Next come specifications headed respectively ‘A most conceited tinder-box,’ ‘An artificial bird,’ and ‘An hour water-ball;’ the last of which speaks of a ball of any metal, ‘which, thrown into a pool or pail of water, shall presently rise from the bottom, and constantly shew, by the superficies of the water, the hour of the day or night, never rising more out of the water than just to the minute it sheweth of each quarter of the hour; and, if by force kept under water, yet the time is not yet lost, but recovered as soon as it is permitted to rise to the superficies of the water.’ Number forty-eight is the description of an improved staircase, and number forty-nine of ‘A portable engine, in way of a tobacco tongs, whereby a man may get over a wall, or get up again being come down, finding the coast proving unsecure unto him.’ Then there is ‘A pocket ladder,’ ‘A rule of gradation’ useful for cipher-writing, ‘A mystical jangling of bells’ for the conveyance of private intelligence, and three notices relating to ‘water-scrues.’ Number fifty-six is entitled ‘An advantageous change of centers;’ and respecting it the Marquis says: ‘A most incredible thing if not seen, but tried before the late king of blessed memory, in the Tower by my directions, two extraordinary ambassadors accompanying His Majesty, and the Dukes of Richmond and Hamilton, with most of the court, attending him. The wheel was fourteen feet over, and forty weights of fifty pounds apiece. Sir William Balfore, then lieutenant of the Tower, can justify it with several others. They all saw that no sooner these great weights passed the diameter line of the lower side but they hung a foot further from the center, nor no sooner passed the diameter line of the upper side but they hung a foot nearer. Be pleased to judge the consequence.’ In this modest request the Marquis appears to shroud a hint that he has discovered the secret of perpetual motion, which, however, has like all other perpetual-motion schemes, failed in practice.
Specification number fifty-eight is certainly in some measure responsible for the modern revolver, telling as it does of a method ‘whereby a pistol may be made to discharge a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as once new priming requisite, or to change it out of one hand into the other, or stop one’s horse.’ And the next notices are for the application of similar systems to carabines, muskets, arquebusses, and crocks or ship-muskets, and of a different method for sakers. In these ideas we may recognise indeed the first principles not only of the revolver, but also of the Winchester rifle and of the mitrailleuse in its various forms. Warfare has recently been revolutionised by inventions of this kind; and the conditions of naval warfare especially are now likely to be altered by the arrangement which practically places the whole broadside of a vessel under the control of one man. For this latter improvement we may find the idea in the Marquis’s plan by which ‘one man in the cabbin may govern the whole side of ship-muskets, to the number, if need require, of two or three thousand shots.’ After devoting several notices to the various aspects of this subject, the noble inventor complacently remarks: ‘When first I gave my thoughts to make guns shoot often, I thought there had been but one only exquisite way inventible, yet by several trials and much charge I have perfectly tried all these.’ The necessary experiments appear to have left him with an old cannon or two upon his hands, as the next and most important specification shews that the scientific nobleman nearly succeeded in blowing himself up, and so concluding his investigations. He calls it ‘A fire water-work;’ and probably that remarkable name expresses, as well as any other might, the Marquis’s ‘admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire, not by drawing or sucking it upwards, for that must be as the philosopher calleth it, intra sphæram activitatis, which is but at such a distance. But,’ he emphatically continues, ‘this way hath no bounder, if the vessels be strong enough.’
Then he goes on to give us what seems to be the earliest record of the employment of steam-power in England. ‘I have taken,’ he says, ‘a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it three-quarters full of water, stopping and scruing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole; and making a constant fire under it, within twenty-four hours it burst and made a great crack. So that having a way to make my vessels, so that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other, I have seen the water run like a constant fountain-stream forty feet high; one vessel of water, rarefied by fire, driveth up forty of cold water. And a man that tends the work is but to turn two cocks; that, one vessel of water being consumed, another begins to force and re-fill with cold water, and so successively, the fire being tended and kept constant, which the self-same person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said cocks.’ Following this are four notices relating to improvements for locks to chests and safes, one relating to a drawbridge, and one treating of what the Marquis calls ‘A conceited door’—namely one which will open either inwards or outwards.
