“Now, Master Dávy,Now, sir, I háve ’e,No one shall save ’e;Good Master Dávy.”
“Now, Master Dávy,Now, sir, I háve ’e,No one shall save ’e;Good Master Dávy.”
“Now, Master Dávy,Now, sir, I háve ’e,No one shall save ’e;Good Master Dávy.”
And with the end of the rhyme down came the flat ruler on the open palm of the culprit! School, while it may not have done him a great deal of good, at least did not do him much harm. His own frank, buoyant mind prevented his being twisted into a cut-and-dried shape, or pressed into any special mould. Long years after he gave thanks that in those young days he was left very much to his own bent.
“What I am I have made myself,” he said. “I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart.”
So passed the long, sunshiny days of school-time, and when he was sixteen he left school finally. After that, for one short, blissful year he shot and fished and lived chiefly in the open, surrounded by the beauties of Cornish scenery, for which in after years his heart always kept a tender memory, when the bustle and din of a city, and the whirl of city life, had well-nigh drowned for him Nature’s softer tones. He grew then to know familiarly bird and beast, and rock and flower. In after years, when his life was more fully filled than most men’s, a chance word or reference would seem to waft him a whiff of the sea off the Cornish shore, and a great longing would seize him for the loved scenes of his childhood. Then, in the midst of his work, he would take a hurried run home. During this year of holiday, which he enjoyed with the whole-heartedness of a careless, happy boy, he collected a number of birds, and stuffed them with his own hands—and with not a little skill.
Almost to the end of life he kept his love of shooting. As in fishing he tried to efface himself and deceive the wily fish, so in shooting he was strangely beset by fear of an accident, and he would study to make himself as conspicuousas possible in a scarlet hat! Almost at the end, when his strength was failing, it is pathetic enough to find him ask to be driven to the field, that he might still fire a shot.
But already over his young life there brooded its first great shadow. In 1794 his father died. It may have been this which helped to change young Humphrey from the happy, careless boy to something more serious, more thoughtful, that fixed his mind on the responsibilities life was so full of, that helped to turn it from mere sport and pleasure to the improvement of his mind—to the gaining of knowledge. At any rate, about this time the boy laid hold of life, and, as a rower in a boat-race might do, steadied down to his responsibilities.
His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments—anything that he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery—nothing was safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and hideous odours—he burnt holes in his sister’s dresses. When he turnedthe garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim—
“This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.”
Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy “Philosopher,” or “Sir Humphrey,” as if already his prophetic eye pierced the future and beheld his greatness.
So he spent much of the day, and in the long summer evenings he would ramble along the seashore as far as Marazion armed with a hammer with which to chip off “specimens” from the rocks, for already geology had thrown over him its peculiar spell. He would end these happy days with tea at a favourite aunt’s. And it was not merely boyish enjoyment these solitary rambles brought. They and the still small voice of Nature were telling on him. Gradually they were making and moulding the boy, approaching now as he was, very near to the threshold of manhood.
Even then, however, he was trying to improve himself. With the roar of the waves and the howl of the winds in his ears in these lonely walks, he would declaim to the elements, in the hope of softening a defect in his voice. Thisprobably arose from his having what is called “no ear.” He had no notion of either time or tune. It used to trouble him much that he never could keep step in the Volunteer Infantry corps to which he belonged, and someone tried to teach him “God Save the King,” but without success.
The surgical part of his profession was always disagreeable and distasteful to the boy, although from no want of courage on his part. The story goes that one day about this time he was bitten in the leg by a dog supposed to be mad. No sooner did he realise what had happened to him than he there and then took a knife and cut the piece right out of his leg, and then went to the surgery and had the wound cauterised.
His mind was such that it instinctively rose to emergencies and grappled with anything—a big thing or a little thing. Both were to him alike. Knowledge was what he wanted. He wanted to know as much as possible, and he liked to get to the bottom of a difficulty for himself. Into each new thing that came his way he threw himself with all the ardour and impetuosity of his nature. Nor was he merely practical and nothing more. He had that sympathy and delicacy of mind that revelled incommuning with nature. This expressed itself in sonnets and poems—some of which he wrote when he was only twelve. A great poetic genius once said of him—
“If Davy had not been the first chemist he would have been the first poet of his age.”
