 no money to pay the postage. The man was about 
 to put it back in his wallet and pass on, for it was an 
 every-day thing for him to receive such a reply from 
 the poor countryfolk, when Mr. Hill in his goodness 
 of heart, out of compassion for the woman, stepped 
 forward and paid the shilling, regardless of many 
 
286 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 shakes of the head, and hints of remonstrance from 
 her, which he interpreted as merely unwillingness to 
 trespass on a stranger's bounty. As soon as the 
 postman was out of sight she broke the seal, and 
 showed him why she did not want him to pay foi 
 the letter. The sheet was a blank, and the envelope 
 had served as a means of communication between 
 her and her correspondent. It appeared that she 
 had arranged with her brother, that as long as all 
 went well with him he should send a blank sheet in 
 that way once a quarter, and thus she had tidings 
 of him without paying the postage. 
 
 As he pursued his walk, Mr. Hill could not help 
 meditating on the incident, which had made a deep 
 impression on his mind. He could not blame the 
 poor woman and her brother for the trick they had 
 played upon the post office in order to correspond 
 with each other; and yet he felt there must be some- 
 thing wrong in a system which put it out of their 
 reach, and of others similarly circumstanced, to do 
 8O in a lawful manner. Every country post -master 
 had a budget of touching stories of poor folk who 
 were tantalized with the sight of a letter from some 
 dear one, full, perhaps, of kind words and cheering 
 news, or asking sympathy and condolence in misfor- 
 tune, or transmitting money to help them in their 
 straits; as well as of countless little frauds of the 
 sort described, which they could not always harden 
 themselves to circumvent and punish, so piteously 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 287 
 
 eager did the poor souls appear to be to get word of 
 their friends. And yet, in spite of all sorts of frauds, 
 to people in humble life letters came like " angels' 
 visits, few and far between." 
 
 Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means 
 of lessening the cost of postage, whether the govern- 
 ment could not afford to charge a lower rate, or manage 
 to get the work done more cheaply ? Keeping his ears 
 and eyes open, always on the alert to pick up a fact as 
 regarded the present, ora hint for the future, examining 
 the mode of carriage and delivery, the routes chosen, 
 and the time occupied, Mr. Hill, after a while, arrived 
 at the conviction, that the postage rates might not 
 only be reduced, but that the transmission of letters 
 might be more quickly performed by a remodelling 
 of the system. He ascertained that the cost of mere 
 transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to 
 Edinburgh, a distance of 400 miles, was not more 
 than a thirty-sixth part of a penny, and that, there- 
 fore, there was a margin, under the existing charge, 
 of 1 If-fd. for extra expenses and profit. He observed 
 that the twopenny posts of London and other large 
 towns were found to answer very well, although 
 people, being within easy distances of each other, 
 did not need so much as in the country to cor- 
 respond in writing, and that the carriers, in spite 
 of the illegality of the traffic, had loads of letters to 
 deliver at a penny each, and that penny paid them 
 for their trouble, as well as their risk of detection. 
 
288 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 He therefore came to the conclusion, that what was 
 wanted, and what it was quite possible to establish, 
 was a uniform penny postage rate over the whole of 
 the United Kingdom. He calculated that if that 
 were adopted, the number of people then in the 
 habit of writing letters would write a great many 
 more^ than ever; that others, who had been pre- 
 cluded by the expense from corresponding, would 
 come into the field; and that hundreds of letters 
 forwarded illegally would now pass through the post, 
 so that the number of letters sent by post would be 
 increased fourfold, and the revenue, at first, perhaps 
 a trifle curtailed, would soon mount up again. 
 
 The post-office authorities were greatly shocked 
 and disgusted at so audacious and Utopian a proposal. 
 But the public were greatly delighted with it, only 
 doubting whether it was not too good news to be 
 true. First by means of an anonymous pamphlet, 
 then by direct and personal application to the 
 government, Mr. Hill endeavoured to get his plans 
 taken into consideration no easy matter, for cir- 
 cumlocution officials had passed from contemptuous 
 indifference to active hostility, as they gradually 
 discovered how formidable an antagonist in the 
 truth and accuracy of his calculations, the sincerity 
 and earnestness of his purpose, they had to deal 
 with. It was a great national cause Mr. Hill was 
 fighting, and he was not to be put down. The 
 people took his side, Parliament granted an inquiry, 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 289 
 
 and the result was a report in favour of his scheme. 
 On the 17th of August 1839 why is not the 
 anniversary kept with rejoicings ? penny postage 
 became the law of the land. 
 
