Employment has thus been given to vast numbers of our industrial
population, and the wealth and resources of the Scotch iron districts
have been increased to an extraordinary extent.  During the last year
there were 125 furnaces in blast throughout Scotland, each employing
about 400 men in making an average of 200 tons a week; and the money
distributed amongst the workmen may readily be computed from the fact
that, under the most favourable circumstances, the cost of making iron
in wages alone amounts to 36s. a-ton.[7]

An immense additional value was given to all land in which the Black
Band was found.  Mr. Mushet mentions that in 1839 the proprietor of the
Airdrie estate derived a royalty of 16,500L. from the mineral, which
had not before its discovery yielded him one farthing.  At the same
time, many fortunes have been made by pushing and energetic men who
have of late years entered upon this new branch of industry.  Amongst
these may be mentioned the Bairds of Gartsherrie, who vie with the
Guests and Crawshays of South Wales, and have advanced themselves in
the course of a very few years from the station of small farmers to
that of great capitalists owning estates in many counties, holding the
highest character commercial men, and ranking among the largest
employers of labour in the kingdom.



[1] Article by Dugald Bannatyne in Glasgow Mechanic's Magazine, No. 53,
Dec. 1824.

[2] Glasgow Mechanic's Magazine, vol. iii. p. 159.

[3] Mr. Mushet described it as "a wonderful discovery," and one of the
"most novel and beautiful improvements in his time."  Professor Gregory
of Aberdeen characterized it as "the greatest improvement with which he
was acquainted."  Mr. Jessop, an extensive English iron manufacturer,
declared it to be "of as great advantage in the iron trade as
Arkwright's machinery was in the cotton-spinning trade"; and Mr.
Fairbairn, in his contribution on "Iron" in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, says that it "has effected an entire revolution in the iron
industry of Great Britain, and forms the last era in the history of
this material."

[4] The invention of the tubular air-vessels and the water-tuyere
belongs, we believe, to Mr. John Condie, sometime manager of the Blair
Iron Works.

[5] Mr. Mushet says, "The greatest produce in iron per furnace with the
Black Band and cold blast never exceeded 60 tons a-week.  The produce
per furnace now averages 90 tons a-week.  Ten tons of this I attribute
to the use of raw pit-coal, and the other twenty tons to the use of hot
blast."  [Papers on Iron and Steel, 127.] The produce per furnace is
now 200 tons a-week and upwards.  The hot blast process was afterwards
applied to the making of iron with the anthracite or stone coal of
Wales; for which a patent was taken out by George Crane in 1836.
Before the hot blast was introduced, anthracite coal would not act as
fuel in the blast-furnace.  When put in, it merely had the effect of
putting the fire out.  With the aid of the hot blast, however, it now
proves to be a most valuable fuel in smelting.

[6] It is stated in the North British Review for Nov. 1845, that "As in
Scotland every furnace--with the exception of one at Carron--now uses
the hot blast the saving on our present produce of 400,000 tons of
pig-iron is 2,000,000 tons of coals, 200,000 tons of limestone, and
#650,000 sterling per annum."  But as the Scotch produce is now above a
million tons of pig-iron a year, the above figures will have to be
multiplied by 2 1/2 to give the present annual savings.

[7] Papers read by Mr. Ralph Moore, Mining Engineer, Glasgow, before
the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, Edin. 1861, pp. 13, 14.




CHAPTER X.

MECHANICAL INVENTIONS AND INVENTORS.

"L'invention nest-elle pas la poesie de la science? . . .  Toutes les
grandes decouvertes portent avec elles la trace ineffacable d'une
pensee poetique.  Il faut etre poete pour creer.  Aussi, sommes-nous
convaincus que si les puissantes machines, veritable source de la
production et de l'industrie de nos jours, doivent recevoir des
modifications radicales, ce sera a des hommes d'imagination, et non
point a dea hommes purement speciaux, que l'on devra cette
transformation."--E. M. BATAILLE, Traite des Machines a Vapeur.


Tools have played a highly important part in the history of
civilization.  Without tools and the ability to use them, man were
indeed but a "poor, bare, forked animal,"--worse clothed than the
birds, worse housed than the beaver, worse fed than the jackal.  "Weak
in himself," says Carlyle, "and of small stature, he stands on a basis,
at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely
enough; has to straddle out his legs, Jest the very wind supplant him.
Feeblest of bipeds!  Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the
steer of the meadow tosses him aloft like a waste rag.  Nevertheless he
can use tools, can devise tools:  with these the granite mountain melts
into light dust before him; he kneads glowing iron as if it were soft
paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unvarying
steeds.  Nowhere do you find him without tools: without tools he is
nothing; with tools he is all."  His very first contrivances to support
life were tools of the simplest and rudest construction; and his latest
achievements in the substitution of machinery for the relief of the
human hand and intellect are founded on the use of tools of a still
higher order.  Hence it is not without good reason that man has by some
philosophers been defined as A TOOL-MAKING ANIMAL.