But poetry was not the field in which he was to shine. His genius was for experiments. He went on eagerly experimenting on anything—heat, light, air. Anything connected with chemistry drew him as with a magnet. The first time some real experimenting apparatus found its way to his hands he could not conceal his delight. Specially did an air-pump charm him. It was to him as a new and fascinating toy to a child. He kept working the piston up and down, and would hardly let it go!
And now it seemed as if it were almost time for him to try his wings in the larger air of the great world. More than one man had come to Penzance who perhaps gave the boy a foretaste of the delights he was to know by-and-by as a man in the atmosphere of culture and talent in which his lot was to be cast. Among these were Josiah Wedgwood, the Staffordshire Potter, and young Watt, the son of the inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.
There was about young Humphrey’s outward appearance about this time nothing specially attractive. He had round shoulders, not a comely face, and a manner that was in no way remarkable or engaging, but surely the light of genius must have shone from his eyes!
However, such as he was outwardly, he now prepared to launch away into the great world. A professor of chemistry in Bristol had heard of his experiments in light and heat, and proposed to him that he should become assistant in the Pneumatic Institution there. There was not much money to be earned by it.
“He must be maintained, but the fund will not furnish a salary from which a man can lay up anything.” So they told him. But was it not his most direct road to fortune?
Perhaps Humphrey thought so. At any rate, the Penzance surgeon was prevailed upon to cut short the term of the boy’s apprenticeship, “on account of the singularly promising talents Mr. Davy had displayed.”
So Humphrey went out from his native town, and from his home, as many a young man had gone before him, with a heart beating high with hope, and, as his young, ardent spirit believed, the world spread out before him.
And certainly a brilliant future was opening to the boy. He turned his steps to Bristol, throwing himself in his own characteristic way into his new work.
He made experiments on air and gases, some of these daring and dangerous enough, and entailing not a little personal risk. But while these things lay nearest to his heart, he had eye and ear both open for all that was going forward in his new life. He was so many-sided himself, it was as if he could not come in contact with anyone without catching some spark of interest from him—the philosopher, the poet, the physician, the sportsman. He had something in common with all.
He entered into his work as if body and mind knew no fatigue. If an idea came into his head he could not rest until he had worked it out. If he broke down in health, he simply started afresh when he had recovered.
In his spare time he wrote books and pamphlets on chemistry, so that in writing and experimenting his name came to be known to the scientific men of the day. And now it seemed as if one step in fame followed another. Success was crowned by success.
He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Chemistryto the Royal Institution in 1801. He had now entered on manhood, and was launched on the great world of London, having all the ability to carry himself through. He may have been handicapped with slight flaws of manner. If he appeared over-confident, it probably was that in reality he was shy and timid, and attempted to cover these little awkwardnesses. His friends grieved in secret over the noticeable change, fearing lest with simplicity of manner he might throw over simplicity of character. But no man is, after all, perfect, and in spite of this, Davy was rapidly mounting the ladder of success.
The young chemist soon discovered that his lectures drew crowds, even created a great and extraordinary sensation. In imagination we can picture the lecture-room, the crowded audience—all sorts and conditions, from lovers of science, ladies of fashion, men of rank, to the threadbare-coated student—eagerly watching the experiments, and all drinking in his words as the young lecturer, fired with his subject, animated with all the charm of which he was so complete a master the dry bones of geology with life and breath, or again brought the study of chemistry, hitherto unget-at-able and out of reach, down totheir level. The audience hung on his lips spellbound.
The young popular lecturer was caressed and made much of.
“Davy, covered with glory,” writes a friend at this time, “dines with me to-day.”
Soon they made him Professor of Chemistry to the Institution. Promotion followed promotion, but each year was a spur to greater exertion. Time would fail to enumerate the steps in his triumphs. A continuous sun seemed to shine upon him. And his strength seemed equal to all demands. Money had never been of much account to him. Now, indeed, he might have had it in abundance had he chosen, by helping forward manufactures with his scientific knowledge, but that was not his aim. His ambition was scientific glory.
“To be useful to science and mankind was the pursuit in which he gloried.”
The years that followed were years full of hard work. In 1812 he was knighted. It seemed as if almost everything he touched were like a gold mine which yielded some new treasure to him.
“Science,” he said once to a young man anxious to pursue it, “is a harsh mistress, andrepays one poorly.” But for him she surely rather had “full measure pressed down and running over.”
And now, when he was about thirty-seven, his thoughts were first turned to the great triumph of his life, the invention that was to make his name famous.
