Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
THE BIRMINGHAM MEN OF SCIENCE—INVENTORS—PIONEERS IN THE MECHANIC ARTS—BASKERVILLE, WATT, BOULTON, COX, ETC.
NOT only the moral and material worlds but their prime forces run parallel to each other. What the power of public opinion is in the one, the power of steam is in the other. We have noticed how public opinion was first "improved," applied and utilized in Birmingham. What it did to and through this force for the moral world, it did to and through steam for the world of matter and mechanics. James Watt came here with the alphabet and a few short syllables of the mighty science he founded. He came with a nervous, sensitive, impulsive mind, jaded with the long wrestle and grapple with conceptions half hidden and half revealed in various experiments of varying success. He had encountered much of that souring and fretting experience through which all the pioneers of invention have passed to their fame or failure. Like them he had exhausted his means in the development of principles which he saw-what he could make few believe—would double the wealth of the world, and up to its last ages work for the well-being of mankind. He needed the copartnership of a man like Boulton, whose mind should supplement the qualities which his own lacked; a man of clear, collected, working sense, who could not only grasp intellectually all the principles and philosophy of Watt's dynamics, but could render the inventor just the assistance he needed to utilize them and bring them into the great work which they are now performing for the world. His faith in their immense faculties was steady, genuine, and strong: and it held up that of Watt, and cheered and strengthened him in the hours of depression. Then he had the means as well as the mind to work up the new force to its great capacities. It is said that he expended nearly £50,000 in experiments on the steam engine before Watt had so perfected it as to yield any return of profit. Had not Watt found such a partner, the world might have lost the use and value of steam power for half a century. And who can estimate what it has done for the world in the last fifty years, on land or sea? What would England have been to-day without it? What would the flat lands of tidemills and windmills have been without it? Several minds of vivid speculation have essayed to give some approximate estimates or conceptions of the value of this motive power to various countries; some have measured it against the small standards of horse-power and man-power; but it is almost like gauging infinity with a yard-stick, to attempt to measure and value the new capacities which this force has given to mankind. What Stratford-upon-Avon was to Shakespeare, Birmingham should be to Watt. He was not born here, nor was he schooled here in the first rudiments of his science; but here he launched his great invention; here he brought out in one grand result the value and vitality of all his early conceptions and experiments in Scotland. At Soho, but a little way from Newhall Hill, where the parallel force of public opinion was organized a motive power in the moral world, steam force was first made a perfected working-power for the material and mechanical world.
But Birmingham has given to the world another working-power, a fitting and natural complement to the two great forces we have noticed; as natural and complemental as light is to the heat of the sun. Watt and Boulton, having developed steam at Soho into a working-force for its thousand uses, now educed a light to lighten the towns and villages which that force should build and fill with mechanical industries. At Soho they elaborated and gave to the world gas-power; for it really belongs to one of the utilitarian forces that are now working for human comfort and progress. There was a happy coincidence in the advent of this new illumination. Not only was it a mechanical or material but a moral coincidence of pleasant augury. It was natural that such men as Watt and Boulton should find in a lump of coal the two great properties of the sun—heat for steam and light for illumination; but it was a coincidence full of moral beauty, that they first set that light aglow in their Soho Works to celebrate the conclusion of peace between England and France in 1802. The association may have been entirely accidental, but it is no less interesting for that circumstance: the enlightenment of the public mind and the illumination of the dwellings and cities of the people emanated, in natural succession, from Birmingham, the one under Attwood, the other under Watt.
But there is still another coincidence worthy of note and admiration in the productive history of Birmingham. In speaking of the invaluable agencies which Watt and Boulton brought into operation, and especially of the new light they elaborated for the great cities and private dwellings of the people, a predecessor in a collateral and co-working science of illumination should have had a prior notice. This was John Baskerville, who was to the printing-press what Watt was to the steam-engine. Indeed, from Caxton's day to this. England has not produced such another hero of typography. Considering his brave and unwavering patience, and his life-long, self-sacrificing efforts in raising the art to its highest perfection, he well deserves an appellation too exclusively monopolized by military careers. Not ten in ten thousand of educated men, who read and admire the most beautifully-printed books of the present day have the slightest idea how much the art that so delights them is indebted to the genius and indomitable and ill-requited perseverance of John Baskerville. But the public debt to him was better known and appreciated by illustrious contemporaries in different countries; and by none more fully and admiringly than by an American printer named Benjamin Franklin. He was born at Wolverley, in Worcestershire, in 1706, the same year in which Franklin was born in Boston. Massachusetts; and up to a certain stage in their experience it ran somewhat in the same vicissitous pathway of life and labour. Young John was apprenticed to a stonecutter, and young Benjamin began his useful life by cutting candle-wicks for his father, a soap-boiler and tallow-chandler. Neither followed his original occupation long. John seems to have acquired great taste and skill for caligraphy while a stonecutter's apprentice. Doubtless he was employed on monumental literature written with his chisel on grave-stones, which afforded his genius a fine scope in forming letters of every form and size on the great white sheets of marble. At any rate, he is soon found in Birmingham teaching as a writing-master the art he had acquired. It was probably just about the same time that the boy Ben. Franklin left off cutting candle-wicks for his father, and became an apprentice to his elder brother in Boston as a type-setter. