THE INVENTORS, CIVIL ENGINEERS, AND MECHANICS OF ENGLAND, AND ENGLISH
PROGRESS.
A Trade is better than a Profession. -- The Railway, Telegraph, and
Steamship are more Potent than the Lawyer, Doctor, and Priest. --
Book-makers writing the Lives of the Inventors of last Century. -- The
Workshop to be the Scene of the Greatest Triumphs of Man. -- The Civil
Engineers of England the Heroes of English Progress. -- The Life of
James Brindley, the Canal-maker; his Struggles and Poverty. -- The
Roll of Honor. -- Mr. Gladstone’s Significant Admission that English
Triumphs in Science and Art were won without Government Aid. --
Disregarding the Common-sense of the Savage, Legislators have chosen
to learn of Plato, who declared that “The Useful Arts are Degrading.”
-- How Improvements in the Arts have been met by Ignorant Opposition.
-- The Power wielded by the Mechanic.
The young man with a mechanical trade is better equipped for the battle
of life than the young man with a learned profession. The prizes may not
be so dazzling, but they are more numerous, and they are within reach.
The skilled mechanic, with industry and prudence, is sure of a cottage,
and the cottage may grow into a mansion, while the man of letters
struggles so often in vain to mount the steps of a palace. The railroad,
the telegraph, and the steamship exert a more potent influence upon the
destinies of mankind than the lawyer, the doctor, and the priest. The
giants, steam and electricity, which bear the great burdens of commerce,
have to be harnessed to enable them to do their work; and to make this
harness, the furnace, the forge, and the shop are brought into
requisition. The railroad alone taxes to the utmost nearly every
department of the useful arts. To the construction of the
passenger-coach, for instance, more than a hundred trades contribute the
varied cunning and skill of their workmanship.
This is the age of steel, and he who knows how to mould the king of
metals into puissant forms has his hand nearest the rod of empire. Who
would not rather be able to construct a Corliss engine than learn the
trick of drawing a bill in chancery?
There was a time, not long ago, when inventors and discoverers were
little recognized and poorly compensated for their splendid
achievements. But that time is past. The book-makers of to-day are
groping about the old shops where the inventors of last century worked,
and the cottages where they lived, in order to tell the simple story of
their lives, and write their names in the temple of fame. Huntsman, who
emerged from long seclusion over the furnace and crucible, and presented
to his fellow-workmen a piece of steel which rivalled that of old
Damascus, and drove from the British markets all other steels--how
resplendent his name is now! How every incident in the life of Watt is
sought for--his struggles, his disappointments, and his final success!
And so of Mushet, Neilson, Bramah, Maudslay, Clement, Murray, Nasmyth,
Stephenson, and Fulton. When Watt had devised his engine he found no
workmen expert enough to make it. Then Maudslay, Clement, and Murray
invented automatic iron hands and fingers, and endowed them with almost
human intelligence, and far more than human precision, and Watt’s
difficulty was removed.
The “greasy mechanics” did more to hasten the world’s progress in a
century--1740 to 1840--than had been accomplished up to that time by
all the statesmen of all the dead ages. But those heroes of the workshop
had none of the opportunities afforded by the manual training school of
the present age. They toiled many hours each day for a shilling or two,
and lived in stuffy hovels, and puzzled over the _a_ _b_ _c_ of
mechanics by the light of a tallow-candle. Some of them gained fortunes,
while others were robbed of the fruits of genius, and slept in unknown
graves; but all their names are treasured and honored now. The world
moves, and in this age it moves always toward a higher appreciation of
the value of the useful arts. This country is destined to become a vast
workshop, and in this workshop the best energies, the strongest vital
forces of the American people are eventually to be exerted. How
necessary, then, to educate the hands as well as the brain of the youth
of the country.[E8]
Mr. Smiles, in his “Lives of the Engineers,” has shown us the true
springs of English greatness. In telling the story of the struggles and
triumphs of the canal-makers, the bridge-builders, the coal-miners, the
millwrights, the road-makers, the harbor and dock makers, the
ship-builders, the iron and steel makers, and the railway-builders--in
telling this story of persistence, of nerve, and “pluck,” he has
sketched the career of the real heroes of English progress. A brief
sketch of the life of James Brindley will serve to show how these noble
men wrought, how they suffered, and how they conquered.