 During the last weeks of the year a uniform four- 
 penny rate was charged by way of accustoming 
 people to the cheap system, and saving official feel- 
 ings from the rude shock of a sudden descent from 
 the respectable rate of a shilling, to the vulgar one 
 of a penny. On the 10th January 1840 the penny 
 system came into force. At first Mr. Hill availed 
 himself of a suggestion thrown out some years before 
 by Mr. Charles Knight, that the best way of collect- 
 ing the penny postage on newspapers would be to 
 have stamped covers ; but subsequently stamped 
 envelopes were done away with, .and queen's heads 
 introduced. The franking privilege, of course, died 
 with the dear postage. 
 
 Upon the adoption of the scheme, Mr. Hill, 
 received an appointment in the post office in order 
 to superintend its working ; but he had an uneasy 
 berth of it. His plan was adopted only in part, 
 the postage rate was lowered, while the other com- 
 pensating and essential features were thrown aside ; 
 official jealousy of reform showed itself in various 
 attempts to thwart his efforts, and to fulfil its pre- 
 diction of failure to the scheme. The consequence 
 was, that the immediate results were not so satisfac- 
 tory as could have been wished. The increase in 
 
 (24) 19 
 
290 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 the number of letters was certainly very great. 
 During the last month of the old system the total 
 number of letters passing through the post office was 
 little more than two millions and a half, of which 
 only a fifth were paid letters ; while a twelvemonth 
 after the introduction of the new system the total 
 number of letters had risen to nearly six millions 
 per month, of which the unpaid letters formed less 
 than a twelfth part. Yery heavy expenses, however, 
 not connected with the new plan, had been incurred ; 
 and the consequence was, that the profits of the 
 post office were only a fourth of what they had been. 
 Advantage was taken of this to get Mr. Hill ousted 
 from his post ; but, after he had transferred his 
 services for some years to the management of the 
 London and Brighton Railway, the authorities were 
 glad to receive him back again, to place the remodel- 
 ling of the system in his hands, and to allow him to 
 introduce the other parts of his scheme which had 
 before been neglected. In this work Mr. Hill was 
 busily engaged for a number of years, and most of 
 his plans were gradually carried out with great ad- 
 vantage to the public. In 1846 a public testi- 
 monial of 13,360 was presented to Mr. Hill in 
 acknowledgment of his distinguished services to the 
 country; and at a later date he was made a Knight 
 of the Bath. 
 
 Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and 
 must be pronounced a grand success. It has become 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 291 
 
 part and parcel of our national life, and has been 
 found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We 
 should miss the loss of cheap and rapid correspond- 
 ence with our friends and acquaintances almost as 
 much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight. The 
 postman has now to find his way to the humblest, 
 poorest districts, where twenty years back his knock 
 was never heard ; and what was once a rare luxury, 
 has now come to be considered a common necessary 
 of life. Instead of only seventy-six millions of 
 letters passing through the post in a year, as in 
 1838, the number has risen to between seven and 
 eight hundred millions. On the average every in- 
 dividual in England receives twenty-eight letters 
 a-year (in London the individual average is forty- 
 six), in Scotland eighteen, and in Ireland nine. 
 
 The gross revenue derived from these sources is 
 over four millions; and some of the railway com- 
 panies each make more money out of the conveyance 
 of the mails in a year, than the annual revenue of 
 the whole kingdom in the days of William and 
 Mary. 
 
