The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

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 turn his 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 would one 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.