Bridge, but it was awarded to the Rennies, under whose superintendence
it was built. The bridge is nine hundred and twenty-eight feet in
length, and has five arches. In this structure although utility was the
first consideration, there in an elegant solidity of design which makes
it pleasing and impressive in the highest degree. The rapid stream is as
little obstructed as the circumstances admitted, and there does not
appear to be in the bridge an atom of superfluous material. London
Bridge is, I suppose, the most crowded thoroughfare in the world.
Twenty-five thousand vehicles cross it daily, as well as countless
multitudes of foot-passengers. So great is the throng, that there is a
project now on foot to widen it. In 1831, when it was formally opened by
King William IV., the great engineer was knighted, and he was in
consequence ever after called Sir John Rennie.
During the period of railroad building, Sir John Rennie constructed a
great many remarkable works, particularly in Portugal and Sweden. We
have lately heard much of the disappointment of young engineers whom the
cessation in the construction of railroads has thrown out of business.
Perhaps no profession suffered more from the dull times than this. Sir
John Rennie explains the matter in his autobiography:--
"In 1844," he tells us, "the demand for engineering surveyors and
assistants was very great. Engineering was considered to be the only
profession where immense wealth and fame were to be acquired, and
consequently everybody became engineers. It was not the question whether
they were educated for it, or competent to undertake it, but simply
whether any person chose to dub himself engineer; hence lawyers' clerks,
surgeons' apprentices, merchants, tradesmen, officers in the army and
navy, private gentlemen, left their professions and became engineers.
The consequence was that innumerable blunders were made and vast sums of
money were recklessly expended."
It was much the same in the United States; and hence a good many of
these gentlemen have been obliged to find their way back to the homelier
occupations which they rashly abandoned. But in our modern world a
thoroughly trained engineer, like Sir John Rennie, will always be in
request; for man's conquest of the earth is still most incomplete; and I
do not doubt that the next century will far outdo this in the magnitude
of its engineering works, and in the external changes wrought by the
happy union of theory and practice in such men as Telford, Stephenson,
and Rennie.
Sir John Rennie spent the last years of his life in writing his Memoirs,
a most interesting and useful work, recently published in London, which,
I hope, will be republished here. It is just the book for a young fellow
who has an ambition to gain honor by serving mankind in a skillful and
manly way. Sir John Rennie, like his father before him, and like all
other great masters of men, was constantly attentive to the interests
and feelings of those who assisted him. He was a wise and considerate
employer; and the consequence was, that he was generally served with
loyal and affectionate fidelity. He died in 1874, aged eighty years.
SIR MOSES MONTEFIORE.
We still deal strangely with the Jews. While at one end of Europe an
Israelite scarcely dares show himself in the streets for fear of being
stoned and abused, in other countries of the same continent we see them
prime ministers, popular authors, favorite composers of music,
capitalists, philanthropists, to whom whole nations pay homage.
Sir Moses Montefiore, though an English baronet, is an Israelite of the
Israelites, connected by marriage and business with the Rothschilds, and
a sharer in their wonderful accumulations of money. His hundredth
birthday was celebrated in 1883 at his country-house on the English
coast, and celebrated in such a way as to make the festival one of the
most interesting events of the year. The English papers tell us that
nearly a hundred telegrams of congratulation and benediction reached the
aged man in the course of the day, from America, Africa, Asia, and
all-parts of Europe, from Christians, Jews, Mahomedans, and men of the
world. The telegraph offices, we are told, were clogged during the
morning with these messages, some of which were of great length, in
foreign languages and in strange alphabets, such as the Arabic and
Hebrew. Friends in England sent him addresses in the English manner,
several of which were beautifully written upon parchment and superbly
mounted. The railroad passing near his house conveyed to him by every
train during the day presents of rare fruit and beautiful flowers. The
Jews in Spain and Portugal forwarded presents of the cakes prepared by
orthodox Jews for the religious festival which occurred on his birthday.
