That the management of the Institution at this time was by no means harmonious is seen by a letter of Mr. Webster to his mother, and by his recollections, written some time afterwards, of the failure of the school for mechanics, of which he was to have been master.
January 8, 1802.
I wish I could give you a more favourable account of my situation at the Institution. I believe I told you it did not by any means answer my expectations; the men who conduct it at present cannot always be its managers, and its very system may and probably will be very much altered at some future period.... Except some change takes place in the domestic arrangements of the Institution, I do not think that I shall sleep there again; I am sorry to say that whatever good qualities the managers possess—and they are by no means deficient in them—they have shown very little attention to the comforts of those employed in it.
In his recollections he says:
But this project for improving mechanics, well intended as it was, which promised to be so useful, and which had already gained for the Institution ‘golden opinions,’ was doomed to be crushed by the timidity (for I shall forbear to speak more harshly) of a few. I was asked rudely (by an individual whom I shall not now name) what I meant by instructing the lower classes in science. I was told likewise that it was resolved upon that the plan must be dropped as quietly as possible. It was thought to have a dangerous political tendency, and I was told that if I persisted I would become a marked man! It was in vain to argue—the time was unfavourable—and I found the necessity of yielding. No notice was ever given publicly that the idea of instructing the mechanic was abandoned, and I have no doubt but that in many parts of the kingdom the Institution got the credit of great liberality long after the mechanics’ school had become extinct.
I have no wish to detail now a thousand circumstances curious enough in a historical point of view connected with my residence in the house of the Royal Institution; suffice it to say that, notwithstanding I became much known and had many friends, yet my chief views being evidently thwarted, and there being no prospect of my situation becoming valuable in a pecuniary way, I thought it was high time to think of my own interest, and I determined on becoming a landscape painter, a profession which then offered considerable prospects in a very agreeable and independent occupation. Count Rumford left England about the same time, certainly neither rewarded nor thanked in proportion to the good he had done.
The management of the Institution now fell into other hands, and, from what appeared to me very erroneous reasoning, my mechanics’ stone staircase was pulled down at a considerable expense. All the culinary and other contrivances which the Count and I had taken so much trouble to fit up in the kitchen as an exhibition—and many of them were really good things—were put away. The workmen employed in the house to make models were discharged, there being no one to direct them. The lecture room had been warmed by steam and satisfactorily. When the boiler was worn out (as things will in time) the whole steam apparatus was taken away by the ironmonger then employed, and something of his own was put up, which for years was an annoyance to Mr. Faraday, who did not even know that steam had ever been employed till I informed him. In short, it might seem as if the then managers had resolved that the Institution should not be for the application of science to the common purposes of life.
On April 26 Mr. Webster was allowed leave of absence for the benefit of his health until December 1, and he was given 50l. on account of his salary. This was his retirement from the Institution. In 1826 he was appointed house secretary of the Geological Society, and Curator of the Museum. He died in 1844, Professor of Geology in the (then) London University.
At the meeting of managers and visitors on the same day Count Rumford made a report on the present state of the Institution. This was the last meeting of the managers that he ever attended.
He said: ‘I shall briefly state what has been accomplished since my last report on May 25, 1801, and what still remains to be done to complete this great and interesting establishment in all its details.’
He spoke of the new lecture room as holding nine hundred persons; ‘a whisper may be distinctly heard from one extremity to the other, and no echo is ever perceived in it on any occasion.’
This theatre is warmed in cold weather by steam, which, coming in covered and concealed tubes from the lower part of the house, circulates in a large semicircular copper tube eight inches in diameter and above sixty feet long, which is concealed under the rising seats of the pit.
The repository already contains a considerable number of specimens of new and useful mechanical contrivances. The chemical laboratory, in which there is provision made for placing and using no less than sixteen furnaces of different kinds at the same time, is quite finished.
All the workshops of the Institution are now quite finished, and they have been furnished with the most complete sets of tools that could be procured, and several excellent workmen are now employed in them; and a great variety of useful articles designed as models of imitation have already been manufactured in the house, and are ready to be delivered to any of the proprietors or subscribers to the Institution who may be disposed to purchase them.
The great kitchen at the house of the Institution has been furnished, and now contains a variety of new and useful utensils and implements of cookery, many of which are in daily use, and others (which are not) are so exposed to view as to be easily understood and their merit appreciated.
He then gives an account of each room. The present lower library was divided into two rooms, the first for foreign newspapers, the other for books. Over these rooms was the second lecture room, which at some future period was to become the library.