Tools, like everything else, had small beginnings.  With the primitive
stone-hammer and chisel very little could be done.  The felling of a
tree would occupy a workman a month, unless helped by the destructive
action of fire.  Dwellings could not be built, the soil could not be
tilled, clothes could not be fashioned and made, and the hewing out of
a boat was so tedious a process that the wood must have been far gone
in decay before it could be launched.  It was a great step in advance
to discover the art of working in metals, more especially in steel, one
of the few metals capable of taking a sharp edge and keeping it.  From
the date of this discovery, working in wood and stone would be found
comparatively easy; and the results must speedily have been felt not
only in the improvement of man's daily food, but in his domestic and
social condition.  Clothing could then be made, the primitive forest
could be cleared and tillage carried on; abundant fuel could be
obtained, dwellings erected, ships built, temples reared; every
improvement in tools marking a new step in the development of the human
intellect, and a further stage in the progress of human civilization.

The earliest tools were of the simplest possible character, consisting
principally of modifications of the wedge; such as the knife, the
shears (formed of two knives working on a joint), the chisel, and the
axe.  These, with the primitive hammer, formed the principal
stock-in-trade of the early mechanics, who were handicraftsmen in the
literal sense of the word.  But the work which the early craftsmen in
wood, stone, brass, and iron, contrived to execute, sufficed to show
how much expertness in the handling of tools will serve to compensate
for their mechanical imperfections.  Workmen then sought rather to aid
muscular strength than to supersede it, and mainly to facilitate the
efforts of manual skill.  Another tool became added to those mentioned
above, which proved an additional source of power to the workman.  We
mean the Saw, which was considered of so much importance that its
inventor was honoured with a place among the gods in the mythology of
the Greeks.  This invention is said to have been suggested by the
arrangement of the teeth in the jaw of a serpent, used by Talus the
nephew of Daedalus in dividing a piece of wood.  From the
representations of ancient tools found in the paintings at Herculaneum
it appears that the frame-saw used by the ancients very nearly
resembled that still in use; and we are informed that the tools
employed in the carpenters' shops at Nazareth at this day are in most
respects the same as those represented in the buried Roman city.
Another very ancient tool referred to in the Bible and in Homer was the
File, which was used to sharpen weapons and implements.  Thus the
Hebrews "had a file for the mattocks, and for the coulters, and for the
forks, and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads." [1]  When to these
we add the adze, plane-irons, the anger, and the chisel, we sum up the
tools principally relied on by the early mechanics for working in wood
and iron.

Such continued to be the chief tools in use down almost to our own day.
The smith was at first the principal tool-maker; but special branches
of trade were gradually established, devoted to tool-making.  So long,
however, as the workman relied mainly on his dexterity of hand, the
amount of production was comparatively limited; for the number of
skilled workmen was but small.  The articles turned out by them, being
the product of tedious manual labour, were too dear to come into common
use, and were made almost exclusively for the richer classes of the
community.  It was not until machinery had been invented and become
generally adopted that many of the ordinary articles of necessity and
of comfort were produced in sufficient abundance and at such prices as
enabled them to enter into the consumption of the great body of the
people.

But every improver of tools had a long and difficult battle to fight;
for any improvement in their effective power was sure to touch the
interests of some established craft.  Especially was this the case with
machines, which are but tools of a more complete though complicated
kind than those above described.

Take, for instance, the case of the Saw.  The tedious drudgery of
dividing timber by the old fashioned hand-saw is well known.  To avoid
it, some ingenious person suggested that a number of saws should be
fixed to a frame in a mill, so contrived as to work with a
reciprocating motion, upwards and downwards, or backwards and forwards,
and that this frame so mounted should be yoked to the mill wheel, and
the saws driven by the power of wind or water.  The plan was tried,
and, as may readily be imagined, the amount of effective work done by
this machine-saw was immense, compared with the tedious process of
sawing by hand.

It will be observed, however, that the new method must have seriously
interfered with the labour of the hand-sawyers; and it was but natural
that they should regard the establishment of the saw-mills with
suspicion and hostility.  Hence a long period elapsed before the
hand-sawyers would permit the new machinery to be set up and worked.
The first saw-mill in England was erected by a Dutchman, near London,
in 1663, but was shortly abandoned in consequence of the determined
hostility of the workmen.  More than a century passed before a second
saw-mill was set up; when, in 1767, Mr. John Houghton, a London
timber-merchant, by the desire and with the approbation of the Society
of Arts, erected one at Limehouse, to be driven by wind.  The work was
directed by one James Stansfield, who had gone over to Holland for the
purpose of learning the art of constructing and managing the sawing
machinery.  But the mill was no sooner erected than a mob assembled and
razed it to the ground.  The principal rioters having been punished,
and the loss to the proprietor having been made good by the nation, a
new mill was shortly after built, and it was suffered to work without
further molestation.

