“Stephenson fighting the fire in Killingworth Colliery.”“Stephenson fighting the fire in Killingworth Colliery.”
We cannot visit Wylam without feeling at once that we are in the heart of the collierycountry. Newcastle’s lofty chimneys tower some eight miles off, and chimneys closer at hand belch forth great volumes of smoke and smut, and flaming furnaces shoot out lurid lights by night far across the country.
In a common little wayside house, just a labourer’s cottage, standing on the roadside, some 120 years ago a baby opened his eyes on a world that was to be rough enough at first for his young feet, though at last they were to land on the very topmost round of the ladder.
The second child of the fireman of the old pumping-engine of the colliery of Wylam, little George was born to grinding poverty. Time as it passed brought other children besides George to the Stephensons, and soon it came to be a question how the fireman and his wife and six children were to live on 12s.a week!
It was indeed a problem to solve and a struggle to face. When food had been got for the little mouths, what was left for clothes and schooling? Very little for the first, nothing for the second. No schooling certainly for little George, and so he spent his childhood between running errands for his mother and standing by his father’s engine fire, where the boys and girls of the village loved to gather to listen to oldRobert’s wondrous tales, or to see the birds fed, for the old man loved birds of all kinds, and would save the crumbs from his own scant dinner to feed the robins. Here it was that baby George learned that early love of birds that lasted as long as life. As a boy he would catch and tame the blackbirds, and these would fly about the cottage all day, and at night come and roost at his bed-head. Years after, when he was an old man, he used to tell how, walking with his father one day, he parted some thick branches overhead and lifted the child in his arms that he might peep at a nest full of young blackbirds. It was a sight he never forgot.
But, baby though he was, his days were not all spent in play. At home there were seven younger brothers and sisters to be nursed and watched and kept out of the way of the heavy waggons that were dragged by horses along the tram-road in front of the house, and much of this fell to George’s share.
As the years passed the Stephenson family, obliged like other colliers “to follow the work,” moved to a place called Dewley Burn, and now as George had reached the age of eight he was ready to earn some money!
To show how smart and quick the child wasfor his years there has come down to us a pretty story.
He and his sister Nell had gone to Newcastle one day, and among their little commissions they were bent on buying Nell a new bonnet. They found the very thing she wanted in a shop, but the price was beyond their purse. It was 1s.3d.over the mark, and the pair, sadly downcast, had to leave the shop. Standing crestfallen outside the boy suddenly exclaimed, “I have it! Wait here till I come back.” Off he darted, and Nell waited while the minutes wore to hours, and still he did not come. Just as she began to think he must either have been killed or run over he dashed up breathless and thrust the coveted 1s.3d.into her hand.
“But where did you get it?” she asked, astonished.
“By holding gentlemen’s horses,” was the reply.
The child’s first situation at this time was with a woman who kept a farm and needed a boy to herd her cows and keep them out of the way of passing waggons. For this the little herd-boy was paid 2d.a day. How happy he was in long leisure hours to bird’s-nest or whittle whistles out of reeds, or in companywith another boy—by-and-by, like himself, to be one of the world’s great engineers—to model toy engines out of clay, using hollowed corks for corves and hemlock stalks for steam pipes!
Soon George advanced a step in life. His work was still farm-work—hoeing turnips for 4d.a day, leading the plough horses when his little legs could hardly stride the furrows, and working in the dawning hours of day when other children slept.
But his heart was really at the engine fire or in the coal shaft. It was “bred in the bone,” and he gladly returned to the black, grimy life, and along with his brother became a coal-picker, separating stones and dross from the coal, and so earning 6d.a day.
By-and-by he was advanced to driving “the gin-horse,” a horse that travels round and round at the pit’s mouth drawing up and letting down by means of a rope wound round a drum, baskets of coal or buckets of water, and for this he was paid 8d.a day.
Long miles he had to walk every day to and from his work, “a grit-growing lad, with bare legs and feet,” and I think we may be sure there was not a bird’s nest on that familiar road that the little bird-lover did not know by heart.
His next rise was to a shilling a day. This was a great step up, and for this he had what was called a night shift, lading and unlading the coals as they came to the mouth of the pit, and reversing the rope to go down again. Monotonous enough work it was, but he held on to it for two years. And now another step up was at hand. It was a proud day for the boy—that Saturday afternoon when he was told that his wage had been raised to 12s.a week!
“I am a made man now,” he exclaimed in great delight.
And now he was seventeen years old. He had really stepped beyond his father both in wage and position. But there was one thing which he had yet to master. It may seem strange to us, but George could neither read nor write. It began to dawn upon him then that things about which he wanted to know—pumps and engines and the great world of mechanics—could only be learned from between the boards of books that were closed to him. But with George to realise an evil was to try at once to mend it. Inside the boy’s rough working jacket there beat a manly heart, with a great longing to make the most of his opportunities, to let no chance slip of doing his best.
So he actually went to school at nights—three times a week, spending 3d.out of his wages to be taught to read and write. He laboured on and made progress, and in time he wrote and read, and by-and-by he took another step and added to these arithmetic. With marvellous quickness he “caught on” to figures. In the long weary night shifts sitting by the blaze of the fire he would “work” the sums his master had “set” him or write his copies, just as years after, so eager was he to seize every opportunity that offered, he would many a time (in odd moments) chalk his sums on the sides of the coal waggons!
