Eyes and Hands Inform the Brain.
Inventors and artists have in common a keen perception of form, an ability to confer form with skill and accuracy. Often the same man is at once inventor and artist. Of this class Leonardo da Vinci is the most illustrious example. Alexander Nasmyth, of Edinburgh, who invented the bow-string bridge, was an eminent painter of portraits and landscapes. His son, James Nasmyth, who devised the steam hammer and the steam pile-driver, tells us in his autobiography:—
“My father taught me to sketch with exactness every object, whether natural or artificial, so as to enable the hand accurately to reproduce what the eye had seen. In order to acquire this almost invaluable art, he was careful to educate my eye, so that I might perceive the relative proportions of objects placed before me. He would throw down at random a number of bricks, or pieces of wood representing them, and set me to copy their forms, proportions, lights and shadows. I have often heard him say that any one who could make a correct drawing in regard to outline, and also indicate by a few effective touches the variation of lights and shadows of such a group of model objects, might not despair of making a good and correct sketch of York Minster. My father was an enthusiast in praise of this graphic language, and I have followed his example. In fact it formed a principal part of my own education. It gave me the power of recording observations with a few graphic strokes of the pencil, and far surpassing in expression any number of mere words. This graphic eloquence is one of the highest gifts in conveying clear and correct ideas as to the forms of objects—whether they be those of a simple and familiar kind, or of some form of mechanical construction, or of the details of a fine building, or the characteristic features of a wide-stretching landscape. This accomplishment of accurate drawing, which I achieved for the most part in my father’s workroom, served me many a good turn in future years with reference to the engineering work which became the business of my life.”
His mastery of the pencil had undoubtedly a great deal to do in cultivating his powers of inventive imagination. He says:—“It is one of the most delightful results of the possession of the constructive faculty, that one can build up in the mind mechanical structures and set them to work in imagination, and observe beforehand the various details performing their respective functions, as if they were in absolute form and action. Unless this happy faculty exists in the brain of the mechanical engineer, he will have a hard and disappointing life before him. It is the early cultivation of the imagination which gives the right flexibility to the thinking faculty.”