Improved methods of manufacture have usually had to encounter the same
kind of opposition.  Thus, when the Flemish weavers came over to
England in the seventeenth century, bringing with them their skill and
their industry, they excited great jealousy and hostility amongst the
native workmen.  Their competition as workmen was resented as an
injury, but their improved machinery was regarded as a far greater
source of mischief.  In a memorial presented to the king in 1621 we
find the London weavers complaining of the foreigners' competition, but
especially that "they have made so bould of late as to devise engines
for working of tape, lace, ribbin, and such like, wherein one man doth
more among them than 7 Englishe men can doe; so as their cheap sale of
commodities beggereth all our Englishe artificers of that trade, and
enricheth them." [2]

At a much more recent period new inventions have had to encounter
serious rioting and machine-breaking fury.  Kay of the fly-shuttle,
Hargreaves of the spinning-jenny, and Arkwright of the spinning-frame,
all had to fly from Lancashire, glad to escape with their lives.
Indeed, says Mr. Bazley, "so jealous were the people, and also the
legislature, of everything calculated to supersede men's labour, that
when the Sankey Canal, six miles long, near Warrington, was authorized
about the middle of last century, it was on the express condition that
the boats plying on it should be drawn by men only!" [3]  Even improved
agricultural tools and machines have had the same opposition to
encounter; and in our own time bands of rural labourers have gone from
farm to farm breaking drill-ploughs, winnowing, threshing, and other
machines, down even to the common drills,--not perceiving that if their
policy had proved successful, and tools could have been effectually
destroyed, the human race would at once have been reduced to their
teeth and nails, and civilization summarily abolished.[4]  It is, no
doubt, natural that the ordinary class of workmen should regard with
prejudice, if not with hostility, the introduction of machines
calculated to place them at a disadvantage and to interfere with their
usual employments; for to poor and not very far-seeing men the loss of
daily bread is an appalling prospect.  But invention does not stand
still on that account.  Human brains WILL work.  Old tools are improved
and new ones invented, superseding existing methods of production,
though the weak and unskilled may occasionally be pushed aside or even
trodden under foot.  The consolation which remains is, that while the
few suffer, society as a whole is vastly benefitted by the improved
methods of production which are suggested, invented, and perfected by
the experience of successive generations.

The living race is the inheritor of the industry and skill of all past
times; and the civilization we enjoy is but the sum of the useful
effects of labour during the past centuries.  Nihil per saltum.  By
slow and often painful steps Nature's secrets have been mastered.  Not
an effort has been made but has had its influence.  For no human labour
is altogether lost; some remnant of useful effect surviving for the
benefit of the race, if not of the individual.  Even attempts
apparently useless have not really been so, but have served in some way
to advance man to higher knowledge, skill, or discipline.  "The loss of
a position gained," says Professor Thomson, "is an event unknown in the
history of man's struggle with the forces of inanimate nature."  A
single step won gives a firmer foothold for further effort.  The man
may die, but the race survives and continues the work,--to use the
poet's simile, mounting on stepping-stones of dead selves to higher
selves.

Philarete Chasles, indeed, holds that it is the Human Race that is your
true inventor:  "As if to unite all generations," he says, "and to show
that man can only act efficiently by association with others, it has
been ordained that each inventor shall only interpret the first word of
the problem he sets himself to solve, and that every great idea shall
be the RESUME of the past at the same time that it is the germ of the
future."  And rarely does it happen that any discovery or invention of
importance is made by one man alone.  The threads of inquiry are taken
up and traced, one labourer succeeding another, each tracing it a
little further, often without apparent result.  This goes on sometimes
for centuries, until at length some man, greater perhaps than his
fellows, seeking to fulfil the needs of his time, gathers the various
threads together, treasures up the gain of past successes and failures,
and uses them as the means for some solid achievement, Thus Newton
discovered the law of gravitation, and thus James Watt invented the
steam-engine.  So also of the Locomotive, of which Robert Stephenson
said, "It has not been the invention of any one man, but of a race of
mechanical engineers."  Or, as Joseph Bramah observed, in the preamble
to his second Lock patent, "Among the number of patents granted there
are comparatively few which can be called original so that it is
difficult to say where the boundary of one ends and where that of
another begins."

The arts are indeed reared but slowly; and it was a wise observation of
Lord Bacon that we are too apt to pass those ladders by which they have
been reared, and reflect the whole merit on the last new performer.
Thus, what is hailed as an original invention is often found to be but
the result of a long succession of trials and experiments gradually
following each other, which ought rather to be considered as a
continuous series of achievements of the human mind than as the
conquest of any single individual.  It has sometimes taken centuries of
experience to ascertain the value of a single fact in its various
bearings.  Like man himself, experience is feeble and apparently
purposeless in its infancy, but acquires maturity and strength with
age.  Experience, however, is not limited to a lifetime, but is the
stored-up wealth and power of our race.  Even amidst the death of
successive generations it is constantly advancing and accumulating,
exhibiting at the same time the weakness and the power, the littleness
and the greatness of our common humanity.  And not only do we who live
succeed to the actual results of our predecessors' labours,--to their
works of learning and of art, their inventions and discoveries, their
tools and machines, their roads, bridges, canals, and railways,--but to
the inborn aptitudes of blood and brain which they bequeath to us, to
that "educability," so to speak, which has been won for us by the
labours of many generations, and forms our richest natural heritage.

