When the duke discussed with Gilbert old abandoned and new possible schemes of water conveyance for his Worsley coal, Gilbert advised the calling in of the ingenious James Brindley of Leek, "the Schemer." When the duke came into contact with Brindley, he at once put trust in him, and gave him the direction of the proposed work; whereupon he was requested to base his advice upon what he enters in his memorandum-book of jobs done, as an "ochilor," (ocular) "servey or a ricconitering."
Brindley examined the ground, and formed his own plan. He was against carrying the canal down into Irwell by a flight of locks, and so up again on the other side to the proposed level, but counselled carrying the canal by solid embankments and a stone aqueduct right over the river upon one [{242}] level throughout. The duke accepted his opinion, and had plans prepared for a new application to parliament, Brindley often staying with him at work and in consultation for weeks together, while still travelling to and fro in full employment upon mills, water-wheels, cranes, fire-engines, and other mechanical work. Small as his pay was, he lived frugally. He had by this time even saved a little money, and gained credit enough to be able, by borrowing from a friend at Leek, to pay between five and six hundred pounds for a fourth share of an estate at Turnhurst, in Staffordshire, supposed by him to be full of minerals.
The Duke of Bridgewater obtained his act in the year 1760, but the bold and original part of Brindley's scheme, which many ridiculed as madness, caused the duke much anxiety. In England there had never been so great an aqueduct, but the scheme was not only for the carrying of water in a water-tight trunk of earth over an embankment, but also for the carrying of ships on a bridge of water over water. Brindley had no misgivings. To allay the duke's fears, he suggested calling in and questioning another engineer, who surprised the man of genius by ending an adverse report thus: "I have often heard of castles an the air; but never before saw where any of them were to be erected."
The duke, however, with all his hesitation, had most faith in the head of James Brindley, bade him go on in his own way, and resolved to run the risk of failure. And so, on a bridge of three arches, the canal was carried over the Irwell by the Barton aqueduct, thirty-nine feet above the river. The water was confined within a puddled channel, to prevent leakage, and the work is at this day as sound as it was when first constructed. For the safe carrying of water along the top of an earthen embankment, Brindley had relied upon the retaining powers of clay puddle. It was by help also of clay puddle that he carried the weight of the embankment safe over the ooze of Trafford Moss.
With great ingenuity, also, Brindley provided for the crossing of his canal by streams intercepting its course, without breach of his rule that it is unsafe to let such waters freely mix with the canal stream. Thus, to provide for the free passage of the Medlock without causing a rush into the canal, an ingenious form of weir was contrived, over which its waters flowed into a lower level, and thence down a well several yards deep, leading to a subterranean passage by which the stream was passed into the Irwell, near at hand. Arthur Young, who saw Brindley's canal soon after it was opened, said that "the whole plan of these works shows a capacity and extent of mind which foresees difficulties, and invents remedies in anticipation of possible evils. The connection and dependence of the parts upon each other are happily imagined; and all are exerted in concert, to command by every means the wished-for success." At the Worsley end Brindley constructed a basin, into which coal was brought from different workings of the mine by a subterranean water channel. Brindley also invented cranes for the more ready loading of the boats, laid down within the mines a system of underground railways leading from the face of the coal where the miners worked, to the wells that he had made at different points in the tunnels for shooting the coal down into the boats waiting below. He drained and ventilated with a water-bellows the lower parts of the mine. He improved the barges, invented water-weights, raising dams, riddles to wash the coal for the forges. At the Manchester end Brindley made equally ingenious arrangements for the easy delivery of the coal at the top of Castle Hill. At every turn in the work his inventive genius was felt. When the want of lime for the masonry was a serious impediment, Brindley discovered how to make, of a useless, unadhesive lime-marl, by tempering it and casting it in [{243}] moulds before burning, an excellent lime, a contrivance that alone saved the duke several thousands of pounds cost. When the water was let in, and the works everywhere stood firm, people of fashion flocked to see Brindley's canal, as "perhaps the greatest artificial curiosity in the world:" and writers spoke in glowing terms of the surprise with which they saw several barges of great burden drawn by a single mule or horse along a "river hung in the air," over another river flowing beneath.
As for Manchester, with the price of coal reduced one half, it was ready to make the best use of the steam-engine when it was established as the motive-power in our factories.
