cart in the middle of the market-place, his boyish figure drawn to its
full height, and there harangue the boys who gathered in little groups
to hear the young orator. At school there was nothing in any way
remarkable about young Humphrey, except, perhaps, that somewhere hid
away within him was the gift of rhyme or the gift of poetry. English
and Latin verse alike came easy to him, and by-and-by his schoolfellows
found out his facility, and they pressed him into their service to
compose valentines and love-letters. But except for this he seemed in
these early years to be nothing more than a happy, healthy English boy,
full of fun and spirits. He would fish off Penzance Pier for grey
mullet, catching more than his companions. He would bait his hooks and
wait till a shoal of these difficult fish were swimming about the bait,
then by a clever jerk of his tackle entangle and capture them. His love
of fishing remained with him all through life--almost to the end. So
strong was it that even as a man he never could conceal his annoyance
if unsuccessful, or if he discovered a friend to have caught a larger
number than he. So keen and ardent was he that he would dress himself in
green that the wily fish might know no difference between him and the
green trees and grassy banks!
In his boyhood we find it difficult to trace any germs of that talent
for experimenting and inventing that distinguished him in later life.
He scooped turnips hollow, and lighted up the insides with candles--but
what boy has not experimented in the same way? He made squibs, or
"thunder-powder," that exploded on a stone with a loud report that
delighted his companions. But there is no trace of an unusual bent of
mind here--just an example of an ardent, eager English boy, full of life
and spirits.
In 1793 he went to school in Truro, not far from Penzance. He was quick,
but that was all--a clever boy, not a prodigy. His master, writing long
years after, when the boy's name had become a household word in England,
said:--
"I did not at that time discover any extraordinary abilities."
It must have been a school of the old sort that Mr. Davy had lighted
upon for his son, for the story goes that young Humphrey, at times in
scrapes like other boys, while punishment hung over him, had these
doggrel lines fired off by his master at his head--
"Now, Master Davy,
Now, sir, I have 'e,
No one shall save 'e;
Good Master Davy."
And with the end of the rhyme down came the flat ruler on the open palm
of the culprit! School, while it may not have done him a great deal of
good, at least did not do him much harm. His own frank, buoyant mind
prevented his being twisted into a cut-and-dried shape, or pressed into
any special mould. Long years after he gave thanks that in those young
days he was left very much to his own bent.
"What I am I have made myself," he said. "I say this without vanity, and
in pure simplicity of heart."
So passed the long, sunshiny days of school-time, and when he was
sixteen he left school finally. After that, for one short, blissful year
he shot and fished and lived chiefly in the open, surrounded by the
beauties of Cornish scenery, for which in after years his heart always
kept a tender memory, when the bustle and din of a city, and the whirl
of city life, had well-nigh drowned for him Nature's softer tones. He
grew then to know familiarly bird and beast, and rock and flower. In
after years, when his life was more fully filled than most men's, a
chance word or reference would seem to waft him a whiff of the sea off
the Cornish shore, and a great longing would seize him for the loved
scenes of his childhood. Then, in the midst of his work, he would take a
hurried run home. During this year of holiday, which he enjoyed with the
whole-heartedness of a careless, happy boy, he collected a number of
birds, and stuffed them with his own hands--and with not a little skill.
Almost to the end of life he kept his love of shooting. As in fishing
he tried to efface himself and deceive the wily fish, so in shooting
he was strangely beset by fear of an accident, and he would study to
make himself as conspicuous as possible in a scarlet hat! Almost at
the end, when his strength was failing, it is pathetic enough to find
him ask to be driven to the field, that he might still fire a shot.
But already over his young life there brooded its first great shadow.
In 1794 his father died. It may have been this which helped to change
young Humphrey from the happy, careless boy to something more serious,
more thoughtful, that fixed his mind on the responsibilities life was
so full of, that helped to turn it from mere sport and pleasure to the
improvement of his mind--to the gaining of knowledge. At any rate, about
this time the boy laid hold of life, and, as a rower in a boat-race
might do, steadied down to his responsibilities.
His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and
straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so
much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He
tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments--anything that
he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery--nothing was
safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and
hideous odours--he burnt holes in his sister's dresses. When he turned
the garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim--
"This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He
will blow us all into the air."
Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy
"Philosopher," or "Sir Humphrey," as if already his prophetic eye
pierced the future and beheld his greatness.
So he spent much of the day, and in the long summer evenings he would
ramble along the seashore as far as Marazion armed with a hammer with
which to chip off "specimens" from the rocks, for already geology had
thrown over him its peculiar spell. He would end these happy days with
tea at a favourite aunt's. And it was not merely boyish enjoyment these
solitary rambles brought. They and the still small voice of Nature
were telling on him. Gradually they were making and moulding the boy,
approaching now as he was, very near to the threshold of manhood.
Even then, however, he was trying to improve himself. With the roar of
the waves and the howl of the winds in his ears in these lonely walks,
he would declaim to the elements, in the hope of softening a defect in
his voice. This probably arose from his having what is called "no ear."
He had no notion of either time or tune. It used to trouble him much
that he never could keep step in the Volunteer Infantry corps to which
he belonged, and someone tried to teach him "God Save the King," but
without success.
The surgical part of his profession was always disagreeable and
distasteful to the boy, although from no want of courage on his part.
The story goes that one day about this time he was bitten in the leg by
a dog supposed to be mad. No sooner did he realise what had happened to
him than he there and then took a knife and cut the piece right out of
his leg, and then went to the surgery and had the wound cauterised.
His mind was such that it instinctively rose to emergencies and grappled
with anything--a big thing or a little thing. Both were to him alike.
Knowledge was what he wanted. He wanted to know as much as possible, and
he liked to get to the bottom of a difficulty for himself. Into each
new thing that came his way he threw himself with all the ardour and
impetuosity of his nature. Nor was he merely practical and nothing more.
He had that sympathy and delicacy of mind that revelled in communing
with nature. This expressed itself in sonnets and poems--some of which
he wrote when he was only twelve. A great poetic genius once said of
him--
"If Davy had not been the first chemist he would have been the first
poet of his age."
But poetry was not the field in which he was to shine. His genius was
for experiments. He went on eagerly experimenting on anything--heat,
light, air. Anything connected with chemistry drew him as with a magnet.
The first time some real experimenting apparatus found its way to his
hands he could not conceal his delight. Specially did an air-pump charm
him. It was to him as a new and fascinating toy to a child. He kept
working the piston up and down, and would hardly let it go!
And now it seemed as if it were almost time for him to try his wings
in the larger air of the great world. More than one man had come to
Penzance who perhaps gave the boy a foretaste of the delights he was to
know by-and-by as a man in the atmosphere of culture and talent in
which his lot was to be cast. Among these were Josiah Wedgwood, the
Staffordshire Potter, and young Watt, the son of the inventor of the
Condensing Steam Engine.
There was about young Humphrey's outward appearance about this time
nothing specially attractive. He had round shoulders, not a comely face,
and a manner that was in no way remarkable or engaging, but surely the
light of genius must have shone from his eyes!
However, such as he was outwardly, he now prepared to launch away into
the great world. A professor of chemistry in Bristol had heard of his
experiments in light and heat, and proposed to him that he should become
assistant in the Pneumatic Institution there. There was not much money
to be earned by it.
"He must be maintained, but the fund will not furnish a salary from
which a man can lay up anything." So they told him. But was it not his
most direct road to fortune?
Perhaps Humphrey thought so. At any rate, the Penzance surgeon was
prevailed upon to cut short the term of the boy's apprenticeship, "on
account of the singularly promising talents Mr. Davy had displayed."
So Humphrey went out from his native town, and from his home, as many a
young man had gone before him, with a heart beating high with hope, and,
as his young, ardent spirit believed, the world spread out before him.
And certainly a brilliant future was opening to the boy. He turned his
steps to Bristol, throwing himself in his own characteristic way into
his new work.
He made experiments on air and gases, some of these daring and dangerous
enough, and entailing not a little personal risk. But while these things
lay nearest to his heart, he had eye and ear both open for all that was
going forward in his new life. He was so many-sided himself, it was as
if he could not come in contact with anyone without catching some spark
of interest from him--the philosopher, the poet, the physician, the
sportsman. He had something in common with all.
He entered into his work as if body and mind knew no fatigue. If an idea
came into his head he could not rest until he had worked it out. If he
broke down in health, he simply started afresh when he had recovered.
