A. Fraser Robertson

“ A strict secrecy—a protection of themselves—as merchant vessels on the high seas in olden days guarded themselves from the pirates who, ready to pounce upon them, roamed the waters.
But as a man—a great, large-hearted, open-minded man—and one of the greatest inventors of his time, Wedgwood never followed this line of action. Rather was he nobly willing that others should be the better for his brains. And so during his long life he took out only one patent, as we call that which makes an invention all a man’s own and prevents others touching it. ”

“ When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy’s ears, so brutal had been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life, and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted disappointment long years ago as a boy. ”

“ SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Perhaps no man has risen out of lower depths of poverty and ignorance and obscurity to the very top of fame’s ladder than Richard Arkwright. More than 150 years ago, towards the end of December, 1732, there was born in a house in a humble side street of Preston, a child who was to leave his stamp, not only on his native town, but on the whole of England, and indeed on the civilisation of the world. ”

“ The great steam-horse that we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be the world’s greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a thousand throats. ”

“ He is like some mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to see [66] him leap from one dazzling peak to another. Honours and attainments were his such as come to few men in this world, but we cannot but feel that what gave him the greatest joy in life was that he had been enabled to rescue hundreds of lives, to bring light out of darkness, and cheer and safety where before there had been uncertainty and death. It is for this that the name of Humphrey Davy will be blessed by men and women in the ages still to come. ”

“ In every college of mechanics or engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.
It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before James Watt came into it—before, as it were, steam took its place and while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what steam now does with such apparent ease.
On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving, seaport town of Greenock—the birthplace of James Watt. ”

“ We cannot visit Wylam without feeling at once that we are in the heart of the colliery [103] country. Newcastle’s lofty chimneys tower some eight miles off, and chimneys closer at hand belch forth great volumes of smoke and smut, and flaming furnaces shoot out lurid lights by night far across the country.
In a common little wayside house, just a labourer’s cottage, standing on the roadside, some 120 years ago a baby opened his eyes on a world that was to be rough enough at first for his young feet, though at last they were to land on the very topmost round of the ladder. ”

“ To the end, as well in time of difficulty and of toil as in time of triumph, the man retained very much those qualities that had drawn out people’s love for him in boyhood, the kindly word from the customer in the shop behind the counter. The world offered him of its best, as it has a way of doing to those who do well [47] for themselves, but it had no power to draw him from his work and the simplicity of his simple home-life. It was only and always to that which is highest and best that he gave of his genius. ”

“ They laid her in the quiet little church of Burslem, and the brothers and sisters went on living together.
It was not till he had reached the age of twenty-two that Josiah cut the knot that bound him to home and went out into the great world to seek his fortune, as eager youths will do to the end of time. He took with him his little all—his father’s legacy of £20, a pair of capable hands, and a wonderful brain.
His boyhood was over. Manhood lay before him—rough places at first in the world, puzzles, difficulties, trials, but in the end name, fame, riches. ”

“ He had taken other men’s thoughts and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings, struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of weary waiting, an expenditure of £12,000, and yet no profit from his invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of hundreds. ”

“ Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned, and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake. And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes, looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. ”

“ The world looks still upon John Smeaton as a wonderful engineer—a great mechanic—a man who climbed to the top of his profession, and the sound of whose fame spread over Europe; but he will ever be best remembered by the light of the Eddystone, that memorial monument that stood firm for more than a century, sometimes hid in blinding spray, anon gleaming out clear and steady, a rescuer from shipwreck and death. ”

“ He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble potter’s cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name. [101] He was a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything attempts the first beginning. ”

“ What a strange thing that in this world of passing-away and change we should be able to preserve from destruction such treasures sheltered in a wax cylinder—some great man’s words of wisdom, or the silver tones of a sweet musician! ”

“ Then, owing to the undermining of a portion of the reef, it was thought well to build a new house on another part of the rock. The old base still stands on the old place, and the upper rooms have been put on the Hoe at Plymouth.
These are, after all, the best monuments we could have of the builder. Welded into the stones, it seems to us we can trace, not alone genius and great mechanical power, but a patience in difficulty, a courage in danger, and in face of long, wearing months of anxiety. It is these, perhaps, more than all else, for which we honour the name of Smeaton. ”