Within two months of the day, seventeenth of July, 1761, when the first boat-load of coals travelled over the Barton viaduct, Brindley's notes testify that he was at Liverpool "recconitoring" and by the end of September he was levelling for a proposed extension of his canal from Manchester to Liverpool, by joining it with the Mersey, eight miles below Warrington Bridge, whence there is a natural tideway to Liverpool, about fifteen miles distant. At that time there was not even a coach communication over the bad roads between Manchester and Liverpool, the first stage-coach having been started six years later, when it required six, and sometimes eight horses to pull it the thirty miles along the ruts and through the sloughs. The coach started from Liverpool early in the morning, breakfasted at Prescot, dined at Warrington, and reached Manchester by supper-time. From Manchester to Liverpool it made the return journey next day. The Duke of Bridgewater's proposed canal was strongly opposed as an antagonist interest by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company. The canal promised to take freights at half the price charged by the Navigation Company. A son of the Earl of Derby took the part of the "Old Navigators," and as the Duke of Bridgewater was a Whig, Brindley had to enter in his note-book that "the Toores" (Tories) had "mad had" (made head) "agane ye Duk." But at last his entry was: "ad a grate Division of 127 fort Duk 98 nos for t e Duke 29 Me Jorete," and the Duke's cause prospered during the rest of the contest.
Brindley bought a new suit of clothes to grace his part as principal engineering witness for the canal, and having upset his mind for some days by going to see Garrick play Richard the Third, (wherefore he declared against all further indulgence in that sort of excitement), he went to the committee-room duly provided with a bit of chalk in his pocket, and made good the saying that originated from his clear way of showing what he meant, upon the floor of the committee-room, that "Brindley and chalk would go through the world." When asked to produce a drawing of a proposed bridge, he said he had none, but could immediately get a model. Whereupon he went out and bought a large cheese, which he brought into the committee-room and cut into two equal parts, saying, "Here is my model." The two halves of the cheese represented the two arches of his bridge, the rest of the work connected with them he built with paper, with books, or with whatever he found ready to hand. Once when he had repeatedly talked about "puddling," some of the members wished to know what puddling was. Brindley sent out for a lump of clay, hollowed it into a trough, poured water in, and showed that it leaked out. Then he worked up the clay with water, going through the process of puddling in miniature, again made a trough of the puddled clay, filled it with water, and showed that it was water-tight. "Thus it is," he said, "that I form a water-tight trunk to carry water over rivers and valleys, wherever they cross the path of the canal."
And so the battle was fought, and the canal works completed at a total [{244}] cost of two hundred and twenty thousand pounds, of which Brindley was content to take as his share a rate of pay below that of an ordinary mechanic at the present day. The canal yielded an income which eventually reached eighty thousand pounds a year; but three and sixpence a day, and for a greater part of the time half a crown a day, was the salary of the man of genius by whom it was planned and executed. Yet Brindley was then able to get a guinea a day for services to others, though from the Duke of Bridgewater he never took more than a guinea a week, and had not always that. The duke was investing all the money he could raise, and sometimes at his wit's end for means to go on with the work. Brindley gave his soul to the work for its own sake, and if he had a few pence to buy himself his dinner with—one day he enters only "ating and drinking 6d."—he could live, content with having added not a straw's weight of impediment to the great enterprise he was bent with all the force of his great genius upon achieving. It gave him the advantage, also, of being able, as was most convenient, to treat with the duke on equal terms. He was invited as a canal maker to Hesse by offers of any payment he chose to demand, but stuck to the duke, who is said even to have been in debt to him for travelling and other expenses, which he had left unpaid with the answer, "I am much more distressed for money than you; however, as soon as I can recover myself, your services shall not go unrewarded." After Brindley's sudden death his widow applied in vain for sums which she said were due to her late husband.
The Staffordshire Grand Trunk Canal, Brindley's other great work, started from the duke's canal, near Runcorn, passed through the salt-making districts of Cheshire and the Pottery district, to unite the Severn with the Mersey by one hundred and forty miles of water-way. This canal went through five tunnels, one of them, that at Harecastle, being nearly three thousand yards long, a feature in the scheme accounted by many to be as preposterous as they had called his former "castle in the air." The work was done; bringing with it traffic, population, and prosperity into many half-savage midland districts. It gave comfort and ample employment in the Pottery district, while trebling the numbers of those whom it converted, from a half-employed and ill-paid set of savages, into a thriving community.