James Brindley was born in 1716. His parents were poor. His father was a
ne’er-do-well. His mother taught him to be honest and industrious. James
worked as a common laborer till he was seventeen years of age. In 1733
he became a millwright’s apprentice--bound for seven years. He was a
dull boy, learning slowly, but before the end of his “bound” term he
became the best workman in the neighborhood. He helped the now
celebrated Wedgwoods out of a difficulty by inventing and constructing
flint-mills for their works. He invented and constructed pumps for
clearing the Clifton coal-mines of water--an entirely new device that
opened coal chambers which had long been completely drowned out. His
compensation for this class of work--the work of genius--was two
shillings a day!
In 1755 he built a silk-mill, in which he made several important
improvements in machinery, etc. But this man, who possessed inventive
genius of a high order and large executive ability, could neither write
legibly nor spell correctly, and his charge for almost inestimable
services was still, in 1757, only two to four shillings a day. His
struggles to improve the steam-engine form a curious chapter in the
story of his life. It was to him that the Duke of Bridgewater owed his
success in canal-making.
The duke was born in 1736. He was a weak and sickly child, his mental
capacity being apparently defective to a degree sufficient to debar him
from his inheritance of the family title and estates. An affair of the
heart which resulted unfavorably rendered him morose, and changed his
whole course of life. He abruptly quitted the race-track, where he had
condescended even to play the rôle of “jockey,” and turned his attention
to the improvement of his estates. They contained coal deposits, which
he undertook to develop through cheapening transportation, and Brindley
became his engineer. His first canal, consisting largely of aqueducts,
was called “Brindley’s castle in the air,” and his “river hung in the
air.” It was this “river hung in the air”--the first English
canal--that made the Manchester of to-day possible. Another canal
enterprise of the duke cost more than a million dollars--that connecting
Liverpool with Manchester. This latter canal yielded £80,000 per annum
income, and it was constructed by Brindley at a salary of 3_s._ 6_d._ a
day!
Brindley was obstinate, and often quarrelled with his employer about the
methods of construction of great works; and what is more, the duke
always yielded. He humbly submitted to every demand made by his engineer
except a demand for compensation. Brindley’s “wage” rate during the many
years occupied in the duke’s great canal enterprises was 3_s._ 6_d._ per
day. This, at all events, is the price named by Smiles in his life of
Brindley. In a note to the work it is, however, stated that his
stipulated pay was a guinea a day. It is agreed on all hands, however,
that whatever the rate agreed upon was, Brindley was not paid, and that
his heirs were begging unsuccessfully for his just dues long after his
death. In a word, Brindley’s honor as an engineer being at stake, and it
being dearer to him than any money consideration, he worked for nothing
rather than allow the enterprise to fail. And the duke was parsimonious
enough to take the engineer’s services for nothing, and his heirs were
mean enough to refuse payment for such services when demanded by his
widow.
In a literary point of view Brindley was ignorant, but in no other
respect. This was said of him by one of his contemporaries:
“Mr. Brindley is one of those great geniuses whom Nature sometimes rears
by her own force, and brings to maturity without the necessity of
cultivation. His whole plan is admirable, and so well calculated that he
is never at a loss; for if any difficulty arises he removes it with a
facility which appears so much like inspiration that you would think
Minerva was at his fingers’ ends.”[33]
[33] “Lives of the Engineers.” By Samuel Smiles. London: John Murray,
1862. Vol. I., “Life of James Brindley.”
The life of Brindley is typical of a score of biographies presented in
the “Lives of the Engineers,” among which the following are especially
worthy of mention: William Edwards, John Metcalf, John Perry, Sir Hugh
Myddelton, Cornelius Vermuyden, Andrew Yarranton,[34] Andrew Meikle,
John Rennie, John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, William Murdock, Dr. D.
