Captains of Industry

J >> James Parton >> Captains of Industry

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If the people of London are proud of what was done by Sir Christopher
Wren, they lament perhaps still more what he was not permitted to do.
They are now attempting to execute some of his plans. Miss Lucy
Phillimore, his biographer, says:--

"Wren laid before the king and Parliament a model of the city as he
proposed to build it, with full explanations of the details of the
design. The street leading up Ludgate Hill, instead of being the
confined, winding approach to St. Paul's that it now is, even its
crooked picturesqueness marred by the Viaduct that cuts all the lines of
the cathedral, gradually widened as it approached St. Paul's, and
divided itself into two great streets, ninety feet wide at the least,
which ran on either side of the cathedral, leaving a large open space in
which it stood. Of the two streets, one ran parallel with the river
until it reached the Tower, and the other led to the Exchange, which
Wren meant to be the centre of the city, standing in a great piazza, to
which ten streets each sixty feet wide converged, and around which were
placed the Post-Office, the Mint, the Excise Office, the Goldsmiths'
Hall, and the Insurance, forming the outside of the piazza. The smallest
streets were to be thirty feet wide, 'excluding all narrow, dark alleys
without thoroughfares, and courts.'

"The churches were to occupy commanding positions along the principal
thoroughfares, and to be 'designed according to the best forms for
capacity and hearing, adorned with useful porticoes and lofty
ornamental towers and steeples in the greater parishes. All church
yards, gardens, and unnecessary vacuities, and all trades that use great
fires or yield noisome smells to be placed out of town.'

"He intended that the church yards should be carefully planted and
adorned, and be a sort of girdle round the town, wishing them to be an
ornament to the city, and also a check upon its growth. To burials
within the walls of the town he strongly objected, and the experience
derived from the year of the plague confirmed his judgment. No gardens
or squares are mentioned in the plan, for he had provided, as he
thought, sufficiently for the healthiness of the town by his wide
streets and numerous open spaces for markets. Gardening in towns was an
art little considered in his day, and contemporary descriptions show us
that 'vacuities' were speedily filled with heaps of dust and refuse.

"The London bank of the Thames was to be lined with a broad quay along
which the halls of the city companies were to be built, with suitable
warehouses in between for the merchants' to vary the effect of the
edifices. The little stream whose name survives in _Fleet_ Street was to
be brought to light, cleansed, and made serviceable as a canal one
hundred and twenty feet wide, running much in the line of the present
Holborn Viaduct."

These were the wise and large thoughts of a great citizen for the
metropolis of his country. But the king was Charles II.! Our race
produces good citizens in great numbers, and great citizens not a few,
but the supreme difficulty of civilization is to get a few such where
they can direct and control.

SIR JOHN RENNIE,

ENGINEER.

One of the most striking city scenes in the world is the view of London
as you approach London Bridge in one of the small, low-decked steamers
which ply upon the Thames. London stands where navigation for sea-going
vessels ceases on this famous stream, which is crossed at London, within
a stretch of three or four miles, by about fifteen bridges, of which
seven or eight can be seen at one view under the middle arch of London
Bridge.

Over all these bridges there is a ceaseless tide of human life, and in
the river below, besides long lines of ships at anchor and unloading,
there are as many steam-vessels, barges, skiffs, and wherries as can
find safe passage. A scene more animated, picturesque, and grand is
nowhere else presented, especially when the great black dome of St.
Paul's is visible, hanging over it, appearing to be suspended in the
foggy atmosphere like a black balloon, the cathedral itself being
invisible.

Three of these bridges were built by the engineers, father and son,
whose name appears at the head of this article, and those three are
among the most wonderful structures of their kind. One of these is
London Bridge; another is called Southwark, and the third, Waterloo. The
time may come when the man who builds bridges will be as celebrated as
the man who batters them down with cannon; but, at present, for one
person who knows the name of Sir John Rennie there are a thousand who
are familiar with Wellington and Waterloo.