So little by little, by untiring labour and unwearied industry, by “neglecting nothing,” he rose. The miners who were his daily companions were, many of them, a rough lot. Their life was a hard one and their pleasures few, and on Saturday afternoons—pay-day—their amusements were cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and drinking in the ale-house, while the future great engineer might be found engaged in pulling to pieces his engine, cleaning it, getting to know it as we know the character, the habits, the face of our dearest friend, all the time laying in such a store of practical knowledgeas was to serve him in good stead in time to come.
Not that George did not delight in exercise. Indeed, few of his companions could equal him in athletics. There was nothing he enjoyed like challenging them to feats of strength in throwing the hammer or in lifting heavy weights. And even in comparative old age he loved to engage in a wrestle with a friend.
About this time George had a favourite dog which he taught to fetch and carry his dinner in a pitcher tied round his neck. At the appointed hour the creature used to go straight to his master, turning neither to the right nor to the left. But one day he was beset with danger in the shape of a bigger dog with murder in its eye. George’s dog closed with it, and a deadly tussle began, but it beat the bully and came off victorious but bleeding. When he reached his master the pitcher was there, but the dinner was spilt; but George was prouder far, when an onlooker described the fight, of his dog’s courage than he would have been of the most sumptuous feast.
But in spite of his larger wage money was scarce, and George beat about in his own mind how he was to earn a few extra shillings. Withkeen eye ever on the outlook for what lay nearest, he lighted on theshoesof his fellow-workmen! He took to mending these, and he mended them so well that the pitmen soon got into the way of making George their cobbler. And from this he went on to making shoe-lasts for the village shoemaker. In this way it came to pass that in a fortnight’s time he would sometimes make as much as £2. When he had by long and careful labour saved his first guinea great was his delight. “I am now a rich man!” he said.
Yet another source of earning money was at hand. One day the chimney of his house went on fire, and being drenched with water, the soot and water together succeeded in damaging an eight-day clock that stood in his kitchen. Money was still scarce, and the watchmaker did not work without pay, so George set to work and took the clock to pieces, cleaned it, and put it together again. Rumours of this new “handiness” spread, and colliers from far and near sent their watches and clocks to him to doctor. It was almost as if nothing came amiss to these wonderful hands or, indeed, to that wonderful brain.
A wheezy engine pump, a clock out of gear,a pair of worn-out shoes—he had a remedy for all. Painstaking, conscientious, thorough—the work of the boy shadowed forth the success of the man.
If I had space I could tell you how, after he ceased to be a boy, he became a splendid man. That divine capacity—the creative faculty for making something out of nothing—that had been struggling long within him came to the surface, and he burst on the world as an Inventor.
The boon he gave to men—the thing with which his name will ever be linked in history—is the Locomotive Steam Engine.
What battles he fought for it when the country rose in arms and said they would rather hold by the old post-horses and coaches that had been good enough for their fathers! They were hard to convince. They declared if railways and trains came the country would be ruined. The engines would vomit forth smoke. No bird could live in the poisoned air. Game all over the country would be spoiled. The sparks that came from the engine would set fire to the houses near which they passed. Hens would stop laying! Cattle would cease to graze! The man who said he would send engines flyingthrough the air at the rate of twenty miles an hour was a fool and a maniac!
Then Stephenson showed the same patience—for the world was long of being convinced—as he had done on those long night-shifts, sitting lonely by the engine fire and working out his sums, or as years later, when prospects were very dark and money scarce, he wept bitter tears, “for he knew not where his lot in life would be cast.”
But though only a self-taught mechanic, Stephenson stuck to his guns in the face of the most skilled engineers in the land. For two long months the thing hung in the balance. It came before the great House of Commons. George himself was put into the witness-box. Single-handed, undaunted, he faced a world that was all against him. And then he had to bear the great trial of his life. The Bill was thrown out of Parliament. But still he did not despair. He looked into the future, and he saw himself conqueror. The Bill was again brought forward and eventually passed. I could tell you then of his long course of triumphs. How his engine, “The Rocket,” won a £500 prize. How really the first seed of the Railway System of the world was sown then. How then he got leave tomake a railway between Stockton and Darlington, and in time one between Manchester and Liverpool. How when, in 1830, the line was finished, people flocked in hundreds and thousands to see “a steam coach running upon a railway at three times the speed of a mail-coach.”
The people were carried away with excitement! The great steam-horse that we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be the world’s greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a thousand throats.
And now that he was successful, now that people praised where they had blamed, and pandered where they had scoffed, the man remained the same—modest, single-minded, just what he had been as the boy earning his shilling a day by driving the old “gin” horse at the pit’s mouth.
And now from the humble labourer’s cottagehe had climbed to the highest heights of fame. He was the first mechanical genius in the eyes of the world. The greatest in the land rejoiced to honour him. From the depths of poverty he had risen to wealth. Honours flowed in upon him. But the “boy is father to the man,” and it was peculiarly true of George Stephenson.
“I never want,” he had said long years before, when he was earning £100 a year, and was able to keep a horse, “I never want to be higher.”