There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a great and crying evil—the danger in which our miners and their families lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of accidents in our coal-pits—mines exploding, men and boys and horses being blown to pieces or buried alive—and always from the same cause—the want of a safety lamp. A great quantity of gas got cooped up, in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or “steel mills,” which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents multiplied.And though men were startled and shocked when they read of them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down the trap-doors, leaving men to die of “after-damp,” the more horrible death of suffocation, because lingering and slow.
To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward.
It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted. With his “Davy” in his hand there was now no fear for the miner.
“The highest ambition of my life,” he wrote, “has been to deserve the name of a friend to humanity.”
He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough for him to see it work.
“If you had patented it,” said a friend to him one day, “you might have been drawing your five or ten thousand a year.”
“No, my good friend,” was his reply, “I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?”
“I value it,” he said again, “more than anything I ever did.”
And now the world’s honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society.
But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy, followed by paralysis.
“Here I am,” he wrote pathetically from Rome, “a ruin among ruins.”
And so he began to look death in the face.
“I do not wish to live so far as I am personally concerned,” he said, “but I have views which I could develop—if it please God to save my life—which would be useful to science and mankind.”
Never again, however, was he to return toEngland. In Rome he had a second seizure. He had a great longing to reach Geneva, and a few hours after he arrived, although he appeared at first to rally, he took ill, and there passed away quietly and peacefully, not merely, as someone has it, “one of the greatest, but one of the most benevolent and amiable of men.”
They buried him in the little burying-ground at Geneva, the long procession wending its way to his last resting-place on foot. His widow erected a tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
He was the greatest chemist of the age; but after all, his best memorial will abide in the memory of his fellow-men as the inventor of the Safety Lamp.
To himself his invention brought no small happiness.
“I was never more affected,” he said on one occasion, “than by a written address I received from the working colliers, when I was in the north, thanking me, on behalf of themselves and their families, for the preservation of their lives.”
His, indeed, is a career of striking brilliancy. He is like some mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to seehim leap from one dazzling peak to another. Honours and attainments were his such as come to few men in this world, but we cannot but feel that what gave him the greatest joy in life was that he had been enabled to rescue hundreds of lives, to bring light out of darkness, and cheer and safety where before there had been uncertainty and death. It is for this that the name of Humphrey Davy will be blessed by men and women in the ages still to come.
Perhapsno man has risen out of lower depths of poverty and ignorance and obscurity to the very top of fame’s ladder than Richard Arkwright. More than 150 years ago, towards the end of December, 1732, there was born in a house in a humble side street of Preston, a child who was to leave his stamp, not only on his native town, but on the whole of England, and indeed on the civilisation of the world.
The son of poor parents, and, like Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of thirteen, it may be that that Christmas held even less brightness than usual for the struggling Arkwrights because of the coming of an extra mouth to feed. At any rate, if ever child were confronted by the chill and dreary outlook on a cold world, that child was the baby Richard.
Preston was not, 150 years ago, the Preston of to-day. Then it was a town with a few thousand inhabitants, “beyond the trading part of the county,” while to-day it is in the verycentre of the cotton manufacture, hiving with crowds of human beings—a great town because here, in a squalid, insignificant by-street, one bleak December day, there first saw the light the man who was to “give to England the power of cotton.”
As there was scant enough money for food and clothing in the Arkwright house, so it followed that for schooling there was none at all. Young Richard would have stood a poor chance had it not been that his uncle Richard took pity on the boy growing up in a state of neglect and ignorance, and taught him to read. In later days he added something to this small beginning by attending classes in the winter evenings. And so the early years of his life passed, and in time the boy went out into the world, poorly and scantily enough armed for its difficult battle. Long years after he bemoaned his ignorance and want of education when he felt all the drawbacks, the trammelling, the holding-down of it, when he realised how it handicapped him in the race of life. And when he was an old man over fifty, after pressing into the day as many as sixteen working hours, he would steal an hour from sleep to learn English grammar and another hour to practise writing and spelling.
But, poorly equipped as young Richard was in most ways, he went out into life provided with a great brain, and had he known it, that brain was to open to him a door through which—could he have looked then—he might have seen stretching away into the years a long vista of triumphs and successes. The boy began on a very low round of the ladder—a strange enough beginning for the future maker of the cotton world: he entered on his career as apprentice to a barber. But, boy as he was, he threw himself with energy and ardour—these two qualities that made him a great man later on—into the new business. He took a firm hold of it. He worked steadily at it for years, having most likely nothing in his mind higher than the setting up for himself—the becoming some day a master barber! It was this goal at that time that seemed to him getting on in life.