 The moral and social effects of the cheap postage 
 are incalculable. It has tended to strengthen and 
 perpetuate domestic ties, to bring the most scattered 
 and distant members of a family under the benign 
 influences of home, and to foster feelings of friend- 
 ship and sympathy between man and man. Upon 
 the education and intelligence of the people, too, it 
 
292 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 has had, concurrently with other causes, a marked 
 effect. Many who looked upon the art of writing 
 as only a temptation to forgery, were induced to 
 take pen in hand and master the science of pot-hooks 
 and hangers, for the sake of corresponding with their 
 friends, and of being able to read the letters they 
 received. In 1839 a third of the men and half of 
 the women who were married, according to the 
 registrar's returns, could not sign their own names ; 
 in 1857 that was the case with only a seventh of 
 the men, and a fifth of the women ; and not a little 
 of this advanced education may be attributed to the 
 impulse given by the introduction of cheap postage. 
 Nor have the advantages derived from the post 
 office by the great body of the public ended here. 
 It has shown itself the most progressive department 
 of the government, and has undertaken many 
 benevolent branches of work which were never con- 
 templated by Sir Rowland Hill. Thus it carries on 
 an extensive savings-bank system, worked out by 
 Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, adopted by Mr. Gladstone 
 when Chancellor of the Exchequer, and established 
 by Act of Parliament in 1861. This valuable 
 department, whose operations are now of a very 
 extensive character, keeps a separate account for every 
 depositor, acknowledges the receipt, and, 011 the 
 requisite notice being furnished, sends out warrants 
 authorizing post-masters to pay such sums as deposi- 
 tors may wish to withdraw. The deposits are 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 293 
 
 handed over to the Commissioners for the reduction 
 of the National Debt, and repaid to the depositors 
 through the post office. The rate of interest payable 
 to depositors is two and a half per cent. Each 
 depositor has his savings-bank book, which is sent 
 to him yearly for examination, and the increasing 
 interest calculated and allowed. 
 
 The post office now acts, too, as a life-insurance 
 society, offering advantages to the operative which 
 no other society can offer, and which the public are 
 beginning to appreciate. 
 
 In 1869 the entire telegraphic system of the 
 United Kingdom passed into the hands of the post 
 office, whose administrators have shown themselves 
 anxious to offer increased facilities to the public for 
 the transaction of business. The number of tele- 
 graphic stations has been greatly increased, and the 
 rate reduced at which messages are flashed from one 
 part of the island to the other. 
 
 Finally, a recent innovation, made entirely in the 
 interest of the public weal, is the introduction of 
 Halfpenny Post Cards. On one side of these 
 missives the sender writes the name and address of 
 his correspondent ; on the other, the communication 
 intended for him. The card already bears a half- 
 penny stamp impressed, and nothing more remains 
 to be done but to deposit it in the nearest office or 
 pillar-post. We think, then, it may fairly be said 
 that the post office has shown itself anxious to u keep 
 
294 PENNY POSTAGE. 
 
 abreast " with, the ever-increasing wants of the com- 
 mercial classes of Great Britain. 
 
 While these pages are passing through the press, 
 the following particulars, apparently issued under 
 official direction, have attracted our attention. We 
 append them here, as they cannot fail to interest the 
 reader : " It appears that there are in the United 
 Kingdom 6 miles 712 yards of pneumatic tubes in 
 connection with the postal telegraphic system 
 (1871). Of these, 4 miles 688 yards exist in 
 London, and 2 miles 74 yards in the provinces 
 the latter being confined to Liverpool, Manchester, 
 Birmingham, and Glasgow. Of the total length of 
 tubes now existing, only 2 miles 1324 yards 
 existed prior to the transfer of the telegraphs to the 
 post office; so that no less than 3 miles 1148 yards 
 have been laid since that date; or, in other words, 
 the system has been considerably more than doubled 
 in less than a year. The total length of new tubes 
 ordered and in progress exceeds 3 miles, and when 
 these are completed, the system will be nearly 10 
 miles in length. All of the tubes in the provinces,' 
 and all but two of those in London, are worked on 
 Clark's system. The two which form an exception 
 are those between Telegraph Street and St. Mar tin' s- 
 le-Grand, which are worked on Siemens' system. 
 The former are made of lead, with a diameter vary- 
 ing from 1J to 2J inches the more frequent size 
 