Indeed, there has seldom been in Europe such a widespread and cordial
recognition of the birthday of any private citizen.
Doubtless, the remarkable longevity of Sir Moses had something to do
with emphasizing the celebration. Great wealth, too, attracts the regard
of mankind. But there are many rich old Jews in the world whose birthday
excites no enthusiasm. The briefest review of the long life of Sir Moses
Montefiore will sufficiently explain the almost universal recognition of
the recent anniversary.
He was born as long ago as 1784, the second year of American
independence, when William Pitt was prime minister of England. He was
five years old when the Bastille was stormed, and thirty-one when the
battle of Waterloo was fought. He was in middle life before England had
become wise enough to make Jew and Christian equal before the law, and
thus attract to her shores one of the most gifted and one of the most
virtuous of races.
The father of Sir Moses lived and died in one of the narrow old streets
near the centre of London called Philpot Lane, where he became the
father of an old-fashioned family of seventeen children. This prolific
parent was a man of no great wealth, and consequently his eldest son,
Moses, left school at an early age, and was apprenticed to a London firm
of provision dealers. He was a singularly handsome young man, of
agreeable manners and most engaging disposition, circumstances which led
to his entering the Stock Exchange. This was at a time when only twelve
Jewish brokers were allowed to carry on business in London, and he was
one of the twelve.
At the age of twenty-eight he had fully entered upon his career, a
broker and a married man, his wife the daughter of Levy Cohen, a rich
and highly cultivated Jewish merchant. His wife's sister had married N.
M. Rothschild, and one of his brothers married Rothschild's sister.
United thus by marriage to the great banker, he became also his partner
in business, and this at a time when the gains of the Rothschilds were
greatest and most rapid.
Most readers remember how the Rothschilds made their prodigious profits
during the last years of Bonaparte's reign. They had a pigeon express at
Dover, by means of which they obtained the first correct news from the
continent. During the "Hundred Days," for example, such a panic
prevailed in England that government bonds were greatly depressed. The
first rumors from Waterloo were of defeat and disaster, which again
reduced consols to a panic price. The Rothschilds, notified of the
victory a few hours sooner than the government itself, bought largely of
securities which, in twenty-four hours, almost doubled in value. Moses
Montefiore, sharing in these transactions, found himself at forty-five a
millionaire.
Instead of slaving away in business to the end of his life, adding
million to million, with the risk of losing all at last, he took the
wise resolution of retiring from business and devoting the rest of his
life to works of philanthropy.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Moses Montefiore was
sheriff of London. The queen had lived near his country-house, and had
often as a little girl strolled about his park. She now enjoyed the
satisfaction of conferring upon her neighbor the honor of knighthood,
and a few years later she made him a baronet. Thus he became Sir Moses,
which has an odd sound to us, but which in England seems natural enough.
During the last fifty years Sir Moses has been, as it were, a
professional philanthropist. Every good cause has shared his bounty, but
he has been most generous to poor members of his own race and religion.
He has visited seven times the Holy Land, where the Jews have been for
ages impoverished and degraded. He has directed his particular attention
to improving the agriculture of Palestine, once so fertile and
productive, and inducing the Jews to return to the cultivation of the
soil. In that country he himself caused to be planted an immense garden,
in which there are nine hundred fruit trees, made productive by
irrigation. He has promoted the system of irrigation by building
aqueducts, digging wells, and providing improved apparatus. He has also
endowed hospitals and almshouses in that country.
In whatever part of the world, during the last fifty years, the Jews
have been persecuted or distressed, he has put forth the most efficient
exertions for their relief, often going himself to distant countries to
convey the requisite assistance. When he was ninety-one years of age he
went to Palestine upon an errand of benevolence. He has pleaded the
cause of his persecuted brethren before the Emperor of Russia, and
pleaded it with success. To all that part of the world known to us
chiefly through the Jews he has been a constant and most munificent
benefactor during the last half century, while never turning a deaf ear
to the cry of want nearer home.