He had, however, a pedigree longer than that of some lords. His father
was a very great engineer before him, and that father acquired his
training in practical mechanics under a Scotch firm of machinists and
mill-wrights which dates back to the reign of Charles the Second. It is
to be particularly noted that both John Rennie, the elder, and Sir John,
his son, derived an important part of their education in the workshop
and model-room. Both of them, indeed, had an ideal education; for they
enjoyed the best theoretical instruction which their age and country
could furnish, and the best practical training also. Theory and practice
went hand in hand. While the intellect was nourished, the body was
developed, the hand acquired skill, and the eyesight, certainty. It is
impossible to imagine a better education for a young man than for him to
receive instruction at Edinburgh University under the illustrious
Professor Black, and afterwards a training in practical mechanics under
Andrew Meikle, one of the best mechanics then living. This was the
fortunate lot of Rennie's father, who wisely determined that his son
should have the same advantage.

When the boy had passed through the preparatory schools, the question
arose, whether he should be sent to one of the universities, or should
go at once into the workshop. His father frequently said that the real
foundation of civil engineering is mechanics, theoretical and practical.
He did not believe that a young man could become an engineer by sitting
in a class-room and hearing lectures; but that he must be placed in
contact with realities, with materials, with tools, with men, with
difficulties, make mistakes, achieve successes, and thus acquire the
blended boldness and caution which mark the great men in this
profession. It is a fact that the greatest engineers of the past
century, whatever else they may have had or lacked, were thoroughly
versed in practical mechanics. Smeaton, Telford, Arkwright, Hargreaves,
George Stephenson, Rennie, were all men who, as they used to say, had
"an ounce of theory to a pound of practice."

Young Rennie worked eight hours a day in the practical part of his
profession, and spent four in the acquisition of science and the modern
languages, aided in both by the first men in London in their branches.
Four or five years of this training gave him, as he says in his
autobiography, the "_rudiments_" of his profession. His father next
determined to give him some experience in bearing responsibility, and
placed him as an assistant to the resident-engineer of Waterloo Bridge,
then in course of construction. He was but nineteen years of age; but,
being the son of the head of the firm, he was naturally deferred to and
prepared to take the lead. Soon after, the Southwark Bridge was begun,
which the young man superintended daily at every stage of its
construction.

English engineers regard this bridge as the _ne plus ultra_ of
bridge-building. A recent writer speaks of it as "confessedly unrivaled
as regards its colossal proportions, its architectural effect, or the
general simplicity and massive character of its details." It crosses the
river by three arches, of which the central one has a span of two
hundred and forty feet, and it is built at a place where the river at
high tide is thirty-six feet deep. The cost of this bridge was four
millions of dollars, and it required five years to build it. The bridge
is of iron, and contains a great many devices originated by the young
engineer, and sanctioned by his father. It was he also who first, in
recent times, learned how to transport masses of stone of twenty-five
tons weight, used for the foundation of bridges.

Having thus become an accomplished engineer, his wise old father sent
him on a long tour, which lasted more than two years, in the course of
which he inspected all the great works, both of the ancients and
moderns, in Europe, and the more accessible parts of Africa and Asia.
Returning home, the death of his father suddenly placed upon his
shoulders the most extensive and difficult engineering business in Great
Britain. But with such a training, under such a father, and inheriting
so many traditional methods, he proved equal to the position, continued
the great works begun by his father, and carried them on to successful
completion.

His father had already convinced the government that the old London
Bridge could never be made sufficient for the traffic, or unobstructive
to the navigation. A bridge has existed at this spot since the year 928,
and some of the timbers of the original structure were still sound in
1824, when work upon the new bridge was begun.

Thirty firms competed for the contract for building the new London
Bridge, but it was awarded to the Rennies, under whose superintendence
it was built. The bridge is nine hundred and twenty-eight feet in
length, and has five arches. In this structure although utility was the
first consideration, there in an elegant solidity of design which makes
it pleasing and impressive in the highest degree. The rapid stream is as
little obstructed as the circumstances admitted, and there does not
appear to be in the bridge an atom of superfluous material. London
Bridge is, I suppose, the most crowded thoroughfare in the world.
Twenty-five thousand vehicles cross it daily, as well as countless
multitudes of foot-passengers. So great is the throng, that there is a
project now on foot to widen it. In 1831, when it was formally opened by
King William IV., the great engineer was knighted, and he was in
consequence ever after called Sir John Rennie.