PENNY POSTAGE. 295 
 
 being 1J inches. The latter are made of iron, and 
 have a diameter of 3 inches. The idea of iron tubes 
 worked on Siemens' principle is derived, we believe, 
 from Berlin, where the system is entirely of this 
 description; and of the new tubes in progress, that 
 from St. Martin' s-le-Grand to Temple Bar will be 
 of this kind. All of the tubes now in existence are 
 worked in both directions by means of alternate 
 pressure and vacuum; the motive power, in the 
 shape of a steam-engine, being stationed at the 
 central office, with which the out-stations have com- 
 munication by this means. It is interesting to note 
 the difference of time occupied by the different tubes 
 in London in passing the "carriers" through from 
 one end to the other the speed being governed by 
 the length and diameter of the tube, and by the 
 circumstance whether it is carried in a straight line, 
 or has to encounter sharp curves and bends on its 
 way. The great advantage of this means of com- 
 munication, for short distance, over the electric is, 
 that the tubes are not liable to sudden blocks of 
 work as the wires are, and that a dozen or more 
 messages may be sent through, at one blow, if de- 
 sired. For local telegraphs in great towns the 
 pneumatic system is invaluable, and is certain to be 
 greatly extended under the postal administration. 
 
LIEUTENANT WAGHOKN. 
 
THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 299 
 
 Cjf* 
 
 LIEUTENANT WAGHORN. 
 
 WORTHY to stand on a par with, or at lowest, in the 
 very next rank to, the men who originate great inven- 
 tions, are those whose foresight and energy discover 
 the means of extending their utility; and in shortening 
 the journey between Europe and India, by the estab- 
 lishment of the overland route, Lieutenant Waghorn 
 practically achieved as great a triumph over time and 
 space, as if he had invented a machine for the pur- 
 pose that would have traversed the old route in the 
 same time. 
 
 It was in 1827 that Thomas Waghorn first pro- 
 mulgated the idea of steam communication between 
 our Eastern possessions and the mother country. He 
 was then twenty-seven years of age, and had just 
 returned to Calcutta from rough and arduous service 
 in the Arracan war. When a midshipman of barely 
 seventeen, he had passed the " navigation" examina- 
 tion for lieutenant, the youngest, it appears, who 
 ever did so ; but although, consequently, eligible for 
 that rank, he had never reached it up to this time, 
 in spite of the distinction he had acquired in various 
 actions. His health had been so much shattered by 
 a fever caught in Arracan, that he had to return to 
 England ; but ho did not leave Calcutta without 
 
300 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 communicating his design to the government there, 
 and obtaining a letter of credence from Lord Comber- 
 mere (then vice-president in council) to the East 
 India Company, recommending him, in consequence 
 of his meritorious conduct in the recent war, " as a 
 fit and proper person to open steam navigation with 
 India, via the Cape of Good Hope/' 
 
 The idea, however, was just then in advance of the 
 time, and all Waghorn's agitation in its favour 
 proved of no avail. In the meantime, the idea of 
 saving the time spent in "doubling the Cape," by 
 means of a route through the Mediterranean, across 
 the Isthmus of Suez, and down the Eed Sea, had 
 occurred to him ; and in 1829 he procured a com- 
 mission from the East India Directory to report on 
 the probability of Red Sea navigation, arid at the 
 same time to convey certain despatches to Sir John 
 Malcolm, Governor of Bombay. 
 
 He got notice of this mission on the 24th October, 
 and was desired to be at Suez by the 8th December, 
 in order to catch the steamer Enterprise, and pro- 
 ceed in her to India. He took only four days to 
 make ready for the journey, and on the 28th left 
 London on the top of the Eagle stage -coach from 
 Gracechurch Street. Circumstances were anything but 
 propitious all through this expedition of his ; and yet 
 he defied and disregarded them all. Bridges broke 
 down at central points, falling avalanches had to be 
 kept clear off, an accident disabled the steamer, and 
 
THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 30] 
 
 he had to go some hundred and thirty miles out of 
 his way in consequence. In spite of all that, he 
 dashed through five kingdoms, and reached Trieste in 
 nine days, or little more than half the time occupied 
 by the post-office mails on the same journey. Im- 
 patient of delay, he learned that an Austrian brig had 
 left for Alexandria the night before, but the breeze 
 had fallen, and she was still to be caught a glimpse 
 of from the hill-tops. A fresh posting carriage was 
 got out, and off he went in chase of the vessel, 
 hoping to make up to her at Pesano, twenty miles 
 down the Gulf of Venice. The calm still prevailed ; 
 and as he went dashing along he could catch sight, now 
 and then, as the carriage passed some open part of 
 the road and disclosed the sea, of the brig creeping 
 lazily along. Every hour he gained on her ; instead of 
 a dull, black speck upon the horizon, he began to 
 make out her hull, her sails, and rigging. He urged 
 the post-boys with redoubled vehemence kept them 
 going at a furious pace. He was within three miles 
 of the vessel it was crawling, he was flying another 
 half hour would see him safe on board, and then 
 heigh for India. But stay, surely that was the wind 
 among the trees ; could the breeze have risen ? It 
 had indeed. A strong northerly wind sprang up ; 
 gradually the sails of the brig swelled out before it, 
 and poor Waghorn, with his panting, jaded horses, 
 was left far behind. The chase was hopeless now 
 so he went back mournfully to Trieste " exhausted 
 
302 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 in body with fatigue, and racked by disappointment 
 after the previous excitement." 
 
 The next ship, a Spanish one, was not to sail for 
 three days. That was more than Waghorn could 
 endure ; he went to the captain, urged him, bribed 
 him with fifty dollars to make it two days, instead 
 of three, and succeeded. In eight and forty hours 
 he was somewhat consoled for his former discourage- 
 ment, to find himself at length at sea. In sixteen 
 days he was at Alexandria, and after a rest of only 
 five hours there, hired donkeys and was off to 
 Rosetta. The donkeys were in the conspiracy 
 against him, as well as the wind and the avalan- 
 ches. The first day they trotted and walked 
 along as brisk as may be, and our indefatigable 
 traveller worked them well. It is well known 
 that the donkey of the east is a paragon of wisdom, 
 compared with his dunce of a brother in Europe ; 
 and upon a night's reflection, Mr. Waghorn's donkeys 
 seem to have clearly perceived that he had no notion 
 of easy stages, and was bent on keeping them going 
 as fast as he could, and as long as daylight suffered. 
 So the second day they managed to stumble, and limp, 
 and fall down intentionally four or five times, and to 
 put on a pitiful affectation of fatigue and weariness, 
 a common dodge, the drivers said, of those know- 
 ing animals. 
 
 Fortunately he was soon able to dispense with the 
 deceitful donkeys ; and embarking on the Nile, under- 
 
THE OVEKLAND EOUTE. 303 
 
 took to navigate the boat himself, in order to take 
 soundings and make observations in regard to the 
 route. After brief repose at Rosetta, he set out for 
 Cairo on a cange, a sort of boat of fifteen tons bur- 
 then, with two large latteen sails. The captain under- 
 took to land him at Cairo in three days and four 
 nights ; but the boat went aground on a shoal, and 
 after tacking for five days and nights, Waghorn lost 
 all patience, and proceeded to his destination upon 
 donkeys. He crossed the desert from Cairo to Suez 
 in four days, on two of which he travelled seventy- 
 four miles. He was thus able to keep his appoint- 
 ment and be at Suez by the 8th December, but there 
 was no sign of the steamer. The wind was blowing 
 right in her teeth ; so after waiting two days, with 
 feverish impatience, Mr. Waghorn determined to sail 
 down the centre of the Red Sea, in an open boat, in 
 the hope of meeting the steamer somewhere above 
 Cossier. All the seamen of the locality held up 
 their hands at the proposal of the mad Englishman, 
 and tried to dissuade him. It was the opinion, he 
 knew, of nautical authorities at the time, that the 
 Red Sea was not navigable. But he could not rest 
 quiet at Suez ; he had important despatches to 
 deliver; he was commissioned to inquire into the 
 navigability of these waters ; and out he would go in 
 an open boat, let folk say what they would, and so 
 he did. 
 