He was much the same as in those old days. There was no dazzling him with worldly display or worldly honours. He cared little for social distinctions. His instincts all along had been “to dwell among his own people.” It gave him the keenest pleasure to have a day at Newcastle among the scenes of his boyhood, looking up the simple friends of his youth. And his tastes, too, remained in many ways just the old simple ones. When he was an old man, and nearing the end of his pilgrimage, when he was surrounded by every luxury of table and otherwise, he would call for a “crowdie,” and with the basin of boiling water between his knees, would stir in the oatmeal with his own hands, watching it with greatsatisfaction, and then sup the whole with sweet milk, pronouncing it “capital.”
His last days were very peaceful. He removed from the swirling current of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the mind of a Greater Inventor than he. He took no part in business life, leaving it to his son, though now and then he would hear from afar echoes from the old world as the old war-horse scents the smoke of battle.
There was no long illness to mar the end of his splendid energetic life. Those who had known him in the full tide and flush of health had not the pain of noting either physical or mental decay. He was at a meeting in connection with engineering in July. Some weeks later he took a severe fever, and after ten day’s illness, without much suffering, the end came. On the 12th August, in his sixty-seventh year, George Stephenson, the great engineer, passed away.
The whole civilised world bewailed his going. He had lived long enough for it to realise and appreciate the mark he had made on the age.But most of all did the colliers mourn him—the men to whom he had been as a kindly father, a leader, a hero. They laid him in the quiet little churchyard at Chesterfield, and they raised monuments to him all over the country, as a grateful people will do,—erected statues and memorial schools, and painted portraits. But a man like George Stephenson needs no memorial of stone. He has left an undying work to speak for him, and a character that has moved men to admiration everywhere for its simplicity, combined with its greatness, its manliness, that made it possible for him, the poor collier’s son, to meet on equal ground—himself also being a man—men of the highest rank in the land.
We cannot, any of us, imitate his genius or his power of invention, or his splendid physical strength, but it is within the scope of all of us, however young or insignificant, to copy his conscientious, unwearied hard work.
“Ah, ye lads,” he used to say to young men when he was himself an old one, in his broad, honest Doric, “there’s none o’ ye know whatwarkis!”
He has left us a splendid example of patience, content, courage, attention to detail. But most precious of all, of a heart that beat as kindly inold age as in youth, that made him dearly loved by his workmen, and that never turned away from hearing and helping those in trouble.
Riches and success and prosperity, crowding upon him in later years, had no power to spoil the simple beauty of his character, for the Wylam collier’s son, besides being the world’s honoured inventor, was also “one of Nature’s gentlemen.”
Tosee as a boy the greatest inventor of the age, we shall have to cross the Atlantic and take a journey to the United States of America. England has done wonders in the way of discovery and invention, but it is to New England, as we call it, because she is a daughter of the old Mother Country, that we must go for a brightness and a sharpness of wit that sometimes make us think of the flash of polished steel.
We all know the name of Edison. It is not a name of history, for he is living to-day, a man still in his prime, still sending out from that wonderful brain of his things that astonish men, and have won for him the name of the “wonder-worker of the modern world.”
I have before me as I write the picture of a square, brick house, with outside shutters hooked back, a white paling half encircling it, and a couple of bare, leafless trees before it. The house is plain and poor, and has a strangely unfamiliarlook to our English eyes, but it is of the deepest interest to us as the birthplace of Thomas Edison.
EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.
The boy first saw the light in 1847, and though he came into the world with but a poor provision waiting him, he found himself welcomed with a very wealth of love and tenderness. Mrs. Edison had Scotch blood in her veins, and she was a mother in a thousand. It is a common thing in history to find that a son draws his greatness, many of his best qualities, from his mother, and this son took many of his from Mrs. Edison. She was his constant companion, his loving nurse, his gentle teacher during those early years of life that leave so deep an impress on the “afterwards.”
The child was seven years old when the Edison family moved to a place called Port Huron, and there he began to spend every spare moment in reading. So earnest was he that he set himself to read through the Detroit Free Library, and had devoured a close row of volumes before his attempt was discovered.
Strange and solemn sound some of the titles of the books he read when he was twelve years old—a time when most boys are lightly dipping into newspapers and magazines and books of adventure. Burton’sAnatomy of Melancholy,Hume’sHistory of England, Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In 1862, when he was barely fifteen years old, he came out more fully from the shelter of home and mixed with the busy world, making a place in it for himself by his own young wits. He was a newspaper boy, and sold his papers like other boys, not stopping still in one place, but going on the train to different stations along the line, and selling as he went.
About this time there was a great fever and ferment in America. The North were fighting with the South, and people panted for news of each battle as it took place. Papers with reports were devoured as soon as printed.
“Now,” thought Edison, “is my chance,” and there began to work in the brain of the boy a big scheme. As the first step to carrying it out, he betook himself to the station telegraph clerk.
“If,” he said, “you will let me wire the war news on a few stations ahead, and have it written up on the blackboard, I will promise you some papers, and now and then a magazine.”
He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and hisrequest was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.
“Give me a thousand copies,” he begged, “and I will pay out of the proceeds of my venture.” Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the different stations, and he started on his venture.
At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded, and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and their excited gestures, that it waspapersthey wanted! He dashed on to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each, or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station. The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same all along the line. At the last station—Port Huron—his home, the people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station. Edison startedoff with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager, hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the usual price of his paper. He began “to take in,” as he expressed it, in his own terse, telling words, “a young fortune.”