Papin, Thomas Savery, Dud Dudley, Matthew Boulton, and William
Symington. These, and their natural coadjutors, the discoverers of new
forces in nature and the inventors of new things in art, the
iron-workers and tool-makers--these are _the_ great names in English
history. They are the names without which there would have been no
English history worth writing. Mr. Gladstone once said of them, naming
Brindley, Metcalf, Smeaton, Rennie, and Telford, “These men who have now
become famous among us had no mechanics’ institutes, no libraries, no
classes, no examinations to cheer them on their way. In the greatest
poverty, difficulties, and discouragements their energies were found
sufficient for their work, and they have written their names in a
distinguished page of the history of their country.”
[34] “He was the founder of English political economy, the first man
in England who saw and said that peace is better than war, that trade
is better than plunder, that honest industry is better than martial
greatness, and that the best occupation of a government is to secure
prosperity at home, and let other nations alone.”--“Elements of
Political Science.” By Patrick Edward Dove. Edinburgh: 1854.
The admission of Mr. Gladstone that the great achievements of these
heroes of invention and discovery were won without any aid whatever,
either from the government or the people of England, is a pregnant fact.
It is the key-note of this work, the reason why it is written and
published.
The neglect of the useful arts by all the governments of the world, from
the dawn of civilization down to the present time, is an impeachment of
the common-sense of mankind as shown in the conduct of public affairs.
The civilized man might have learned wisdom from the savage, who is
taught to fight, to hunt, and to fish, the brain, the hand, and the eye
being trained simultaneously. But he chose to learn of Plato, who in the
“Republic” says to Glaucon, “All the useful arts, I believe, we thought
degrading.” And further in the same work: “We shall tell our people, in
mythical language, you are doubtless all brethren as many as inhabit the
city, but the God who created you, mixed gold in the composition of such
of you as are qualified to rule, which gives them the highest value,
while in the auxiliaries he made silver an ingredient, assigning iron
and copper to the cultivators of the soil and the other workmen.
Therefore, inasmuch as you are all related to one another, although your
children will generally resemble their parents, yet sometimes a golden
parent will produce a silver child, and a silver parent a golden child,
and so on, each producing any. The rulers, therefore, have received this
in charge first and above all from the gods, to observe nothing more
closely, in their character of vigilant guardians, than the children
that are born, to see which of these metals enters into the composition
of their souls; and if a child be born in their class with an alloy of
copper or iron, they are to have no manner of pity upon it, but giving
it the value that belongs to its nature, they are to thrust it away into
the class of artisans or agriculturists. And if, again, among these a
child be born with an admixture of gold or silver, when they have
assayed it they are to raise it either to the class of guardians or to
that of auxiliaries, because there is an oracle which declares that the
city shall then perish when it is guarded by iron or copper.”[35]
[35] “The Republic of Plato,” p. 114. London: Macmillan & Co., 1881.
So ingrained in the public mind has this contempt for the artisan and
laborer become in the course of ages, that notwithstanding the fact of
the admitted kingship of iron among metals, and notwithstanding the fact
that without iron the world would almost sink into a state of barbarism,
still the opposition to the introduction of tool practice into the
public schools is violent, and most violent among those classes who
would be most benefited by it. Pending consideration of a bill by the
Massachusetts Assembly in 1883, providing for the admission of manual
training to the public-school curriculum, an opponent of the measure
said: “The introduction of the use of tools is only another attempt to
deprive the poorer classes of a good education. It is simply an attempt
to overload the course of studies in the schools so that children shall
not learn anything; so that the poor may be made poorer, while the
children of the rich having a good time in the public schools may have
their thought and health preserved for higher or special education.”
This is a repetition of the old answer of the Inquisition to Galileo
upon the announcement and defence of his great discovery. He was
summoned to Rome, and “accused of having taught that the earth moves,
that the sun is stationary, and of having attempted to reconcile these
doctrines with the Scriptures.” Bruno had been driven to and fro over
the face of the civilized world, and finally burned in the year 1600 for
teaching the system of Copernicus. Having the fear of Bruno’s fate
before his eyes, Galileo recanted, and promised neither to publish nor
defend his theories. But his love of science overcame his fear of
oppression, and in 1632 he published his “System of the World.” Again he
was summoned before the Inquisition, which was destined forever after to
torment and persecute him. He was driven to his knees before the
cardinals, consigned to prison, and tortured to blindness. After his
death in a prison of the Inquisition at the age of seventy-seven years,
his right to make a will was disputed, his body was denied burial in
consecrated ground, and his friends were prohibited the privilege of
raising a monument to his memory in the Church of Santa Croce in
Florence.