 " He embarked/' says the narrator of his " Life 
 
304 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 and Labours/' in Household Words* "in an open 
 boat, and without having any personal knowledge of 
 the navigation of this sea, without chart, without 
 compass, or even the encouragement of a single pre- 
 cedent for such an enterprise his only guide the 
 sun by day, and the north star by night he sailed 
 down the centre of the Red Sea. Of this most in- 
 teresting and unprecedented voyage Mr. Waghorn 
 gives no detailed account. All intermediate things 
 are abruptly cut off with these very characteristic 
 words : ' Suffice it to say, / arrived at Juddah, 
 620 miles in six and a half days, in that boat ! ' You 
 get nothing more than the sum total. He kept a 
 sailor's log-journal ; but it is only meant for sailors 
 to read, though now and then you obtain a glimpse 
 of the sort of work he went through. Thus : 
 'Sunday, ]3th Strong, N.W. wind, half a gale, 
 but scudding under storm-sail. Sunset, anchored 
 for the night. Jaffateen Islands out of sight to the 
 N. Lost two anchors during the night,' &c. The 
 rest is equally nautical and technical. In one of the 
 many scattered papers collected since the death of 
 Mr. Waghorn, we find a very slight passing allusion 
 to toils, perils, and privations, which, however, he 
 calmly says, were ' inseparable from such a voyage 
 under such circumstances,' but not one touch of 
 description from first to last. A more extraordinary 
 
 * August 17, 1850. 
 
THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 305 
 
 instance of great practical experience and knowledge, 
 resolutely and fully carrying out a project which 
 must of necessity have appeared little short of mad- 
 ness to almost everybody else, was never recorded. 
 He was perfectly successful, so far as the navigation 
 was concerned, and in the course he adopted, not- 
 withstanding that his crew of six Arabs mutinied. 
 It appears (for he tells us only the bare fact) they 
 were only subdued on the principle known to philo- 
 sophers in theory, and to high-couraged men, accus- 
 tomed to command, by experience, namely, that 
 the one man who is braver, stronger, and firmer than 
 any individual of ten or twenty men, is more than a 
 match for the ten or twenty put together. He 
 touched at Cossier on the 14th, not having fallen in 
 with the Enterprise. There he was told by the 
 governor that the steamer was expected every hour. 
 Mr. Waghorn was in no state of mind to wait very 
 long ; so, finding she did not arrive, he again put to 
 sea in his open boat, resolved, if he did not fall in 
 with her, to proceed the entire distance to Juddah 
 a distance of 400 miles further. Of this further 
 voyage he does not leave any record, even in his log, 
 beyond the simple declaration that he 'embarked 
 for Juddah ran the distance in three days and 
 twenty-one hours and a quarter and on the 23d 
 anchored his boat close to one of the East India 
 Company's cruisers, the Benares.' But now comes 
 the most trying part of his whole undertaking 
 
 (24) 20 
 
300 TEE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 the part which a man of his vigorously constituted 
 impulses was least able to bear as the climax of his 
 prolonged and arduous efforts, privations, anxieties, 
 and fatigue. Repairing on board the Benares to 
 learn the news, the captain informed him that, in 
 consequence of being found in a defective state on 
 her arrival at Bombay, ' the Enterprise was not 
 coming at all.' This intelligence seems to have 
 felled him like a blow, and he was immediately 
 seized with a delirious fever. The captain and 
 officers of the Benares felt great sympathy and in- 
 terest in this sad result of so many extraordinary 
 efforts, and detaining him on board, bestowed every 
 attention on his malady." 
 
 It was six weeks before he could proceed by 
 sailing vessel to Bombay, where he arrived on the 
 21st March, having, in spite of all the drawbacks in 
 his way, accomplished the journey in four months and 
 twenty-one days quite an extraordinary rapidity 
 at that time. Had he escaped the fever at Juddah, 
 and fallen in with the Enterprise at the right time, 
 nearly two months might have been saved. 
 