After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain—why not print a paper on the train?
The question was no sooner asked than answered.
He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of what he calledThe GrandTrunk Herald, the first and last paper ever printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and newsvendor in one. The paper “caught on,” and the circulation went up to 400.
But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One unlucky day the printing-office—the old car, which grew daily more decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey—by a more violent lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out, and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got under, but Edison’s venture had received its deathblow. The furious car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings—the whole paraphernalia of his craft.
It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind’s eye. The boy standing half stunned, the rubbish anddébrisof his belongings strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to nothing. As he stood there he facedit all—a mere boy low down in the world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed, but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as the years rolled on.
When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy’s ears, so brutal had been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life, and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted disappointment long years ago as a boy.
At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father’s house.
It was about this time that his mind began to bend towards that which has ever held forhim a keen interest through life—the Telegraph. A waking ambition in him desired strongly to perfect himself in it. He was poor and friendless, and yet firmly, doggedly resolved to get on somehow. So out of his scant earnings—still as newsboy—he bought a book on Telegraphy, and this he pored over night and day.
And now at this early age I think the great inventor must have touched that mine that was afterwards to yield him so wondrously of its wealth.
The boyish mind was putting out feelers, gropingly at first, in the direction of creation, that divine faculty that is granted to so few of us. We can recognise the seed in its first tiny sproutings. He and a boy friend resolved to make a telegraph. They made a line of wire between their houses, insulated with bottles, and crossed under a busy thoroughfare by means of an old cable found in the bed of the Detroit River. The first magnets were wound with wire and swathed in ancient rags, and a piece of spring brass formed the key. Edison pressed two large and formidable-looking cats into his service, tied a wire to their legs, and applied friction to their backs. But the experiment ended in failure. The cats, frightened and furious, resented theliberty, and parted company with, the wire, dashing off in different directions.
But failure never discouraged Edison, nor stayed the working of his brain. He was a true philosopher, and he was, like an elastic ball, possessed of enormous rebound.
Handed down to us there is a story of the boy which, while it may not throw much light on his brain, throws some on his heart and on his ready courage. He was still a newspaper boy on the trains, and while at most stations a few minutes was the limit of waiting, at a certain station where shunting took place the minutes ran to half an hour. The boy was wont to spend this half-hour with the stationmaster’s child, of whom he was fond, or to loiter about his garden. On this particular day the engine-driver had unlinked the cars in a siding, and one was being sent with a good deal of impetus to join another portion. It came on steadily, no one on it to control it, and right in its path was the unconscious baby smiling in the morning sunshine. Not a moment was to be lost. Edison threw down his papers and his hat on the platform and dashed to the rescue. And not a second too soon. As he threw himself and the child free of the line the car passedand struck his heel. The two fell with such violence on the gravel beyond that the stone particles were driven into their flesh, but they were safe!
The grateful father was at a loss how he could show his gratitude to the rescuer of his child. He had little money and no reward to give. At last a plan occurred to him.
“I will teach you telegraphing,” he said to the boy, “and prepare you for the position of night operator at not less than twenty-five dollars a month.”
Edison was delighted. The bargain was struck. The wage seemed, no doubt, a small fortune to the boy—rather more than five of our English pounds.
And now he had got his “toe on the tape,” his foot on the ladder, if it were only on the lowest round. In three months he could teach his master, and the promised situation was got for him. From that he passed to other situations, and gradually he began to make his mark.
He had a mind wonderfully quick to see a difficult situation and to deal with it.
There is a story told of how one winter a severe frost had coated the great river between Port Huron and Sarnia, how the cable wasbroken, and people could neither get news nor send it to the opposite bank of the river. The spot was crowded with people, baffled and vexed. Edison came along with a brain rarely at fault and faced the thing. Suddenly, to the onlookers’ astonishment, he mounted a locomotive and sent a piercing whistle across the water, imitating by the toots of the engine the dots and dashes of the telegraph system.
In this way he shouted—
“Holloa, Sarnia! Sarnia, do you get what I say?”
At first there was silence on the part of the telegraph man across the water. The people on the bank were breathless with excitement. At last the reply came clear—thrilling. The man on the other side had understood, and the two cities could “talk” again to each other.
After this, people began to hear of Edison’s fame. But the mania for experiments had seized him. The cut-and-dried monotonous routine of work seemed flat and stale to him by comparison. It was as if an enchanted region of fairyland had been opened to the boy. To be allowed to revel in it he denied himself food and necessary sleep. When he was seventeen years old he invented a telegraph instrument that would transferwriting from one line to another without the help of the operator.
There were no want of openings now for him to choose from, but sometimes doors after they had been opened were rudely shut again through envy and evil feeling. In the great world of invention and discovery there are perhaps more “ups and downs” than in any other. Some of Edison’s fellow-workers were kind and generous—others were jealous and detracting. One manager did him an ill turn. He was unequal to completing a discovery he had begun. On the thing being shown him, Edison immediately “saw a light” and brought it to completion, but jealousy crept into the man’s small mind and he dismissed the boy on a false charge.
