[2] “But if we contrast this stationary aspect of moral truths with the progressive aspect of intellectual truths, the difference is, indeed, startling.... These are to every educated man recognized and notorious facts, and the inference to be drawn from them is immediately obvious. Since civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies, and since that product is constantly changing, it evidently cannot be regulated by the stationary agent; because when surrounding circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can only produce a stationary effect. The only other agent is the intellectual one, and that this is the real mover may be proved in two distinct ways: first, because being, as we have already seen, either moral or intellectual, and being, as we have also seen, not moral, it must be intellectual; and secondly, because the intellectual principle has an activity and a capacity for adaptation which, as I undertake to show, is quite sufficient to account for the extraordinary progress that, during several centuries, Europe has continued to make.”—Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” Vol. I., p. 130. D. Appleton & Co., 1864.
Nothing stimulates and quickens the intellect more than the use of mechanical tools. The boy who begins to construct things is compelled at once to begin to think, deliberate, reason, and conclude. As he proceeds he is brought in contact with powerful natural forces. If he would control, direct, and apply these forces he must first master the laws by which they are governed; he must investigate the causes of the phenomena of matter, and it will be strange if from this he is not also led to a study of the phenomena of mind. At the very threshold of practical mechanics a thirst for wisdom is engendered, and the student is irresistibly impelled to investigate the mysteries of philosophy. Thus the training of the eye and the hand reacts upon the brain, stimulating it to excursions into the realm of scientific discovery in search of facts to be applied in practical forms at the bench and the anvil.
The history of invention and discovery in England affords a striking confirmation of the truth of the proposition that mechanical investigation, with tools in hand, stimulates the intellectual faculties to the highest point of activity and excellence. The germs of nearly all the great inventions in mechanics, the benefit of which the world is now enjoying in such ample measure, are directly traceable to the workshops of Great Britain during the period 1740-1840.
England had then no popular system of education, and the apprentices in her shops were poor, obscure, and, at the start, illiterate. But to those poor apprentices the honor of the great inventions and discoveries of that age is almost wholly due. And it is a notable fact that in the struggle to invent tools and machines, to master the art of mechanism, to steal from Nature her secret forces, and harness and use them for the benefit of man, the toiling workers not infrequently became highly educated, intellectual giants, familiar not alone with special studies, but masters of many branches of learning.
In 1770 the Russian Government, aware of the inferiority of English iron, and deeming Russian iron essential to England, directed the price of iron for export to be raised three hundred per cent. This arbitrary act stimulated invention. Henry Cort, the son of a brick-maker, entered upon a series of experiments, with a view to the improvement of English iron. They occupied several years, and were of a very expensive character—so expensive as eventually to bankrupt the man who made them. They were, however, so successful as to constitute a splendid epoch in the history of metallurgy. In 1786 Lord Sheffield declared that Cort’s improvements in iron, and the steam-engine of Watt, were of more value to Great Britain than the thirteen colonies of America; and in 1862 it was estimated that those improvements had added three thousand million dollars to the wealth of England alone, to say nothing of the rest of the world of iron manufacture throughout which they had been applied. But the only estate secured by this great man as a reward of his genius and a life of toil, as his biographer pathetically remarks, was “the little domain of six feet by two in which he lies buried in Hampstead churchyard.”