In October he completes his hundredth year. At present (January, 1884),
he reads without spectacles, hears well, stands nearly erect, although
six feet three in height, and has nothing of the somnolence of old age.
He drives out every day, gets up at eleven, and goes to bed at nine. His
diet is chiefly milk and old port wine, with occasionally a little soup
or bread and butter. He still enjoys the delights of beneficence, which
are among the keenest known to mortals, and pleases himself this year by
giving checks of ninety-nine pounds to benevolent objects, a pound for
each year that he has had the happiness of living.
MARQUIS OF WORCESTER,
INVENTOR OF THE STEAM-ENGINE.
In the English county of Monmouthshire, near Wales, a region of coal
mines and iron works, there are the ruins of Raglan Castle, about a mile
from a village of the same name. To these ruins let pilgrims repair who
delight to visit places where great things began; for here once dwelt
the Marquis of Worcester, who first made steam work for men. The same
family still owns the site; as indeed it does the greater part of the
county; the head of the family being now styled the Duke of Beaufort.
The late Lord Raglan, commander of the English forces in the Crimea,
belonged to this house, and showed excellent taste in selecting for his
title a name so interesting. Perhaps, however, he never thought of the
old tower of Raglan Castle, which is still marked and indented where the
second Marquis of Worcester set up his steam-engine two hundred and
twenty years ago. Very likely he had in mind the time when the first
marquis held the castle for Charles I. against the Roundheads, and
baffled them for two months, though he was then eighty-five years of
age. It was the son of that valiant and tough old warrior who put steam
into harness, and defaced his ancestral tower with a ponderous and
imperfect engine.
For many centuries before his time something had been known of the power
of steam; and the Egyptians, a century or more before Christ, had even
made certain steam toys, which we find described in a manuscript written
about 120 B. C., at Alexandria, by a learned compiler and inventor named
Hero. One of these was in the form of a man pouring from a cup a
libation to the gods. The figure stood upon an altar, and it was
connected by a pipe with a kettle of water underneath. On lighting a
fire under the kettle, the water was forced up through the figure, and
flowed out of the cup upon the altar. Another toy was a revolving copper
globe, which was kept in motion by _the escape_ of steam from two little
pipes bent in the same direction. Of this contrivance the French
Professor Arago once wrote:--
"This was, beyond doubt, a machine in which steam engendered motion, and
could produce mechanical effects. It was _a veritable steam-engine_! Let
us hasten, however, to add that it bears no resemblance, either by its
form or in mode of action, to steam-engines now in use."
Other steam devices are described by Hero. By one a horn was blown, and
by another figures were made to dance upon an altar. But there is no
trace in the ancient world of the application of steam to an important
useful purpose. Professor Thurston of Hoboken, in his excellent work
upon the "History of the Steam-Engine," has gleaned from the literature
of the last seven hundred years several interesting allusions to the
nature and power of steam. In 1125 there was, it appears, at Rheims in
France, some sort of contrivance for blowing a church organ by the aid
of steam. There is an allusion, also, in a French sermon of 1571, to the
awful power in volcanic eruptions of a small quantity of confined steam.
There are traces of steam being made to turn a spit upon which meat was
roasted. An early French writer mentions the experiment of exploding a
bomb-shell nearly filled with water by putting it into a fire. In 1630
King Charles the First of England granted to David Ramseye a patent for
nine different contrivances, among which were the following:--
"To raise water from low pits by fire. To make any sort of mills to go
on standing waters by continual motion without help of wind, water, or
horse. To make boats, ships, and barges to go against strong wind and
tide. To raise water from mines and coal pits by a way never yet in
use."
This was in 1630, which was about the date of the Marquis of Worcester's
engine. It is possible, however, that these devices existed only in the
imagination of the inventor. The marquis was then twenty-nine years of
age, and as he was curious in matters of science, it is highly probable
that he was acquainted with this patent, and may have conversed with the
inventor.
