Excerpts from
"Self-Help;
with
Illustrations of
Conduct and Perseverance"
by Samuel Smiles
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Description
A bestseller immediately after
its
publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly
became one of Victorian Britain's most important statements on the
allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance. Interpreted by
some as a paean to personal avarice, Smiles' most celebrated book is in fact a
practical and engaging tribute to the working and lower-middle classes,
in whom he identified the capacity for self-improvement and for whom he
tirelessly advocated the right of social advancement. Part practical
guide, part proverbial testament, part secular hagiography, this literary hybrid turns
biography into an inspirational medium that awakens the reader to their
own potential and instills the desire to succeed. Smiles' book is the
precursor of today's motivational and self-help literature, although
its vision is significantly more cosmopolitan than that of most books in an
ever-expanding genre.
CHAPTER
I—SELF-HELP—NATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL
“The worth of a State, in the
long run,
is the worth of the individuals composing it.”—J. S. Mill.
“We put too much faith in
systems, and
look too little to men.”—B. Disraeli.
“Heaven helps those who help
themselves” is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the
results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the
root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the
lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and
strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects,
but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for
men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and
necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to
over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render
them comparatively helpless.
Even the best institutions can
give a
man no active help. Perhaps the most they can do is, to leave him
free to develop himself and improve his individual condition. But
in all times men have been prone to believe that their happiness and
well-being were to be secured by means of institutions rather than by
their own conduct. Hence the value of legislation as an agent in
human advancement has usually been much over-estimated. To
constitute the millionth part of a Legislature, by voting for one or
two men once in three or five years, however conscientiously this duty
may be performed, can exercise but little active influence upon any
man’s life and character. Moreover, it is every day becoming more
clearly understood, that the function of Government is negative and
restrictive, rather than positive and active; being resolvable
principally into protection—protection of life, liberty, and
property. Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the
enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a
comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent,
can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken
sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual
action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by
greater rights.
The Government of a nation itself
is
usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing
it. The Government that is ahead of the people will inevitably be
dragged down to their level, as the Government that is behind them will
in the long run be dragged up. In the order of nature, the
collective character of a nation will as surely find its befitting
results in its law and government, as water finds its own level.
The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt
ignobly. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and
strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions
than upon the character of its men. For the nation is only an
aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a
question of the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of
whom society is composed.
National progress is the sum of
individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of
individual idleness, selfishness, and vice. What we are
accustomed to decry as great social evils, will, for the most part, be
found to be but the outgrowth of man’s own perverted life; and though
we may endeavour to cut them down and extirpate them by means of Law,
they will only spring up again with fresh luxuriance in some other
form, unless the conditions of personal life and character are
radically improved. If this view be correct, then it follows that
the highest patriotism and philanthropy consist, not so much in
altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and stimulating
men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and independent
individual action.
It may be of comparatively little
consequence how a man is governed from without, whilst everything
depends upon how he governs himself from within. The greatest
slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be,
but he who is the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and
vice. Nations who are thus enslaved at heart cannot be freed by
any mere changes of masters or of institutions; and so long as the
fatal delusion prevails, that liberty solely depends upon and consists
in government, so long will such changes, no matter at what cost they
may be effected, have as little practical and lasting result as the
shifting of the figures in a phantasmagoria. The solid
foundations of liberty must rest upon individual character; which is
also the only sure guarantee for social security and national
progress. John Stuart Mill truly observes that “even despotism
does not produce its worst effects so long as individuality exists
under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by
whatever name it be called.”
Old fallacies as to human
progress are
constantly turning up. Some call for Caesars, others for
Nationalities, and others for Acts of Parliament. We are to wait
for Caesars, and when they are found, “happy the people who recognise
and follow them.” This doctrine shortly means, everything for
the people, nothing by them,—a doctrine which, if taken as a
guide, must, by destroying the free conscience of a community, speedily
prepare the way for any form of despotism. Caesarism is human
idolatry in its worst form—a worship of mere power, as degrading in its
effects as the worship of mere wealth would be. A far healthier
doctrine to inculcate among the nations would be that of Self-Help; and
so soon as it is thoroughly understood and carried into action,
Caesarism will be no more. The two principles are directly
antagonistic; and what Victor Hugo said of the Pen and the Sword alike
applies to them, “Ceci tuera cela.” [This will kill that.]
The power of Nationalities and
Acts of
Parliament is also a prevalent superstition. What William Dargan,
one of Ireland’s truest patriots, said at the closing of the first
Dublin Industrial Exhibition, may well be quoted now. “To tell
the truth,” he said, “I never heard the word independence mentioned
that my own country and my own fellow townsmen did not occur to my
mind. I have heard a great deal about the independence that we
were to get from this, that, and the other place, and of the great
expectations we were to have from persons from other countries coming
amongst us. Whilst I value as much as any man the great
advantages that must result to us from that intercourse, I have always
been deeply impressed with the feeling that our industrial independence
is dependent upon ourselves. I believe that with simple industry
and careful exactness in the utilization of our energies, we never had
a fairer chance nor a brighter prospect than the present. We have
made a step, but perseverance is the great agent of success; and if we
but go on zealously, I believe in my conscience that in a short period
we shall arrive at a position of equal comfort, of equal happiness, and
of equal independence, with that of any other people.”
All nations have been made what
they
are by the thinking and the working of many generations of men.
Patient and persevering labourers in all ranks and conditions of life,
cultivators of the soil and explorers of the mine, inventors and
discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and artisans, poets,
philosophers, and politicians, all have contributed towards the grand
result, one generation building upon another’s labours, and carrying
them forward to still higher stages. This constant succession of
noble workers—the artisans of civilisation—has served to create order
out of chaos in industry, science, and art; and the living race has
thus, in the course of nature, become the inheritor of the rich estate
provided by the skill and industry of our forefathers, which is placed
in our hands to cultivate, and to hand down, not only unimpaired but
improved, to our successors.
The spirit of self-help, as
exhibited
in the energetic action of individuals, has in all times been a marked
feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our
power as a nation. Rising above the heads of the mass, there were
always to be found a series of individuals distinguished beyond others,
who commanded the public homage. But our progress has also been
owing to multitudes of smaller and less known men. Though only
the generals’ names may be remembered in the history of any great
campaign, it has been in a great measure through the individual valour
and heroism of the privates that victories have been won. And
life, too, is “a soldiers’ battle,”—men in the ranks having in all
times been amongst the greatest of workers. Many are the lives of
men unwritten, which have nevertheless as powerfully influenced
civilisation and progress as the more fortunate Great whose names are
recorded in biography. Even the humblest person, who sets before
his fellows an example of industry, sobriety, and upright honesty of
purpose in life, has a present as well as a future influence upon the
well-being of his country; for his life and character pass
unconsciously into the lives of others, and propagate good example for
all time to come.
Daily experience shows that it is
energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon
the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best
practical education. Schools, academies, and colleges, give but
the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more
influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the
streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in
counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men.
This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which
Schiller designated “the education of the human race,” consisting in
action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,—all that tends to
discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the
duties and business of life,—a kind of education not to be learnt from
books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary training. With
his usual weight of words Bacon observes, that “Studies teach not their
own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by
observation;” a remark that holds true of actual life, as well as of
the cultivation of the intellect itself. For all experience
serves to illustrate and enforce the lesson, that a man perfects
himself by work more than by reading,—that it is life rather than
literature, action rather than study, and character rather than
biography, which tend perpetually to renovate mankind.
Biographies of great, but
especially of
good men, are nevertheless most instructive and useful, as helps,
guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost
equivalent to gospels—teaching high living, high thinking, and
energetic action for their own and the world’s good. The valuable
examples which they furnish of the power of self-help, of patient
purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity, issuing in the
formation of truly noble and manly character, exhibit in language not
to be misunderstood, what it is in the power of each to accomplish for
himself; and eloquently illustrate the efficacy of self-respect and
self-reliance in enabling men of even the humblest rank to work out for
themselves an honourable competency and a solid reputation.
Great men of science, literature,
and
art—apostles of great thoughts and lords of the great heart—have
belonged to no exclusive class nor rank in life. They have come
alike from colleges, workshops, and farmhouses,—from the huts of poor
men and the mansions of the rich. Some of God’s greatest apostles
have come from “the ranks.” The poorest have sometimes taken the
highest places; nor have difficulties apparently the most insuperable
proved obstacles in their way. Those very difficulties, in many
instances, would ever seem to have been their best helpers, by evoking
their powers of labour and endurance, and stimulating into life
faculties which might otherwise have lain dormant. The instances
of obstacles thus surmounted, and of triumphs thus achieved, are indeed
so numerous, as almost to justify the proverb that “with Will one can
do anything.” Take, for instance, the remarkable fact, that from
the barber’s shop came Jeremy Taylor, the most poetical of divines; Sir
Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of
the cotton manufacture; Lord Tenterden, one of the most distinguished
of Lord Chief Justices; and Turner, the greatest among landscape
painters.
No one knows to a certainty what
Shakespeare was; but it is unquestionable that he sprang from a humble
rank. His father was a butcher and grazier; and Shakespeare
himself is supposed to have been in early life a woolcomber; whilst
others aver that he was an usher in a school and afterwards a
scrivener’s clerk. He truly seems to have been “not one, but all
mankind’s epitome.” For such is the accuracy of his sea phrases
that a naval writer alleges that he must have been a sailor; whilst a
clergyman infers, from internal evidence in his writings, that he was
probably a parson’s clerk; and a distinguished judge of horse-flesh
insists that he must have been a horse-dealer. Shakespeare was
certainly an actor, and in the course of his life “played many parts,”
gathering his wonderful stores of knowledge from a wide field of
experience and observation. In any event, he must have been a
close student and a hard worker; and to this day his writings continue
to exercise a powerful influence on the formation of English character.
The common class of day labourers
has
given us Brindley the engineer, Cook the navigator, and Burns the
poet. Masons and bricklayers can boast of Ben Jonson, who worked
at the building of Lincoln’s Inn, with a trowel in his hand and a book
in his pocket, Edwards and Telford the engineers, Hugh Miller the
geologist, and Allan Cunningham the writer and sculptor; whilst among
distinguished carpenters we find the names of Inigo Jones the
architect, Harrison the chronometer-maker, John Hunter the
physiologist, Romney and Opie the painters, Professor Lee the
Orientalist, and John Gibson the sculptor.
From the weaver class have sprung
Simson the mathematician, Bacon the sculptor, the two Milners, Adam
Walker, John Foster, Wilson the ornithologist, Dr. Livingstone the
missionary traveller, and Tannahill the poet. Shoemakers have
given us Sir Cloudesley Shovel the great Admiral, Sturgeon the
electrician, Samuel Drew the essayist, Gifford the editor of the
‘Quarterly Review,’ Bloomfield the poet, and William Carey the
missionary; whilst Morrison, another laborious missionary, was a maker
of shoe-lasts. Within the last few years, a profound naturalist
has been discovered in the person of a shoemaker at Banff, named Thomas
Edwards, who, while maintaining himself by his trade, has devoted his
leisure to the study of natural science in all its branches, his
researches in connexion with the smaller crustaceae having been
rewarded by the discovery of a new species, to which the name of
“Praniza Edwardsii” has been given by naturalists.
Nor have tailors been
undistinguished. John Stow, the historian, worked at the trade
during some part of his life. Jackson, the painter, made clothes
until he reached manhood. The brave Sir John Hawkswood, who so
greatly distinguished himself at Poictiers, and was knighted by Edward
III. for his valour, was in early life apprenticed to a London
tailor. Admiral Hobson, who broke the boom at Vigo in 1702,
belonged to the same calling. He was working as a tailor’s
apprentice near Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, when the news flew
through the village that a squadron of men-of-war was sailing off the
island. He sprang from the shopboard, and ran down with his
comrades to the beach, to gaze upon the glorious sight. The boy
was suddenly inflamed with the ambition to be a sailor; and springing
into a boat, he rowed off to the squadron, gained the admiral’s ship,
and was accepted as a volunteer. Years after, he returned to his
native village full of honours, and dined off bacon and eggs in the
cottage where he had worked as an apprentice. But the greatest
tailor of all is unquestionably Andrew Johnson, the present President
of the United States—a man of extraordinary force of character and
vigour of intellect. In his great speech at Washington, when
describing himself as having begun his political career as an alderman,
and run through all the branches of the legislature, a voice in the
crowd cried, “From a tailor up.” It was characteristic of Johnson
to take the intended sarcasm in good part, and even to turn it to
account. “Some gentleman says I have been a tailor. That
does not disconcert me in the least; for when I was a tailor I had the
reputation of being a good one, and making close fits; I was always
punctual with my customers, and always did good work.”
