Eastern fable, whose supernatural powers were occasionally at the command of man."—" Arnott's Physics," fourth edition, vol. i. p. 384.)

In addition to those difficulties which his unrivalled mechanical ingenuity enabled him to surmount, Watt, notwithstanding the merit of his inventions, had to contend for some time with others of a different nature, in his attempts to reduce them to practice. He had no pecuniary resources of his own, and was at first without any friend willing to run the risk of the outlay necessary for an experiment on a sufficiently large scale. At last he applied to Dr. Roebuck, an ingenious and spirited speculator, who had just established the Carron iron-works, not far from Glasgow, and held also at this time a lease of the extensive coal-works at Kinneal, the property of the Duke of Hamilton. Dr. Roebuck agreed to advance the requisite funds on having two-thirds of the profits made over to him; and upon this Mr. Watt took out his first patent in the beginning of the year 1769. An engine with a cylinder of eighteen inches diameter was soon after erected at Kinneal; and, although, as a first experiment, it was necessarily in some respects of defective construction, its working completely demonstrated the great value of Watt's improvements. But Dr. Roebuck, whose undertakings were very numerous and various, in no long time after forming this connection, found himself involved in such pecuniary difficulties, as to put it out of his power to make any farther advances in prosecution of its object. On this Watt applied himself for some years almost entirely to the ordinary work of his profession as a civil engineer; but at last, about the year 1774, when all hopes of any farther assistance from Dr. Roebuck were at an end, he resolved to close with a proposal which had been made to him through his friend Dr. Small, of Birmingham, that he should remove to that town, and enter into partnership with the eminent hardware manufacturer, Mr. Boulton, whose extensive establishments at Soho had already become famous over Europe, and procured for England an unrivalled reputation for the arts there carried on. Accordingly, an arrangement having been made with Dr. Roebuck, by which his share of the patent was transferred to Mr. Boulton, the firm of Boulton and Watt commenced the business of making steam-engines in the year 1775.

Mr. Watt now obtained from Parliament an extension of his patent for twenty-five years from this date, in consideration of the acknowledged national importance of his inventions. The first thing which he and his partner did was to erect an engine at Soho, which they invited all persons interested in such machines to inspect. They then proposed to erect similar engines wherever required, on the very liberal principle of receiving as payment for each only one-third of the saving in fuel which it should effect, as compared with one of the old construction. As this saving, however, had been found to amount in the whole to fully

three-fourths of all the fuel that had been wont to be employed, the revenue thus accruing to the patentees became very great after their engines were extensively adopted. This they very soon were, especially in Cornwall, where the numerous mines afforded a vast field for the employment of the new power, partly in continuing or commencing works which only an economized expenditure could make profitable, and often also in labours which the old engine was altogether inadequate to attempt.

But the draining of mines was only one of many applications of the steam-power now at his command which Watt contemplated, and in course of time accomplished. During the whole twenty-five years, indeed, over which his renewed patent extended, the perfecting of his invention was his chief occupation; and, notwithstanding a delicate state of health, and the depressing affliction of severe head-aches to which he was extremely subject, he continued throughout this period to persevere with unwearied diligence in adding new improvements to the mechanism of the engine, and devising the means of applying it to new purposes of usefulness. He devoted, in particular, the exertions of many years to the contriving of the best methods of making the action of the piston communicate a rotatory motion in various circumstances; and between the years 1781 and 1785 he took out four different patents for inventions having this object in view. In the midst of these scientific labours, too, his attention was much distracted by attempts which were made in several quarters to pirate his improvements, and the consequent necessity of defending his rights in a series of actions, which, notwithstanding successive verdicts in his favour, did not terminate till the year 1799, when the validity of his claims was finally confirmed by the unanimous decision of the Judges of the Court of King's Bench.

Watt's inexhaustible ingenuity displayed itself in various other contrivances beside those which make part of his steam-engine. An apparatus for copying letters and other writings, now in extensive use; a method of heating houses by steam; a new composition, for the purposes of sculpture, having the transparency and nearly the hardness of marble; a machine for multiplying copies of busts and other performances in carving or statuary—are enumerated among his minor inventions. But it is his steam-engine that forms the great monument of his genius, and that has conferred upon his name its imperishable renown. This invention has already gone far to revolutionize the whole domain of human industry; and almost every year is adding to its power and its conquests. In our manufactures, our arts, our commerce, our social accommodations, it is constantly achieving what, little more than half a century ago, would have been accounted miracles and impossibilities. “The trunk of an elephant,” it has been finely and truly said, “ that can pick up a pin, or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal,

