The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

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 boyhood and 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 his whole mind upon 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 detail too 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 he won 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 where they 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.