Cardinal Wolsey, De Foe,
Akenside, and
Kirke White were the sons of butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph
Lancaster a basket-maker. Among the great names identified with
the invention of the steam-engine are those of Newcomen, Watt, and
Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical
instruments, and the third an engine-fireman. Huntingdon the
preacher was originally a coalheaver, and Bewick, the father of
wood-engraving, a coalminer. Dodsley was a footman, and Holcroft
a groom. Baffin the navigator began his seafaring career as a man
before the mast, and Sir Cloudesley Shovel as a cabin-boy.
Herschel played the oboe in a military band. Chantrey was a
journeyman carver, Etty a journeyman printer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence
the son of a tavern-keeper. Michael Faraday, the son of a
blacksmith, was in early life apprenticed to a bookbinder, and worked
at that trade until he reached his twenty-second year: he now occupies
the very first rank as a philosopher, excelling even his master, Sir
Humphry Davy, in the art of lucidly expounding the most difficult and
abstruse points in natural science.
Among those who have given the
greatest
impulse to the sublime science of astronomy, we find Copernicus, the
son of a Polish baker; Kepler, the son of a German public-house keeper,
and himself the “garçon de cabaret;” d’Alembert, a foundling
picked up one winter’s night on the steps of the church of St. Jean le
Rond at Paris, and brought up by the wife of a glazier; and Newton and
Laplace, the one the son of a small freeholder near Grantham, the other
the son of a poor peasant of Beaumont-en-Auge, near Honfleur.
Notwithstanding their comparatively adverse circumstances in early
life, these distinguished men achieved a solid and enduring reputation
by the exercise of their genius, which all the wealth in the world
could not have purchased. The very possession of wealth might
indeed have proved an obstacle greater even than the humble means to
which they were born. The father of Lagrange, the astronomer and
mathematician, held the office of Treasurer of War at Turin; but having
ruined himself by speculations, his family were reduced to comparative
poverty. To this circumstance Lagrange was in after life
accustomed partly to attribute his own fame and happiness. “Had I
been rich,” said he, “I should probably not have become a
mathematician.”
The sons of clergymen and
ministers of
religion generally, have particularly distinguished themselves in our
country’s history. Amongst them we find the names of Drake and
Nelson, celebrated in naval heroism; of Wollaston, Young, Playfair, and
Bell, in science; of Wren, Reynolds, Wilson, and Wilkie, in art; of
Thurlow and Campbell, in law; and of Addison, Thomson, Goldsmith,
Coleridge, and Tennyson, in literature. Lord Hardinge, Colonel
Edwardes, and Major Hodson, so honourably known in Indian warfare, were
also the sons of clergymen. Indeed, the empire of England in
India was won and held chiefly by men of the middle class—such as
Clive, Warren Hastings, and their successors—men for the most part bred
in factories and trained to habits of business.
Among the sons of attorneys we
find
Edmund Burke, Smeaton the engineer, Scott and Wordsworth, and Lords
Somers, Hardwick, and Dunning. Sir William Blackstone was the
posthumous son of a silk-mercer. Lord Gifford’s father was a
grocer at Dover; Lord Denman’s a physician; judge Talfourd’s a country
brewer; and Lord Chief Baron Pollock’s a celebrated saddler at Charing
Cross. Layard, the discoverer of the monuments of Nineveh, was an
articled clerk in a London solicitor’s office; and Sir William
Armstrong, the inventor of hydraulic machinery and of the Armstrong
ordnance, was also trained to the law and practised for some time as an
attorney. Milton was the son of a London scrivener, and Pope and
Southey were the sons of linendrapers. Professor Wilson was the
son of a Paisley manufacturer, and Lord Macaulay of an African
merchant. Keats was a druggist, and Sir Humphry Davy a country
apothecary’s apprentice. Speaking of himself, Davy once said,
“What I am I have made myself: I say this without vanity, and in pure
simplicity of heart.” Richard Owen, the Newton of Natural
History, began life as a midshipman, and did not enter upon the line of
scientific research in which he has since become so distinguished,
until comparatively late in life. He laid the foundations of his
great knowledge while occupied in cataloguing the magnificent museum
accumulated by the industry of John Hunter, a work which occupied him
at the College of Surgeons during a period of about ten years.
Foreign not less than English
biography
abounds in illustrations of men who have glorified the lot of poverty
by their labours and their genius. In Art we find Claude, the son
of a pastrycook; Geefs, of a baker; Leopold Robert, of a watchmaker;
and Haydn, of a wheelwright; whilst Daguerre was a scene-painter at the
Opera. The father of Gregory VII. was a carpenter; of Sextus V.,
a shepherd; and of Adrian VI., a poor bargeman. When a boy,
Adrian, unable to pay for a light by which to study, was accustomed to
prepare his lessons by the light of the lamps in the streets and the
church porches, exhibiting a degree of patience and industry which were
the certain forerunners of his future distinction. Of like humble
origin were Hauy, the mineralogist, who was the son of a weaver of
Saint-Just; Hautefeuille, the mechanician, of a baker at Orleans;
Joseph Fourier, the mathematician, of a tailor at Auxerre; Durand, the
architect, of a Paris shoemaker; and Gesner, the naturalist, of a
skinner or worker in hides, at Zurich. This last began his career
under all the disadvantages attendant on poverty, sickness, and
domestic calamity; none of which, however, were sufficient to damp his
courage or hinder his progress. His life was indeed an eminent
illustration of the truth of the saying, that those who have most to do
and are willing to work, will find the most time. Pierre Ramus
was another man of like character. He was the son of poor parents
in Picardy, and when a boy was employed to tend sheep. But not
liking the occupation he ran away to Paris. After encountering
much misery, he succeeded in entering the College of Navarre as a
servant. The situation, however, opened for him the road to
learning, and he shortly became one of the most distinguished men of
his time.
The chemist Vauquelin was the son
of a
peasant of Saint-André-d’Herbetot, in the Calvados. When a
boy at school, though poorly clad, he was full of bright intelligence;
and the master, who taught him to read and write, when praising him for
his diligence, used to say, “Go on, my boy; work, study, Colin, and one
day you will go as well dressed as the parish churchwarden!” A
country apothecary who visited the school, admired the robust boy’s
arms, and offered to take him into his laboratory to pound his drugs,
to which Vauquelin assented, in the hope of being able to continue his
lessons. But the apothecary would not permit him to spend any
part of his time in learning; and on ascertaining this, the youth
immediately determined to quit his service. He therefore left
Saint-André and took the road for Paris with his havresac on his
back. Arrived there, he searched for a place as apothecary’s boy,
but could not find one. Worn out by fatigue and destitution,
Vauquelin fell ill, and in that state was taken to the hospital, where
he thought he should die. But better things were in store for the
poor boy. He recovered, and again proceeded in his search of
employment, which he at length found with an apothecary. Shortly
after, he became known to Fourcroy the eminent chemist, who was so
pleased with the youth that he made him his private secretary; and many
years after, on the death of that great philosopher, Vauquelin
succeeded him as Professor of Chemistry. Finally, in 1829, the
electors of the district of Calvados appointed him their representative
in the Chamber of Deputies, and he re-entered in triumph the village
which he had left so many years before, so poor and so obscure.
England has no parallel instances
to
show, of promotions from the ranks of the army to the highest military
offices; which have been so common in France since the first
Revolution. “La carrière ouverte aux talents” has there
received many striking illustrations, which would doubtless be matched
among ourselves were the road to promotion as open. Hoche,
Humbert, and Pichegru, began their respective careers as private
soldiers. Hoche, while in the King’s army, was accustomed to
embroider waistcoats to enable him to earn money wherewith to purchase
books on military science. Humbert was a scapegrace when a youth;
at sixteen he ran away from home, and was by turns servant to a
tradesman at Nancy, a workman at Lyons, and a hawker of rabbit
skins. In 1792, he enlisted as a volunteer; and in a year he was
general of brigade. Kleber, Lefèvre, Suchet, Victor,
Lannes, Soult, Massena, St. Cyr, D’Erlon, Murat, Augereau,
Bessières, and Ney, all rose from the ranks. In some cases
promotion was rapid, in others it was slow. Saint Cyr, the son of
a tanner of Toul, began life as an actor, after which he enlisted in
the Chasseurs, and was promoted to a captaincy within a year.
Victor, Duc de Belluno, enlisted in the Artillery in 1781: during the
events preceding the Revolution he was discharged; but immediately on
the outbreak of war he re-enlisted, and in the course of a few months
his intrepidity and ability secured his promotion as Adjutant-Major and
chief of battalion. Murat, “le beau sabreur,” was the son of a
village innkeeper in Perigord, where he looked after the horses.
He first enlisted in a regiment of Chasseurs, from which he was
dismissed for insubordination: but again enlisting, he shortly rose to
the rank of Colonel. Ney enlisted at eighteen in a hussar
regiment, and gradually advanced step by step: Kleber soon discovered
his merits, surnaming him “The Indefatigable,” and promoted him to be
Adjutant-General when only twenty-five. On the other hand,
Soult was six years from the date of his enlistment before he
reached the rank of sergeant. But Soult’s advancement was rapid
compared with that of Massena, who served for fourteen years before he
was made sergeant; and though he afterwards rose successively, step by
step, to the grades of Colonel, General of Division, and Marshal, he
declared that the post of sergeant was the step which of all others had
cost him the most labour to win. Similar promotions from the
ranks, in the French army, have continued down to our own day.
Changarnier entered the King’s bodyguard as a private in 1815.
Marshal Bugeaud served four years in the ranks, after which he was made
an officer. Marshal Randon, the present French Minister of War,
began his military career as a drummer boy; and in the portrait of him
in the gallery at Versailles, his hand rests upon a drum-head, the
picture being thus painted at his own request. Instances such as
these inspire French soldiers with enthusiasm for their service, as
each private feels that he may possibly carry the baton of a marshal in
his knapsack.
The instances of men, in this and
other
countries, who, by dint of persevering application and energy, have
raised themselves from the humblest ranks of industry to eminent
positions of usefulness and influence in society, are indeed so
numerous that they have long ceased to be regarded as
exceptional. Looking at some of the more remarkable, it might
almost be said that early encounter with difficulty and adverse
circumstances was the necessary and indispensable condition of
success. The British House of Commons has always contained a
considerable number of such self-raised men—fitting representatives of
the industrial character of the people; and it is to the credit of our
Legislature that they have been welcomed and honoured there. When
the late Joseph Brotherton, member for Salford, in the course of the
discussion on the Ten Hours Bill, detailed with true pathos the
hardships and fatigues to which he had been subjected when working as a
factory boy in a cotton mill, and described the resolution which he had
then formed, that if ever it was in his power he would endeavour to
ameliorate the condition of that class, Sir James Graham rose
immediately after him, and declared, amidst the cheers of the House,
that he did not before know that Mr. Brotherton’s origin had been so
humble, but that it rendered him more proud than he had ever before
been of the House of Commons, to think that a person risen from that
condition should be able to sit side by side, on equal terms, with the
hereditary gentry of the land.
The late Mr. Fox, member for
Oldham,
was accustomed to introduce his recollections of past times with the
words, “when I was working as a weaver boy at Norwich;” and there are
other members of parliament, still living, whose origin has been
equally humble. Mr. Lindsay, the well-known ship owner, until
recently member for Sunderland, once told the simple story of his life
to the electors of Weymouth, in answer to an attack made upon him by
his political opponents. He had been left an orphan at fourteen,
and when he left Glasgow for Liverpool to push his way in the world,
not being able to pay the usual fare, the captain of the steamer agreed
to take his labour in exchange, and the boy worked his passage by
trimming the coals in the coal hole. At Liverpool he remained for
seven weeks before he could obtain employment, during which time he
lived in sheds and fared hardly; until at last he found shelter on
board a West Indiaman. He entered as a boy, and before he was
nineteen, by steady good conduct he had risen to the command of a
ship. At twenty-three he retired from the sea, and settled on
shore, after which his progress was rapid “he had prospered,” he said,
“by steady industry, by constant work, and by ever keeping in view the
great principle of doing to others as you would be done by.”