The beginning of most inventions is very remote.  The first idea, born
within some unknown brain, passes thence into others, and at last comes
forth complete, after a parturition, it may be, of centuries.  One
starts the idea, another developes it, and so on progressively until at
last it is elaborated and worked out in practice; but the first not
less than the last is entitled to his share in the merit of the
invention, were it only possible to measure and apportion it duly.
Sometimes a great original mind strikes upon some new vein of hidden
power, and gives a powerful impulse to the inventive faculties of man,
which lasts through generations.  More frequently, however, inventions
are not entirely new, but modifications of contrivances previously
known, though to a few, and not yet brought into practical use.
Glancing back over the history of mechanism, we occasionally see an
invention seemingly full born, when suddenly it drops out of sight, and
we hear no more of it for centuries.  It is taken up de novo by some
inventor, stimulated by the needs of his time, and falling again upon
the track, he recovers the old footmarks, follows them up, and
completes the work.

There is also such a thing as inventions being born before their
time--the advanced mind of one generation projecting that which cannot
be executed for want of the requisite means; but in due process of
time, when mechanism has got abreast of the original idea, it is at
length carried out; and thus it is that modern inventors are enabled to
effect many objects which their predecessors had tried in vain to
accomplish.  As Louis Napoleon has said, "Inventions born before their
time must remain useless until the level of common intellects rises to
comprehend them."  For this reason, misfortune is often the lot of the
inventor before his time, though glory and profit may belong to his
successors.  Hence the gift of inventing not unfrequently involves a
yoke of sorrow.  Many of the greatest inventors have lived neglected
and died unrequited, before their merits could be recognised and
estimated.  Even if they succeed, they often raise up hosts of enemies
in the persons whose methods they propose to supersede.  Envy, malice,
and detraction meet them in all their forms; they are assailed by
combinations of rich and unscrupulous persons to wrest from them the
profits of their ingenuity; and last and worst of all, the successful
inventor often finds his claims to originality decried, and himself
branded as a copyist and a pirate.

Among the inventions born out of time, and before the world could make
adequate use of them, we can only find space to allude to a few, though
they are so many that one is almost disposed to accept the words of
Chaucer as true, that "There is nothing new but what has once been
old;" or, as another writer puts it, "There is nothing new but what has
before been known and forgotten;" or, in the words of Solomon, "The
thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing
under the sun."  One of the most important of these is the use of
Steam, which was well known to the ancients; but though it was used to
grind drugs, to turn a spit, and to excite the wonder and fear of the
credulous, a long time elapsed before it became employed as a useful
motive-power.  The inquiries and experiments on the subject extended
through many ages.  Friar Bacon, who flourished in the thirteenth
century, seems fully to have anticipated, in the following remarkable
passage, nearly all that steam could accomplish, as well as the
hydraulic engine and the diving-bell, though the flying machine yet
remains to be invented:--

"I will now," says the Friar, "mention some of the wonderful works of
art and nature in which there is nothing of magic, and which magic
could not perform.  Instruments may be made by which the largest ships,
with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity
than if they were full of sailors.  Chariots may be constructed that
will move with incredible rapidity, without the help of animals.
Instruments of flying may be formed, in which a man, sitting at his
ease and meditating on any subject, may beat the air with his
artificial wings, after the manner of birds.  A small instrument may be
made to raise or depress the greatest weights.  An instrument may be
fabricated by which one man may draw a thousand men to him by force and
against their will; as also machines which will enable men to walk at
the bottom of seas or rivers without danger." It is possible that Friar
Bacon derived his knowledge of the powers which he thus described from
the traditions handed down of former inventions which had been
neglected and allowed to fall into oblivion; for before the invention
of printing, which enabled the results of investigation and experience
to be treasured up in books, there was great risk of the inventions of
one age being lost to the succeeding generations.  Yet Disraeli the
elder is of opinion that the Romans had invented printing without being
aware of it; or perhaps the senate dreaded the inconveniences attending
its use, and did not care to deprive a large body of scribes of their
employment.  They even used stereotypes, or immovable printing-types,
to stamp impressions on their pottery, specimens of which still exist.
In China the art of printing is of great antiquity.  Lithography was
well known in Germany, by the very name which it still bears, nearly
three hundred years before Senefelder reinvented it; and specimens of
the ancient art are yet to be seen in the Royal Museum at Munich.[5]

Steam-locomotion by sea and land, had long been dreamt of and
attempted.  Blasco de Garay made his experiment in the harbour of
Barcelona as early as 1543; Denis Papin made a similar attempt at
Cassel in 1707; but it was not until Watt had solved the problem of the
steam-engine that the idea of the steam-boat could be developed in
practice, which was done by Miller of Dalswinton in 1788.  Sages and
poets have frequently foreshadowed inventions of great social moment.
Thus Dr. Darwin's anticipation of the locomotive, in his Botanic
Garden, published in 1791, before any locomotive had been invented,
might almost be regarded as prophetic:

      Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! afar
      Drag the slow barge, and drive the rapid car.

