William Bridges Adams

“ Time was, that inventors holding patents were regarded as public enemies, and every judge on the bench thought it a triumph when a patent was overthrown. They have lived through this, but the community owes them yet a larger measure of justice—a law court of their own, in which rapid and cheap justice may be done, in which patents may be declared valid, or overthrown, without the law’s delay, as now practised; in which chicanery may be abolished, and in which the poor inventor may not be overwhelmed by the long purses of the unscrupulous. ”

“ If chemistry can make the putrid fish of Billingsgate and the putrid flesh of Newgate and Leadenhall Markets wholesome, by neutralising the poisonous qualities, it seems desirable that it should be a lawful process. ”

“ After all, the evils of an earthquake would be less evils of nature than of art. The shaking of our soil can do no more to us than the shaking of the water round our soil. The trees and the corn and the fruits of the earth will continue to grow let the earth shake never so often. Only, if earthquakes are to come at frequent intervals, we must give up our luxuries of lofty buildings of brick and stone, and such-like brittle material, and betake ourselves to a material that will not break. ”

“ It is quite true that there was a time when from Normandy sailed a force that established itself in England; but that force was not Celtic but Norse — kinsmen of our own ancestry— -of very little sense of justice, but strong men withal; and so England absorbed them, and grew out of them a Richard as well as a John: and so has she gone on absorbing, from time to time, the best blood of all the Continent, whenever men of more than ordinary intelligence were driven from their hearths by despotic power jealous of their moral force. ”

“ If the warm weather lasted long enough each summer, and the supply of matter were cut off, the Thames would become pure, as it does in casks or tanks on shipboard,—horrible to every sense while the fermenting process is going on, but pronounced by all skippers frequenting the Thames harbour as the finest water in the universe when the gases are thrown off and the no longer fermentable mud subsides to the bottom—a thing almost incredible to those who have not witnessed it. ”

“ It was the triumph of a simple-minded man, earnest of purpose, and frank of nature, with nothing to conceal, but with the instinct of unsealing every mystery of nature so far as he could, and giving it to man’s uses. And, verily, that man had toiled and ranged through matter for twenty years, and at last gave to the world a process of which the results are incalculable;—homogeneous iron and steel without limit as to size. ”

“ And take the very worst condition of an earthquake and all its consequences, better that than the atrocious civil war now raging between our descendants in America. We should not be demoralised, but become better and stronger men by our physical trials, and all the new circumstances we should have to surmount by improved art. Who shall say that such an event would not ultimately serve to increase our commerce, making us the iron-house builders for the earthquake zone of the earth, as we are already the iron shipbuilders to girdle the ocean round? ”

“ Once outside, there was a clear sky and bright moon looking down, and but for the thought that all in-door comforts were wrecked, and the possibility of a great ocean wave coming up the bed of the lake, and the lofty sand hills tumbling down into the valley, one might have imagined oneself at sea in a bright gale of wind. ”

“ How many of the readers of this paper will get these facts into their brains, that a smooth road is a less nuisance than a rough one, and that an ordinary omnibus would lose half its noisome qualities by running on a smooth surface, and save half the cost of horse flesh and human labour? Perhaps five per cent. of my readers will realise this in their minds, and then throw down the paper and think no more of it. The ninety-five others will go on believing that a street railway is a nuisance—until they see it realised. ”

“ In Chili and Peru, and on the table-lands of the Andes, when the stars at night seem pendent from strings, so that you seem to look round them in the pellucid atmosphere, there is the land of indigenous charqui, where moisture flies away before the drying winds, where a mule lost in a snow-drift comes forth in the spring a grinning statue of leather, couchant, disembowelled, and with his eyes picked out by the condors, but with his hide impregnable, gradually getting to look like an old and worn leathern trunk after a hard campaign. ”

“ Some future artist will yet give us the pictured aspect of more benefactors to society at large, including those rare men who, though not conspicuous by large apparent results, yet do as Hampden did in the cause of freedom—men not great in acts or speech, but prophets constantly suggesting to others the true paths of progress, giving the ideas and planning those processes by which others achieve what is called success—success I mean in the eyes of the multitude, which measures men and their results by the stir and noise which they excite. ”

“ Grateful are we to men like Mr. Walker, who has thus gathered together in groups the world’s workers, with their images and superscriptions, that men may know their benefactors and render to their memory that justice which was too rarely accorded in their lives.
So, all honour to the work of both the father and the son, the picture and the book, in teaching the men of the present what they owe to men of the past. ”

“ It is a conventional fashion to speak with great respect of the French Emperor as the soul of chivalry, the soldier of liberty, and so on. Perhaps! If a man has universally spoken truth, people have no right to disbelieve him: but the French Emperor has more than once said one thing and done another. ”

“ If it can be demonstrated that the public gain a million a year by an invention, why should not the inventor obtain a small percentage during a prolonged period in his life-time? If one man combines a number of words in the form of a book, he obtains a per-centage for its use, fixed by himself or his descendants for three generations. Why should not an inventor have a claim for a longer or shorter period for a combination of mechanical principles? ”

“ And so long as England shall be a doer of justice, the moral sense of the world will uphold her physical power on the ocean. The perfection of her iron ships—her indigenous manufacture—is no mere creature of the imagination, but a practical fact to be accomplished by science. ”