The career of Mr. William
Jackson, of
Birkenhead, the present member for North Derbyshire, bears considerable
resemblance to that of Mr. Lindsay. His father, a surgeon at
Lancaster, died, leaving a family of eleven children, of whom William
Jackson was the seventh son. The elder boys had been well
educated while the father lived, but at his death the younger members
had to shift for themselves. William, when under twelve years
old, was taken from school, and put to hard work at a ship’s side from
six in the morning till nine at night. His master falling ill,
the boy was taken into the counting-house, where he had more
leisure. This gave him an opportunity of reading, and having
obtained access to a set of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ he read the
volumes through from A to Z, partly by day, but chiefly at night.
He afterwards put himself to a trade, was diligent, and succeeded in
it. Now he has ships sailing on almost every sea, and holds
commercial relations with nearly every country on the globe.
Among like men of the same class
may be
ranked the late Richard Cobden, whose start in life was equally
humble. The son of a small farmer at Midhurst in Sussex, he was
sent at an early age to London and employed as a boy in a warehouse in
the City. He was diligent, well conducted, and eager for
information. His master, a man of the old school, warned him
against too much reading; but the boy went on in his own course,
storing his mind with the wealth found in books. He was promoted
from one position of trust to another—became a traveller for his
house—secured a large connection, and eventually started in business as
a calico printer at Manchester. Taking an interest in public
questions, more especially in popular education, his attention was
gradually drawn to the subject of the Corn Laws, to the repeal of which
he may be said to have devoted his fortune and his life. It may
be mentioned as a curious fact that the first speech he delivered in
public was a total failure. But he had great perseverance,
application, and energy; and with persistency and practice, he became
at length one of the most persuasive and effective of public speakers,
extorting the disinterested eulogy of even Sir Robert Peel
himself. M. Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Ambassador, has
eloquently said of Mr. Cobden, that he was “a living proof of what
merit, perseverance, and labour can accomplish; one of the most
complete examples of those men who, sprung from the humblest ranks of
society, raise themselves to the highest rank in public estimation by
the effect of their own worth and of their personal services; finally,
one of the rarest examples of the solid qualities inherent in the
English character.”
In all these cases, strenuous
individual application was the price paid for distinction; excellence
of any sort being invariably placed beyond the reach of
indolence. It is the diligent hand and head alone that maketh
rich—in self-culture, growth in wisdom, and in business. Even
when men are born to wealth and high social position, any solid
reputation which they may individually achieve can only be attained by
energetic application; for though an inheritance of acres may be
bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The
wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is
impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase
any kind of self-culture. Indeed, the doctrine that excellence in
any pursuit is only to be achieved by laborious application, holds as
true in the case of the man of wealth as in that of Drew and Gifford,
whose only school was a cobbler’s stall, or Hugh Miller, whose only
college was a Cromarty stone quarry.
Riches and ease, it is perfectly
clear,
are not necessary for man’s highest culture, else had not the world
been so largely indebted in all times to those who have sprung from the
humbler ranks. An easy and luxurious existence does not train men
to effort or encounter with difficulty; nor does it awaken that
consciousness of power which is so necessary for energetic and
effective action in life. Indeed, so far from poverty being a
misfortune, it may, by vigorous self-help, be converted even into a
blessing; rousing a man to that struggle with the world in which,
though some may purchase ease by degradation, the right-minded and
true-hearted find strength, confidence, and triumph. Bacon says,
“Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength: of the
former they believe greater things than they should; of the latter much
less. Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to drink out
of his own cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn and
labour truly to get his living, and carefully to expend the good things
committed to his trust.”
Riches are so great a temptation
to
ease and self-indulgence, to which men are by nature prone, that the
glory is all the greater of those who, born to ample fortunes,
nevertheless take an active part in the work of their generation—who
“scorn delights and live laborious days.” It is to the honour of
the wealthier ranks in this country that they are not idlers; for they
do their fair share of the work of the state, and usually take more
than their fair share of its dangers. It was a fine thing said of
a subaltern officer in the Peninsular campaigns, observed trudging
alone through mud and mire by the side of his regiment, “There goes
15,000l. a year!” and in our own day, the bleak slopes of
Sebastopol and the burning soil of India have borne witness to the like
noble self-denial and devotion on the part of our gentler classes; many
a gallant and noble fellow, of rank and estate, having risked his life,
or lost it, in one or other of those fields of action, in the service
of his country.
Nor have the wealthier classes
been
undistinguished in the more peaceful pursuits of philosophy and
science. Take, for instance, the great names of Bacon, the father
of modern philosophy, and of Worcester, Boyle, Cavendish, Talbot, and
Rosse, in science. The last named may be regarded as the great
mechanic of the peerage; a man who, if he had not been born a peer,
would probably have taken the highest rank as an inventor. So
thorough is his knowledge of smith-work that he is said to have been
pressed on one occasion to accept the foremanship of a large workshop,
by a manufacturer to whom his rank was unknown. The great Rosse
telescope, of his own fabrication, is certainly the most extraordinary
instrument of the kind that has yet been constructed.
But it is principally in the
departments of politics and literature that we find the most energetic
labourers amongst our higher classes. Success in these lines of
action, as in all others, can only be achieved through industry,
practice, and study; and the great Minister, or parliamentary leader,
must necessarily be amongst the very hardest of workers. Such was
Palmerston; and such are Derby and Russell, Disraeli and
Gladstone. These men have had the benefit of no Ten Hours Bill,
but have often, during the busy season of Parliament, worked “double
shift,” almost day and night. One of the most illustrious of such
workers in modern times was unquestionably the late Sir Robert
Peel. He possessed in an extraordinary degree the power of
continuous intellectual labour, nor did he spare himself. His
career, indeed, presented a remarkable example of how much a man of
comparatively moderate powers can accomplish by means of assiduous
application and indefatigable industry. During the forty years
that he held a seat in Parliament, his labours were prodigious.
He was a most conscientious man, and whatever he undertook to do, he
did thoroughly. All his speeches bear evidence of his careful
study of everything that had been spoken or written on the subject
under consideration. He was elaborate almost to excess; and
spared no pains to adapt himself to the various capacities of his
audience. Withal, he possessed much practical sagacity, great
strength of purpose, and power to direct the issues of action with
steady hand and eye. In one respect he surpassed most men: his
principles broadened and enlarged with time; and age, instead of
contracting, only served to mellow and ripen his nature. To the
last he continued open to the reception of new views, and, though many
thought him cautious to excess, he did not allow himself to fall into
that indiscriminating admiration of the past, which is the palsy of
many minds similarly educated, and renders the old age of many nothing
but a pity.
The indefatigable industry of
Lord
Brougham has become almost proverbial. His public labours have
extended over a period of upwards of sixty years, during which he has
ranged over many fields—of law, literature, politics, and science,—and
achieved distinction in them all. How he contrived it, has been
to many a mystery. Once, when Sir Samuel Romilly was requested to
undertake some new work, he excused himself by saying that he had no
time; “but,” he added, “go with it to that fellow Brougham, he seems to
have time for everything.” The secret of it was, that he never
left a minute unemployed; withal he possessed a constitution of
iron. When arrived at an age at which most men would have retired
from the world to enjoy their hard-earned leisure, perhaps to doze away
their time in an easy chair, Lord Brougham commenced and prosecuted a
series of elaborate investigations as to the laws of Light, and he
submitted the results to the most scientific audiences that Paris and
London could muster. About the same time, he was passing through
the press his admirable sketches of the ‘Men of Science and Literature
of the Reign of George III.,’ and taking his full share of the law
business and the political discussions in the House of Lords.
Sydney Smith once recommended him to confine himself to only the
transaction of so much business as three strong men could get
through. But such was Brougham’s love of work—long become a
habit—that no amount of application seems to have been too great for
him; and such was his love of excellence, that it has been said of him
that if his station in life had been only that of a shoe-black, he
would never have rested satisfied until he had become the best
shoe-black in England.
Another hard-working man of the
same
class is Sir E. Bulwer Lytton. Few writers have done more, or
achieved higher distinction in various walks—as a novelist, poet,
dramatist, historian, essayist, orator, and politician. He has
worked his way step by step, disdainful of ease, and animated
throughout by the ardent desire to excel. On the score of mere
industry, there are few living English writers who have written so
much, and none that have produced so much of high quality. The
industry of Bulwer is entitled to all the greater praise that it has
been entirely self-imposed. To hunt, and shoot, and live at
ease,—to frequent the clubs and enjoy the opera, with the variety of
London visiting and sight-seeing during the “season,” and then off to
the country mansion, with its well-stocked preserves, and its thousand
delightful out-door pleasures,—to travel abroad, to Paris, Vienna, or
Rome,—all this is excessively attractive to a lover of pleasure and a
man of fortune, and by no means calculated to make him voluntarily
undertake continuous labour of any kind. Yet these pleasures, all
within his reach, Bulwer must, as compared with men born to similar
estate, have denied himself in assuming the position and pursuing the
career of a literary man. Like Byron, his first effort was
poetical (‘Weeds and Wild Flowers’), and a failure. His second
was a novel (‘Falkland’), and it proved a failure too. A man of
weaker nerve would have dropped authorship; but Bulwer had pluck and
perseverance; and he worked on, determined to succeed. He was
incessantly industrious, read extensively, and from failure went
courageously onwards to success. ‘Pelham’ followed ‘Falkland’
within a year, and the remainder of Bulwer’s literary life, now
extending over a period of thirty years, has been a succession of
triumphs.
Mr. Disraeli affords a similar
instance
of the power of industry and application in working out an eminent
public career. His first achievements were, like Bulwer’s, in
literature; and he reached success only through a succession of
failures. His ‘Wondrous Tale of Alroy’ and ‘Revolutionary Epic’
were laughed at, and regarded as indications of literary lunacy.
But he worked on in other directions, and his ‘Coningsby,’ ‘Sybil,’ and
‘Tancred,’ proved the sterling stuff of which he was made. As an
orator too, his first appearance in the House of Commons was a
failure. It was spoken of as “more screaming than an Adelphi
farce.” Though composed in a grand and ambitious strain, every
sentence was hailed with “loud laughter.” ‘Hamlet’ played as a
comedy were nothing to it. But he concluded with a sentence which
embodied a prophecy. Writhing under the laughter with which his
studied eloquence had been received, he exclaimed, “I have begun
several times many things, and have succeeded in them at last. I
shall sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear
me.” The time did come; and how Disraeli succeeded in at length
commanding the attention of the first assembly of gentlemen in the
world, affords a striking illustration of what energy and determination
will do; for Disraeli earned his position by dint of patient
industry. He did not, as many young men do, having once failed,
retire dejected, to mope and whine in a corner, but diligently set
himself to work. He carefully unlearnt his faults, studied the
character of his audience, practised sedulously the art of speech, and
industriously filled his mind with the elements of parliamentary
knowledge. He worked patiently for success; and it came, but
slowly: then the House laughed with him, instead of at him. The
recollection of his early failure was effaced, and by general consent
he was at length admitted to be one of the most finished and effective
of parliamentary speakers.
Although much may be accomplished
by
means of individual industry and energy, as these and other instances
set forth in the following pages serve to illustrate, it must at the
same time be acknowledged that the help which we derive from others in
the journey of life is of very great importance. The poet
Wordsworth has well said that “these two things, contradictory though
they may seem, must go together—manly dependence and manly
independence, manly reliance and manly self-reliance.” From
infancy to old age, all are more or less indebted to others for nurture
and culture; and the best and strongest are usually found the readiest
to acknowledge such help. Take, for example, the career of the
late Alexis de Tocqueville, a man doubly well-born, for his father was
a distinguished peer of France, and his mother a grand-daughter of
Malesherbes. Through powerful family influence, he was appointed
Judge Auditor at Versailles when only twenty-one; but probably feeling
that he had not fairly won the position by merit, he determined to give
it up and owe his future advancement in life to himself alone. “A
foolish resolution,” some will say; but De Tocqueville bravely acted it
out. He resigned his appointment, and made arrangements to leave
France for the purpose of travelling through the United States, the
results of which were published in his great book on ‘Democracy in
America.’ His friend and travelling companion, Gustave de
Beaumont, has described his indefatigable industry during this
journey. “His nature,” he says, “was wholly averse to idleness,
and whether he was travelling or resting, his mind was always at work.
. . . With Alexis, the most agreeable conversation was that which was
the most useful. The worst day was the lost day, or the day ill
spent; the least loss of time annoyed him.” Tocqueville himself
wrote to a friend—“There is no time of life at which one can wholly
cease from action, for effort without one’s self, and still more effort
within, is equally necessary, if not more so, when we grow old, as it
is in youth. I compare man in this world to a traveller
journeying without ceasing towards a colder and colder region; the
higher he goes, the faster he ought to walk. The great malady of
the soul is cold. And in resisting this formidable evil, one
needs not only to be sustained by the action of a mind employed, but
also by contact with one’s fellows in the business of life.”
