James Brindley was born in the year 1716, the third of the reign of George the First, in a cottage in the parish of Wormhill, midway between the remote hamlets of the High Peak of Derby. There his father, more devoted to shooting, hunting, and bull-running, than to his work as a cottier, cultivated the little croft he rented, got into bad company and poverty, and left his children neglected and untaught. The idle man had an industrious wife, who taught the children, of whom James was the eldest, what little she knew; but they must all help to earn as soon as they were able, and James Brindley earned wages at any ordinary laborer's work that he could get until he was seventeen years old. [{239}] He was a lad clever with his knife, who made little models of mills, and set them to work in mill-streams of his own contrivance. The machinery of a neighboring grist-mill was his especial delight, and had given the first impulse to his modellings. He and his mother agreed that he should bind himself, whenever he could, to a millwright; and at the age of seventeen he did, after a few weeks' trial, become apprentice for seven years to Abraham Bennett, wheelwright and millwright, at the village of Sutton, near Macclesfield, which was the market-town of Brindley's district.
The millwrights were then the only engineers; they worked by turns at the foot-lathe, the carpenter's bench, and the anvil; and, in country places where there was little support for division of labor, they had to find skill or invention to meet any demand on mechanical skill. Bennett was not a sober man, his journeymen were a rough set, and much of the young apprentice's time was at first occupied in running for beer. He was taught little, and had to find out everything for himself, which he did but slowly; so that, during some time, he passed with his master for a stupid bungler, only fit for the farm-work from which he had been taken. But, after two years of this sort of pupilage, a fire having injured some machinery in a small silk-mill at Macclesfield, Brindley was sent to bring away the damaged pieces; and, by his suggestions on that occasion, he showed to Mr. Milner, the mill superintendent, an intelligence that caused his master to be applied to for Brindley's aid in a certain part of the repairs. He was unwillingly sent, worked under the encouragement of the friendly superintendent with remarkable ability, and was surprised that his master and the other workmen seemed to be dissatisfied with his success. When they chaffed him, at the supper celebrating the completion of the work, his friend Milner offered to wager a gallon of the best ale that, before the lad's apprenticeship was out, he would be a cleverer workman than any of them there present, master or man. This was a joke against Brindley among his fellow-workmen; but in another year they found "the young man Brindley" specially asked for when the neighboring millers needed repairs of machinery, and sometimes he was chosen in preference to the master himself. Bennett asked "the young man Briudley" where he had learnt his skill in mill-work, but he could tell no more than that it "came natural like." He even suggested and carried out improvements, especially in the application of the water-power, and worked so substantially well, that his master said to him one day, "Jem, if thou goes on i' this foolish way o' workin', there will be very little trade left to be done when thou comes oot o' thy time: thou knaws firmness o' wark's h' ruin o' trade."
But presently Jem's "firmness o' wark" was the saving of his master. Bennett got a contract to set up a paper-mill on the river Dane, upon the model of a mill near Manchester. Bennett went to examine the Manchester mill, brought back a confused and beery notion of it, and, proceeding with the job, got into the most hopeless bewilderment. An old hand, who had looked in on the work, reported, over his drink at the nearest public-house, that the job was a farce, and that Abraham Bennett was only throwing away his employer's money. Next Saturday, after his work, young Jem Brindley disappeared. He was just of age, and it was supposed he had taken it into his head to leave his master and begin life on his own account. But on Monday morning, there he was at his work, with his coat off, and the whole duty to be done clear in his head. He had taken on Saturday night a twenty-five mile walk to the pattern mill, near Manchester. On Sunday morning he had asked leave of its proprietor to go in and examine it. He had spent [{240}] some hours on Sunday in the study of its machinery, and then had walked the twenty-five miles back, to resume his work and save his master from a failure that would have been disastrous to his credit. The conduct of the work was left to him; he undid what was amiss, and proceeded with the rest so accurately, that the contract was completed within the appointed time, to the complete satisfaction of all persons concerned. After that piece of good service, Bennett left to James Brindley the chief care over his business. When Bennett died, Brindley carried on to completion all work then in hand, and wound up the accounts for the benefit of his old master's family. That done, he set up in business on his own account at the town of Leek, in Staffordshire; he was then twenty-six years old, having served seven years as an apprentice and two years as journeyman.