Denis Papin first threw out the idea of atmospheric locomotion; and
Gauthey, another Frenchman, in 1782 projected a method of conveying
parcels and merchandise by subterraneous tubes,[6] after the method
recently patented and brought into operation by the London Pneumatic
Despatch Company.  The balloon was an ancient Italian invention,
revived by Mongolfier long after the original had been forgotten.  Even
the reaping machine is an old invention revived.  Thus Barnabe Googe,
the translator of a book from the German entitled 'The whole Arte and
Trade of Husbandrie,' published in 1577, in the reign of Elizabeth,
speaks of the reaping-machine as a worn-out invention--a thing "which
was woont to be used in France.  The device was a lowe kinde of carre
with a couple of wheeles, and the frunt armed with sharpe syckles,
whiche, forced by the beaste through the corne, did cut down al before
it.  This tricke," says Googe, "might be used in levell and champion
countreys; but with us it wolde make but ill-favoured woorke." [7]  The
Thames Tunnel was thought an entirely new manifestation of engineering
genius; but the tunnel under the Euphrates at ancient Babylon, and that
under the wide mouth of the harbour at Marseilles (a much more
difficult work), show that the ancients were beforehand with us in the
art of tunnelling.  Macadamized roads are as old as the Roman empire;
and suspension bridges, though comparatively new in Europe, have been
known in China for centuries.

There is every reason to believe--indeed it seems clear that the Romans
knew of gunpowder, though they only used it for purposes of fireworks;
while the secret of the destructive Greek fire has been lost
altogether.  When gunpowder came to be used for purposes of war,
invention busied itself upon instruments of destruction.  When recently
examining the Museum of the Arsenal at Venice, we were surprised to
find numerous weapons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
embodying the most recent English improvements in arms, such as
revolving pistols, rifled muskets, and breech-loading cannon.  The
latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modern idea, though in a rude
form, had been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the
ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago.  Even
Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci
and by him attributed to Archimedes.[8]  The Congreve rocket is said to
have an Eastern origin, Sir William Congreve having observed its
destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in
the Mahratta war, on which he adopted and improved the missile, and
brought out the invention as his own.

Coal-gas was regularly used by the Chinese for lighting purposes long
before it was known amongst us.  Hydropathy was generally practised by
the Romans, who established baths wherever they went.  Even chloroform
is no new thing.  The use of ether as an anaesthetic was known to
Albertus Magnus, who flourished in the thirteenth century; and in his
works he gives a recipe for its preparation.  In 1681 Denis Papin
published his Traite des Operations sans Douleur, showing that he had
discovered methods of deadening pain.  But the use of anaesthetics is
much older than Albertus Magnus or Papin; for the ancients had their
nepenthe and mandragora; the Chinese their mayo, and the Egyptians
their hachisch (both preparations of Cannabis Indica), the effects of
which in a great measure resemble those of chloroform.  What is perhaps
still more surprising is the circumstance that one of the most elegant
of recent inventions, that of sun-painting by the daguerreotype, was in
the fifteenth century known to Leonardo da Vinci,[9] whose skill as an
architect and engraver, and whose accomplishments as a chemist and
natural philosopher, have been almost entirely overshadowed by his
genius as a painter.[10]  The idea, thus early born, lay in oblivion
until 1760, when the daguerreotype was again clearly indicated in a
book published in Paris, written by a certain Tiphanie de la Roche,
under the anagrammatic title of Giphantie.  Still later, at the
beginning of the present century, we find Thomas Wedgwood, Sir Humphry
Davy, and James Watt, making experiments on the action of light upon
nitrate of silver; and only within the last few months a silvered
copper-plate has been found amongst the old household lumber of Matthew
Boulton (Watt's partner), having on it a representation of the old
premises at Soho, apparently taken by some such process.[11]

In like manner the invention of the electric telegraph, supposed to be
exclusively modern, was clearly indicated by Schwenter in his
Delasements Physico-Mathematiques, published in 1636; and he there
pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each other by
means of the magnetic needle.  A century later, in 1746, Le Monnier
exhibited a series of experiments in the Royal Gardens at Paris,
showing how electricity could be transmitted through iron wire 950
fathoms in length; and in 1753 we find one Charles Marshall publishing
a remarkable description of the electric telegraph in the Scots
Magazine, under the title of 'An expeditions Method of conveying
Intelligence.' Again, in 1760, we find George Louis Lesage, professor
of mathematics at Geneva, promulgating his invention of an electric
telegraph, which he eventually completed and set to work in 1774.  This
instrument was composed of twenty-four metallic wires, separate from
each other and enclosed in a non-conducting substance.  Each wire ended
in a stalk mounted with a little ball of elder-wood suspended by a silk
thread.  When a stream of electricity, no matter how slight., was sent
through the wire, the elder-ball at the opposite end was repelled, such
movement designating some letter of the alphabet.  A few years later we
find Arthur Young, in his Travels in France, describing a similar
machine invented by a M. Lomond of Paris, the action of which he also
describes.[12]  In these and similar cases, though the idea was born
and the model of the invention was actually made, it still waited the
advent of the scientific mechanical inventor who should bring it to
perfection, and embody it in a practical working form.