 He had proved the practicability of the overland 
 route, and he now devoted himself to its establish- 
 ment. In an address to the Home Government and 
 the East India Company, he thus expresses his 
 views : 
 
 " Of myself, I trust I may be excused when I say, 
 that the highest object of my ambition has ever 
 
THE OVEKLAND EOTJTE. ' 307 
 
 been an extensive usefulness ; and my line of life 
 my turn of mind my disposition, long ago impelled 
 me to give all my leisure, and all my opportunities 
 of observation, to the introduction of steam-vessels, 
 and permanently establishing them as the means of 
 communication between India and England including 
 all the colonies on the route. The vast importance 
 of three months' earlier information to his Majesty's 
 government, and to the Honourable Company, 
 whether relative to a war or a peace to abundant 
 or to short crops to the sickness or convalescence 
 of a colony or district, and oftentimes even of an 
 individual ; the advantages to the merchant, by en- 
 abling him to regulate his supplies and orders 
 according to circumstances and demands ; the 
 anxieties of the thousands of my countrymen in 
 India for accounts, and further accounts, of their 
 parents, children, and friends at home ; the corre- 
 sponding anxieties of those relatives and friends in this 
 country ; in a word, the speediest possible transit of 
 letters to the tens of thousands who at all times in 
 solicitude await them, was, to my mind, a service of 
 the greatest general importance ; and it shall not be 
 my fault if I do not, and for ever establish it." 
 
 The scheme which he thus resolutely and enthu- 
 siastically declared his adoption of, he lived to carry 
 out, but at the cost of years of weary advocacy, 
 agitation for help, desperate attempts on his own 
 account, or in conjunction with a few enterprising 
 
308 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 associates, in the teeth of constant discouragement, 
 official indifference, jealousy, and disguised hostility. 
 The East India Company told him there was no 
 need of steam navigation to the East at all, ordered 
 him to mind his own business and return to field 
 service, circulated reports of his insanity through 
 their agents in Egypt when Waghorn went there to 
 enlist the Pasha in his cause. The overland route, 
 however, was no theory, but an undoubted fact. 
 Waghorn never for a moment relaxed his grasp of it, 
 or doubted its value ; and in the end, after unheard 
 of difficulties, disappointments, and opposition, into 
 the long, painful story of which we need not enter, 
 succeeded in establishing the overland route. When 
 he left Egypt in 1841, he had provided English 
 carriages, vans, and horses, for the conveyance of 
 passengers across the desert, placed small steamers on 
 the Nile and Alexandrian Canal, and built the eight 
 halting-places on the desert between Cairo and 
 Suez. He also set up the three hotels in the same 
 quarter " in which every comfort, and even some 
 luxuries, were provided and stored for the passing 
 traveller, among which should be mentioned iron 
 tanks with good water, ranged in cellars beneath ; 
 and all this in a region which was previously a 
 waste of arid sands and scorching gravel, beset with 
 wandering robbers and their camels. These wander- 
 ing robbers he converted into faithful guides, as they 
 are now found to be by every traveller ; and even 
 
TliE OVERLAND ROUTE. 309 
 
 ladies with their infants are enabled to cross and re- 
 cross the desert with as much security as if they 
 were in Europe." 
 
 In acknowledgment of his services, Mr. Waghorn 
 received the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Navy, 
 a grant of 1500, and an annuity of 200 a-year 
 from Government, and another annuity of 200 from 
 the East India Company ; but he did not live long 
 to enjoy his well-earned rewards. The care, and 
 anxiety, and fatigue he had undergone had shattered 
 his constitution. Through some misunderstanding 
 or mismanagement on the part of the East India 
 Company, rivals were allowed to step in and carry 
 off the chief profits of the overland system, and his 
 last years were embittered by various disputes with 
 the authorities. He died in the end of 1849, by 
 years only in the prime of life; but old, and worn 
 by his labours before his time. Such was the 
 career of the "pioneer of the Overland Route." 
 
