and his wife took care that the chips were not wasted in their early career: she was witty in her way, too, as well as thrifty, for when the future chemist, apprenticed to his father’s trade, and up betimes at the bench, was wanted to breakfast, she would put her head out of the back window, and call:
“Now, young Chopstick,” a playful paraphrase on the family surname. And he might chop sticks, but like the smith in the nursery tale, who could only make a “hiss out of his hot iron,” so the labour of the small Hatchett was nought—no king, or prince, or duke, ever rode behind his unhandy work.
But his father was born before him, and of the thriving class. When he grew rich he built himself a new house, still over his great front shop, with such taste as was in him. A wooden palm-tree supported the brestsummer[1] below, and there was a square court on the leads of the first floor, with mock windows whitened, to give light to his back front, and to shut out the shops where his men plied their tools. The house itself was a curiosity. There was a breakfast parlour, a complete oval in plan, with door and window to match. And there was a large front room, canvassed and painted all over with classic scenery in dark colours, the doors all concealed, and the spring-door handle made in imitation of an ivy leaf. We believe that the place still exists, looking down into Long Acre, and that it is in the occupation of a bookseller, or bookstorer.
The ruling passion is strong in most men, and the ruling passion of Mr. Hatchett was carriage building. Thus, he built his house like a carriage, without any fixed staircase. While it was building he went in and out by the ladders and folding steps; and when it was finished he found that a staircase was needed, and that there was no space to make it. So he bought a small house in an adjoining back street, and made an unsightly stair, with an entrance door very like that of a watchhouse.
But he had turned the luxury of the wealthy into a save-all for himself, and had accumulated a large fortune, which he left to his only son Charles, who was a chemist, partly from taste and partly that it was a popular and fashionable pursuit. Yet he worked hard at it, and rendered good service, having leisure thereto, and not being driven (like Dalton) to seek a livelihood by his labour. He was not an originator, but a plodding worker, with a rich man’s laboratory, in some of the many paths that had been struck out by others.
At the central table opposite to Dalton sits James Watt, worthily representing Chemistry and Mechanism. Midway is Matthew Boulton, a veritable gentleman of the old English stamp, a man of clear perception, without whom Watt would perchance have been doomed to blossom unseen. It is no light thing to conceive a mechanical idea, and to bring that idea forth and cultivate it, and to cause it to grow up into healthy existence. But not the less needful is it to have appreciators of ideas. All the mechanism, all the chemistry of the world would be practically valueless were it not that there is a multitude to perceive and applaud, and to profit by them. All the buttons in the world could not prevent Matthew Boulton from having “a soul above buttons,” or from perceiving and hailing greatness wheresoever it might be found. So Watt and Boulton were the Pylades and Orestes of early mechanism, and they needed no Jason to lead them forth on a golden quest. Coal mining and water pumping was the great work of their day, and mechanism and machine mills followed. In both these men is to be seen that union of Celt and Saxon, or Dane, which constitutes an Englishman,—the faculties of perception to generate and perseverance and daring to accomplish.
Close to Boulton sits Marc Isambard Brunel, a Celt full of contrivance at a time when contrivance was not so common as it is now, when the public mind has become cultivated by the wide spread of mechanism. He was a fortunate man, for he fell in with Sir Samuel Bentham, and through him obtained Government employment. The judgment of the man was not equal to his imagination. He was not of the stuff of which Watt was made; but he was of the class of whom it has been said that they can no more help contriving than hens can help laying eggs.
On one occasion, when he had been laid up for several months with some defect in his lower limbs, John Farey called on him. “Take a seat, Mr. Farey,” said the invalid. A large chair stood before him, looking as if two men could scarcely lift it, so Mr. Farey put two hands to it with all his strength, when suddenly it went up to his head, and Brunel burst into a violent laugh, prolonged for some time. The chair was a cheat. He had amused himself with pasting strips of paper round an ordinary stick chair, then cutting it off with his penknife and gluing it together, and thickening it till it became a mass of hollow papier maché. Sir Samuel Bentham, had originated this tubular idea many years before, and had all his fire-irons made of thin tubular steel.
Behind Brunel, when he should have been in front as the master mind, stands the mechanist, and more, the ideal and constructive engineer, Sir Samuel Bentham, to whom nothing came amiss, and whose patent specification to this day marks the character of his mind—a specification without drawings, so clear is the wording. A lawyer’s son, he had no taste for the law, but, like Peter the Great, went to the Royal Dockyards to study shipbuilding; and so he went on, his moral sense and perception guiding the course of his physical inventions, now machines, now a school, now a prison, and then a factory. He went to Russia, and there executed much military and other work. When he found his light guns kick, and his round shot hop off from stone walls, he backed them up with timber against the cascables, converted all recoil into added force on the shot, and soon made lime and stone fly. And when he came back from Russia to his brother Jeremy’s house, in Queen Square, he began to make machinery for all kinds of wood-work before unknown, and planned and built ships for the Admiralty, in which for the first time powder magazines were made safe. The Portsmouth block machinery, called Brunel’s, was in reality Bentham’s, whose mind took the same logical form in mechanism that the mind of- ↑ Probably from the French, apprêt-sous-mur.