During the period of railroad building, Sir John Rennie constructed a
great many remarkable works, particularly in Portugal and Sweden. We
have lately heard much of the disappointment of young engineers whom the
cessation in the construction of railroads has thrown out of business.
Perhaps no profession suffered more from the dull times than this. Sir
John Rennie explains the matter in his autobiography:--

"In 1844," he tells us, "the demand for engineering surveyors and
assistants was very great. Engineering was considered to be the only
profession where immense wealth and fame were to be acquired, and
consequently everybody became engineers. It was not the question whether
they were educated for it, or competent to undertake it, but simply
whether any person chose to dub himself engineer; hence lawyers' clerks,
surgeons' apprentices, merchants, tradesmen, officers in the army and
navy, private gentlemen, left their professions and became engineers.
The consequence was that innumerable blunders were made and vast sums of
money were recklessly expended."

It was much the same in the United States; and hence a good many of
these gentlemen have been obliged to find their way back to the homelier
occupations which they rashly abandoned. But in our modern world a
thoroughly trained engineer, like Sir John Rennie, will always be in
request; for man's conquest of the earth is still most incomplete; and I
do not doubt that the next century will far outdo this in the magnitude
of its engineering works, and in the external changes wrought by the
happy union of theory and practice in such men as Telford, Stephenson,
and Rennie.

Sir John Rennie spent the last years of his life in writing his Memoirs,
a most interesting and useful work, recently published in London, which,
I hope, will be republished here. It is just the book for a young fellow
who has an ambition to gain honor by serving mankind in a skillful and
manly way. Sir John Rennie, like his father before him, and like all
other great masters of men, was constantly attentive to the interests
and feelings of those who assisted him. He was a wise and considerate
employer; and the consequence was, that he was generally served with
loyal and affectionate fidelity. He died in 1874, aged eighty years.

SIR MOSES MONTEFIORE.

We still deal strangely with the Jews. While at one end of Europe an
Israelite scarcely dares show himself in the streets for fear of being
stoned and abused, in other countries of the same continent we see them
prime ministers, popular authors, favorite composers of music,
capitalists, philanthropists, to whom whole nations pay homage.

Sir Moses Montefiore, though an English baronet, is an Israelite of the
Israelites, connected by marriage and business with the Rothschilds, and
a sharer in their wonderful accumulations of money. His hundredth
birthday was celebrated in 1883 at his country-house on the English
coast, and celebrated in such a way as to make the festival one of the
most interesting events of the year. The English papers tell us that
nearly a hundred telegrams of congratulation and benediction reached the
aged man in the course of the day, from America, Africa, Asia, and
all-parts of Europe, from Christians, Jews, Mahomedans, and men of the
world. The telegraph offices, we are told, were clogged during the
morning with these messages, some of which were of great length, in
foreign languages and in strange alphabets, such as the Arabic and
Hebrew. Friends in England sent him addresses in the English manner,
several of which were beautifully written upon parchment and superbly
mounted. The railroad passing near his house conveyed to him by every
train during the day presents of rare fruit and beautiful flowers. The
Jews in Spain and Portugal forwarded presents of the cakes prepared by
orthodox Jews for the religious festival which occurred on his birthday.
Indeed, there has seldom been in Europe such a widespread and cordial
recognition of the birthday of any private citizen.

Doubtless, the remarkable longevity of Sir Moses had something to do
with emphasizing the celebration. Great wealth, too, attracts the regard
of mankind. But there are many rich old Jews in the world whose birthday
excites no enthusiasm. The briefest review of the long life of Sir Moses
Montefiore will sufficiently explain the almost universal recognition of
the recent anniversary.

He was born as long ago as 1784, the second year of American
independence, when William Pitt was prime minister of England. He was
five years old when the Bastille was stormed, and thirty-one when the
battle of Waterloo was fought. He was in middle life before England had
become wise enough to make Jew and Christian equal before the law, and
thus attract to her shores one of the most gifted and one of the most
virtuous of races.