In his spare time he wrote books and pamphlets on chemistry, so that in
writing and experimenting his name came to be known to the scientific
men of the day. And now it seemed as if one step in fame followed
another. Success was crowned by success.
He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry to the Royal
Institution in 1801. He had now entered on manhood, and was launched
on the great world of London, having all the ability to carry himself
through. He may have been handicapped with slight flaws of manner. If he
appeared over-confident, it probably was that in reality he was shy and
timid, and attempted to cover these little awkwardnesses. His friends
grieved in secret over the noticeable change, fearing lest with
simplicity of manner he might throw over simplicity of character. But
no man is, after all, perfect, and in spite of this, Davy was rapidly
mounting the ladder of success.
The young chemist soon discovered that his lectures drew crowds,
even created a great and extraordinary sensation. In imagination we
can picture the lecture-room, the crowded audience--all sorts and
conditions, from lovers of science, ladies of fashion, men of rank, to
the threadbare-coated student--eagerly watching the experiments, and all
drinking in his words as the young lecturer, fired with his subject,
animated with all the charm of which he was so complete a master the dry
bones of geology with life and breath, or again brought the study of
chemistry, hitherto unget-at-able and out of reach, down to their
level. The audience hung on his lips spellbound.
The young popular lecturer was caressed and made much of.
"Davy, covered with glory," writes a friend at this time, "dines with me
to-day."
Soon they made him Professor of Chemistry to the Institution. Promotion
followed promotion, but each year was a spur to greater exertion. Time
would fail to enumerate the steps in his triumphs. A continuous sun
seemed to shine upon him. And his strength seemed equal to all demands.
Money had never been of much account to him. Now, indeed, he might have
had it in abundance had he chosen, by helping forward manufactures with
his scientific knowledge, but that was not his aim. His ambition was
scientific glory.
"To be useful to science and mankind was the pursuit in which he
gloried."
The years that followed were years full of hard work. In 1812 he was
knighted. It seemed as if almost everything he touched were like a gold
mine which yielded some new treasure to him.
"Science," he said once to a young man anxious to pursue it, "is a harsh
mistress, and repays one poorly." But for him she surely rather had
"full measure pressed down and running over."
And now, when he was about thirty-seven, his thoughts were first turned
to the great triumph of his life, the invention that was to make his
name famous.
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. A great quantity of gas got cooped up,
in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of
the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked
flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble
light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or "steel
mills," which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint
was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents
multiplied. And though men were startled and shocked when they read of
them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting
up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal
and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down
the trap-doors, leaving men to die of "after-damp," the more horrible
death of suffocation, because lingering and slow.
To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant
intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He
surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and
exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward.
It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted.
With his "Davy" in his hand there was now no fear for the miner.
"The highest ambition of my life," he wrote, "has been to deserve the
name of a friend to humanity."
He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough
for him to see it work.
"If you had patented it," said a friend to him one day, "you might have
been drawing your five or ten thousand a year."
"No, my good friend," was his reply, "I never thought of such a thing.
My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly
enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me
to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?"
"I value it," he said again, "more than anything I ever did."
And now the world's honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him
Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society.
But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that
showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the
Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy,
followed by paralysis.
"Here I am," he wrote pathetically from Rome, "a ruin among ruins."
And so he began to look death in the face.
"I do not wish to live so far as I am personally concerned," he said,
"but I have views which I could develop--if it please God to save my
life--which would be useful to science and mankind."
Never again, however, was he to return to England. In Rome he had a
second seizure. He had a great longing to reach Geneva, and a few hours
after he arrived, although he appeared at first to rally, he took ill,
and there passed away quietly and peacefully, not merely, as someone has
it, "one of the greatest, but one of the most benevolent and amiable of
men."
They buried him in the little burying-ground at Geneva, the long
procession wending its way to his last resting-place on foot. His widow
erected a tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
He was the greatest chemist of the age; but after all, his best memorial
will abide in the memory of his fellow-men as the inventor of the Safety
Lamp.
To himself his invention brought no small happiness.
"I was never more affected," he said on one occasion, "than by a written
address I received from the working colliers, when I was in the north,
thanking me, on behalf of themselves and their families, for the
preservation of their lives."
His, indeed, is a career of striking brilliancy. He is like some
mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to
see 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.
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 son of poor parents, and, like Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of
thirteen, it may be that that Christmas held even less brightness than
usual for the struggling Arkwrights because of the coming of an extra
mouth to feed. At any rate, if ever child were confronted by the chill
and dreary outlook on a cold world, that child was the baby Richard.
Preston was not, 150 years ago, the Preston of to-day. Then it was
a town with a few thousand inhabitants, "beyond the trading part of
the county," while to-day it is in the very centre of the cotton
manufacture, hiving with crowds of human beings--a great town because
here, in a squalid, insignificant by-street, one bleak December day,
there first saw the light the man who was to "give to England the power
of cotton."
As there was scant enough money for food and clothing in the Arkwright
house, so it followed that for schooling there was none at all. Young
Richard would have stood a poor chance had it not been that his uncle
Richard took pity on the boy growing up in a state of neglect and
ignorance, and taught him to read. In later days he added something to
this small beginning by attending classes in the winter evenings. And so
the early years of his life passed, and in time the boy went out into
the world, poorly and scantily enough armed for its difficult battle.
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.
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. But, boy as he was, he threw
himself with energy and ardour--these two qualities that made him a
great man later on--into the new business. He took a firm hold of it. He
worked steadily at it for years, having most likely nothing in his mind
higher than the setting up for himself--the becoming some day a master
barber! It was this goal at that time that seemed to him getting on in
life.
So his boyhood sped away, and when his apprenticeship had come to an end
he took the great and important step of setting up for himself. He left
Preston and went to Bolton. Poor indeed must have been his stock of
money at this point in his fortunes. It was no imposing shop he took,
with windows and painted sign, but the smallest and poorest place to be
had. He rented an underground cellar, but his eager spirit was to be
damped neither by poverty nor a dreary outlook. He bent all his powers
on getting customers, and as the first step to this he stuck out a
placard above his cellar door with the scrawled invitation--
"_Come to the subterraneous barber, he shaves for a penny._"
In the little world of hair-dressing the rude appeal made a small
sensation. Here, as in other businesses, there was competition.
Arkwright shaved for a penny. At this rate the subterraneous barber
would draw away the customers of others! While the underground cellar
would be crowded, their shops would be empty. And so they were forced to
let down their prices, and others besides Arkwright shaved for a penny.
Young Richard, rising one morning, grasped the fact that he was now not
alone in his prices. Others were running him dangerously close. He was
merely one of many now, but with the enterprise that outdid others
by-and-by in the great world of mechanical invention he resolved to
strike out a bold new line. The old placard was taken down and another
printed and set up in its stead.
"_A clean shave for a halfpenny!_"
But Arkwright was not content to stand still in shaving people's chins
or in anything else. These were the days of wearing wigs, and it struck
him that something was to be made out of wigs, or perukes, as they were
called, and so he gave up his business of shaving in a measure and began
to travel about the country buying and selling human hair. He regularly
attended country fairs and bought the locks and tresses of the young
girls who came there to be hired out to service. In time he grew to
make successful bargains with these, and to add to this he discovered a
chemical dye, with which he dyed the hair and sold it to wig-makers, and
by-and-by "Arkwright's Hair" came to be known as the best in the market.
It most likely was--at any rate, it may have been in those
journeys--going in and out among the houses and cottages in the country
that he came to be familiar with the sound of the "weaver's shuttle"
and the turning of the "one-thread machine." Long years after he was
to find that familiarity stand him in good stead. But, successful and
hard-working as he was, life was still a struggle, and with all his
efforts he earned but a bare living. It was hard to wrest a fortune from
wig-making and chin-shaving, so gradually there grew up in his busy
brain a project. It formed very slowly, but it did grow. It was the
genius within him struggling with disadvantages and drawbacks that would
have "posed" most men. His mind, leaning strongly to the mechanical,
groped vaguely at first after something, and then gradually it settled
down to the "spinning machine," and from that time onwards all his
energies were bent on that.
In his journeys among the cottagers it had been easy enough to see that
the yarn could not be made quickly enough for the weaver, that though in
thousands of cottages the "one-thread machine" turned from morning till
night and again from night till morning, it could not keep pace with the
shuttle. What was wanted was a dozen, fifty, a hundred threads to be
made by a single pair of hands. Did he perhaps see dimly even then that
he was to be the man who should throw out the old-fashioned hand-wheel?