Eighteen hundred years ago a Roman emperor refused to sanction the use
of improved machinery in the prosecution of a great public work, on the
ground that it would deprive the poor of employment.
In 1663 a Dutchman erected a saw-mill in England, but the hostility of
the workmen compelled its abandonment. More than a hundred years elapsed
before the second saw-mill was put in operation in England, and that was
destroyed by hand-sawyers.
The Flemish weavers who introduced improved weaving machinery into
England in the seventeenth century were met by protests. One of these
protests, addressed to Parliament, represented that the Flemish weavers
had “made so bould as to devise engines for working of tape, lace,
ribbin, and such like, wherein one man doth more among them than seven
Englishe men can doe, so as their cheap sale of commodities beggereth
all our Englishe artificers of that trade and enricheth them.”
A little more than a hundred years ago, in England, when the Sankey
Canal, six miles long, was authorized, it was upon the express condition
that the boats plying upon it should be drawn by men only.
Illustrations of the _vis inertiæ_ of ignorance might be multiplied
indefinitely. Ignorance reverences the past. Ignorance never doubts.
Ignorance is content; perfectly satisfied with its own knowledge, if the
paradox may be allowed, it never seeks to increase it. But it is
suspicious. In every effort to enlighten it discovers a conspiracy to
undermine. Incapable of the intellectual effort of inquiry, it
stagnates, and regards as a deadly enemy those who seek to disturb the
serenity of its muddy pool.
When labor was only another name for a state of slavery, to teach men to
labor skilfully was merely to raise them to a little higher grade of
servitude. Hence it is only at a very recent period that it has occurred
to mankind to teach skilled labor in the schools. All educational
systems, our own among the rest, seem to have been intended to make
lawyers, doctors, priests, statesmen, _littérateurs_, poets. But this is
the age of steel, the age of machines and machinery. Tremendous forces
in nature have been discovered and utilized, and these discoveries and
their utilization have so multiplied vast enterprises that the
importance of the mere ornamental branches of learning is dwarfed in
their presence. “This is the practical age, and an educational system
which is not practical is nothing. We shall still have our Tennysons,
and our Longfellows, and our doctors of abstract philosophy; but there
is little time to sentimentalize with the poets or speculate with the
philosophers. There is work to do.[E9] The mine is to be explored and
its treasures brought to the surface; more and more powerful machines
are to be constructed to bear the burdens of commerce; new elements of
force are to be discovered and applied to the constantly increasing
wants of mankind.[36]
[36] “To know the ‘use’ either of land or tools you must know what
useful things can be grown from the one and made with the other. And
therefore to know what is useful, and what useless, and be skilful to
provide the one, and wise to scorn the other, is the first need for
all industrious men. Wherefore, I propose that schools should be
established wherein the use of land and tools shall be taught
conclusively--in other words, the sciences of agriculture (with
associated river and sea culture), and the noble arts and exercises of
humanity.--“Fors Clavigera,” p. 302. Part. III. By John Ruskin, LL.D.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1881.
On the subject of the demand for a more comprehensive educational
system, Col. Augustus Jacobson says, with great force, “Youth is the
expensive period of man’s existence. Youth produces nothing and eats all
the time. If the youth is not trained there can hardly be a profit to
mankind on his existence. As mankind is liable for, and bound to pay,
his expenses, he should be so trained that he may repay them. He can
only become a profitable investment by training. If he is left
unskilled, the money spent on him is wasted. There is no profit on a
whole generation of Spaniards or Turks. Mankind should be wise enough to
reap the profit there always is in finishing raw material, by making
human raw material into a highly finished product.”
There are millions of intelligent little children in the public schools
of the United States, receiving, doubtless, excellent intellectual or
mental training. But they are not being trained for the actual duties of
life as the savage child is taught to fight, to fish, and to hunt. They
are not taught to labor with their hands, either skilfully or
unskilfully. They are not given instruction in any department of the
useful arts, notwithstanding the fact that in the case of a vast
majority of them the alternative of earning their bread by the labor of
their unskilled hands, or resorting to their wits for a support, will be
presented immediately on their entrance upon the stage of active life.