Some of the most valuable inventions have descended to us without the
names of their authors having been preserved.  We are the inheritors of
an immense legacy of the results of labour and ingenuity, but we know
not the names of our benefactors.  Who invented the watch as a measurer
of time? Who invented the fast and loose pulley? Who invented the
eccentric? Who, asks a mechanical inquirer,[13] "invented the method of
cutting screws with stocks and dies? Whoever he might be, he was
certainly a great benefactor of his species.  Yet (adds the writer) his
name is not known, though the invention has been so recent."  This is
not, however, the case with most modern inventions, the greater number
of which are more or less disputed.  Who was entitled to the merit of
inventing printing has never yet been determined.  Weber and Senefelder
both laid claim to the invention of lithography, though it was merely
an old German art revived.  Even the invention of the penny-postage
system by Sir Rowland Hill is disputed; Dr. Gray of the British Museum
claiming to be its inventor, and a French writer alleging it to be an
old French invention.[14]  The invention of the steamboat has been
claimed on behalf of Blasco de Garay, a Spaniard, Papin, a Frenchman,
Jonathan Hulls, an Englishman, and Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, a
Scotchman.  The invention of the spinning machine has been variously
attributed to Paul, Wyatt, Hargreaves, Higley, and Arkwright.  The
invention of the balance-spring was claimed by Huyghens, a Dutchman,
Hautefeuille, a Frenchman, and Hooke, an Englishman.  There is scarcely
a point of detail in the locomotive but is the subject of dispute.
Thus the invention of the blast-pipe is claimed for Trevithick, George
Stephenson, Goldsworthy Gurney, and Timothy Hackworth; that of the
tubular boiler by Seguin, Stevens, Booth, and W.  H.  James; that of
the link-motion by John Gray, Hugh Williams, and Robert Stephenson.

Indeed many inventions appear to be coincident.  A number of minds are
working at the same time in the same track, with the object of
supplying some want generally felt; and, guided by the same experience,
they not unfrequently arrive at like results.  It has sometimes
happened that the inventors have been separated by great distances, so
that piracy on the part of either was impossible.  Thus Hadley and
Godfrey almost simultaneously invented the quadrant, the one in London,
the other in Philadelphia; and the process of electrotyping was
invented at the same time by Mr. Spencer, a working chemist at
Liverpool, and by Professor Jacobi at St.  Petersburg.  The safety-lamp
was a coincident invention, made about the same time by Sir Humphry
Davy and George Stephenson; and perhaps a still more remarkable
instance of a coincident discovery was that of the planet Neptune by
Leverrier at Paris, and by Adams at Cambridge.

It is always difficult to apportion the due share of merit which
belongs to mechanical inventors, who are accustomed to work upon each
other's hints and suggestions, as well as by their own experience.
Some idea of this difficulty may be formed from the fact that, in the
course of our investigations as to the origin of the planing
machine--one of the most useful of modern tools--we have found that it
has been claimed on behalf of six inventors--Fox of Derby, Roberts of
Manchester, Matthew Murray of Leeds, Spring of Aberdeen, Clement and
George Rennie of London; and there may be other claimants of whom we
have not yet heard.  But most mechanical inventions are of a very
composite character, and are led up to by the labour and the study of a
long succession of workers.  Thus Savary and Newcomen led up to Watt;
Cugnot, Murdock, and Trevithick to the Stephensons; and Maudslay to
Clement, Roberts, Nasmyth, Whitworth, and many more mechanical
inventors.  There is scarcely a process in the arts but has in like
manner engaged mind after mind in bringing it to perfection.  "There is
nothing," says Mr. Hawkshaw, "really worth having that man has
obtained, that has not been the result of a combined and gradual
process of investigation.  A gifted individual comes across some old
footmark, stumbles on a chain of previous research and inquiry.  He
meets, for instance, with a machine, the result of much previous
labour; he modifies it, pulls it to pieces, constructs and reconstructs
it, and by further trial and experiment he arrives at the long
sought-for result." [15]

But the making of the invention is not the sole difficulty.  It is one
thing to invent, said Sir Marc Brunel, and another thing to make the
invention work.  Thus when Watt, after long labour and study, had
brought his invention to completion, he encountered an obstacle which
has stood in the way of other inventors, and for a time prevented the
introduction of their improvements, if not led to their being laid
aside and abandoned.  This was the circumstance that the machine
projected was so much in advance of the mechanical capability of the
age that it was with the greatest difficulty it could be executed.
When labouring upon his invention at Glasgow, Watt was baffled and
thrown into despair by the clumsiness and incompetency of his workmen.
Writing to Dr. Roebuck on one occasion, he said, "You ask what is the
principal hindrance in erecting engines? It is always the smith-work."
His first cylinder was made by a whitesmith, of hammered iron soldered
together, but having used quicksilver to keep the cylinder air-tight,
it dropped through the inequalities into the interior, and "played the
devil with the solder."  Yet, inefficient though the whitesmith was,
Watt could ill spare him, and we find him writing to Dr. Roebuck almost
in despair, saying, "My old white-iron man is dead!" feeling his loss
to be almost irreparable.  His next cylinder was cast and bored at
Carron, but it was so untrue that it proved next to useless.  The
piston could not be kept steam tight, notwithstanding the various
expedients which were adopted of stuffing it with paper, cork, putty,
pasteboard, and old hat.  Even after Watt had removed to Birmingham,
and he had the assistance of Boulton's best workmen, Smeaton expressed
the opinion, when he saw the engine at work, that notwithstanding the
excellence of the invention, it could never be brought into general use
because of the difficulty of getting its various parts manufactured
with sufficient precision.  For a long time we find Watt, in his
letters, complaining to his partner of the failure of his engines
through "villainous bad workmanship." Sometimes the cylinders, when
cast, were found to be more than an eighth of an inch wider at one end
than the other; and under such circumstances it was impossible the
engine could act with precision.  Yet better work could not be had.
First-rate workmen in machinery did not as yet exist; they were only in
process of education.  Nearly everything had to be done by hand.  The
tools used were of a very imperfect kind.  A few ill-constructed
lathes, with some drills and boring-machines of a rude sort,
constituted the principal furniture of the workshop.  Years after, when
Brunel invented his block-machines, considerable time elapsed before he
could find competent mechanics to construct them, and even after they
had been constructed he had equal difficulty in finding competent hands
to work them.[16]