So at seventeen he was thrown again on the world. Money was still scarce. Books and instruments and calls from home swallowed up the most of it. The boy was chafing under ill-treatment and a sense of injustice. The want of sleep, perhaps of proper food, was telling on him, but he looked forward with a clear, undaunted eye. He wanted to reach a certain town where he believed work awaited him. It meant a walk of a hundred miles. He was weak, disheartened, ill-prepared for it, but he did it. Hearrived footsore and weary, with torn shoes and tattered clothes, and his worldly possessions tied in a handkerchief on his back.
In this shabby plight he presented himself at the telegraph office. He was eyed coldly enough at first, but by-and-by when tests were given he stood the tests. There was that in the eager eyes and underneath the shabby clothes that could not but make itself felt as a power. He began work. At first his fellow-clerks laughed at him. In time they were won over, and later he stood out as a workman of the first order.
He began to collect about him materials for printing—machinery without which he never felt quite happy. He did a clever thing one day in the office that brought him into notice. He took a press report at one sitting—a sitting that lasted from 3.30 p.m. till 4.30 a.m.! After that he carefully divided it into paragraphs so that each printer would have exactly three lines to print, and so that a column could be set up in two or three minutes!
It may be that about this time money was rather more plentiful, for Edison began to go to second-hand bookshops and so to gratify his deep-seated thirst for knowledge.
His kindness of heart was well known, andthere were many about only too ready to take advantage of it. There were telegraphists who roamed the country in time of war—“tramp operators” they were called, who took short engagements and generally ended their time with a “spree.” These found out Edison—a man who did not drink himself and a man who might be persuaded to lend them money—and these were his worst enemies.
One day he had bought at an auction fifty volumes of theNorth American Review. Half a dozen men were sponging off him in his rooms when he brought home the books and ranged them unsuspiciously round his walls. Directly he had gone out his guests helped themselves to his purchase, landed them at the nearest pawnbroker’s, and drank the money they brought.
But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into scrapes and disaster, as when he moved a bottle of sulphuric acid one day, strictly against rules, and the bottle spilt, the contents eating through the floor to the manager’s room below and there eating uphisfloor and carpet, the unlucky accident bringing Edison his dismissal.
And now, at the age of twenty-one, after many different situations and different experiences,Edison turned his steps to Boston. His openhandedness had left him short of money. As was often the case with him, he was sailing very close to the wind. His dress was poor and shabby, and four days’ and nights’ travelling had not improved his appearance. When he presented himself at the office where he was to be taken on, the other clerks ridiculed him as “a jay from the woolly west.”
They made up their minds to play a practical joke on him. They took the New York telegraph man into their confidence. It was arranged he should send a despatch which Edison was to receive. By this time Edison had so perfected himself in receiving messages that he could write from forty-six to fifty-four words a minute—quicker than any operator in the United States.
Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly—then quickened his pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and then to sharpen a pencil between.
By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get “a rise” out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Thenhe stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.
“Say, young man,” he said, in his dry humorous way, “change off and send with your other foot.”
But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and “the jay from the woolly west” was regarded ever after with enormous respect.
After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great, strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life held out to him swept over him.
“Adams,” he said to a friend, “I’ve got so much to do, and life is so short, that I’m going to hustle.”
And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we must allow he has indeed “hustled” to some purpose. As we briefly glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of the age. If we tried toenumerate his inventions the names alone would fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph wire.
But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery, what “ups and downs”—what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him! Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly, relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or rather more than £10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.
And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.
His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and hislove of fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely reluctant to help him.
“Now, you fellows!” he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in a room on the top flat, “I’ve locked the door, and you’ll have to stay here until this job is completed.”
During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food, while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours at a stretch.
And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to which he removed—some twenty-four miles from New York—began to look upon him as a wizard—a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful powers spread over the country.
“If people track me here,” he said (he had been besieged at Newark), “I shall simply have to take to the woods.”
Child after child was the offspring of theinventor’s brain. At one time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.
There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures—as many as forty-six a second—seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the lines of that toy of our childhood, “The Wheel of Life.” And there was the grand king of inventions—the Phonograph—that overtops all the rest.
We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great singer.
In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison himself were in the room talking to him!
Great men all over the world recorded theirastonishment and their praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it—to the French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak—to tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway “talk”; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!
What a strange thing that in this world of passing-away and change we should be able to preserve from destruction such treasures sheltered in a wax cylinder—some great man’s words of wisdom, or the silver tones of a sweet musician!
The more Edison’s brain accomplished the more did it seem able to do. As a man he showed himself untiring as when a boy. He went on discovering. He invented a way of telegraphing from a moving train. He invented an Electric Railroad, that drew delighted thousands at the Chicago Exhibition.
In 1879 his attention turned to lighting, and he bent all his energies on inventing an Incandescent lamp for electric light. He spent days working at a sort of white heat. He began on the 16th October, but mishaps and accidents seemed to threaten his invention.
“Let us,” he cried to his partner in a ferment of excitement—“let us make a lamp before we sleep, or die in the attempt.” On the morning of the 21st it was done!
It astonished the world. It opened up possibilities for miners and divers, and for men everywhere.
On the occasion of its exhibition people flocked from all parts of the United States. Special trains were run. The same furore over the marvel reigned at the Paris Exposition, and at every other exhibition. And through it all—a fame, a popularity enough to turn the head of most mortals—the man remained the same—modest, simple, unpretentious.