The apprentice system gave skilled mechanics to England, and her
splendid manufacturing establishments are the result. The trained
English apprentice became an inventor, and his inventions and art
discoveries studded the island with workshops filled with automatic
product-multiplying machinery.
The savage of Australia in Captain Cook’s time could kill a pigeon with
a spear at thirty yards, but he couldn’t count the fingers on his right
hand. The Southern Esquimau turns a somersault in the water in his boat
with ease. But his more Northern brother has no canoe, and is ignorant
of the existence of a boat; he has no use for a boat, because the sea in
the latitude of his home is frozen the entire year. The savage is taught
what he needs to know in his condition, and is taught nothing else;
hence his skill in the few avocations he pursues.
The civilized boy in school is taught many theories, but is not required
to put any of them in practice; hence he enters upon the serious duties
of life unprepared to discharge any of them.[37] It may be said that he
is in real danger of the penitentiary until he learns a profession or a
trade. “Of four hundred and eighty-seven convicts consigned to the State
Prison for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1879, five-sixths had
attended public schools, and the same number were without trades.” It is
noticeable also that during the same period “not five were received who
were what are called mechanics.” In the penitentiary of the State of
Illinois four out of five of the convicts have no handicraft. The fact
that the skilled workman is far more likely than the common laborer to
keep out of the penitentiary is a powerful argument in favor of joining
manual training to the mental exercises of our common schools.
[37] Discussion of the subject of technical education at a meeting of
the Society of Arts, London, England, 1885.
Dr. Gladstone, F.R.S.: “It should be their aim in [elementary schools]
to give such a notion of the value of materials and the use of tools
as could afterwards be turned to use in any required direction. There
were two great difficulties in the way of doing this. The first and
greatest was the inveterate notion that education consisted of
book-learning.... Another difficulty was the ignorance of teachers in
this respect. If an endeavor were made to introduce some knowledge of
science into schools, they generally found that the teachers had some
kind of theoretical knowledge, but it had been obtained mainly from
books; and what was chiefly wanted was that things should be taught as
well as words and before words.”
Prof. Guthrie, F.R.S.: “This method of bringing the hand and the mind
to work together really lay at the basis of all true technical
instruction; where the mind alone was employed the knowledge acquired
passed away, but when the mind and the hand had been educated together
the knowledge was never forgotten.”
The general adoption of a comprehensive system of mechanical education
in the public schools would quickly dispel the unworthy prejudice
against labor which taints the minds of the youth of the country. The
splendid career which this age opens to the educated mechanic should be
made clear to the vision of every boy in the land, and he will see, in
the tools he is taught to handle, the key not only to fair success, but
to wealth and fame. Professor Thurston, President of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers, thus sums up the mighty power wielded
by the mechanic:
“The class of men from whose ranks the membership of this society is
principally drawn direct the labors of nearly three millions of
prosperous people in three hundred thousand mills, with $2,500,000,000
capital; they direct the payment of more than $1,000,000,000 in annual
wages; the consumption of $3,000,000,000 worth of raw material, and the
output of $5,000,000,000 worth of manufactured products. Fifty thousand
steam-engines, and more than as many water-wheels, at their command turn
the machinery of these hundreds of thousands of workshops that
everywhere dot our land, giving the strength of three million horses
night or day.”[38]
[38] Inaugural address, as President of the American Society of
Engineers, New York, November 4, 1880.
[E8] “Deeds are greater than words. Deeds have such a life, mute but
undeniable, and grow as living trees and fruit-trees do; they people
the vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy.”--“Past and
Present,” p. 139. By Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall.
[E9] “Natural science is the point of interest now, and I think it is
dimming and extinguishing a good deal that was called poetry. These
sublime and all-reconciling revelations of nature will exact of poetry
a correspondent height and scope, or put an end to it.”--Letter of R.
W. Emerson to Anna C. L. Botta, “Memoirs of --. By her friends,” 8vo,
pp. 459. J. Selwin, Tait & Sons.