Watt endeavoured to remedy the defect by keeping certain sets of
workmen to special classes of work, allowing them to do nothing else.
Fathers were induced to bring up their sons at the same bench with
themselves, and initiate them in the dexterity which they had acquired
by experience; and at Soho it was not unusual for the same precise line
of work to be followed by members of the same family for three
generations.  In this way as great a degree of accuracy of a mechanical
kind was arrived at was practicable under the circumstances.  But
notwithstanding all this care, accuracy of fitting could not be secured
so long as the manufacture of steam-engines was conducted mainly by
hand.  There was usually a considerable waste of steam, which the
expedients of chewed paper and greased hat packed outside the piston
were insufficient to remedy; and it was not until the invention of
automatic machine-tools by the mechanical engineers about to be
mentioned, that the manufacture of the steam-engine became a matter of
comparative ease and certainty.  Watt was compelled to rest satisfied
with imperfect results, arising from imperfect workmanship.  Thus,
writing to Dr. Small respecting a cylinder 18 inches in diameter, he
said, "at the worst place the long diameter exceeded the short by only
three-eighths of an inch."  How different from the state of things at
this day, when a cylinder five feet wide will be rejected as a piece of
imperfect workmanship if it be found to vary in any part more than the
80th part of an inch in diameter!

Not fifty years since it was a matter of the utmost difficulty to set
an engine to work, and sometimes of equal difficulty to keep it going.
Though fitted by competent workmen, it often would not go at all.  Then
the foreman of the factory at which it was made was sent for, and he
would almost live beside the engine for a month or more; and after
easing her here and screwing her up there, putting in a new part and
altering an old one, packing the piston and tightening the valves, the
machine would at length begot to work.[17]  Now the case is altogether
different.  The perfection of modern machine-tools is such that the
utmost possible precision is secured, and the mechanical engineer can
calculate on a degree of exactitude that does not admit of a deviation
beyond the thousandth part of an inch.  When the powerful oscillating
engines of the 'Warrior' were put on board that ship, the parts,
consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the
different workshops of the Messrs. Penn and Sons, where they had been
made by workmen who knew not the places they were to occupy, and fitted
together with such precision that so soon as the steam was raised and
let into the cylinders, the immense machine began as if to breathe and
move like a living creature, stretching its huge arms like a new-born
giant, and then, after practising its strength a little and proving its
soundness in body and limb, it started off with the power of above a
thousand horses to try its strength in breasting the billows of the
North Sea.

Such are among the triumphs of modern mechanical engineering, due in a
great measure to the perfection of the tools by means of which all
works in metal are now fashioned.  These tools are themselves among the
most striking results of the mechanical invention of the day.  They are
automata of the most perfect kind, rendering the engine and
machine-maker in a great measure independent of inferior workmen.  For
the machine tools have no unsteady hand, are not careless nor clumsy,
do not work by rule of thumb, and cannot make mistakes.  They will
repeat their operations a thousand times without tiring, or varying one
hair's breadth in their action; and will turn out, without complaining,
any quantity of work, all of like accuracy and finish.  Exercising as
they do so remarkable an influence on the development of modern
industry, we now propose, so far as the materials at our disposal will
admit, to give an account of their principal inventors, beginning with
the school of Bramah.



[1] 1 Samuel, ch. xiii. v. 21.

[2] State Papers, Dom. 1621, Vol. 88, No. 112.

[3] Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd
Series, 117.

[4] Dr. Kirwan, late President of the Royal Irish Academy, who had
travelled much on the continent of Europe, used to relate, when
speaking of the difficulty of introducing improvements in the arts and
manufactures, and of the prejudices entertained for old practices,
that, in Normandy, the farmers had been so long accustomed to the use
of plough's whose shares were made entirely of WOOD that they could not
be prevailed on to make trial of those with IRON; that they considered
them to be an idle and useless innovation on the long-established
practices of their ancestors; and that they carried these prejudices so
far as to force the government to issue an edict on the subject.  And
even to the last they were so obstinate in their attachment to
ploughshares of wood that a tumultuous opposition was made to the
enforcement of the edict, which for a short time threatened a rebellion
in the province.--PARKES, Chemical Essays, 4th Ed. 473.

[5] EDOUARD FOURNIER, Vieux-Neuf, i. 339.

[6] Memoires de l' Academie des Sciences, 6 Feb. 1826.

[7] Farmer's Magazine, 1817, No. ixxi. 291.