From Menlo Park he went to Orange. His laboratory there was fitted up with everything conceivable that an inventor red-hot and eager might want at a moment’s notice. And yet often the workrooms presented the strangest appearance of disorder. Workmen sometimesstretched on benches or floor after a heavy strain, the great master himself thrown down—a stick under his head, a coat wound round it for a pillow, and so snatching a short interval of sleep! He will not be interrupted by visitors. In this great world of his own he seems at times to live a sort of separate existence.
We are amazed, dazzled, astonished by the tremendous results one man in his lifetime has achieved. He has not been content to take some thing and modify and improve it and set it to a new purpose as men whom we call inventors have done in all ages. But he seems to have called upon the very forces of nature to do his bidding. It is almost as if he had harnessed the winds, the air, sound, electricity, for his purposes.
A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life. This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of what he has done. He lives sometimes in his northern home, in New Jersey, sometimes at Orange.
As a man he shows the same genial, kindly sympathy which, as a boy, never failed to win the hearts of his fellow-clerks, the same modestythat disarmed their jealousy. These things chain his workmen to him to-day with links of love. Now that men praise and laud him all over the world he shows the same good-natured indifference to name and fame he has shown all through. And he has lost nothing of the tireless energy that used to support him through hard work and long night-sittings as a boy—this man who, as someone has it, “has kept the path to the patent office red-hot with his footsteps—this wonder-worker of the modern world.”
Thereis perhaps no inventor’s name with which the British boy is more familiar than with that of James Watt. In every college of mechanics or engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.
It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before James Watt came into it—before, as it were, steam took its place and while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what steam now does with such apparent ease.
On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving, seaport town of Greenock—the birthplace of James Watt. But in 1736, more than 150 years ago, it was little more than a picturesque fishing-village, looking out on a peaceful, smiling bay, where a few modest fishing-craft were to be seen, and beyond to the hills of Argyllshire, beforesmoke and funnels blotted the fairness of the landscape.
In an unpretentious little house in a Greenock by-street James Watt first saw the light. His father was by trade a carpenter, an undertaker, a general “merchant,” for there was little competition in those simple days, and men often “professed” more than one trade. In the course of a few years little James was left the sole surviving child of five, and perhaps on that account was specially precious to his parents. Neither as the years went on did he grow into a sturdy, lusty country boy, but rather struggled up slowly, anxiously overlooked by a mother’s care, a prey to ill-health and headache, even in his baby years. So that most of his early education fell to his parents, his mother opening up to him the beginnings of reading, his father those of writing and arithmetic.
School, to which he went by-and-by, proved a failure. Shy and shrinking, he cared little for the play of other children. He was slow at games, perhaps dull in class, and the boys and girls laughed at him. Ill-health, too, made it hard for him to get on. He liked best to be at home. For amusement he would draw in chalk on the kitchen floor, and for playthings hewould choose his father’s instruments. One day a neighbour remarked on the child’s drawing.
“He should be at school,” she said, “and not trifling away his time.”
“Look first,” said the father, pointing to the floor, “before you blame him. He is solving a problem in geometry.”
The child was then six years old!
We are familiar with the story handed down to us through the centuries of how the dreamy-eyed boy was engaged in watching the steam hiss from the kettle-spout, the while holding a teaspoon below to count and catch the drops of water. Tradition likes to see in this the tiny seedlings of that mighty tree—the Condensing Steam Engine, but we fear that common sense in the shape of his robust-minded aunt was nearer the mark when she exclaimed—
“James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy as you are. For the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into.”
For change of air the boy was sometimes sent to Glasgow, the great commercial capitalbeing then no larger than a country market-town. Mightily astonished were his relatives, and, according to their own account, not a little scared, when of an evening his tongue was loosed, and he would launch into tales, wonderful things that held them entranced for hours, and sent them wakeful to bed. Was this time prophetic of those later years when he would hold men and women fascinated by the charm of his conversation?
And now young James was sent to the Greenock Grammar School, but he made no great mark there, except in mathematics, in which he easily headed the class. But Latin and Greek are not a boy’s only education. At home he was learning other things, from his parents’ talk, from the pages of books. And then there were the long golden hours when he put on a leather apron like his father, and installed himself in his father’s workshop with a small forge and a small bench all his own, and with his boyish fingers handled the tools so deftly and so cleverly that the workmen watching him exclaimed—
“Little Jamie has gotten a fortune at his fingers’ ends.”
But while he worked his mind was not idle.He read eagerly and precociously, as a delicate child sometimes does, devouring all such books as he could lay hands on. Solid enough reading they will seem to boys to-day.
The Cloud of Witnesses, Henry the Rymer’sLife of Wallace, Boston, Bunyan.
Added to this was his parents’ talk, that fell on his young ears and stamped itself on his young mind, and the picturesque surroundings of his home, for he loved nature’s beauties—the hills, the stars, the trees. The mountains and the plains about his home were made romantic by memories and associations of Covenanting times, told him by his father, and his boyish rambles were made beautiful by wild flowers, and again there were long delightful days of fishing to add to these.
But in the midst of all this struggling in the boy’s mind was that strong leaning to mechanical invention longing for an outlet. It peeped out here and there—for instance, in being unable to see an instrument without wishing to discover all its uses. And so well did he show himself able even then to fashion delicate things like compasses and quadrants—an instrument in shape like the fourth of a circle—that his father, after much thought, made up hismind that James should learn the trade of a mathematical instrument maker.