So his boyhood sped away, and when his apprenticeship had come to an end he took the great and important step of setting up for himself. He left Preston and went to Bolton. Poor indeed must have been his stock of money at this point in his fortunes. It was no imposing shop he took, with windows and painted sign, but the smallest and poorest place to be had.He rented an underground cellar, but his eager spirit was to be damped neither by poverty nor a dreary outlook. He bent all his powers on getting customers, and as the first step to this he stuck out a placard above his cellar door with the scrawled invitation—
“Come to the subterraneous barber, he shaves for a penny.”
In the little world of hair-dressing the rude appeal made a small sensation. Here, as in other businesses, there was competition. Arkwright shaved for a penny. At this rate the subterraneous barber would draw away the customers of others! While the underground cellar would be crowded, their shops would be empty. And so they were forced to let down their prices, and others besides Arkwright shaved for a penny.
Young Richard, rising one morning, grasped the fact that he was now not alone in his prices. Others were running him dangerously close. He was merely one of many now, but with the enterprise that outdid others by-and-by in the great world of mechanical invention he resolved to strike out a bold new line. The old placard was taken down and another printed and set up in its stead.
“A clean shave for a halfpenny!”
But Arkwright was not content to stand still in shaving people’s chins or in anything else. These were the days of wearing wigs, and it struck him that something was to be made out of wigs, or perukes, as they were called, and so he gave up his business of shaving in a measure and began to travel about the country buying and selling human hair. He regularly attended country fairs and bought the locks and tresses of the young girls who came there to be hired out to service. In time he grew to make successful bargains with these, and to add to this he discovered a chemical dye, with which he dyed the hair and sold it to wig-makers, and by-and-by “Arkwright’s Hair” came to be known as the best in the market.
It most likely was—at any rate, it may have been in those journeys—going in and out among the houses and cottages in the country that he came to be familiar with the sound of the “weaver’s shuttle” and the turning of the “one-thread machine.” Long years after he was to find that familiarity stand him in good stead. But, successful and hard-working as he was, life was still a struggle, and with all his efforts he earned but a bare living. It was hard to wrest a fortune from wig-making and chin-shaving, sogradually there grew up in his busy brain a project. It formed very slowly, but it did grow. It was the genius within him struggling with disadvantages and drawbacks that would have “posed” most men. His mind, leaning strongly to the mechanical, groped vaguely at first after something, and then gradually it settled down to the “spinning machine,” and from that time onwards all his energies were bent on that.
In his journeys among the cottagers it had been easy enough to see that the yarn could not be made quickly enough for the weaver, that though in thousands of cottages the “one-thread machine” turned from morning till night and again from night till morning, it could not keep pace with the shuttle. What was wanted was a dozen, fifty, a hundred threads to be made by a single pair of hands. Did he perhaps see dimly even then that he was to be the man who should throw out the old-fashioned hand-wheel?
One day he noticed a red-hot bar of iron become elongated as it passed between two iron rollers. In that instant he first saw dimly the tiny seedling that was to grow one day to the mighty tree of the spinning-frame. The idea lodged in his brain and took firm hold of him.
In outward appearance at this time Arkwrightwas in no way specially attractive or remarkable, but genius is not always outwardly beautiful, and “there were notions in that rough head of his” that were one day to alter England.
But Arkwright was no practical mechanic, and so he called in help from outside—from one Kay, a clockmaker in Warrington, and under his directions Kay made rollers and wheels, and shortly Arkwright had his models ready to hand. Meantime, while his heart beat high with hope and exultation, his pet models being always in his mind though for bread and butter he still made wigs and shaved chins, he received a sudden and unexpected check. His wife—for he was already married—chafing in secret over what she considered his fantastic imaginings and idle dreamings, made up her mind to destroy that which distracted his mind from the business of shaving and money-making. As the surest means to her end she burned his models one day when he was out of the way. Poor Arkwright returned and discovered the mischief. In an instant his whole stubborn nature was up in arms. Indeed, so wrathful was he that he would from that day have nothing more to do with his wife, and the two separated.