Notwithstanding de Tocqueville’s
decided views as to the necessity of exercising individual energy and
self-dependence, no one could be more ready than he was to recognise
the value of that help and support for which all men are indebted to
others in a greater or less degree. Thus, he often acknowledged,
with gratitude, his obligations to his friends De Kergorlay and
Stofells,—to the former for intellectual assistance, and to the latter
for moral support and sympathy. To De Kergorlay he wrote—“Thine
is the only soul in which I have confidence, and whose influence
exercises a genuine effect upon my own. Many others have
influence upon the details of my actions, but no one has so much
influence as thou on the origination of fundamental ideas, and of those
principles which are the rule of conduct.” De Tocqueville was not
less ready to confess the great obligations which he owed to his wife,
Marie, for the preservation of that temper and frame of mind which
enabled him to prosecute his studies with success. He believed
that a noble-minded woman insensibly elevated the character of her
husband, while one of a grovelling nature as certainly tended to
degrade it.
In fine, human character is
moulded by
a thousand subtle influences; by example and precept; by life and
literature; by friends and neighbours; by the world we live in as well
as by the spirits of our forefathers, whose legacy of good words and
deeds we inherit. But great, unquestionably, though these
influences are acknowledged to be, it is nevertheless equally clear
that men must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being
and well-doing; and that, however much the wise and the good may owe to
others, they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own
best helpers.
CHAPTER
II—LEADERS OF INDUSTRY—INVENTORS AND PRODUCERS
“Le travail et la Science sont
désormais les maîtres du monde.”—De Salvandy.
“Deduct all that men of the
humbler
classes have done for England in the way of inventions only, and see
where she would have been but for them.”—Arthur Helps.
One of the most strongly-marked
features of the English people is their spirit of industry, standing
out prominent and distinct in their past history, and as strikingly
characteristic of them now as at any former period. It is this
spirit, displayed by the commons of England, which has laid the
foundations and built up the industrial greatness of the empire.
This vigorous growth of the nation has been mainly the result of the
free energy of individuals, and it has been contingent upon the number
of hands and minds from time to time actively employed within it,
whether as cultivators of the soil, producers of articles of utility,
contrivers of tools and machines, writers of books, or creators of
works of art. And while this spirit of active industry has been
the vital principle of the nation, it has also been its saving and
remedial one, counteracting from time to time the effects of errors in
our laws and imperfections in our constitution.
The career of industry which the
nation
has pursued, has also proved its best education. As steady
application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so
is it the best discipline of a state. Honourable industry travels
the same road with duty; and Providence has closely linked both with
happiness. The gods, says the poet, have placed labour and toil
on the way leading to the Elysian fields. Certain it is that no
bread eaten by man is so sweet as that earned by his own labour,
whether bodily or mental. By labour the earth has been subdued,
and man redeemed from barbarism; nor has a single step in civilization
been made without it. Labour is not only a necessity and a duty,
but a blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty
of work is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism
of the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose healthy
action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of labour is
taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment,
as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high mental culture.
Hugh Miller, than whom none knew
better
the strength and the weakness belonging to the lot of labour, stated
the result of his experience to be, that Work, even the hardest, is
full of pleasure and materials for self-improvement. He held
honest labour to be the best of teachers, and that the school of toil
is the noblest of schools—save only the Christian one,—that it is a
school in which the ability of being useful is imparted, the spirit of
independence learnt, and the habit of persevering effort
acquired. He was even of opinion that the training of the
mechanic,—by the exercise which it gives to his observant faculties,
from his daily dealing with things actual and practical, and the close
experience of life which he acquires,—better fits him for picking his
way along the journey of life, and is more favourable to his growth as
a Man, emphatically speaking, than the training afforded by any other
condition.
The array of great names which we
have
already cursorily cited, of men springing from the ranks of the
industrial classes, who have achieved distinction in various walks of
life—in science, commerce, literature, and art—shows that at all events
the difficulties interposed by poverty and labour are not
insurmountable. As respects the great contrivances and inventions
which have conferred so much power and wealth upon the nation, it is
unquestionable that for the greater part of them we have been indebted
to men of the humblest rank. Deduct what they have done in this
particular line of action, and it will be found that very little indeed
remains for other men to have accomplished.
Inventors have set in motion some
of
the greatest industries of the world. To them society owes many
of its chief necessaries, comforts, and luxuries; and by their genius
and labour daily life has been rendered in all respects more easy as
well as enjoyable. Our food, our clothing, the furniture of our
homes, the glass which admits the light to our dwellings at the same
time that it excludes the cold, the gas which illuminates our streets,
our means of locomotion by land and by sea, the tools by which our
various articles of necessity and luxury are fabricated, have been the
result of the labour and ingenuity of many men and many minds.
Mankind at large are all the happier for such inventions, and are every
day reaping the benefit of them in an increase of individual well-being
as well as of public enjoyment.
Though the invention of the
working
steam-engine—the king of machines—belongs, comparatively speaking, to
our own epoch, the idea of it was born many centuries ago. Like
other contrivances and discoveries, it was effected step by step—one
man transmitting the result of his labours, at the time apparently
useless, to his successors, who took it up and carried it forward
another stage,—the prosecution of the inquiry extending over many
generations. Thus the idea promulgated by Hero of Alexandria was
never altogether lost; but, like the grain of wheat hid in the hand of
the Egyptian mummy, it sprouted and again grew vigorously when brought
into the full light of modern science. The steam-engine was
nothing, however, until it emerged from the state of theory, and was
taken in hand by practical mechanics; and what a noble story of
patient, laborious investigation, of difficulties encountered and
overcome by heroic industry, does not that marvellous machine tell
of! It is indeed, in itself, a monument of the power of self-help
in man. Grouped around it we find Savary, the military engineer;
Newcomen, the Dartmouth blacksmith; Cawley, the glazier; Potter, the
engine-boy; Smeaton, the civil engineer; and, towering above all, the
laborious, patient, never-tiring James Watt, the
mathematical-instrument maker.
Watt was one of the most
industrious of
men; and the story of his life proves, what all experience confirms,
that it is not the man of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who
achieves the highest results, but he who employs his powers with the
greatest industry and the most carefully disciplined skill—the skill
that comes by labour, application, and experience. Many men in
his time knew far more than Watt, but none laboured so assiduously as
he did to turn all that he did know to useful practical purposes.
He was, above all things, most persevering in the pursuit of
facts. He cultivated carefully that habit of active attention on
which all the higher working qualities of the mind mainly depend.
Indeed, Mr. Edgeworth entertained the opinion, that the difference of
intellect in men depends more upon the early cultivation of this habit
of attention, than upon any great disparity between the powers of
one individual and another.
Even when a boy, Watt found
science in
his toys. The quadrants lying about his father’s carpenter’s shop
led him to the study of optics and astronomy; his ill health induced
him to pry into the secrets of physiology; and his solitary walks
through the country attracted him to the study of botany and
history. While carrying on the business of a
mathematical-instrument maker, he received an order to build an organ;
and, though without an ear for music, he undertook the study of
harmonics, and successfully constructed the instrument. And, in
like manner, when the little model of Newcomen’s steam-engine,
belonging to the University of Glasgow, was placed in his hands to
repair, he forthwith set himself to learn all that was then known about
heat, evaporation, and condensation,—at the same time plodding his way
in mechanics and the science of construction,—the results of which he
at length embodied in his condensing steam-engine.
For ten years he went on
contriving and
inventing—with little hope to cheer him, and with few friends to
encourage him. He went on, meanwhile, earning bread for his
family by making and selling quadrants, making and mending fiddles,
flutes, and musical instruments; measuring mason-work, surveying roads,
superintending the construction of canals, or doing anything that
turned up, and offered a prospect of honest gain. At length, Watt
found a fit partner in another eminent leader of industry—Matthew
Boulton, of Birmingham; a skilful, energetic, and far-seeing man, who
vigorously undertook the enterprise of introducing the
condensing-engine into general use as a working power; and the success
of both is now matter of history.
Many skilful inventors have from
time
to time added new power to the steam-engine; and, by numerous
modifications, rendered it capable of being applied to nearly all the
purposes of manufacture—driving machinery, impelling ships, grinding
corn, printing books, stamping money, hammering, planing, and turning
iron; in short, of performing every description of mechanical labour
where power is required. One of the most useful modifications in
the engine was that devised by Trevithick, and eventually perfected by
George Stephenson and his son, in the form of the railway locomotive,
by which social changes of immense importance have been brought about,
of even greater consequence, considered in their results on human
progress and civilization, than the condensing-engine of Watt.
One of the first grand results of
Watt’s invention,—which placed an almost unlimited power at the command
of the producing classes,—was the establishment of the
cotton-manufacture. The person most closely identified with the
foundation of this great branch of industry was unquestionably Sir
Richard Arkwright, whose practical energy and sagacity were perhaps
even more remarkable than his mechanical inventiveness. His
originality as an inventor has indeed been called in question, like
that of Watt and Stephenson. Arkwright probably stood in the same
relation to the spinning-machine that Watt did to the steam-engine and
Stephenson to the locomotive. He gathered together the scattered
threads of ingenuity which already existed, and wove them, after his
own design, into a new and original fabric. Though Lewis Paul, of
Birmingham, patented the invention of spinning by rollers thirty years
before Arkwright, the machines constructed by him were so imperfect in
their details, that they could not be profitably worked, and the
invention was practically a failure. Another obscure mechanic, a
reed-maker of Leigh, named Thomas Highs, is also said to have invented
the water-frame and spinning-jenny; but they, too, proved unsuccessful.
When the demands of industry are
found
to press upon the resources of inventors, the same idea is usually
found floating about in many minds;—such has been the case with the
steam-engine, the safety-lamp, the electric telegraph, and other
inventions. Many ingenious minds are found labouring in the
throes of invention, until at length the master mind, the strong
practical man, steps forward, and straightway delivers them of their
idea, applies the principle successfully, and the thing is done.
Then there is a loud outcry among all the smaller contrivers, who see
themselves distanced in the race; and hence men such as Watt,
Stephenson, and Arkwright, have usually to defend their reputation and
their rights as practical and successful inventors.
Richard Arkwright, like most of
our
great mechanicians, sprang from the ranks. He was born in Preston
in 1732. His parents were very poor, and he was the youngest of
thirteen children. He was never at school: the only education he
received he gave to himself; and to the last he was only able to write
with difficulty. When a boy, he was apprenticed to a barber, and
after learning the business, he set up for himself in Bolton, where he
occupied an underground cellar, over which he put up the sign, “Come to
the subterraneous barber—he shaves for a penny.” The other
barbers found their customers leaving them, and reduced their prices to
his standard, when Arkwright, determined to push his trade, announced
his determination to give “A clean shave for a halfpenny.” After
a few years he quitted his cellar, and became an itinerant dealer in
hair. At that time wigs were worn, and wig-making formed an
important branch of the barbering business. Arkwright went about
buying hair for the wigs. He was accustomed to attend the hiring
fairs throughout Lancashire resorted to by young women, for the purpose
of securing their long tresses; and it is said that in negotiations of
this sort he was very successful. He also dealt in a chemical
hair dye, which he used adroitly, and thereby secured a considerable
trade. But he does not seem, notwithstanding his pushing
character, to have done more than earn a bare living.
The fashion of wig-wearing having
undergone a change, distress fell upon the wig-makers; and Arkwright,
being of a mechanical turn, was consequently induced to turn machine
inventor or “conjurer,” as the pursuit was then popularly termed.
Many attempts were made about that time to invent a spinning-machine,
and our barber determined to launch his little bark on the sea of
invention with the rest. Like other self-taught men of the same
bias, he had already been devoting his spare time to the invention of a
perpetual-motion machine; and from that the transition to a
spinning-machine was easy. He followed his experiments so
assiduously that he neglected his business, lost the little money he
had saved, and was reduced to great poverty. His wife—for he had
by this time married—was impatient at what she conceived to be a wanton
waste of time and money, and in a moment of sudden wrath she seized
upon and destroyed his models, hoping thus to remove the cause of the
family privations. Arkwright was a stubborn and enthusiastic man,
and he was provoked beyond measure by this conduct of his wife, from
whom he immediately separated.