[8] Vieux-Neuf, i. 228; Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 742.

[9] Vieux-Neuf, i. 19.  See also Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 803.

[10] Mr. Hallam, in his Introduction to the History of Europe,
pronounces the following remarkable eulogium on this extraordinary
genius:--"If any doubt could be harboured, not only as to the right of
Leonardo da Vinci to stand as 'the first name of the fifteenth century,
which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many
discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such
circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis not very
untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a
height which mere books do not record."  "Unpublished MSS. by Leonardo
contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr. Hallam,
"within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with something
like the awe of preternatural knowledge."

[11] The plate is now to be seen at the Museum of Patents at South
Kensington.  In the account which has been published of the above
discovery it is stated that "an old man of ninety (recently dead or
still alive) recollected, or recollects, that Watt and others used to
take portraits of people in a dark (?) room; and there is a letter
extant of Sir William Beechey, begging the Lunar Society to desist from
these experiments, as, were the process to succeed, it would ruin
portrait-painting."

[12] "16th Oct. 1787.  In the evening to M. Lomond, a very ingenious
and inventive mechanic, who has made an improvement of the jenny for
spinning cotton.  Common machines are said to make too hard a thread
for certain fabrics, but this forms it loose and spongy.  In
electricity he has made a remarkable discovery:  you write two or three
words on a paper; he takes it with him into a room, and turns a machine
inclosed in a cylindrical case, at the top of which is an electrometer,
a small fine pith ball; a wire connects with a similar cylinder and
electrometer in a distant apartment; and his wife, by remarking the
corresponding motions of the ball, writes down the words they indicate;
from which it appears that he has formed an alphabet of motions.  As
the length of the wire makes no difference in the effect, a
correspondence might be carried on at any distance: within and without
a besieged town, for instance; or for a purpose much more worthy, and a
thousand times more harmless, between two lovers prohibited or
prevented from any better connexion.  Whatever the use may be, the
invention is beautiful."--Arthur Young's Travels in France in 1787-8-9.
London, 1792, 4to. ed. p. 65.

[13] Mechanic's Magazine, 4th Feb. 1859.

[14] A writer in the Monde says:--"The invention of postage-stamps is
far from being so modern as is generally supposed.  A postal regulation
in France of the year 1653, which has recently come to light, gives
notice of the creation of pre-paid tickets to be used for Paris instead
of money payments.  These tickets were to be dated and attached to the
letter or wrapped round it, in such a manner that the postman could
remove and retain them on delivering the missive.  These franks were to
be sold by the porters of the convents, prisons, colleges, and other
public institutions, at the price of one sou."

[15] Inaugural Address delivered before the Institution of Civil
Engineers, 14th Jan. 1862.

[16] BEAMISH'S Memoir of Sir I. M. Brunel, 79, 80.

[17] There was the same clumsiness in all kinds of mill-work before the
introduction of machine-tools.  We have heard of a piece of machinery
of the old school, the wheels of which, when set to work, made such a
clatter that the owner feared the engine would fall to pieces.  The
foreman who set it agoing, after working at it until he was almost in
despair, at last gave it up, saving, "I think we had better leave the
cogs to settle their differences with one another:  they will grind
themselves right in time!"




CHAPTER XI.

JOSEPH BRAMAH.

"The great Inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial
world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and
decked with honours, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and
oil."--ISAAC TAYLOR, Ultimate Civilization.


The inventive faculty is so strong in some men that it may be said to
amount to a passion, and cannot be restrained.  The saying that the
poet is born, not made, applies with equal force to the inventor, who,
though indebted like the other to culture and improved opportunities,
nevertheless invents and goes on inventing mainly to gratify his own
instinct.  The inventor, however, is not a creator like the poet, but
chiefly a finder-out.  His power consists in a great measure in quick
perception and accurate observation, and in seeing and foreseeing the
effects of certain mechanical combinations.  He must possess the gift
of insight, as well as of manual dexterity, combined with the
indispensable qualities of patience and perseverance,--for though
baffled, as he often is, he must be ready to rise up again unconquered
even in the moment of defeat.  This is the stuff of which the greatest
inventors have been made.  The subject of the following memoir may not
be entitled to take rank as a first-class inventor, though he was a
most prolific one; but, as the founder of a school from which proceeded
some of the most distinguished mechanics of our time, he is entitled to
a prominent place in this series of memoirs.

Joseph Bramah was born in 1748 at the village of Stainborough, near
Barnsley in Yorkshire, where his father rented a small farm under Lord
Strafford.  Joseph was the eldest of five children, and was early
destined to follow the plough.  After receiving a small amount of
education at the village school, he was set to work upon the farm.
From an early period he showed signs of constructive skill.  When a
mere boy, he occupied his leisure hours in making musical instruments,
and he succeeded in executing some creditable pieces of work with very
imperfect tools.  A violin, which he made out of a solid block of wood,
was long preserved as a curiosity.  He was so fortunate as to make a
friend of the village blacksmith, whose smithy he was in the practice
of frequenting.  The smith was an ingenious workman, and, having taken
a liking for the boy, he made sundry tools for him out of old files and
razor blades; and with these his fiddle and other pieces of work were
mainly executed.