And now the great question was—how best topush the new model Kay had made. Poverty handicapped him sadly. It was impossible to push anything without money. He cast about in his mind where the money was to come from, and settled on an old friend in Preston, “a liquor merchant and painter” (probably a house-painter). To Preston he took his way. The friend consented to help him, and together with high hopes and great rejoicing he and Kay set up their model. But their secrecy had roused suspicion. Behind this friend’s house there happened to be a closed-in garden with a number of gooseberry bushes. Close by in a neighbouring cottage lived two old ladies. At nights they declared they heard a strange humming noise among the bushes, as if the devil himself were making music, tuning up his bagpipes for Arkwright and Kay to dance a reel! The story got abroad. The people of Preston, excited and curious, were eager to break into the house and discover if Arkwright and Kay were indeed in league with the Evil One.
But after the model had been set up and was about to be shown in the Free Grammar School in Preston, there came a sudden memory of dark stories still fresh in men’s minds of how other inventors had been treated in Preston—howthey had been mobbed and furiously ill-used, while their inventions had been smashed to atoms by a people panic-stricken because of their dread of machinery, which they believed would throw them out of work and take the bread out of their and their children’s mouths. Arkwright remembered all this, and he and Kay finally made up their minds to pack up their models and set off for Nottingham.
While Arkwright had been at Preston engrossed with thoughts of his model a political election took place, and he was called upon to vote. But so poor and so wretchedly clad was the man who was by-and-by to be a knight—the man who was to leave behind him half a million—that before he could present himself at the poll, several people had to club together to exchange the tattered garments for something that would at least be presentable!
Arrived at Nottingham, Arkwright tried to get someone to help him with money. This brave man had firm faith in his invention and firm faith in himself. It was simply impossible to discourage him. But the time of waiting was long and weary before he fell in with a Mr. Strutt, the inventor of the stocking-frame. An inventor himself, perhaps he was the manwho could best understand and appreciate Arkwright’s invention. The two entered into partnership, and it may have seemed to Arkwright that his time of trial and waiting had at last come to an end.
And now truly enough he had his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success. Behind him was a hard and toilsome boyhood. Before him were still long waiting, difficulties to face, men’s opposition to overcome, dislike, distrust, envy, and jealousy to live down and conquer. But the first step had been taken, and never once along the difficult way do we find him flinch.
In 1769, the same year in which James Watt patented his Condensing Steam Engine, Arkwright at the age of thirty-seven took out the patent for his Spinning-Frame. His next step was to erect a cotton mill at Chorley, and following that, one at Cromford, in Derbyshire. No sooner were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock of the country.
But Arkwright’s brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who said this invention was not all his.He had taken other men’s thoughts and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings, struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of weary waiting, an expenditure of £12,000, and yet no profit from his invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of hundreds. A strong force of police, and even of the military, was called out to quell the rioters. Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned, and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake. And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes, looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. They were doubtless at the same time looking to their pockets. If working men werethrown out of work, it meant thattheywould have larger poor rates to pay, and so they too fell upon Arkwright, not seeing that here was the man ready and anxious, if they would but listen to him, to give thousands of people work where now instead only hundreds had it.
Meantime he faced his opponents, showing always a brave front, and trying to defend himself at every point. He endured the spoiling of his property, and then, not content with browbeating him, they seized upon his patent rights and disputed them. And the upshot was that Arkwright’s patent was set aside by Parliament. But even then the great inventor was not overwhelmed. Passing by the hotel where some of his enemies were standing after his defeat, he overheard one say to another—
“Well, we have done for the old shaver at last.” Arkwright turned round, ready, cool, immovable.
“Never mind,” he said, “I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave you all yet.”
He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was wanted.
Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England. People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or that—a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle—one of these may have belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins—a hard and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too, was the strong mind that trained men and boys—never before used to machinery—to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the stupidity of workmen had sometimesalmost daunted him, but these days were past.
And how the man worked!—with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his “penny a shave,” striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches from his machines—and even more from his mills—flowed in upon him. He was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land. King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending his mills and his machinery—leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim to bodily suffering—subject to severeasthma—and how bravely and uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now, already early—while he was but in his sixtieth year—he began to fail. Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed away on the 3rd August, 1792.
Arkwright’s name was now of world-wide fame. Hundreds and thousands of people, many of whom had come to see his first cotton-mill, crowded the rocks and roads about Cromford, and mingled with the long procession that bore the body of the great inventor to his last resting-place.
They erected a monument in the church of Cromford to his memory. But the name of Arkwright needs no carved memorial of stone. His memorial is of a more lasting kind, for it is he whom England has to thank to-day for an industry that has enriched the land. Not “proud Preston” alone—a small town at his birth, a mighty place of manufacture now—has Arkwright made to grow and flourish.
