The direct and almost instant benefits of Mechanical Inventions to their
originators have been thus eloquently illustrated in the _Edinburgh
Review_:--"Contributing, as they do, to our most immediate and pressing
wants--appealing to the eye by their magnitude, and often by their
grandeur, and associated, in many cases, with the warmer impulses of
humanity and personal safety--the labours of the mechanist and engineer
acquire a contemporary celebrity, which is not vouchsafed to the results
of scientific research, or to the productions of literature and the fine
arts. The gigantic steam-vessel, which expedites and facilitates the
intercourse of nations--the canal, which unites two distant seas--the
bridge and the aqueduct, which span an impassable valley--the harbour
and the break-water, which shelter our vessels of peace and of war--the
railway, which hurries us along on the wings of mechanism, and the light
beacon which throws its directing beams over the deep--address
themselves to the secular interests of every individual, and obtain for
the engineer who invented or who planned them, a high and a well-merited
popular reputation."
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