In travelling about the country,
Arkwright had become acquainted with a person named Kay, a clockmaker
at Warrington, who assisted him in constructing some of the parts of
his perpetual-motion machinery. It is supposed that he was
informed by Kay of the principle of spinning by rollers; but it is also
said that the idea was first suggested to him by accidentally observing
a red-hot piece of iron become elongated by passing between iron
rollers. However this may be, the idea at once took firm
possession of his mind, and he proceeded to devise the process by which
it was to be accomplished, Kay being able to tell him nothing on this
point. Arkwright now abandoned his business of hair collecting,
and devoted himself to the perfecting of his machine, a model of which,
constructed by Kay under his directions, he set up in the parlour of
the Free Grammar School at Preston. Being a burgess of the town,
he voted at the contested election at which General Burgoyne was
returned; but such was his poverty, and such the tattered state of his
dress, that a number of persons subscribed a sum sufficient to have him
put in a state fit to appear in the poll-room. The exhibition of
his machine in a town where so many workpeople lived by the exercise of
manual labour proved a dangerous experiment; ominous growlings were
heard outside the school-room from time to time, and
Arkwright,—remembering the fate of Kay, who was mobbed and compelled to
fly from Lancashire because of his invention of the fly-shuttle, and of
poor Hargreaves, whose spinning-jenny had been pulled to pieces only a
short time before by a Blackburn mob,—wisely determined on packing up
his model and removing to a less dangerous locality. He went
accordingly to Nottingham, where he applied to some of the local
bankers for pecuniary assistance; and the Messrs. Wright consented to
advance him a sum of money on condition of sharing in the profits of
the invention. The machine, however, not being perfected so soon
as they had anticipated, the bankers recommended Arkwright to apply to
Messrs. Strutt and Need, the former of whom was the ingenious inventor
and patentee of the stocking-frame. Mr. Strutt at once
appreciated the merits of the invention, and a partnership was entered
into with Arkwright, whose road to fortune was now clear. The
patent was secured in the name of “Richard Arkwright, of Nottingham,
clockmaker,” and it is a circumstance worthy of note, that it was taken
out in 1769, the same year in which Watt secured the patent for his
steam-engine. A cotton-mill was first erected at Nottingham,
driven by horses; and another was shortly after built, on a much larger
scale, at Cromford, in Derbyshire, turned by a water-wheel, from which
circumstance the spinning-machine came to be called the water-frame.
Arkwright’s labours, however,
were,
comparatively speaking, only begun. He had still to perfect all
the working details of his machine. It was in his hands the
subject of constant modification and improvement, until eventually it
was rendered practicable and profitable in an eminent degree. But
success was only secured by long and patient labour: for some years,
indeed, the speculation was disheartening and unprofitable, swallowing
up a very large amount of capital without any result. When
success began to appear more certain, then the Lancashire manufacturers
fell upon Arkwright’s patent to pull it in pieces, as the Cornish
miners fell upon Boulton and Watt to rob them of the profits of their
steam-engine. Arkwright was even denounced as the enemy of the
working people; and a mill which he built near Chorley was destroyed by
a mob in the presence of a strong force of police and military.
The Lancashire men refused to buy his materials, though they were
confessedly the best in the market. Then they refused to pay
patent-right for the use of his machines, and combined to crush him in
the courts of law. To the disgust of right-minded people,
Arkwright’s patent was upset. After the trial, when passing the
hotel at which his opponents were staying, one of them said, loud
enough to be heard by him, “Well, we’ve done the old shaver at last;”
to which he coolly replied, “Never mind, I’ve a razor left that will
shave you all.” He established new mills in Lancashire,
Derbyshire, and at New Lanark, in Scotland. The mills at Cromford
also came into his hands at the expiry of his partnership with Strutt,
and the amount and the excellence of his products were such, that in a
short time he obtained so complete a control of the trade, that the
prices were fixed by him, and he governed the main operations of the
other cotton-spinners.
Arkwright was a man of great
force of
character, indomitable courage, much worldly shrewdness, with a
business faculty almost amounting to genius. At one period his
time was engrossed by severe and continuous labour, occasioned by the
organising and conducting of his numerous manufactories, sometimes from
four in the morning till nine at night. At fifty years of age he
set to work to learn English grammar, and improve himself in writing
and orthography. After overcoming every obstacle, he had the
satisfaction of reaping the reward of his enterprise. Eighteen
years after he had constructed his first machine, he rose to such
estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the
county, and shortly after George III. conferred upon him the honour of
knighthood. He died in 1792. Be it for good or for evil,
Arkwright was the founder in England of the modern factory system, a
branch of industry which has unquestionably proved a source of immense
wealth to individuals and to the nation.
All the other great branches of
industry in Britain furnish like examples of energetic men of business,
the source of much benefit to the neighbourhoods in which they have
laboured, and of increased power and wealth to the community at
large. Amongst such might be cited the Strutts of Belper; the
Tennants of Glasgow; the Marshalls and Gotts of Leeds; the Peels,
Ashworths, Birleys, Fieldens, Ashtons, Heywoods, and Ainsworths of
South Lancashire, some of whose descendants have since become
distinguished in connection with the political history of
England. Such pre-eminently were the Peels of South Lancashire.
The founder of the Peel family,
about
the middle of last century, was a small yeoman, occupying the Hole
House Farm, near Blackburn, from which he afterwards removed to a house
situated in Fish Lane in that town. Robert Peel, as he advanced
in life, saw a large family of sons and daughters growing up about him;
but the land about Blackburn being somewhat barren, it did not appear
to him that agricultural pursuits offered a very encouraging prospect
for their industry. The place had, however, long been the seat of
a domestic manufacture—the fabric called “Blackburn greys,” consisting
of linen weft and cotton warp, being chiefly made in that town and its
neighbourhood. It was then customary—previous to the introduction
of the factory system—for industrious yeomen with families to employ
the time not occupied in the fields in weaving at home; and Robert Peel
accordingly began the domestic trade of calico-making. He was
honest, and made an honest article; thrifty and hardworking, and his
trade prospered. He was also enterprising, and was one of the
first to adopt the carding cylinder, then recently invented.
But Robert Peel’s attention was
principally directed to the printing of calico—then a
comparatively unknown art—and for some time he carried on a series of
experiments with the object of printing by machinery. The
experiments were secretly conducted in his own house, the cloth being
ironed for the purpose by one of the women of the family. It was
then customary, in such houses as the Peels, to use pewter plates at
dinner. Having sketched a figure or pattern on one of the plates,
the thought struck him that an impression might be got from it in
reverse, and printed on calico with colour. In a cottage at the
end of the farm-house lived a woman who kept a calendering machine, and
going into her cottage, he put the plate with colour rubbed into the
figured part and some calico over it, through the machine, when it was
found to leave a satisfactory impression. Such is said to have
been the origin of roller printing on calico. Robert Peel shortly
perfected his process, and the first pattern he brought out was a
parsley leaf; hence he is spoken of in the neighbourhood of Blackburn
to this day as “Parsley Peel.” The process of calico printing by
what is called the mule machine—that is, by means of a wooden cylinder
in relief, with an engraved copper cylinder—was afterwards brought to
perfection by one of his sons, the head of the firm of Messrs. Peel and
Co., of Church. Stimulated by his success, Robert Peel shortly
gave up farming, and removing to Brookside, a village about two miles
from Blackburn, he devoted himself exclusively to the printing
business. There, with the aid of his sons, who were as energetic
as himself, he successfully carried on the trade for several years; and
as the young men grew up towards manhood, the concern branched out into
various firms of Peels, each of which became a centre of industrial
activity and a source of remunerative employment to large numbers of
people.
From what can now be learnt of
the
character of the original and untitled Robert Peel, he must have been a
remarkable man—shrewd, sagacious, and far-seeing. But little is
known of him excepting from traditions and the sons of those who knew
him are fast passing away. His son, Sir Robert, thus modestly
spoke of him:- “My father may be truly said to have been the founder of
our family; and he so accurately appreciated the importance of
commercial wealth in a national point of view, that he was often heard
to say that the gains to individuals were small compared with the
national gains arising from trade.”
Sir Robert Peel, the first
baronet and
the second manufacturer of the name, inherited all his father’s
enterprise, ability, and industry. His position, at starting in
life, was little above that of an ordinary working man; for his father,
though laying the foundations of future prosperity, was still
struggling with the difficulties arising from insufficient
capital. When Robert was only twenty years of age, he determined
to begin the business of cotton-printing, which he had by this time
learnt from his father, on his own account. His uncle, James
Haworth, and William Yates of Blackburn, joined him in his enterprise;
the whole capital which they could raise amongst them amounting to only
about 500l., the principal part of which was supplied by William
Yates. The father of the latter was a householder in Blackburn,
where he was well known and much respected; and having saved money by
his business, he was willing to advance sufficient to give his son a
start in the lucrative trade of cotton-printing, then in its
infancy. Robert Peel, though comparatively a mere youth, supplied
the practical knowledge of the business; but it was said of him, and
proved true, that he “carried an old head on young shoulders.” A
ruined corn-mill, with its adjoining fields, was purchased for a
comparatively small sum, near the then insignificant town of Bury,
where the works long after continued to be known as “The Ground;” and a
few wooden sheds having been run up, the firm commenced their
cotton-printing business in a very humble way in the year 1770, adding
to it that of cotton-spinning a few years later. The frugal style
in which the partners lived may be inferred from the following incident
in their early career. William Yates, being a married man with a
family, commenced housekeeping on a small scale, and, to oblige Peel,
who was single, he agreed to take him as a lodger. The sum which
the latter first paid for board and lodging was only 8s. a week;
but Yates, considering this too little, insisted on the weekly payment
being increased a shilling, to which Peel at first demurred, and a
difference between the partners took place, which was eventually
compromised by the lodger paying an advance of sixpence a week.
William Yates’s eldest child was a girl named Ellen, and she very soon
became an especial favourite with the young lodger. On returning
from his hard day’s work at “The Ground,” he would take the little girl
upon his knee, and say to her, “Nelly, thou bonny little dear, wilt be
my wife?” to which the child would readily answer “Yes,” as any child
would do. “Then I’ll wait for thee, Nelly; I’ll wed thee, and
none else.” And Robert Peel did wait. As the girl grew in
beauty towards womanhood, his determination to wait for her was
strengthened; and after the lapse of ten years—years of close
application to business and rapidly increasing prosperity—Robert Peel
married Ellen Yates when she had completed her seventeenth year; and
the pretty child, whom her mother’s lodger and father’s partner had
nursed upon his knee, became Mrs. Peel, and eventually Lady Peel, the
mother of the future Prime Minister of England. Lady Peel was a
noble and beautiful woman, fitted to grace any station in life.
She possessed rare powers of mind, and was, on every emergency, the
high-souled and faithful counsellor of her husband. For many
years after their marriage, she acted as his amanuensis, conducting the
principal part of his business correspondence, for Mr. Peel himself was
an indifferent and almost unintelligible writer. She died in
1803, only three years after the Baronetcy had been conferred upon her
husband. It is said that London fashionable life—so unlike what
she had been accustomed to at home—proved injurious to her health; and
old Mr. Yates afterwards used to say, “if Robert hadn’t made our Nelly
a ‘Lady,’ she might ha’ been living yet.”
The career of Yates, Peel, &
Co.,
was throughout one of great and uninterrupted prosperity. Sir
Robert Peel himself was the soul of the firm; to great energy and
application uniting much practical sagacity, and first-rate mercantile
abilities—qualities in which many of the early cotton-spinners were
exceedingly deficient. He was a man of iron mind and frame, and
toiled unceasingly. In short, he was to cotton printing what
Arkwright was to cotton-spinning, and his success was equally
great. The excellence of the articles produced by the firm
secured the command of the market, and the character of the firm stood
pre-eminent in Lancashire. Besides greatly benefiting Bury, the
partnership planted similar extensive works in the neighbourhood, on
the Irwell and the Roch; and it was cited to their honour, that, while
they sought to raise to the highest perfection the quality of their
manufactures, they also endeavoured, in all ways, to promote the
well-being and comfort of their workpeople; for whom they contrived to
provide remunerative employment even in the least prosperous times.
Sir Robert Peel readily
appreciated the
value of all new processes and inventions; in illustration of which we
may allude to his adoption of the process for producing what is called resist
work in calico printing. This is accomplished by the use of a
paste, or resist, on such parts of the cloth as were intended to remain
white. The person who discovered the paste was a traveller for a
London house, who sold it to Mr. Peel for an inconsiderable sum.