So in 1754 James came out from the shelter of home and launched himself on the great world, rather more of an ordeal to the shy, timid boy than it would have been to one more robust and enterprising. This was practically the last of Greenock. The peaceful fishing-village was never again to be his home. Naturally he turned his steps to Glasgow. We can picture the great event in the quiet household. The boy getting ready, his modest baggage, his clothes (his mother’s tender care), a leather apron, some carpenter’s tools, and a quadrant.
But he was destined to go yet farther afield. No mathematical instrument-maker was to be found in Glasgow. A professor to whom James was introduced advised him to go to London. “To London” is an easy enough journey to-day—then it was a mighty undertaking. No trains—no steamers. One could only go by slow coach or on horseback. James chose the latter. His trunk was sent by sea from Leith, and he along with a friend set off on his long journey. He left on the 7th day of June, and travelling by Coldstream and Newcastle, hearrived in the great metropolis after a ride of twelve days!
Most likely, although there might have been fear in the boyish heart, it also beat high with hope. Again and again has London made fair promises to boys such as he. But disappointment was to meet him on the very threshold. He found that apprentices who intended to serve a term of seven years were only accepted. This was very far from James’s thoughts. What he wanted was to learn the trade, start off home again, and set up in Glasgow for himself as soon as possible. After many failures, however, he at last found a man willing to take him on for a year on his promise to pay twenty guineas with the results of his work during that time.
And now began a time of stern work and self-denial. He took poor lodgings. He scrimped himself in everything but the bare necessaries of life. He spent on himself exactly eight shillings a week. He could not, he wrote, do with less. He scraped and pinched, remembering how ill his father could afford his keep.
When he could get extra work he took it home at nights to his poor rooms and sat up late over it, often ill and weary. In a month hecould make a quadrant better than any of the other apprentices. And so he struggled on against loneliness and headache and depression. It was rarely safe to venture out at night at that time in London, for sailor press-gangs were abroad. No able-bodied man was spared. In one night they took as many as 1,000 men. Sitting as he did close to the shop door when at work, he was often exposed to cold, and caught rheumatic pains which did not leave him for many a day. After a year of this he went home to Greenock, in his possession some tools and instruments, and in his hands and brain a mighty store of skill and knowledge.
Revived by his native air he set out again to seek his fortune—again to Glasgow. Again to be met with disappointment! He had not learned his trade in Glasgow, and therefore Glasgow would have none of him. Not so much as a workshop would it give him. It seemed almost as if there were no place open for the boy.
But his friend the professor came to the front again. If Watt could find no place in the city, then the University should shelter him. And so they gave him a workshop twenty feet square in the old College grounds, and a roomin which to sell his instruments, and he was at last fairly launched.
But business progressed but slowly. He lived, to be sure, in an atmosphere that must have delighted him. The professors and the students found him out. They came and came again. He seemed always to have something original to say. He was a man who read much and thought much—humble as a child about his own attainments—eager with the generosity of the great man to give others their due—yes, even more than their due. They found out that he knew all about engineering, and not a little about natural history, art, languages—and then the trick of observation was so strong with him that nothing escaped him. In time it came to be the general opinion that the young instrument-maker was one of the ablest men about the University. But gratifying as was the making of these friends, they did not bring Watt in any money. Somehow his instruments did not sell well. He was too far from the town. Indeed, his business was so poor he sometimes thought of giving it up. It may have been there was a want of practical “push” in him, a quality he never gained all through his life. Somewhat discouraged he took to making fiddles and flutesand guitars and even organs,—but he was yet very far from making that fortune he had come out to seek.
There are crises, turning-points in the lives of most people. They are seldom noisy. Sometimes, indeed, they come so quietly as to be hardly noticed. And now Watt was gradually nearing his.
About this time his thoughts began to turn to steam. It may be that had he been busy and successful as an organ-maker, his great invention might never have seen the light.
People had, of course, known for long that there was a power in water exposed to heat. Now in 1759, when Watt was twenty-three, his attention was drawn to the Steam Engine. He pondered it. After he had pondered it he set to work. His first model was a failure. But the idea had silently and firmly lodged in his brain. He went on with his everyday business, but ever in his leisure back sprang his mind to that subject that was to be his all-absorbing life-work. He read eagerly what other men had done. He got a model of another man’s engine and he studied it. He found what he thought defects. He groped steadily on—now seeing a light—again thrown into darkness—now followingwhat turned out to be a will-o’-the-wisp—again getting hold of an idea that seemed to him a gem.
There came to him gradually dawning thoughts. First, that of Latent Heat. Again, that a small quantity of water in the shape of steam heats a large quantity of cold water. Yet, again, that at 212° water is elastic, and that steam heats six times the weight of cold water to a temperature of 212°, the temperature of steam.
And so he went on step by step, till one day the thing burst on him, full-fledged, as it were—complete, dazzling, a perfect inspiration.
It was a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1765. He was taking a stroll in a quiet part of Glasgow, now a paved and busy thoroughfare called the Green. A Sunday calm brooded over what was on weekdays a scene of busy life—of washing and drying clothes. His thoughts, as usual, hovered about his beloved theme. It inspired him with a very passion as a child of his own. The key to his engine—long sought—suddenly flashed before his mind’s eye. The thing had been waiting incomplete for want of it. It came to him then—the idea of a Separate Condenser.