In 1715 Sheffield contained two thousand inhabitants, of whom one-third were beggars. Its manufactures consisted of jews-harps, tobacco-boxes, and knives. Sheffield is now the chief seat of the steel manufacture of the world. The initial step in this great transformation scene was taken by Benjamin Huntsman. He was born in 1704, and bred to a mechanical calling. The early years of his life were spent in the occupation of clock making and repairing. He was shrewd, observant, and practical, and he gradually extended the scope of his profession to repairing, and finally to making hand-tools. In this branch of his trade he detected defects in the German steel in common use. He removed from Doncaster to Sheffield, and there in the privacy of his cottage studied metallurgy, and for years labored in secret over the furnace and the crucible. His numerous failures were subsequently found chronicled in masses of metal, in various stages of imperfection, buried in the earth. But when he emerged from his long seclusion he offered to his fellow-mechanics a piece of cast-steel so hard that they declined to work it. He sent the product of his works to France, and the French knives and razors made from it and imported into England drove the Sheffield cutlery from the market. Then the Sheffield cutlers sought to have the export of steel prohibited. Failing in that they stole Huntsman’s secret. This was possible, since the process had not been patented. The story of the theft is told in a little work entitled “The Useful Metals and their Alloys.” It is in substance that one Walker, an iron-founder, “disguised himself as a tramp, and feigning great distress and abject poverty, appeared shivering at the door of Huntsman’s foundery late one night when the workmen were about to begin their labors at steel-casting, and asked for permission to warm himself by the furnace-fire.” He was permitted to enter, and when he left he carried away the secret of the inventor of cast-steel.
Huntsman was a member of the Society of Friends, and it was doubtless on that account that he declined a membership of the Royal Society tendered to him in honor of his great discovery or invention of cast-steel.
David Mushet’s discovery of the extraordinary value of black-band iron-stone in 1801 made Scotland a first-class iron-producing country; and Neilson’s invention of the hot-blast in 1828 revolutionized the processes of iron manufacture by vastly cheapening them. Both these men sprang from the labor class, and both were self-educated. Through almost superhuman efforts they rose from poverty and obscurity to fame. Mushet’s “Papers on Iron and Steel,” in the language of Smiles, “are among the most valuable original contributions to the literature of iron manufacture that have yet been given to the world;” and Neilson was made a member of the Royal Society in recognition of his distinguished ability and the great services he rendered in the cause of the useful arts.
George Stephenson rose from the coal-mine to the summit of renown as a theoretical and practical mechanic. While employed in various collieries as “fireman” and “plugman,” he acquired a thorough knowledge of the engines then in use, taking them apart, repairing, and putting them together again. At eighteen years of age he could not read. In the course of two years attendance at night-schools he learned to read, write, and cipher.[3] Continuing to work in collieries, he employed his leisure hours in studying mechanics and engineering, and in mending clocks and shoes. When thirty-one years of age he was appointed “enginewright” at Killingworth Colliery, at a salary of £100 a year. From this point of time dates his career as an inventor. His first locomotive was completed in 1814, and the “Rocket” made its trial trip in 1829. During the intervening fifteen years Stephenson was largely engaged in the engineering department of railway enterprises as well as in the prosecution of experiments for the perfecting of locomotive engines. The most eminent engineers of the time doubted the practicability of the locomotive, and continued to recommend stationary engines, while Stephenson was leading up to the “Rocket.” The success of the “Rocket” made its inventor the most famous mechanic in the world. For the next fifteen years he was the leading spirit in all the great railway enterprises of England, besides being called repeatedly to Belgium and Spain as consulting engineer. He was offered a fellowship of the Royal Society, also one in the Civil Engineers’ Society, also knighthood by Sir Robert Peel. All these empty honors he declined. “I have to state,” he said, in reply to a request for his “ornamental initials,” “that I have no flourishes to my name, either before or after, and I think it will be as well if you merely say George Stephenson.” He may justly be styled the founder of the existing railway system of the world, which undoubtedly exerts more influence upon civilization than any other one cause or set of allied causes; and to have risen from the humblest station in a colliery to the dignity of founding such a system is sufficient evidence of a gigantic intellectual growth.
[3] “In conclusion, we are of opinion that special instruction which can be applied to the material would be at once more fruitful in good results and more attractive if the pupil could go from the class-room to the workshop (laboratory) to practically demonstrate the theories to which he has just been listening. In support of this opinion we might add the observations made in our own evening-schools, where the most noteworthy and rapid progress is made in those cases where the pupil has occasion to put into actual practice on the material itself the instruction which he has received in the drawing-class.”—“Report of Committee of Council of Arts and Manufactures of the Province of Quebec, created to Inquire into the Question of Practical Schools.”