The father of Sir Moses lived and died in one of the narrow old streets
near the centre of London called Philpot Lane, where he became the
father of an old-fashioned family of seventeen children. This prolific
parent was a man of no great wealth, and consequently his eldest son,
Moses, left school at an early age, and was apprenticed to a London firm
of provision dealers. He was a singularly handsome young man, of
agreeable manners and most engaging disposition, circumstances which led
to his entering the Stock Exchange. This was at a time when only twelve
Jewish brokers were allowed to carry on business in London, and he was
one of the twelve.

At the age of twenty-eight he had fully entered upon his career, a
broker and a married man, his wife the daughter of Levy Cohen, a rich
and highly cultivated Jewish merchant. His wife's sister had married N.
M. Rothschild, and one of his brothers married Rothschild's sister.
United thus by marriage to the great banker, he became also his partner
in business, and this at a time when the gains of the Rothschilds were
greatest and most rapid.

Most readers remember how the Rothschilds made their prodigious profits
during the last years of Bonaparte's reign. They had a pigeon express at
Dover, by means of which they obtained the first correct news from the
continent. During the "Hundred Days," for example, such a panic
prevailed in England that government bonds were greatly depressed. The
first rumors from Waterloo were of defeat and disaster, which again
reduced consols to a panic price. The Rothschilds, notified of the
victory a few hours sooner than the government itself, bought largely of
securities which, in twenty-four hours, almost doubled in value. Moses
Montefiore, sharing in these transactions, found himself at forty-five a
millionaire.

Instead of slaving away in business to the end of his life, adding
million to million, with the risk of losing all at last, he took the
wise resolution of retiring from business and devoting the rest of his
life to works of philanthropy.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Moses Montefiore was
sheriff of London. The queen had lived near his country-house, and had
often as a little girl strolled about his park. She now enjoyed the
satisfaction of conferring upon her neighbor the honor of knighthood,
and a few years later she made him a baronet. Thus he became Sir Moses,
which has an odd sound to us, but which in England seems natural enough.

During the last fifty years Sir Moses has been, as it were, a
professional philanthropist. Every good cause has shared his bounty, but
he has been most generous to poor members of his own race and religion.
He has visited seven times the Holy Land, where the Jews have been for
ages impoverished and degraded. He has directed his particular attention
to improving the agriculture of Palestine, once so fertile and
productive, and inducing the Jews to return to the cultivation of the
soil. In that country he himself caused to be planted an immense garden,
in which there are nine hundred fruit trees, made productive by
irrigation. He has promoted the system of irrigation by building
aqueducts, digging wells, and providing improved apparatus. He has also
endowed hospitals and almshouses in that country.

In whatever part of the world, during the last fifty years, the Jews
have been persecuted or distressed, he has put forth the most efficient
exertions for their relief, often going himself to distant countries to
convey the requisite assistance. When he was ninety-one years of age he
went to Palestine upon an errand of benevolence. He has pleaded the
cause of his persecuted brethren before the Emperor of Russia, and
pleaded it with success. To all that part of the world known to us
chiefly through the Jews he has been a constant and most munificent
benefactor during the last half century, while never turning a deaf ear
to the cry of want nearer home.

In October he completes his hundredth year. At present (January, 1884),
he reads without spectacles, hears well, stands nearly erect, although
six feet three in height, and has nothing of the somnolence of old age.
He drives out every day, gets up at eleven, and goes to bed at nine. His
diet is chiefly milk and old port wine, with occasionally a little soup
or bread and butter. He still enjoys the delights of beneficence, which
are among the keenest known to mortals, and pleases himself this year by
giving checks of ninety-nine pounds to benevolent objects, a pound for
each year that he has had the happiness of living.

MARQUIS OF WORCESTER,

INVENTOR OF THE STEAM-ENGINE.