Leek was then but a small market-town, with a few grist-mills, and Brindley had no capital; but he made himself known beyond Leek as a reliable man, whose work was good and durable, who had invention at the service of his employers, and who always finished a job within the stipulated time. He did not confine himself to mill-work, but was ready to undertake all sorts of machinery connected with the draining of mines, the pumping of water, the smelting of iron and copper, for which a demand was then rising, and became honorably known to his neighbors as "the Schemer." At first he had no journeyman or apprentice, and he cut the tree for his own timber. While working as an apprentice, he had taught himself to write in a clumsy, half-illegible way—he never learnt to spell—and when he had been thirteen years in business, he would still charge an employer his day's work at two shillings for cutting a big tree, for a mill-shaft or for other use. When he was called to exercise his skill at a distance upon some machinery, he added a charge of sixpence a day for extra expenses.
When the brothers John and Thomas Wedgwood, potters in a small way at the outset of their famous career, desired to increase the supply of flint-powder, they called "the Schemer" to their aid, and the success of the flint-mill Brindley then erected brought him business in the potteries from that time forward.
About this time, also, a Manchester man was being married to a young lady of mark in the potteries, and, during the wedding festivities, conversation once turned on the cleverness of the young millwright of Leek. The Manchester man wondered whether he was clever enough to get the water out of some hopelessly drowned coal mines of his, and thought he should like to see him. Brindley was sent for, told the case and its hitherto insuperable difficulties, went into a brown study, then suddenly brightened up, and told in what way he thought that, without great expense, the difficulty might be conquered. The gist of his plan was to use the fall of the river Irwell, that formed one boundary of the estate, and pump the water from the pits by means of the greater power of the water in the river. His suggestion was thought good, and, being set to work upon this job, he drove a tunnel through six hundred yards of solid rock, and by the tunnel brought the river down upon the breast of an immense water-wheel, fixed in a chamber thirty feet below the surface of the ground; the water, when it had turned the wheel, was carried on into the lower level of the Irwell. That wheel, with its pumps, working night and day, soon cleared the drowned outworkings of the mine; and for the invention and direction of this valuable engineering work, he seems only to have charged his workman's wages of two shillings a day.
An engineer from London had been brought down to superintend the building of a new silk-mill at [{241}] Congleton, and Brindley was employed under him to make the water-wheel and do the common work of his trade. The engineer from London got his work into a mess, and at last was obliged to confess his inability to carry out his plan. "The Schemer" Brindley was applied to by the perplexed proprietor. Could he put the confusion straight? James Brindley asked to see the plans; but the great engineer refused to show them to a common millwright. "Well, then," said Brindley to the proprietor of the mill, "tell me exactly what you want the machinery to do, and I will try to contrive what will do it. But you must leave me free to work in my own way." He was told the results desired, and not only achieved them, but achieved much more, adding new contrivances, which afterward proved of the greatest value.
After this achievement, Brindley was employed by the now prospering potters to build flint-mills of more power upon a new plan of his own. One of the largest was that built for Mr. Baddely, of which work there is record in such trade entries of his as "March 15, 1757. With Mr. Baddely to Matherso about a now" (new) "flint-mill upon a windey day 1 day 3s. 6d. March 19 draing a plann 1 day 2s. 6d. March 23 draing a plann and to sat out the wheelrace 1 day 4s."
At this time Brindley is also exercising his wit on an attempt at an improved steam-engine; but though his ideas are good, it is hard to bring them into continuously good working order, and after the close of entries about it in his memorandum-book, when it seems to have broken down for a second time, he underlines the item "to Run about a Drinking Is. 6d." But he confined his despair to the loss of a day and the expenditure of eighteen pence. Not long afterward he had developed a patent of his own, and erected, in 1763, for the Walker Colliery at Newcastle, a steam-engine wholly of iron, which was pronounced the most "complete and noble piece of iron-work" that had up to that time been produced. But the perfecting of the steam-engine was then safe in the hands of Watt, and Brindley had already turned into his own path as the author of our English canal system.
The young Duke of Bridgewater, vexed in love by the frailty of fair woman, had abjured interest in their sex, had gone down to his estate of Worsley, on the borders of Chat Moss, and, to give himself something more wholesome to think about than the sisters Gunning and their fortunes, conferred with John Gilbert, his land steward, as to the possibility of cutting a canal by which the coals found upon his Worsley estate might be readily taken to market at Manchester. Manchester then was a rising town, of which the manufacturers were yet unaided by the steam-engine, and there was no coal smoke but that which arose from household fires. The roads out of Manchester were so bad as to be actually closed in winter, and in summer the coal, sold at the pit mouth by the horse-load, was conveyed on horses' backs at an addition to its cost of nine or ten shillings a ton.