“ He removed from the swirling current of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the mind of a Greater Inventor than he. ”

“ He took to pondering and considering and making experiments with the clay that lay about the doors. How to make the black mottled ware more delicate—the ruddy-coloured of a fairer hue—how to mould rough edges more smoothly—how to introduce fresh colours and glazes.
The whole thing threw over the boy a great glamour of fascination. They show in Burslem yet a teapot—an ornamented thing made of the ochreous clay of the district—as “Josiah Wedgwood’s first teapot.” ”

“ There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a great and crying evil—the danger in which our miners and their families lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of accidents in our coal-pits—mines exploding, men and boys and horses being blown to pieces or buried alive—and always from the same cause—the want of a safety lamp. ”

“ There was no pinch in the lot of the Smeatons, no grinding poverty that we sometimes find to spur a boy to manhood before his time. Little John was cradled, as it were, in love. As a child his parents taught him at home. He was not eager to mix with other boys in outdoor romp or play, and very early, while yet hardly more than a baby, he showed a strong love for pulling his toys to pieces to see what they were made of! Never was he happier than when he could get hold of a cutting-tool with which to shape toy pumps and houses and windmills. ”

“ Here it was that baby George learned that early love of birds that lasted as long as life. As a boy he would catch and tame the blackbirds, and these would fly about the cottage all day, and at night come and roost at his bed-head. Years after, when he was an old man, he used to tell how, walking with his father one day, he parted some thick branches overhead and lifted the child in his arms that he might peep at a nest full of young blackbirds. ”

“ A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life. This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of what he has done. ”

“ It may be that had he been busy and successful as an organ-maker, his great invention might never have seen the light.
People had, of course, known for long that there was a power in water exposed to heat. Now in 1759, when Watt was twenty-three, his attention was drawn to the Steam Engine. He pondered it. After he had pondered it he set to work. His first model was a failure. But the idea had silently and firmly lodged in his brain. He went on with his everyday business, but ever in his leisure back sprang his mind to that subject that was to be his all-absorbing life-work. ”

“ But, poorly equipped as young Richard was in most ways, he went out into life provided with a great brain, and had he known it, that brain was to open to him a door through which—could he have looked then—he might have seen stretching away into the years a long vista of triumphs and successes. The boy began on a very low round of the ladder—a strange enough beginning for the future maker of the cotton world: he entered on his career as apprentice to a barber. ”

“ Long years after he bemoaned his ignorance and want of education when he felt all the drawbacks, the trammelling, the holding-down of it, when he realised how it handicapped him in the race of life. And when he was an old man over fifty, after pressing into the day as many as sixteen working hours, he would steal an hour from sleep to learn English grammar and another hour to practise writing and spelling. ”

“ No longer active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and so took to thinking—not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay very near to his heart. ”

“ For instance, one man might pore over the matter and discover something new or come to some conclusion. He might find one substance, a clay or a soil, that when mixed with a second substance produced a third thing—something new. He might begin to work this out in his pottery, and immediately all the workmen in the place knew the secret of how he did it. The knowledge spread, and while he believed it was still all his own, other men had seized on his discovery; other potteries were turning out his ware and selling it. ”

“ No sooner were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock of the country.
But Arkwright’s brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who said this invention was not all his. ”

“ Close by in a neighbouring cottage lived two old ladies. At nights they declared they heard a strange humming noise among the bushes, as if the devil himself were making music, tuning up his bagpipes for Arkwright and Kay to dance a reel! The story got abroad. The people of Preston, excited and curious, were eager to break into the house and discover if Arkwright and Kay were indeed in league with the Evil One. ”

“ We cannot, any of us, imitate his genius or his power of invention, or his splendid physical strength, but it is within the scope of all of us, however young or insignificant, to copy his conscientious, unwearied hard work. ”

“ To us his life has much of pathos. Men have called him “the greatest inventor in all ages,” “the most extraordinary man that the world has ever seen,” but the long years of struggle and labour and waiting, the weakness of body [158] and the oft depression of spirit, are to us not a little sad, specially when we remember how patiently he endured, how uncomplainingly he suffered, that we might profit, that he might, as Lord Brougham has it, “increase the power of man.” ”

“ GEORGE STEPHENSON. If a town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind horses. ”