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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.

0 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 saltx 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 aGod,
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 ukeep

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
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to prevent the channel from filling up. The deepest
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than 85 feet below the surface : at the water-level
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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
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