“ In the letters of Lord Collingwood, who watched the French coasts during the threatened invasion of another Bonaparte, is to be found the grief expressed at long and tedious separation from his family. If a channel fleet composed of such vessels is to watch the Channel in all weathers, every resource of art should be adopted to lessen the tedium of life, and reduce the drudgery of the crew, while providing for every comfort. Of course all labour, save that of directing labour, would be transferred to steam power, and all the comforts to be found in a first-class hotel would be provided. ”

“ And he might chop sticks, but like the smith in the nursery tale, who could only make a “hiss out of his hot iron,” so the labour of the small Hatchett was nought—no king, or prince, or duke, ever rode behind his unhandy work.
But his father was born before him, and of the thriving class. When he grew rich he built himself a new house, still over his great front shop, with such taste as was in him. ”

“ There are people, and they are numerous, who have an idea that inventors are a thoughtless, wasteful race, who throw away their own property and that of their neighbours in absurd schemes. No doubt, there are numbers of these imaginative schemers, without judgment: but what then? In other departments of life we have unsuccessful merchants, and quack doctors, and mock musicians, and mechanical poets, and pretenders of all sorts; and why should the realm of mechanical invention be without them? ”

“ Oxford Street, Regent Street, the Strand and Holborn—all the buildings in main thoroughfares, whose front walls stand upon plate-glass, would fall prostrate at a blow, and choke the thoroughfares with heterogeneous ruins and the mashed frames of humanity. ”

“ There is, it is true, no royal road to originality, but so also there is no royal road to the selection of judges; only a judge in a condition of ignorance is much more damaging to the public than a pretended originator, who turns out to be a quack. Better blunder over a hundred mistakes, than mistake the one right thing when it starts up. ”

“ We have heard of stray English travellers boiling their dinners in the Geysers for an experiment: we should turn these, if at home, to the uses of agriculture and many other purposes; and earthquakes also may be a blessing, under Providence, when human art shall take the place of human ignorance. We continue to use the ocean for a highway, albeit amidst shaking mountains of water, and we shall not abandon the shaking land when we have adapted our dwellings to its new circumstances, if such new circumstances are to be, as the whirligig of time turns round. ”

“ He was not an originator, but a plodding worker, with a rich man’s laboratory, in some of the many paths that had been struck out by others.
At the central table opposite to Dalton sits James Watt, worthily representing Chemistry and Mechanism. Midway is Matthew Boulton, a veritable gentleman of the old English stamp, a man of clear perception, without whom Watt would perchance have been doomed to blossom unseen. It is no light thing to conceive a mechanical idea, and to bring that idea forth and cultivate it, and to cause it to grow up into healthy existence. ”

“ Few remember the struggle of steam to supplant horses on the highways. Many remember the struggle to supplant highways by railways, for the struggle was crowned by success, and men of all classes abandoned old pursuits for new. ”

“ All employers of skilled workmen understand this: and surely a first-class seaman should be a skilled workman, who, risking life by sudden ending rather than by long process, should be highly prized and carefully nurtured. There is no reason why every good seaman should not be a good mechanic. All good seamen are so in the processes of sailing-vessels, and, in a steam fortress afloat, mechanical operations would be a relief from ennui. Turning and fitting would be an amusement, which “polishing shot” is not. ”

“ The transit of food and fuel by water would cease, and the toppling down of brick viaducts would stop for a time all railway transit.
But men would be left, and women, racy of the soil, and the soil itself would continue to produce its fruits, and we should begin the world anew, but with a mass of knowledge to begin upon such as the world has never before massed together. The Colonies would suffer, for working men and women would become too valuable to be spared till we had again “filled up our numbers,” if war, prompted by our misfortunes, did not intervene. ”

“ The elder Bonaparte could not cross to invade England, because he had no steam. But neither could England enter the harbours of France to take away or destroy in mass all his means of transport, simply because she had no steam. With steam, our sea- dogs would not have lain off French ports to watch their game, and make prey of solitary stragglers from time to time. They would have swooped down in mass, and made assurance doubly sure, as they did at Copenhagen, so soon as they knew that the Danish fleet was virtually made over to the French emperor.
We are a peaceable people; we want no war ”

“ These muscles grew on English soil, and the visible death sheaves that hurtled from them, struck terror into the foe from the distance he could not reach in return. The modern leaden bullet strikes without notice, from amidst the smoke and noise—the ancient arrow flashed its mission as it flew. ”

“ Heeding not money or power, or any worldly reward, he was the man who would have pursued his experiment with the last remaining drop of water while the rest of the world was ablaze,—a special agent of Providence to unfold the secrets of nature in furtherance of the process that substitutes the sweat of heated water for the sweat of man’s heated muscles. ”

“ These men look round the world and find that nearly all matter possesses owners, land and water, and bird and beast, and fish, and tree and plant, and minerals. Air and ocean alone are free to all. In their teeming brains they behold new powers into which matter may be shaped, new combinations of choice art ”

“ If it can be shown that the inventor has received any sum, from a thousand pounds or so upwards, he has very little chance of renewal. And, moreover, the cost of the application amounts to so considerable a sum, that a poor inventor would have little chance of finding it, more especially as the cost increases by the opposition, supported commonly by the clubbed purses of manufacturers,—men not usually imaginative, and who recognise the work done upon matter, but not the work of mind, and still less the value of that perception and judgment which discerns utility and profit in embryo. ”