Two paragraphs further on comes the short specification, ‘How to make a man to fly; which I have tried with a little boy of ten years old in a barn, from one end to the other, on a hay-mow.’ The last clause is certainly acceptable; for it justifies a hope that the poor little fellow did not break his neck in the pursuit of science. The three succeeding notices are entitled respectively ‘A continually going watch,’ ‘A total locking of cabinet-boxes,’ and ‘Light pistol barrels;’ and the headings serve to demonstrate at least the versatility of the author. Next come two methods for carrying secret correspondence without observation, an idea for the economisation of labour in rasping hartshorn, and the specification of a calculating machine. These are followed by notices of two barbarous engines, respectively called ‘An untoothsome pear’ and ‘An imprisoning chair,’ of a candle-moulding machine, and of a talkative artificial head, the modus operandi of which we take the liberty of smiling at. The Marquis states that his invention would answer in French, Latin, Welsh, Irish, or English, any question put to it, and then shut its mouth until the next question was asked. It cannot be doubted that if the artificial head were so life-like as to be able to answer questions, it would also do a little talking on its own account. The noble Lord seems at this period to have been suffering from an attack of moral depravity; for the incredible notice of the brazen head is followed by two specifications of methods for cheating at cards and dice respectively; and a little lower down, we come upon ‘a little engine portable in one’s pocket, which placed to any door, without any noise but one crack, openeth any door or gate.’ Number ninety-three is the specification of an engine for raising sunken ships; and at the end of the long catalogue are some mysterious notices of a machine which the Marquis modestly calls ‘a semi-omnipotent engine,’ and of two other machines which conjointly seem to hint at some knowledge of hydraulic power of which the discoverer was particularly proud. ‘I deem this invention,’ he says, ‘to crown my labours, to reward my expenses, and make my thoughts acquiesce in way of further inventions;’ and he concludes by hinting at leaving to posterity a book wherein his inventions, ‘with the shape and form of all things belonging to them, should be printed by brass plates.’
And so we will take leave of the inventive nobleman, who, though apparently not always too veracious, was decidedly a genius. It is probably owing to the fact of his having lived in an inappreciative age that he is to this day usually placed on a level with the fabulous Academicians of Laputa, rather than among such men as Franklin, Arkwright, and Watt; but on the other hand, it is not unlikely that had his Century of Inventions been judiciously reduced to a score, or even a dozen, the Marquis of Worcester’s reputation among his contemporaries might have stood proportionately higher.
AN INSURANCE TALE.
I am a solicitor of considerable standing and practice in a large provincial town in Ireland, the name of which it is here unnecessary to mention. On the evening of the 31st of December some twenty-five years ago, I was in the aforesaid town sitting in my study. The day had been one of unusual inclemency; rain had alternated with sleet and snow; and the cold and cutting wind had blown with a rude strength which made its chilly touch at once incisive. As the shades of night had begun to fall, the storm, instead of abating, had risen in turbulence and height; and at the hour of which I am about to speak, the spasmodic energy of the elements seemed like the last convulsions of the dying year. I had been reading some legal documents during the evening; but perceiving from a glance at my watch that it was fast approaching twelve o’clock, I laid my papers aside and drew my chair nearer to the fire. The hail beat violently against the windows, the wind sighed amongst the trees outside, and the keyhole of my study-door expressed its feelings in tones if possible more melancholy.
The feeling of which I was conscious, as I sat thus gazing into the blazing comfort before me, was one of selfish satisfaction that I was not at the mercy of the tempest outside. Forms of various human sufferers presented themselves to my mental vision, and seemed to take the shape of the red coals in the fire; while the wind and my sorrowing keyhole seemed vocal with the burden of their woe. I was soon plunged in a deep moralising on the misery which we see around us—on that strange invisible link between sorrow and sin; and the last moments of the passing year were just landing me in one of those good resolutions which we are told form such excellent paving-stones, when I was aroused from my moral reverie by a knock at my study-door. Pushing my chair back a little distance from the fire, and assuming a more professional air, I articulated the well-known ‘Come in;’ and this mandate was duly obeyed by my servant, who informed me that a gentleman outside was particularly anxious to see me.
A moment afterwards, a figure which in all but size resembled our old friend the ‘drowned rat,’ entered my study, and making a courteous bow, said: ‘I fear this is a very unreasonable hour to intrude upon you, sir.’ My visitor was very tall, had a pale thoughtful face, and when he unbuttoned the coat which covered him from head to foot, I perceived that he was a clergyman.