It required the experience of a year or two to perfect the system and
make it practically useful; but the beauty of its effect, and the
extreme precision of outline in the pattern produced, at once placed
the Bury establishment at the head of all the factories for calico
printing in the country. Other firms, conducted with like spirit,
were established by members of the same family at Burnley, Foxhill
bank, and Altham, in Lancashire; Salley Abbey, in Yorkshire; and
afterwards at Burton-on-Trent, in Staffordshire; these various
establishments, whilst they brought wealth to their proprietors,
setting an example to the whole cotton trade, and training up many of
the most successful printers and manufacturers in Lancashire.
Among other distinguished
founders of
industry, the Rev. William Lee, inventor of the Stocking Frame, and
John Heathcoat, inventor of the Bobbin-net Machine, are worthy of
notice, as men of great mechanical skill and perseverance, through
whose labours a vast amount of remunerative employment has been
provided for the labouring population of Nottingham and the adjacent
districts. The accounts which have been preserved of the
circumstances connected with the invention of the Stocking Frame are
very confused, and in many respects contradictory, though there is no
doubt as to the name of the inventor. This was William Lee, born
at Woodborough, a village some seven miles from Nottingham, about the
year 1563. According to some accounts, he was the heir to a small
freehold, while according to others he was a poor scholar, and
had to struggle with poverty from his earliest years. He entered
as a sizar at Christ College, Cambridge, in May, 1579, and subsequently
removed to St. John’s, taking his degree of B.A. in 1582-3. It is
believed that he commenced M.A. in 1586; but on this point there
appears to be some confusion in the records of the University.
The statement usually made that he was expelled for marrying contrary
to the statutes, is incorrect, as he was never a Fellow of the
University, and therefore could not be prejudiced by taking such a step.
At the time when Lee invented the
Stocking Frame he was officiating as curate of Calverton, near
Nottingham; and it is alleged by some writers that the invention had
its origin in disappointed affection. The curate is said to have
fallen deeply in love with a young lady of the village, who failed to
reciprocate his affections; and when he visited her, she was accustomed
to pay much more attention to the process of knitting stockings and
instructing her pupils in the art, than to the addresses of her
admirer. This slight is said to have created in his mind such an
aversion to knitting by hand, that he formed the determination to
invent a machine that should supersede it and render it a gainless
employment. For three years he devoted himself to the prosecution
of the invention, sacrificing everything to his new idea. At the
prospect of success opened before him, he abandoned his curacy, and
devoted himself to the art of stocking making by machinery. This
is the version of the story given by Henson on the authority of
an old stocking-maker, who died in Collins’s Hospital, Nottingham, aged
ninety-two, and was apprenticed in the town during the reign of Queen
Anne. It is also given by Deering and Blackner as the traditional
account in the neighbourhood, and it is in some measure borne out by
the arms of the London Company of Frame-Work Knitters, which consists
of a stocking frame without the wood-work, with a clergyman on one side
and a woman on the other as supporters.
Whatever may have been the actual
facts
as to the origin of the invention of the Stocking Loom, there can be no
doubt as to the extraordinary mechanical genius displayed by its
inventor. That a clergyman living in a remote village, whose life
had for the most part been spent with books, should contrive a machine
of such delicate and complicated movements, and at once advance the art
of knitting from the tedious process of linking threads in a chain of
loops by three skewers in the fingers of a woman, to the beautiful and
rapid process of weaving by the stocking frame, was indeed an
astonishing achievement, which may be pronounced almost unequalled in
the history of mechanical invention. Lee’s merit was all the
greater, as the handicraft arts were then in their infancy, and little
attention had as yet been given to the contrivance of machinery for the
purposes of manufacture. He was under the necessity of
extemporising the parts of his machine as he best could, and adopting
various expedients to overcome difficulties as they arose. His
tools were imperfect, and his materials imperfect; and he had no
skilled workmen to assist him. According to tradition, the first
frame he made was a twelve gauge, without lead sinkers, and it was
almost wholly of wood; the needles being also stuck in bits of
wood. One of Lee’s principal difficulties consisted in the
formation of the stitch, for want of needle eyes; but this he
eventually overcame by forming eyes to the needles with a three-square
file. At length, one difficulty after
another was successfully overcome, and after three years’ labour the
machine was sufficiently complete to be fit for use. The quondam
curate, full of enthusiasm for his art, now began stocking weaving in
the village of Calverton, and he continued to work there for several
years, instructing his brother James and several of his relations in
the practice of the art.
Having brought his frame to a
considerable degree of perfection, and being desirous of securing the
patronage of Queen Elizabeth, whose partiality for knitted silk
stockings was well known, Lee proceeded to London to exhibit the loom
before her Majesty. He first showed it to several members of the
court, among others to Sir William (afterwards Lord) Hunsdon, whom he
taught to work it with success; and Lee was, through their
instrumentality, at length admitted to an interview with the Queen, and
worked the machine in her presence. Elizabeth, however, did not
give him the encouragement that he had expected; and she is said to
have opposed the invention on the ground that it was calculated to
deprive a large number of poor people of their employment of hand
knitting. Lee was no more successful in finding other patrons,
and considering himself and his invention treated with contempt, he
embraced the offer made to him by Sully, the sagacious minister of
Henry IV., to proceed to Rouen and instruct the operatives of that
town—then one of the most important manufacturing centres of France—in
the construction and use of the stocking-frame. Lee accordingly
transferred himself and his machines to France, in 1605, taking with
him his brother and seven workmen. He met with a cordial
reception at Rouen, and was proceeding with the manufacture of
stockings on a large scale—having nine of his frames in full work,—when
unhappily ill fortune again overtook him. Henry IV., his
protector, on whom he had relied for the rewards, honours, and promised
grant of privileges, which had induced Lee to settle in France, was
murdered by the fanatic Ravaillac; and the encouragement and protection
which had heretofore been extended to him were at once withdrawn.
To press his claims at court, Lee proceeded to Paris; but being a
protestant as well as a foreigner, his representations were treated
with neglect; and worn out with vexation and grief, this distinguished
inventor shortly after died at Paris, in a state of extreme poverty and
distress.
Lee’s brother, with seven of the
workmen, succeeded in escaping from France with their frames, leaving
two behind. On James Lee’s return to Nottinghamshire, he was
joined by one Ashton, a miller of Thoroton, who had been instructed in
the art of frame-work knitting by the inventor himself before he left
England. These two, with the workmen and their frames, began the
stocking manufacture at Thoroton, and carried it on with considerable
success. The place was favourably situated for the purpose, as
the sheep pastured in the neighbouring district of Sherwood yielded a
kind of wool of the longest staple. Ashton is said to have
introduced the method of making the frames with lead sinkers, which was
a great improvement. The number of looms employed in different
parts of England gradually increased; and the machine manufacture of
stockings eventually became an important branch of the national
industry.
One of the most important
modifications
in the Stocking-Frame was that which enabled it to be applied to the
manufacture of lace on a large scale. In 1777, two workmen, Frost
and Holmes, were both engaged in making point-net by means of the
modifications they had introduced in the stocking-frame; and in the
course of about thirty years, so rapid was the growth of this branch of
production that 1500 point-net frames were at work, giving employment
to upwards of 15,000 people. Owing, however, to the war, to
change of fashion, and to other circumstances, the Nottingham lace
manufacture rapidly fell off; and it continued in a decaying state
until the invention of the Bobbin-net Machine by John Heathcoat, late
M.P. for Tiverton, which had the effect of at once re-establishing the
manufacture on solid foundations.
John Heathcoat was the youngest
son of
a respectable small farmer at Duffield, Derbyshire, where he was born
in 1783. When at school he made steady and rapid progress, but
was early removed from it to be apprenticed to a frame-smith near
Loughborough. The boy soon learnt to handle tools with dexterity,
and he acquired a minute knowledge of the parts of which the
stocking-frame was composed, as well as of the more intricate
warp-machine. At his leisure he studied how to introduce
improvements in them, and his friend, Mr. Bazley, M.P., states that as
early as the age of sixteen, he conceived the idea of inventing a
machine by which lace might be made similar to Buckingham or French
lace, then all made by hand. The first practical improvement he
succeeded in introducing was in the warp-frame, when, by means of an
ingenious apparatus, he succeeded in producing “mitts” of a lacy
appearance, and it was this success which determined him to pursue the
study of mechanical lace-making. The stocking-frame had already,
in a modified form, been applied to the manufacture of point-net lace,
in which the mesh was looped as in a stocking, but the work was
slight and frail, and therefore unsatisfactory. Many ingenious
Nottingham mechanics had, during a long succession of years, been
labouring at the problem of inventing a machine by which the mesh of
threads should be twisted round each other on the formation of
the net. Some of these men died in poverty, some were driven
insane, and all alike failed in the object of their search. The
old warp-machine held its ground.
When a little over twenty-one
years of
age, Heathcoat went to Nottingham, where he readily found employment,
for which he soon received the highest remuneration, as a setter-up of
hosiery and warp-frames, and was much respected for his talent for
invention, general intelligence, and the sound and sober principles
that governed his conduct. He also continued to pursue the
subject on which his mind had before been occupied, and laboured to
compass the contrivance of a twist traverse-net machine. He first
studied the art of making the Buckingham or pillow-lace by hand, with
the object of effecting the same motions by mechanical means. It
was a long and laborious task, requiring the exercise of great
perseverance and ingenuity. His master, Elliot, described him at
that time as inventive, patient, self-denying, and taciturn, undaunted
by failures and mistakes, full of resources and expedients, and
entertaining the most perfect confidence that his application of
mechanical principles would eventually be crowned with success.
It is difficult to describe in
words an
invention so complicated as the bobbin-net machine. It was,
indeed, a mechanical pillow for making lace, imitating in an ingenious
manner the motions of the lace-maker’s fingers in intersecting or tying
the meshes of the lace upon her pillow. On analysing the
component parts of a piece of hand-made lace, Heathcoat was enabled to
classify the threads into longitudinal and diagonal. He began his
experiments by fixing common pack-threads lengthwise on a sort of frame
for the warp, and then passing the weft threads between them by common
plyers, delivering them to other plyers on the opposite side; then,
after giving them a sideways motion and twist, the threads were
repassed back between the next adjoining cords, the meshes being thus
tied in the same way as upon pillows by hand. He had then to
contrive a mechanism that should accomplish all these nice and delicate
movements, and to do this cost him no small amount of mental
toil. Long after he said, “The single difficulty of getting the
diagonal threads to twist in the allotted space was so great that if it
had now to be done, I should probably not attempt its
accomplishment.” His next step was to provide thin metallic
discs, to be used as bobbins for conducting the threads backwards and
forwards through the warp. These discs, being arranged in
carrier-frames placed on each side of the warp, were moved by suitable
machinery so as to conduct the threads from side to side in forming the
lace. He eventually succeeded in working out his principle with
extraordinary skill and success; and, at the age of twenty-four, he was
enabled to secure his invention by a patent.
During this time his wife was
kept in
almost as great anxiety as himself, for she well knew of his trials and
difficulties while he was striving to perfect his invention. Many
years after they had been successfully overcome, the conversation which
took place one eventful evening was vividly remembered. “Well,”
said the anxious wife, “will it work?” “No,” was the sad answer;
“I have had to take it all to pieces again.” Though he could
still speak hopefully and cheerfully, his poor wife could restrain her
feelings no longer, but sat down and cried bitterly. She had,
however, only a few more weeks to wait, for success long laboured for
and richly deserved, came at last, and a proud and happy man was John
Heathcoat when he brought home the first narrow strip of bobbin-net
made by his machine, and placed it in the hands of his wife.
As in the case of nearly all
inventions
which have proved productive, Heathcoat’s rights as a patentee were
disputed, and his claims as an inventor called in question. On
the supposed invalidity of the patent, the lace-makers boldly adopted
the bobbin-net machine, and set the inventor at defiance. But
other patents were taken out for alleged improvements and adaptations;
and it was only when these new patentees fell out and went to law with
each other that Heathcoat’s rights became established. One
lace-manufacturer having brought an action against another for an
alleged infringement of his patent, the jury brought in a verdict for
the defendant, in which the judge concurred, on the ground that both
the machines in question were infringements of Heathcoat’s
patent. It was on the occasion of this trial, “Boville v. Moore,”
that Sir John Copley (afterwards Lord Lyndhurst), who was retained for
the defence in the interest of Mr. Heathcoat, learnt to work the
bobbin-net machine in order that he might master the details of the
invention. On reading over his brief, he confessed that he did
not quite understand the merits of the case; but as it seemed to him to
be one of great importance, he offered to go down into the country
forthwith and study the machine until he understood it; “and then,”
said he, “I will defend you to the best of my ability.” He
accordingly put himself into that night’s mail, and went down to
Nottingham to get up his case as perhaps counsel never got it up
before. Next morning the learned sergeant placed himself in a
lace-loom, and he did not leave it until he could deftly make a piece
of bobbin-net with his own hands, and thoroughly understood the
principle as well as the details of the machine. When the case
came on for trial, the learned sergeant was enabled to work the model
on the table with such case and skill, and to explain the precise
nature of the invention with such felicitous clearness, as to astonish
alike judge, jury, and spectators; and the thorough conscientiousness
and mastery with which he handled the case had no doubt its influence
upon the decision of the court.