It is strange how little we know of a man so important as the Marquis of
Worcester in our modern industrial development. I believe that not one
of the histories of England mentions him, and scarcely anything is known
of the circumstances that led to his experimenting with steam. Living in
a county of coal and iron mines, and his own property consisting very
much in coal lands, his attention must of necessity have been called to
the difficulties experienced by the miners in pumping the water from the
deep mines. There were mines which employed as many as five hundred
horses in pumping out the water, and it was a thing of frequent
occurrence for a productive mine to be abandoned because the whole
revenue was absorbed in clearing it of water. This inventor was perhaps
the man in England who had the greatest interest in the contrivance to
which in early life he turned his mind.
He was born in the year 1601, and sprung from a family whose title of
nobility dated back to the fourteenth century. He is described by his
English biographer as a learned, thoughtful, and studious Roman
Catholic; as public-spirited and humane; as a mechanic, patient,
skillful, full of resources, and quick to comprehend. He inherited a
great estate, not perhaps so very productive in money, but of enormous
intrinsic value. There is reason to believe that he began to experiment
with steam soon after he came of age. He describes one of his
experiments, probably of early date:--
"I have taken a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and
filled it with water three quarters full, stopping and screwing up the
broken end, as also the touch-hole, and making a constant fire under it.
Within twenty-four hours it burst, and made a great crack."
That the engine which he constructed was designed to pump water is shown
by the very name which he gave it,--"the water-commanding engine,"--and,
indeed, it was never used for any other purpose. The plan of it was very
simple, and, without improvements, it could have answered its purposes
but imperfectly. It consisted of two vessels from which the air was
driven alternately by the condensation of steam within them, and into
the vacuum thus created the water rushed from the bottom of the mine. He
probably had his first machine erected before 1630, when he was still a
young man, and he spent his life in endeavors to bring his invention
into use. In doing this he expended so large a portion of his fortune,
and excited so much ridicule, that he died comparatively poor and
friendless. I think it probable, however, that his poverty was due
rather to the civil wars, in which his heroic old father and himself
were so unfortunate as to be on the losing side. He attempted to form a
company for the introduction of his machine, and when he died without
having succeeded in this, his widow still persisted in the same object,
though without success. He did, however, make several steam-engines
besides the one at Raglan Castle; engines which did actually answer the
purpose of raising water from considerable depths in a continuous
stream. He also erected near London a steam fountain, which he
describes.
During the next century several important improvements were made in the
steam-engine, but without rendering it anything like the useful agent
which we now possess. When James Watt began to experiment, about the
year 1760, in his little shop near the Glasgow University, the
steam-engine was still used only for pumping water, and he soon
discovered that it wasted three fourths of the steam. He once related to
a friend how the idea of his great improvement, that of saving the waste
by a condenser, occurred to his mind. He was then a poor mechanic living
upon fourteen shillings a week.
"I had gone to take a walk," he said, "on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I
had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street, and
had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the
time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea came into
my mind that, as steam was an elastic body, it would rush into a vacuum,
and, if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted
vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without
cooling the cylinder."
He had found it! Before he had crossed the Green, he added, "the whole
thing was arranged in my mind." Since that memorable day the invention
has been ever growing; for, as Professor Thurston well remarks: "Great
inventions are never the work of any one mind." From Hero to Corliss is
a stretch of nearly twenty centuries; during which, probably, a thousand
inventive minds have contributed to make the steam-engine the exquisite
thing it is to-day.
AN OLD DRY-GOODS MERCHANT'S RECOLLECTIONS.
Our great cities have a new wonder of late years. I mean those immense
dry-goods stores which we see in Paris, London, New York, Vienna,
Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, in which are displayed under one roof
almost all the things worn, or used for domestic purposes, by man,
woman, or child.
What a splendid and cheering spectacle the interior presents on a fine,
bright day! The counters a tossing sea of brilliant fabrics; crowds of
ladies moving in all directions; the clerks, well-dressed and polite,
exhibiting their goods; the cash-boys flying about with money in one
hand and a bundle in the other; customers streaming in at every door;
and customers passing out, with the satisfied air of people who have got
what they want. It gives the visitor a cheerful idea of abundance to see
such a provision of comfortable and pleasant things brought from every
quarter of the globe.