He was a man of “Napoleon nerve.” Where other men saw but a short way ahead, he graspedthe end from the beginning; where other minds saw merely a part, his eye was able to take in the whole. He may have gathered up some threads from other men’s brains, but it was he who wove them into one great whole. He had a business faculty—he had shown it as a boy—that rose almost to the height of genius. And he believed in himself. He had great notions, great ambitions. Nothing was too big a project for him to attempt. And success was his—great success, as the world counts it. Immense riches, too, were his, for when he died he left behind him half a million. But to us that seems not of so much account as that that great mind of his was the first to grasp what was to put within their reach a source of riches and profit to thousands of working-people in England, and this in face of bitter opposition from the people themselves. He braved their jealousy, he held his own against their prejudices and attacks, and working often in bodily weakness and pain, but with persevering determination, he brought this boon to his country. With untiring courage and long, patient labour, he built up the splendid scheme that has turned out for us to be the Factory System of our country to-day.
WhenJosiah Wedgwood was born, some 170 years ago, I daresay the people of the little village of Burslem would have been greatly astonished had they been told that the humble potter’s child was by-and-by to change the place, with its few straggling houses, into a flourishing town with thousands of inhabitants. And not this alone, but that he would make for himself such fame that his name should be a household word throughout Great Britain, and indeed throughout the world.
When Josiah came into the world there was already a small army of brothers and sisters awaiting him in the humble little house close by the churchyard of Burslem, for he was the youngest of thirteen.
Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great world. In thisway the midland counties of England were a long time emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways. Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water.
Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and butter-dishes and porringers—for spoons and plates were still of wood—out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy.
A potter’s work could be divided among one family. The father and sons made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strappedthem on the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts, while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their lips, urged them on with whip and lash.
It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born with a boy’s best blessing—a good mother—a woman who had a heart large enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down to them by example a birthright better than riches—to make them patient, industrious, dependent on self.
When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with uncertain step, he was sent to a dame’s school, quite as much to be out of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse’s back, hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature’s beauties—her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances—as we best can know things, byclose and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and Burslem that rose before his mind’s eye as he decorated his china services with coloured leaves and flowers.
When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his hard-won earnings to leave to his children much—£20 when they reached the age of twenty-one.
“And so,” as Josiah used to say long afterwards, “I began on the very lowest round of the ladder.”
And now the child’s scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic, but for the rest—that great storehouse of knowledge the world contained—he had to unlock the door ofthatfor himself, and he did it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years went on.
To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post of turning what was called “the potter’s wheel.”
This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved horizontally and beside which sat a man called “a thrower,” shaping with his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.
The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of “thrower,” hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud descended and settled on his life—a cloud that, though he struggled bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.
The terrible epidemic of small-pox visited Burslem, and the Wedgwood family, living as they did on the edge of the churchyard, were among the first to take it, the youngest so badly that his life was despaired of. However, after long struggle, they pulled him through; but thedisease left behind it a knee which gave him hours and days of excruciating pain, and seemed almost as if it would blight his whole life and ruin his career. Every remedy was tried, in vain. At first when he rose in bed, weak and unstrung, he fell back again. When later he began to stand it was with weariness and pain. But the dark cloud had, though all unseen at first, a silver lining. Out of what looked a great calamity there sprang good. The boy when he crawled back to work was no longer fit for the “thrower’s” bench. The position he had now to take—with his leg stretched out in front of him—cramped and impeded him. No longer active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and so took to thinking—not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay very near to his heart.
At the age of fourteen Josiah was formally bound apprentice to his brother. Here is the form. The quaint words sound ceremonious—almost solemn. The writing provided that he was—
“To learn the Art, Mystery, Occupation orImployment of throwing and handling which he, the said Thomas Wedgwood, now useth, and with him as an apprentice to dwell, continue and serve.”
An apprentice in those days at the pottery works was allowed “his meat, drink, washing and lodging, with suitable apparel of all kinds, both linen and woollen and all other necessaries, both in sickness and in health.”
In return the master “was to teach or cause to be taught the art of throwing and handling.”
How poor these potters were, and how poorly they paid their apprentices, may be gathered from this:
For the first three years he got 1s.a week, for the second three years he got 1s.6d.a week, and for the seventh and last 4s.a week. Besides this he got, once a year, a pair of shoes. At the end of his apprenticeship, if he chose, he got 5s.a week for five years. It was a dreary enough outlook for an eager, ambitious boy anxious to make his way in the world.