After the trial was over, Mr.
Heathcoat, on inquiry, found about six hundred machines at work after
his patent, and he proceeded to levy royalty upon the owners of them,
which amounted to a large sum. But the profits realised by the
manufacturers of lace were very great, and the use of the machines
rapidly extended; while the price of the article was reduced from five
pounds the square yard to about five pence in the course of twenty-five
years. During the same period the average annual returns of the
lace-trade have been at least four millions sterling, and it gives
remunerative employment to about 150,000 workpeople.
To return to the personal history
of
Mr. Heathcoat. In 1809 we find him established as a
lace-manufacturer at Loughborough, in Leicestershire. There he
carried on a prosperous business for several years, giving employment
to a large number of operatives, at wages varying from 5l. to 10l.
a week. Notwithstanding the great increase in the number of hands
employed in lace-making through the introduction of the new machines,
it began to be whispered about among the workpeople that they were
superseding labour, and an extensive conspiracy was formed for the
purpose of destroying them wherever found. As early as the year
1811 disputes arose between the masters and men engaged in the stocking
and lace trades in the south-western parts of Nottinghamshire and the
adjacent parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire, the result of which
was the assembly of a mob at Sutton, in Ashfield, who proceeded in open
day to break the stocking and lace-frames of the manufacturers.
Some of the ringleaders having been seized and punished, the
disaffected learnt caution; but the destruction of the machines was
nevertheless carried on secretly wherever a safe opportunity presented
itself. As the machines were of so delicate a construction that a
single blow of a hammer rendered them useless, and as the manufacture
was carried on for the most part in detached buildings, often in
private dwellings remote from towns, the opportunities of destroying
them were unusually easy. In the neighbourhood of Nottingham,
which was the focus of turbulence, the machine-breakers organized
themselves in regular bodies, and held nocturnal meetings at which
their plans were arranged. Probably with the view of inspiring
confidence, they gave out that they were under the command of a leader
named Ned Ludd, or General Ludd, and hence their designation of
Luddites. Under this organization machine-breaking was carried on
with great vigour during the winter of 1811, occasioning great
distress, and throwing large numbers of workpeople out of
employment. Meanwhile, the owners of the frames proceeded to
remove them from the villages and lone dwellings in the country, and
brought them into warehouses in the towns for their better protection.
The Luddites seem to have been
encouraged by the lenity of the sentences pronounced on such of their
confederates as had been apprehended and tried; and, shortly after, the
mania broke out afresh, and rapidly extended over the northern and
midland manufacturing districts. The organization became more
secret; an oath was administered to the members binding them to
obedience to the orders issued by the heads of the confederacy; and the
betrayal of their designs was decreed to be death. All machines
were doomed by them to destruction, whether employed in the manufacture
of cloth, calico, or lace; and a reign of terror began which lasted for
years. In Yorkshire and Lancashire mills were boldly attacked by
armed rioters, and in many cases they were wrecked or burnt; so that it
became necessary to guard them by soldiers and yeomanry. The
masters themselves were doomed to death; many of them were assaulted,
and some were murdered. At length the law was vigorously set in
motion; numbers of the misguided Luddites were apprehended; some were
executed; and after several years’ violent commotion from this cause,
the machine-breaking riots were at length quelled.
Among the numerous manufacturers
whose
works were attacked by the Luddites, was the inventor of the bobbin-net
machine himself. One bright sunny day, in the summer of 1816, a
body of rioters entered his factory at Loughborough with torches, and
set fire to it, destroying thirty-seven lace-machines, and above 10,000l.
worth of property. Ten of the men were apprehended for the
felony, and eight of them were executed. Mr. Heathcoat made a
claim upon the county for compensation, and it was resisted; but the
Court of Queen’s Bench decided in his favour, and decreed that the
county must make good his loss of 10,000l. The magistrates
sought to couple with the payment of the damage the condition that Mr.
Heathcoat should expend the money in the county of Leicester; but to
this he would not assent, having already resolved on removing his
manufacture elsewhere. At Tiverton, in Devonshire, he found a
large building which had been formerly used as a woollen manufactory;
but the Tiverton cloth trade having fallen into decay, the building
remained unoccupied, and the town itself was generally in a very
poverty-stricken condition. Mr. Heathcoat bought the old mill,
renovated and enlarged it, and there recommenced the manufacture of
lace upon a larger scale than before; keeping in full work as many as
three hundred machines, and employing a large number of artisans at
good wages. Not only did he carry on the manufacture of lace, but
the various branches of business connected with it—yarn-doubling,
silk-spinning, net-making, and finishing. He also established at
Tiverton an iron-foundry and works for the manufacture of agricultural
implements, which proved of great convenience to the district. It
was a favourite idea of his that steam power was capable of being
applied to perform all the heavy drudgery of life, and he laboured for
a long time at the invention of a steam-plough. In 1832 he so far
completed his invention as to be enabled to take out a patent for it;
and Heathcoat’s steam-plough, though it has since been superseded by
Fowler’s, was considered the best machine of the kind that had up to
that time been invented.
Mr. Heathcoat was a man of great
natural gifts. He possessed a sound understanding, quick
perception, and a genius for business of the highest order. With
these he combined uprightness, honesty, and integrity—qualities which
are the true glory of human character. Himself a diligent
self-educator, he gave ready encouragement to deserving youths in his
employment, stimulating their talents and fostering their
energies. During his own busy life, he contrived to save time to
master French and Italian, of which he acquired an accurate and
grammatical knowledge. His mind was largely stored with the
results of a careful study of the best literature, and there were few
subjects on which he had not formed for himself shrewd and accurate
views. The two thousand workpeople in his employment regarded him
almost as a father, and he carefully provided for their comfort and
improvement. Prosperity did not spoil him, as it does so many;
nor close his heart against the claims of the poor and struggling, who
were always sure of his sympathy and help. To provide for the
education of the children of his workpeople, he built schools for them
at a cost of about 6000l. He was also a man of singularly
cheerful and buoyant disposition, a favourite with men of all classes
and most admired and beloved by those who knew him best.
In 1831 the electors of Tiverton,
of
which town Mr. Heathcoat had proved himself so genuine a benefactor,
returned him to represent them in Parliament, and he continued their
member for nearly thirty years. During a great part of that time
he had Lord Palmerston for his colleague, and the noble lord, on more
than one public occasion, expressed the high regard which he
entertained for his venerable friend. On retiring from the
representation in 1859, owing to advancing age and increasing
infirmities, thirteen hundred of his workmen presented him with a
silver inkstand and gold pen, in token of their esteem. He
enjoyed his leisure for only two more years, dying in January, 1861, at
the age of seventy-seven, and leaving behind him a character for
probity, virtue, manliness, and mechanical genius, of which his
descendants may well be proud.
We next turn to a career of a
very
different kind, that of the illustrious but unfortunate Jacquard, whose
life also illustrates in a remarkable manner the influence which
ingenious men, even of the humblest rank, may exercise upon the
industry of a nation. Jacquard was the son of a hard-working
couple of Lyons, his father being a weaver, and his mother a pattern
reader. They were too poor to give him any but the most meagre
education. When he was of age to learn a trade, his father placed
him with a book-binder. An old clerk, who made up the master’s
accounts, gave Jacquard some lessons in mathematics. He very
shortly began to display a remarkable turn for mechanics, and some of
his contrivances quite astonished the old clerk, who advised Jacquard’s
father to put him to some other trade, in which his peculiar abilities
might have better scope than in bookbinding. He was accordingly
put apprentice to a cutler; but was so badly treated by his master,
that he shortly afterwards left his employment, on which he was placed
with a type-founder.
His parents dying, Jacquard found
himself in a measure compelled to take to his father’s two looms, and
carry on the trade of a weaver. He immediately proceeded to
improve the looms, and became so engrossed with his inventions that he
forgot his work, and very soon found himself at the end of his
means. He then sold the looms to pay his debts, at the same time
that he took upon himself the burden of supporting a wife. He
became still poorer, and to satisfy his creditors, he next sold his
cottage. He tried to find employment, but in vain, people
believing him to be an idler, occupied with mere dreams about his
inventions. At length he obtained employment with a line-maker of
Bresse, whither he went, his wife remaining at Lyons, earning a
precarious living by making straw bonnets.
We hear nothing further of
Jacquard for
some years, but in the interval he seems to have prosecuted his
improvement in the drawloom for the better manufacture of figured
fabrics; for, in 1790, he brought out his contrivance for selecting the
warp threads, which, when added to the loom, superseded the services of
a draw-boy. The adoption of this machine was slow but steady, and
in ten years after its introduction, 4000 of them were found at work in
Lyons. Jacquard’s pursuits were rudely interrupted by the
Revolution, and, in 1792, we find him fighting in the ranks of the
Lyonnaise Volunteers against the Army of the Convention under the
command of Dubois Crancé. The city was taken; Jacquard
fled and joined the Army of the Rhine, where he rose to the rank of
sergeant. He might have remained a soldier, but that, his only
son having been shot dead at his side, he deserted and returned to
Lyons to recover his wife. He found her in a garret still
employed at her old trade of straw-bonnet making. While living in
concealment with her, his mind reverted to the inventions over which he
had so long brooded in former years; but he had no means wherewith to
prosecute them. Jacquard found it necessary, however, to emerge
from his hiding-place and try to find some employment. He
succeeded in obtaining it with an intelligent manufacturer, and while
working by day he went on inventing by night. It had occurred to
him that great improvements might still be introduced in looms for
figured goods, and he incidentally mentioned the subject one day to his
master, regretting at the same time that his limited means prevented
him from carrying out his ideas. Happily his master appreciated
the value of the suggestions, and with laudable generosity placed a sum
of money at his disposal, that he might prosecute the proposed
improvements at his leisure.
In three months Jacquard had
invented a
loom to substitute mechanical action for the irksome and toilsome
labour of the workman. The loom was exhibited at the Exposition
of National Industry at Paris in 1801, and obtained a bronze
medal. Jacquard was further honoured by a visit at Lyons from the
Minister Carnot, who desired to congratulate him in person on the
success of his invention. In the following year the Society of
Arts in London offered a prize for the invention of a machine for
manufacturing fishing-nets and boarding-netting for ships.
Jacquard heard of this, and while walking one day in the fields
according to his custom, he turned the subject over in his mind, and
contrived the plan of a machine for the purpose. His friend, the
manufacturer, again furnished him with the means of carrying out his
idea, and in three weeks Jacquard had completed his invention.
Jacquard’s achievement having
come to
the knowledge of the Prefect of the Department, he was summoned before
that functionary, and, on his explanation of the working of the
machine, a report on the subject was forwarded to the Emperor.
The inventor was forthwith summoned to Paris with his machine, and
brought into the presence of the Emperor, who received him with the
consideration due to his genius. The interview lasted two hours,
during which Jacquard, placed at his ease by the Emperor’s affability,
explained to him the improvements which he proposed to make in the
looms for weaving figured goods. The result was, that he was
provided with apartments in the Conservatoire des Arts et
Métiers, where he had the use of the workshop during his stay,
and was provided with a suitable allowance for his maintenance.
Installed in the Conservatoire,
Jacquard proceeded to complete the details of his improved loom.
He had the advantage of minutely inspecting the various exquisite
pieces of mechanism contained in that great treasury of human
ingenuity. Among the machines which more particularly attracted
his attention, and eventually set him upon the track of his discovery,
was a loom for weaving flowered silk, made by Vaucanson the celebrated
automaton-maker.