and crush masses of obdurate metal like wax before it-draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer-and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors; cut steel into ribands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves." But another application of it, which had only begun to be made when the above sketch was originally published, has since been productive of still greater changes on the condition of society than had resulted from any of its previous achievements. It had been employed, several years before, at some of our collieries, in the propelling of heavilyloaded carriages over railways; but the great experiment of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in September, 1830, for the first time practically demonstrated with what hitherto almost undreamt-of rapidity travelling by land might be carried on through the aid of steam. Coaches, under the impetus communicated by this, the most potent, and at the same time the most perfectly controllable of our mechanical agencies, were now drawn forward at the flying speed of thirty and thirty-five miles an hour. Nor did it seem that even this was to be our ultimate limit of attainment. Even in navigation, although there the resistance of the water increases so much more rapidly than the force opposed to it, it was impossible to say what might not yet be accomplished. On land, the thin medium of the air presents no such formidable obstacle to a force making its way through it; and a rapidity of movement might perhaps be eventually attained here, which was as yet inconceivable. But even when the rate of land travelling already shown to be quite practicable should have become universal, in what a new state of society should we find ourselves! When we should be able to travel a hundred miles in any direction in three or four hours, into what comparative neighbourhood would the remotest extremes even of a large country be brought, and how little should we think of what we had hitherto called distance! A nation, it was said, will then be indeed a community; and all the benefits of the highest civilization, instead of being confined to one central spot, will be diffused equally over the land like the light of heaven. This improvement, in short, when fully consummated, will confer upon man nearly as much new power and new enjoyment as if he were actually endowed with wings.

It is gratifying to reflect that, even while he was yet alive, Watt received from the voice of the most illustrious of his contemporaries the honours due to his genius. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Glasgow in 1806; and in 1808 he was elected a member of the French Institute. He died on the 25th of August, 1819, in the 84th year of his age.

* Article on Watt, by Lord Jeffrey, in the "Encyclopædia Britannica."

We cannot better conclude our sketch of the life of this great inventor than by the following extract from the character that has been drawn of him by the eloquent writer (the late Lord Jeffrey) whom we have already quoted, "Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr. Watt was an extraordinary, and, in many respects, a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information-had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and well. He had infinite quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodizing power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation had been that which he had been last occupied in studying and exhausting; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of physical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticizing the measures or the matter of the German poetry.

"His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty-by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were instinctively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. Every conception that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its place among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. He never appeared, therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it for his own use to its true value and to its simplest form. And thus it often happened, that a great deal more was learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could have

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derived from the most faithful study of the originals, and that errors and absurdities became manifest from the mere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that invaluable assistance."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. THE COTTON MANUFACTURE.

THE history of the steam-engine, and of him whose inventive genius has made it what it is, may be appropriately followed by some account of an individual, whose rise from a very humble origin to affluence and distinction was the result of his persevering attention to the improvement of the machinery employed in one of the most important branches of our manufactures, and whose name is intimately connected with the recent history of the commercial greatness of this country; we mean the celebrated SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT. Arkwright was born on the 23rd of December, 1732, at Preston, in Lancashire. His parents were very poor, and he was the youngest of a family of thirteen children; so that we may suppose the school education he received, if he ever was at school at all, was extremely limited. Indeed, but little learning would probably be deemed necessary for the profession to which he was bred, that of a barber. This business he continued to follow till he was nearly thirty years of age; and this first period of his history is of course obscure enough. About the year 1760, however, or soon after, he gave up shaving, and commenced business as an itinerant dealer in hair, collecting the commodity by travelling up and down the country, and then, after he had dressed it, selling it again to the wig-makers, with whom he very soon acquired the character of keeping a better article than any of his rivals in the same trade. He had obtained possession, too, we are told, of a secret method of dyeing the hair, by which he doubtless contrived to augment his profits; and perhaps, in his accidental acquaintance with this little piece of chemistry, we may find the germ of that sensibility he soon began to manifest to the value of new and unpublished inventions in the arts, and of his passion for patent rights and the pleasures of monopoly.

It would appear that his first effort in mechanics, as has happened in the case of many other ingenious men, was an attempt to discover the perpetual motion. It was in inquiring after a person to make him some wheels for a project of this kind, that in the latter part of the year 1767, he got acquainted with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, then residing