But boy though he was, the difficulty of getting on—pain, weakness—none of these obstacles were allowed to overcome Josiah. Then even at that early age he showed the germs of that perseverance that stood out sostrongly by-and-by in the character of the man.
Strange as it may seem to us, what sounds the very common business of making rough earthenware milk-bowls and butter-pots and plates was often half shrouded in mystery, and went near to being something of a secret.
Pottery was yet in its beginnings—not yet an art—and it could only grow and come to perfection by someone giving to it deep thought and long, patient, painstaking experiments. For instance, one man might pore over the matter and discover something new or come to some conclusion. He might find one substance, a clay or a soil, that when mixed with a second substance produced a third thing—something new. He might begin to work this out in his pottery, and immediately all the workmen in the place knew the secret of how he did it. The knowledge spread, and while he believed it was still all his own, other men had seized on his discovery; other potteries were turning out his ware and selling it.
So keen were men to find out the discoveries of other men, and so closely have these secrets been kept, that sometimes a master would prefer to employ idiots, when he could get them, to turnhis wheel. If one workman appeared more skilled than the others he was shut up while at work. The door was locked, the windows were blinded, and when he came out he was carefully searched. Men have been known to pretend to be idiots just that they might get inside a noted pottery; even to put up with kicks and blows for their stupidity; to make intentional mistakes to encourage the falsehood; to hold on to this perhaps as long as two whole years; while night after night they crept home and there wrote down carefully every item of what they had seen, and so made the secrets their own.
In Josiah’s boyhood there was much of this sort of thing carried on. A strict secrecy—a protection of themselves—as merchant vessels on the high seas in olden days guarded themselves from the pirates who, ready to pounce upon them, roamed the waters.
But as a man—a great, large-hearted, open-minded man—and one of the greatest inventors of his time, Wedgwood never followed this line of action. Rather was he nobly willing that others should be the better for his brains. And so during his long life he took out only one patent, as we call that which makes an invention all a man’s own and prevents others touching it.
At the time we write of there was just beginning to dawn on Josiah’s boyish mind what was by-and-by to raise him to the very top of his calling.
He took to pondering and considering and making experiments with the clay that lay about the doors. How to make the black mottled ware more delicate—the ruddy-coloured of a fairer hue—how to mould rough edges more smoothly—how to introduce fresh colours and glazes.
The whole thing threw over the boy a great glamour of fascination. They show in Burslem yet a teapot—an ornamented thing made of the ochreous clay of the district—as “Josiah Wedgwood’s first teapot.”
But the elder brother, brought up to the cut-and-dried routine of the potteries life, had little patience with what he looked on as the younger’s shiftless dreamings. He had brothers and sisters to keep, and money to make, and if Josiah were not more practical he wanted him no longer.
And so the honest but short-sighted brother, his eyes blinded by the present need of ready money, failed to realise that there was something greater, and that the young brother wouldone day leave him and his plodding ways far behind.
But while his brother looked upon the boy as an unpractical dreamer, there were others in Burslem who saw the beauty of the patient, uncomplaining, steadfast life, and more than one father in the place called on his sons to take a pattern from Josiah Wedgwood.
But in the midst of his patient inquiries, and while he was yet little more than a boy, a swift blow descended upon the Wedgwoods. The mother who had for so long been father and mother in one to them was taken from them. They laid her in the quiet little church of Burslem, and the brothers and sisters went on living together.
It was not till he had reached the age of twenty-two that Josiah cut the knot that bound him to home and went out into the great world to seek his fortune, as eager youths will do to the end of time. He took with him his little all—his father’s legacy of £20, a pair of capable hands, and a wonderful brain.
His boyhood was over. Manhood lay before him—rough places at first in the world, puzzles, difficulties, trials, but in the end name, fame, riches. If we could follow him past boyhoodand just peep at the future, I should like to tell you how he let some of these fancies his brother had despised have free play; how he invented a new green earthenware, forming plates in the shape of ornamental leaves; how he coloured snuff-boxes and toilet vessels to imitate precious stones, and how the London jewellers eagerly bought these up. How he made flowered cups and saucers, familiar enough to us to-day, but strange and beautiful to people then. Under him things took a step forward. People even at their meals saw things of beauty. These became an education to them—an art. Besides this they found other improvements. Lids fitted, spouts poured, handles could be held! These were small beginnings, but from these Josiah made great strides.