 But in connection with England's route to India, 
 the name of Monsieur de Lesseps must never be for- 
 gotten, nor the great enterprise which, at so much 
 cost, arid in spite of so many obstacles, he success- 
 fully carried out the Suez Canal. When he first 
 projected it he met with most of the obstacles which 
 are thrown in the way of great inventions. England, 
 jealous of a scheme which seemed likely to throw 
 into the hands of a foreign power the nearest route 
 to her beloved India, stood sullenly aloof, and refused 
 
310 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 to contribute moral or pecuniary support ; while 
 some of the most eminent English and foreign 
 engineers openly declared that it could never be 
 carried out. M. de Lesseps, however, was one of 
 those men who, when they have seized a great idea, 
 can never be thrown off it. It had taken full pos- 
 session of his imagination, judgment, and intellect ! 
 he felt that it could, and he determined that it 
 should be realized. He conquered every difficulty : 
 he raised funds ; he secured the support of his own 
 government; and in 1856 he obtained from the 
 Pasha of Egypt the exclusive privilege of construct- 
 ing a ship-canal from Tyneh, near the ruins of the 
 ancient Pelusium, to Suez. 
 
 M. de Lesseps determined that his canal should be 
 cut in a straight line, with an average width of 
 330 feet, and at an uniform depth of 20 feet under 
 low- water mark, while at each end was to be con- 
 structed a sluice-lock, 330 feet long by 70 wide. 
 Further, at each end he proposed to execute a mag- 
 nificent harbour ; that at the Mediterranean end was 
 to be extended five miles into the sea, so as to 
 obtain a permanent depth of water for a ship drawing 
 twenty-three feet, on account of the enormous 
 quantity of mud annually silted up by the Nile ; 
 that at the Red Sea end was to be three miles long. 
 
 In 1865 the great canal was begun. The 
 Mediterranean entrance is at Port Said, about the 
 middle of the narrow neck of land between Lake 
 
THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 311 
 
 Menzaleh and the sea, in the eastern part of the 
 Delta. Thence it is carried for about twenty miles 
 across Menzaleh Lake, being 112 yards wide at the 
 surface, 26 yards at the bottom, and 26 feet deep. 
 On each side an artificial bank rises some 15 feet 
 high. The distance thence to Abu Ballah Lake is 
 11 miles, through ground which varies from 15 to 
 30 feet above the level of the sea. This lake being 
 traversed, there is land again a troublesome and 
 shifty soil to Timsah Lake, the canal being cut at 
 a depth below the sea-level of 50 to 100 feet. On 
 the shore of Timsah Lake has risen a new and busy 
 town, the central point of the canal, and named 
 Ismailia, in honour of the present Pasha of Egypt. 
 
 A space of eight miles intervenes between the 
 Timsah Lake and the Bitter Lakes, and in this* 
 space the cuttings are very deep and difficult. The 
 soil being almost purely sand, the constant labour 
 of powerful dredging machines is constantly required, 
 to prevent the channel from filling up. The deepest 
 cutting occurs at El Guisr, or Girsch, and is no less 
 than 85 feet below the surface : at the water-level 
 it is 112 yards wide, at the summit-level 173 yards. 
 In traversing the Bitter Lakes the course of the canal 
 is marked by embankments. From the southern 
 end of these lakes to Suez, a distance of about thir- 
 teen miles, the cuttings are heavy and deep. 
 
 After many discouraging failures, M. de Lesseps' 
 great work was completed last year, and the formal 
 
312 THE OVERLAND ROUTE. 
 
 opening of the canal took place in the presence of 
 the Prince and Princess of Wales, and a goodly 
 number of princes, potentates, and distinguished 
 personages. It is now open to navigation from end 
 to end, and ships of considerable tonnage have suc- 
 cessfully accomplished the passage. Whether the 
 canal is a commercial success may still be doubted. 
 The cost of further deepening and enlarging it, and 
 of maintaining its banks and harbours, amounts to a 
 sum which, as yet, the traffic charges are not at all 
 likely to defray. But, in an engineering sense, the 
 Suez Canal is one of the wonders of this wonderful 
 nineteenth century. 
 
8ttiifIl8 Illustrate Maths. 
 
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