4. “As for draining fens and marshes,” &c.
“Thus whole cities may be kept clean, delightful, and wholesome.”
3. “Nothing can be more fit for serving cities and towns with water.”
“Or, if he have (I further say), Mines wherewith to enrich himself withal.”
6. “For draining of mines and coal pits, the use of the engine will sufficiently recommend itself in raising water so easy and cheap.”
“Houses to be served, or gardens to be beautified by plentiful fountains, with little charge, yet certain in ever so dry a Summer.”
2. “It may be of great use for palaces, for the nobilities, or gentlemen’s houses; for by a cistern on the top of a house * * * which water in its fall makes you what sorts of fountains you please.”
Savery says:—“And though my thoughts have been long imployed about water-works, I should never have pretended to any invention of that kind, had I not happily found out this new, but yet a much stronger and cheaper force or cause of motion than any before made use of. But finding this of rarefaction by fire, the consideration of the difficulties the miners and colliers labour under by the frequent disorders, cumbersomness, and in general of water-engines, incouraged me to invent engines to work by this new force, that tho’ I was obliged to incounter the oddest and almost insuperable difficulties, I spared neither time, pains, nor money till I had absolutely conquer’d them.”
Savery is reputed to have died in 1715, therefore he was very probably between 40 and 50 years of age in 1699; and he might have commenced his investigations into the existence of the Marquis’s inventions, models, books, papers, drawings, and traditional statements at 25 or 30 years of age, still leaving him from 15 to 20 years to complete his search for information. If he died at 60 years of age, he would be 12 years old when the Marquis died. At all events he had ample leisure, and the period was promising for such an inquiry.
In his time neither writers nor inventors were very scrupulous in their adoption of the labours of others; the wholesale literary plunder then practised by compilers, would not be permitted in modern times, nor would it be attempted by any author of moderate reputation. Invention, on the contrary, has always been a doubtful sort of preserve, the rights of which have been contested with fearless impunity by every poacher down to the present period. In the 16th and 17th centuries particularly, no rights were so ill defined as those of the inventor, even in the face of patents, and Acts of Parliament. But the rights of a deceased inventor were still less sacred in public opinion, and there never has been, at any time, an organized body interested in detecting and exposing unjust assumptions of being a true and first inventor.