And one of the secrets of these strides was that he bent hiswhole mindupon his work. At night, after a day of hard work, he would sit down and write out every smallest detail of his experiments and discoveries. No pains were too great for him to take. Neither would he trust to memory, so often in pain and weariness, but with a perseverance that was never daunted, he would make his evening notes.
To him no trouble seemed too great, no detailtoo small. The boyhood rarely fails to show the stuff the man is made of, and it was no ordinary stuff the great potter was made of. So we are not surprised that step by step he moved upwards and onwards. Hands and brain were never idle. Often prostrate with pain and weakness, he would still read and think and plan. Indeed, so much did he get into the habit of planning that many a night it robbed him of his sleep, for he never lay down at nights without making in his head a programme for the coming day.
Another secret of his success was his courage. Was it long familiarity with pain—for his knee broke out again and again, and gave him weary hours of suffering—that taught him to endure and resolutely refuse to be overcome? Was it this made him say with Napoleon, “Nothing is impossible”?
He met all difficulties alike with patience and with a steadfast purpose to overcome them. He had two special ones. His workmen—often lazy, indolent, drunken—were a trouble to him, as were also the furnaces, where the heat had to be of a certain degree to fire his ware, and where sometimes the work and labour of months would be destroyed in a few hours. By patience hewon the hearts of the first, and they came to trust him, and by patience, too, he gradually righted the second. He pulled down and he built up till the kilns were right.
“It must be done,” he used to say of any difficult enterprise, “let what may stand in the way.”
He had great ambition for his beloved calling. He wanted to make it an art. England had been long famed for cheapness but not for beauty, and so he set himself to study the designs of the ancients and of the Greeks, copying them on china and porcelain.
And yet it seemed that even as he took step after step there were ever on each round of the ladder new difficulties. There was a long-standing one—the wretched state of the roads in Staffordshire, and the difficulty of getting the ware carried to other places for sale, and of getting necessaries for the work brought into the county.
The backs of horses and donkeys, these were the only mode of conveyance—miserable underfed creatures that tottered and stumbled along and not seldom stuck in the muddy lanes or fell in the ruts and rugged roads, and often broke their legs and their wares, and had to be shot wherethey lay—a happy release for the poor animals. Josiah saw all this, and realised that something must be done to remedy the evil. So in the midst of his watchful care and constant thought for his beloved potteries he made time to push the grand scheme of a canal that began gradually to see daylight. It was not pack-horses that would labour slowly to Birmingham and Sheffield, but a broad waterway to carry goods to Liverpool and other seaports. This was what his native county wanted. And so he subscribed largely to this, and helped to push a Bill through Parliament.
“I scarcely know,” he wrote, “whether I am a landed gentleman, an engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other characters by turns.”
In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of the Tiber in Italy.
By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with thousands of flourishing houses and workmen.And he himself was the mainspring of it all—the moving spirit.
Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice of the Queen—Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full development of that “cream” ware whose first beginnings had dawned on his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known the “Queen’s Ware,” and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might call himself “Potter to the Queen.”
And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered a “jasper dip,” and he invented a special kind of ware of which he made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for Wedgwood’s vases. “A violent vase mania,” he called it himself. The mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation against thecurse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure: “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”
Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he had been as a boy—hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays labelled and classified.
Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing “scamped.” Well did the workmen know the “thud” of his wooden leg on the floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any article he did not think perfect.
“That won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood!” he would say.
As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs, for he was very particular about having it often renewed.Partial blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his perseverance never failed.
As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his family noted his failing powers—not of mind, but of body. Asthma was added to his other sufferings.
“I am becoming an old man,” he wrote. “Age and infirmity overtake me, and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than increase the objects of my attention.”
The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left the better for his passage through it.
He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble potter’s cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name.He was a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything attempts the first beginning.
But while we admire his splendid qualities, it is the singular beauty of his nature—a nature doubtless softened and sweetened by trial—his uncomplaining bravery, his thought for others, his simple, steadfast determination to carry through his life-work, in spite of the burden of weariness and sickness and bodily pain, that most of all speak to our hearts.
Ifa town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind horses. But now times are changed, and it is not wonderful that the name of George Stephenson, the man who has opened up the country and spread lines upon it like a mighty network, is a name to-day that people look up to as one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known.
Most of us are fond of seeing the small beginnings of great endings, so it is natural enough that for us the tiny village of Wylam should be of deepest interest, for here George Stephenson first saw the light.