A great uprising of his mind followed. Inhis solitary walk the flashing thought filled the man with rapture.
Two drawbacks—waste of steam and waste of fuel—had been the ruin of former inventions.
“Ye need not fash yourself about that, man,” Watt said to a friend, answering some objection that he had made, “I have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam.”
And so, though it was but the beginning, though years of weary labour and disappointment and discouragement waited him before the end was reached, the Condensing Steam Engine, as we have it now, first sprang into being that spring afternoon on the Green in Glasgow.
And now the young inventor set himself with eager enthusiasm to make a model. There were no skilled workmen to be had, no self-acting tools, as in our day, and so the first model was only partly successful. But not a whit discouraged, he went on.
“My whole thoughts are bent on this machine,” he said. “I can think of nothing else.”
And now there remains but to tell in a few words—for it is the record of his manhood—the “ups and downs” just beginning, the disappointments, the failures, the hopes and fears thatwaited on this offspring of his brain. He was poor, and money was the first thing that was needed. Who would risk thousands on such a vague and shadowy thing?
Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread and butter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying, though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still ill-health to struggle against. “I am still plagued with headaches,” he wrote about this time, “and sometimes heartaches.”
But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his partial failure.
“It was,” he said, “a clumsy job.” Watt grew depressed.
In 1770 he wrote: “I enter on my thirty-fifthyear, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world.”
A friend, seeing him cast down and unhappy, advised him to give up inventing. As well might he have advised the sun not to shine or living man to cease from breathing. Meantime the years went on. Watt was often, as he said, “heart-sick.” Long years after, remembering this weary time, he said, “The public only look at my success.” He stinted himself in everything but bare necessaries, for as yet his engine had paid him nothing and cost enormously. But light again arose in the darkness when he got as a partner Boulton, of Birmingham, and from that day onwards matters mended. Six of the fourteen years’ patent were gone, but he succeeded in getting a renewal of it for twenty-four years by Act of Parliament, in spite of grumbling discontent of men who wanted to steal the fruit of his brain, and were thus prevented.
Now he set to work in earnest. His first engine was made to blow the bellows of ironworks. His second to pump water out of the mines in Cornwall. In 1776 this was set up, and worked perfectly. “There it was, ‘forking water’ as never engine before had been known ‘to fork.’”
“All the world are agape,” he said, “to see what it can do.”
And it did well. And now the “voice of the country was in its favour.” So the first step was taken. The others followed in quick succession. The partners worked together perfectly. Watt understood engines, but not men. He grew impatient, irritable, peevish if a workman were inefficient, and would have dismissed him on the spot. Boulton was wiser, and never failed to oil the wheels. Watt was despondent, easily cast down; Boulton was his “backbone.”
There came then into Watt’s mind the idea of an engine that would producerotarymotion. This he patented in 1781. All round and about, ready to pounce on it, were a perfect swarm of pirates.
“One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them,” he said. And again, “All mankind seem to be resolved to rob us.”
In 1782 the first rotary machine worked. After long waiting there was a brilliant result. It was made to drive a corn-mill. In our day it would be hard to say what Watt’s rotary machine is not made to do. It is made for corn-mills and for cotton-mills, for sugar-mills and iron-mills. It drives our steamers androlls our hammer-iron and coins our money and prints our books.
And now the great inventor had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. In 1790 he had an interview with the King, who asked about his engines.
But he had not landed at the topmost round of the ladder without much painful climbing and many weary steps. His life had been all through shadowed by ill-health, and an anxious, worrying mind that refused to be calm. He had a shrinking distaste to business, and a fearful habit of looking on the dark side of things. Often would he have sunk in depression and despair had it not been for his cheery partner. It was only in the late years of his life that he came to know anything like peace. His mind all along had been too active for his body.
But though as an old man he retired from public life and from business, he could not altogether retire from invention. He invented a letter-copying machine, and one for copying statuary. In his old age he lived very quietly in his comfortable house near Birmingham, furnishing what he called his Garret, a room where he might be alone and still invent, don again,as in boyhood, the leather apron, cook his own food, and ponder anew the details of those wonderful inventions he had given to the world.
Friends admitted there found “the great Mr. Watt” simple, modest, careless of display—much as he had been as a boy—his voice low and kindly, with still its broad, homely Scottish accent. The world would have liked to draw him from his seclusion, to caress him, to make much of him. It offered him a baronetcy, but his simple tastes lay not at all in the direction of such honours, and he refused it.
In 1819, when he was eighty-three, the end came. “I feel,” said the great man with a calm in strange contrast to the fearfulness and timidity that had accompanied him through life, “I feel that I am now come to my last illness.” He passed away quietly and without suffering. They buried him in Handsworth Church—near to his partner, Boulton—and erected an imposing statue in Westminster Abbey, and beneath it Lord Brougham wrote his famous epitaph.
To us his life has much of pathos. Men have called him “the greatest inventor in all ages,” “the most extraordinary man that the world has ever seen,” but the long years of struggle and labour and waiting, the weakness of bodyand the oft depression of spirit, are to us not a little sad, specially when we remember how patiently he endured, how uncomplainingly he suffered, that we might profit, that he might, as Lord Brougham has it, “increase the power of man.”