An old dry-goods merchant of London, now nearly ninety, and long ago
retired from business with a large fortune, has given his recollections
of business in the good old times. There is a periodical, called the
"Draper's Magazine," devoted to the dry-goods business, and it is in
this that some months ago he told his story.
When he was a few months past thirteen, being stout and large for his
age, he was placed in a London dry-goods store, as boy of all work. No
wages were given him. At that time the clerks in stores usually boarded
with their employer. On the first night of his service, when it was time
to go to bed, he was shown a low, truckle bedstead, under the counter,
made to pull out and push in. He did not have even this poor bed to
himself, but shared it with another boy in the store. On getting up in
the morning, instead of washing and dressing for the day, he was obliged
to put on some old clothes, take down the shutters of the store,--which
were so heavy he could hardly carry them,--then clean the brass signs
and the outside of the shop windows, leaving the inside to be washed by
the older clerks. When he had done this, he was allowed to go up stairs,
wash himself, dress for the day, and to eat his breakfast. Then he took
his place behind the counter.
We think it wrong for boys under fourteen to work ten hours a day. But
in the stores of the olden time, both boys and men worked from fourteen
to sixteen hours a day, and nothing was thought of it. This store, for
example, was opened soon after eight in the morning, and the shutters
were not put up till ten in the evening. There was much work to do after
the store was closed; and the young men, in fact, were usually released
from labor about a _quarter past eleven_. On Saturday nights the store
closed at twelve o'clock, and it was not uncommon for the young men to
be employed in putting away the goods until between two and three on
Sunday morning.
"There used to be," the old gentleman records, "a supper of hot
beafsteaks and onions, and porter, which we boys used to relish
immensely, and eat and drink a good deal more of both than was good for
us."
After such a week's work one would think the clerks would have required
rest on Sunday. But they did not get much. The store was open from eight
until church time, which was then eleven o'clock; and this was one of
the most profitable mornings of the week. The old gentleman explains why
it was so. Almost all factories, shops, and stores were then kept open
very late, and the last thing done in them was to pay wages, which was
seldom accomplished until after midnight. Hence the apparent necessity
for the Sunday morning's business.
Another great evil mentioned by our chronicler grew out of this bad
system of all work and no play. The clerks, released from business
towards midnight, were accustomed to go to a tavern and spend part of
the night in drinking and carousing; reeling home at a late hour, much
the worse for drink, and unfit for business in the morning until they
had taken another glass. All day the clerks were in the habit of
slipping out without their hats to the nearest tap-room for beer.
Nor was the system very different in New York. An aged book-keeper, to
whom I gave an outline of the old gentleman's narrative, informs me that
forty years ago the clerks, as a rule, were detained till very late in
the evening, and often went from the store straight to a drinking-house.
Now let us see how it fared with the public who depended upon these
stores for their dry-goods. From our old gentleman's account it would
seem that every transaction was a sort of battle between the buyer and
seller to see which should cheat the other. On the first day of his
attendance he witnessed a specimen of the mode in which a dexterous
clerk could sell an article to a lady which she did not want. An
unskillful clerk had displayed too suddenly the entire stock of the
goods of which she was in search; upon which she rose to leave, saying
that there was nothing she liked. A more experienced salesman then
stepped up.
"Walk this way, madam, if you please, and I will show you something
entirely different, with which I am sure you will be quite delighted."
He took her to the other end of the store, and then going back to the
pile which she had just rejected, snatched up several pieces, and sold
her one of them almost immediately. Customers, the old merchant says,
were often bullied into buying things they did not want.
"Many a half-frightened girl," he remarks, "have I seen go out of the
shop, the tears welling up into her eyes, and saying, 'I am sure I shall
never like it:' some shawl or dress having been forced upon her contrary
to her taste or judgment."