Vaucanson was a man of the
highest
order of constructive genius. The inventive faculty was so strong
in him that it may almost be said to have amounted to a passion, and
could not be restrained. The saying that the poet is born, not
made, applies with equal force to the inventor, who, though indebted,
like the other, to culture and improved opportunities, nevertheless
contrives and constructs new combinations of machinery mainly to
gratify his own instinct. This was peculiarly the case with
Vaucanson; for his most elaborate works were not so much distinguished
for their utility as for the curious ingenuity which they
displayed. While a mere boy attending Sunday conversations with
his mother, he amused himself by watching, through the chinks of a
partition wall, part of the movements of a clock in the adjoining
apartment. He endeavoured to understand them, and by brooding
over the subject, after several months he discovered the principle of
the escapement.
From that time the subject of
mechanical invention took complete possession of him. With some
rude tools which he contrived, he made a wooden clock that marked the
hours with remarkable exactness; while he made for a miniature chapel
the figures of some angels which waved their wings, and some priests
that made several ecclesiastical movements. With the view of
executing some other automata he had designed, he proceeded to study
anatomy, music, and mechanics, which occupied him for several
years. The sight of the Flute-player in the Gardens of the
Tuileries inspired him with the resolution to invent a similar figure
that should play; and after several years’ study and labour,
though struggling with illness, he succeeded in accomplishing his
object. He next produced a Flageolet-player, which was succeeded
by a Duck—the most ingenious of his contrivances,—which swam, dabbled,
drank, and quacked like a real duck. He next invented an asp,
employed in the tragedy of ‘Cléopâtre,’ which hissed and
darted at the bosom of the actress.
Vaucanson, however, did not
confine
himself merely to the making of automata. By reason of his
ingenuity, Cardinal de Fleury appointed him inspector of the silk
manufactories of France; and he was no sooner in office, than with his
usual irrepressible instinct to invent, he proceeded to introduce
improvements in silk machinery. One of these was his mill for
thrown silk, which so excited the anger of the Lyons operatives, who
feared the loss of employment through its means, that they pelted him
with stones and had nearly killed him. He nevertheless went on
inventing, and next produced a machine for weaving flowered silks, with
a contrivance for giving a dressing to the thread, so as to render that
of each bobbin or skein of an equal thickness.
When Vaucanson died in 1782,
after a
long illness, he bequeathed his collection of machines to the Queen,
who seems to have set but small value on them, and they were shortly
after dispersed. But his machine for weaving flowered silks was
happily preserved in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and
there Jacquard found it among the many curious and interesting articles
in the collection. It proved of the utmost value to him, for it
immediately set him on the track of the principal modification which he
introduced in his improved loom.
One of the chief features of
Vaucanson’s machine was a pierced cylinder which, according to the
holes it presented when revolved, regulated the movement of certain
needles, and caused the threads of the warp to deviate in such a manner
as to produce a given design, though only of a simple character.
Jacquard seized upon the suggestion with avidity, and, with the genius
of the true inventor, at once proceeded to improve upon it. At
the end of a month his weaving-machine was completed. To the
cylinder of Vancanson, he added an endless piece of pasteboard pierced
with a number of holes, through which the threads of the warp were
presented to the weaver; while another piece of mechanism indicated to
the workman the colour of the shuttle which he ought to throw.
Thus the drawboy and the reader of designs were both at once
superseded. The first use Jacquard made of his new loom was to
weave with it several yards of rich stuff which he presented to the
Empress Josephine. Napoleon was highly gratified with the result
of the inventor’s labours, and ordered a number of the looms to be
constructed by the best workmen, after Jacquard’s model, and presented
to him; after which he returned to Lyons.
There he experienced the frequent
fate
of inventors. He was regarded by his townsmen as an enemy, and
treated by them as Kay, Hargreaves, and Arkwright had been in
Lancashire. The workmen looked upon the new loom as fatal to
their trade, and feared lest it should at once take the bread from
their mouths. A tumultuous meeting was held on the Place des
Terreaux, when it was determined to destroy the machines. This
was however prevented by the military. But Jacquard was denounced
and hanged in effigy. The ‘Conseil des prud’hommes’ in vain
endeavoured to allay the excitement, and they were themselves
denounced. At length, carried away by the popular impulse, the
prud’hommes, most of whom had been workmen and sympathized with the
class, had one of Jacquard’s looms carried off and publicly broken in
pieces. Riots followed, in one of which Jacquard was dragged
along the quay by an infuriated mob intending to drown him, but he was
rescued.
The great value of the Jacquard
loom,
however, could not be denied, and its success was only a question of
time. Jacquard was urged by some English silk manufacturers to
pass over into England and settle there. But notwithstanding the
harsh and cruel treatment he had received at the hands of his
townspeople, his patriotism was too strong to permit him to accept
their offer. The English manufacturers, however, adopted his
loom. Then it was, and only then, that Lyons, threatened to be
beaten out of the field, adopted it with eagerness; and before long the
Jacquard machine was employed in nearly all kinds of weaving. The
result proved that the fears of the workpeople had been entirely
unfounded. Instead of diminishing employment, the Jacquard loom
increased it at least tenfold. The number of persons occupied in
the manufacture of figured goods in Lyons, was stated by M. Leon
Faucher to have been 60,000 in 1833; and that number has since been
considerably increased.
As for Jacquard himself, the rest
of
his life passed peacefully, excepting that the workpeople who dragged
him along the quay to drown him were shortly after found eager to bear
him in triumph along the same route in celebration of his
birthday. But his modesty would not permit him to take part in
such a demonstration. The Municipal Council of Lyons proposed to
him that he should devote himself to improving his machine for the
benefit of the local industry, to which Jacquard agreed in
consideration of a moderate pension, the amount of which was fixed by
himself. After perfecting his invention accordingly, he retired
at sixty to end his days at Oullins, his father’s native place.
It was there that he received, in 1820, the decoration of the Legion of
Honour; and it was there that he died and was buried in 1834. A
statue was erected to his memory, but his relatives remained in
poverty; and twenty years after his death, his two nieces were under
the necessity of selling for a few hundred francs the gold medal
bestowed upon their uncle by Louis XVIII. “Such,” says a French
writer, “was the gratitude of the manufacturing interests of Lyons to
the man to whom it owes so large a portion of its splendour.”
It would be easy to extend the
martyrology of inventors, and to cite the names of other equally
distinguished men who have, without any corresponding advantage to
themselves, contributed to the industrial progress of the age,—for it
has too often happened that genius has planted the tree, of which
patient dulness has gathered the fruit; but we will confine ourselves
for the present to a brief account of an inventor of comparatively
recent date, by way of illustration of the difficulties and privations
which it is so frequently the lot of mechanical genius to
surmount. We allude to Joshua Heilmann, the inventor of the
Combing Machine.
Heilmann was born in 1796 at
Mulhouse,
the principal seat of the Alsace cotton manufacture. His father
was engaged in that business; and Joshua entered his office at
fifteen. He remained there for two years, employing his spare
time in mechanical drawing. He afterwards spent two years in his
uncle’s banking-house in Paris, prosecuting the study of mathematics in
the evenings. Some of his relatives having established a small
cotton-spinning factory at Mulhouse, young Heilmann was placed with
Messrs. Tissot and Rey, at Paris, to learn the practice of that
firm. At the same time he became a student at the Conservatoire
des Arts et Métiers, where he attended the lectures, and studied
the machines in the museum. He also took practical lessons in
turning from a toymaker. After some time, thus diligently
occupied, he returned to Alsace, to superintend the construction of the
machinery for the new factory at Vieux-Thann, which was shortly
finished and set to work. The operations of the manufactory were,
however, seriously affected by a commercial crisis which occurred, and
it passed into other hands, on which Heilmann returned to his family at
Mulhouse.
He had in the mean time been
occupying
much of his leisure with inventions, more particularly in connection
with the weaving of cotton and the preparation of the staple for
spinning. One of his earliest contrivances was an
embroidering-machine, in which twenty needles were employed, working
simultaneously; and he succeeded in accomplishing his object after
about six months’ labour. For this invention, which he exhibited
at the Exposition of 1834, he received a gold medal, and was decorated
with the Legion of Honour. Other inventions quickly followed—an
improved loom, a machine for measuring and folding fabrics, an
improvement of the “bobbin and fly frames” of the English spinners, and
a weft winding-machine, with various improvements in the machinery for
preparing, spinning, and weaving silk and cotton. One of his most
ingenious contrivances was his loom for weaving simultaneously two
pieces of velvet or other piled fabric, united by the pile common to
both, with a knife and traversing apparatus for separating the two
fabrics when woven. But by far the most beautiful and ingenious
of his inventions was the combing-machine, the history of which we now
proceed shortly to describe.
Heilmann had for some years been
diligently studying the contrivance of a machine for combing
long-stapled cotton, the ordinary carding-machine being found
ineffective in preparing the raw material for spinning, especially the
finer sorts of yarn, besides causing considerable waste. To avoid
these imperfections, the cotton-spinners of Alsace offered a prize of
5000 francs for an improved combing-machine, and Heilmann immediately
proceeded to compete for the reward. He was not stimulated by the
desire of gain, for he was comparatively rich, having acquired a
considerable fortune by his wife. It was a saying of his that
“one will never accomplish great things who is constantly asking
himself, how much gain will this bring me?” What mainly impelled
him was the irrepressible instinct of the inventor, who no sooner has a
mechanical problem set before him than he feels impelled to undertake
its solution. The problem in this case was, however, much more
difficult than he had anticipated. The close study of the subject
occupied him for several years, and the expenses in which he became
involved in connection with it were so great, that his wife’s fortune
was shortly swallowed up, and he was reduced to poverty, without being
able to bring his machine to perfection. From that time he was
under the necessity of relying mainly on the help of his friends to
enable him to prosecute the invention.
While still struggling with
poverty and
difficulties, Heilmann’s wife died, believing her husband ruined; and
shortly after he proceeded to England and settled for a time at
Manchester, still labouring at his machine. He had a model made
for him by the eminent machine-makers, Sharpe, Roberts, and Company;
but still he could not make it work satisfactorily, and he was at
length brought almost to the verge of despair. He returned to
France to visit his family, still pursuing his idea, which had obtained
complete possession of his mind. While sitting by his hearth one
evening, meditating upon the hard fate of inventors and the misfortunes
in which their families so often become involved, he found himself
almost unconsciously watching his daughters coming their long hair and
drawing it out at full length between their fingers. The thought
suddenly struck him that if he could successfully imitate in a machine
the process of combing out the longest hair and forcing back the short
by reversing the action of the comb, it might serve to extricate him
from his difficulty. It may be remembered that this incident in
the life of Heilmann has been made the subject of a beautiful picture
by Mr. Elmore, R.A., which was exhibited at the Royal Academy
Exhibition of 1862.
Upon this idea he proceeded,
introduced
the apparently simple but really most intricate process of
machine-combing, and after great labour he succeeded in perfecting the
invention. The singular beauty of the process can only be
appreciated by those who have witnessed the machine at work, when the
similarity of its movements to that of combing the hair, which
suggested the invention, is at once apparent. The machine has
been described as “acting with almost the delicacy of touch of the
human fingers.” It combs the lock of cotton at both ends,
places the fibres exactly parallel with each other, separates the long
from the short, and unites the long fibres in one sliver and the short
ones in another. In fine, the machine not only acts with the
delicate accuracy of the human fingers, but apparently with the
delicate intelligence of the human mind.
The chief commercial value of the
invention consisted in its rendering the commoner sorts of cotton
available for fine spinning. The manufacturers were thereby
enabled to select the most suitable fibres for high-priced fabrics, and
to produce the finer sorts of yarn in much larger quantities. It
became possible by its means to make thread so fine that a length of
334 miles might be spun from a single pound weight of the prepared
cotton, and, worked up into the finer sorts of lace, the original
shilling’s worth of cotton-wool, before it passed into the hands of the
consumer, might thus be increased to the value of between 300l.
and 400l. sterling.
The beauty and utility of
Heilmann’s
invention were at once appreciated by the English
cotton-spinners. Six Lancashire firms united and purchased the
patent for cotton-spinning for England for the sum of 30,000l;
the wool-spinners paid the same sum for the privilege of applying the
process to wool; and the Messrs. Marshall, of Leeds, 20,000l.
for the privilege of applying it to flax. Thus wealth suddenly
flowed in upon poor Heilmann at last. But he did not live to
enjoy it. Scarcely had his long labours been crowned by success
than he died, and his son, who had shared in his privations, shortly
followed him.
It is at the price of lives such
as
these that the wonders of civilisation are achieved.
"Self-Help;
with
Illustrations of
Conduct and Perseverance"
by Samuel Smiles
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