In the English county of Monmouthshire, near Wales, a region of coal
mines and iron works, there are the ruins of Raglan Castle, about a mile
from a village of the same name. To these ruins let pilgrims repair who
delight to visit places where great things began; for here once dwelt
the Marquis of Worcester, who first made steam work for men. The same
family still owns the site; as indeed it does the greater part of the
county; the head of the family being now styled the Duke of Beaufort.
The late Lord Raglan, commander of the English forces in the Crimea,
belonged to this house, and showed excellent taste in selecting for his
title a name so interesting. Perhaps, however, he never thought of the
old tower of Raglan Castle, which is still marked and indented where the
second Marquis of Worcester set up his steam-engine two hundred and
twenty years ago. Very likely he had in mind the time when the first
marquis held the castle for Charles I. against the Roundheads, and
baffled them for two months, though he was then eighty-five years of
age. It was the son of that valiant and tough old warrior who put steam
into harness, and defaced his ancestral tower with a ponderous and
imperfect engine.

For many centuries before his time something had been known of the power
of steam; and the Egyptians, a century or more before Christ, had even
made certain steam toys, which we find described in a manuscript written
about 120 B. C., at Alexandria, by a learned compiler and inventor named
Hero. One of these was in the form of a man pouring from a cup a
libation to the gods. The figure stood upon an altar, and it was
connected by a pipe with a kettle of water underneath. On lighting a
fire under the kettle, the water was forced up through the figure, and
flowed out of the cup upon the altar. Another toy was a revolving copper
globe, which was kept in motion by _the escape_ of steam from two little
pipes bent in the same direction. Of this contrivance the French
Professor Arago once wrote:--

"This was, beyond doubt, a machine in which steam engendered motion, and
could produce mechanical effects. It was _a veritable steam-engine_! Let
us hasten, however, to add that it bears no resemblance, either by its
form or in mode of action, to steam-engines now in use."

Other steam devices are described by Hero. By one a horn was blown, and
by another figures were made to dance upon an altar. But there is no
trace in the ancient world of the application of steam to an important
useful purpose. Professor Thurston of Hoboken, in his excellent work
upon the "History of the Steam-Engine," has gleaned from the literature
of the last seven hundred years several interesting allusions to the
nature and power of steam. In 1125 there was, it appears, at Rheims in
France, some sort of contrivance for blowing a church organ by the aid
of steam. There is an allusion, also, in a French sermon of 1571, to the
awful power in volcanic eruptions of a small quantity of confined steam.
There are traces of steam being made to turn a spit upon which meat was
roasted. An early French writer mentions the experiment of exploding a
bomb-shell nearly filled with water by putting it into a fire. In 1630
King Charles the First of England granted to David Ramseye a patent for
nine different contrivances, among which were the following:--

"To raise water from low pits by fire. To make any sort of mills to go
on standing waters by continual motion without help of wind, water, or
horse. To make boats, ships, and barges to go against strong wind and
tide. To raise water from mines and coal pits by a way never yet in
use."

This was in 1630, which was about the date of the Marquis of Worcester's
engine. It is possible, however, that these devices existed only in the
imagination of the inventor. The marquis was then twenty-nine years of
age, and as he was curious in matters of science, it is highly probable
that he was acquainted with this patent, and may have conversed with the
inventor.

It is strange how little we know of a man so important as the Marquis of
Worcester in our modern industrial development. I believe that not one
of the histories of England mentions him, and scarcely anything is known
of the circumstances that led to his experimenting with steam. Living in
a county of coal and iron mines, and his own property consisting very
much in coal lands, his attention must of necessity have been called to
the difficulties experienced by the miners in pumping the water from the
deep mines. There were mines which employed as many as five hundred
horses in pumping out the water, and it was a thing of frequent
occurrence for a productive mine to be abandoned because the whole
revenue was absorbed in clearing it of water. This inventor was perhaps
the man in England who had the greatest interest in the contrivance to
which in early life he turned his mind.

He was born in the year 1601, and sprung from a family whose title of
nobility dated back to the fourteenth century. He is described by his
English biographer as a learned, thoughtful, and studious Roman
Catholic; as public-spirited and humane; as a mechanic, patient,
skillful, full of resources, and quick to comprehend. He inherited a
great estate, not perhaps so very productive in money, but of enormous
intrinsic value. There is reason to believe that he began to experiment
with steam soon after he came of age. He describes one of his
experiments, probably of early date:--

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