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 sometimes stretched 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 modesty that 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.”
JAMES WATT.
There is 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.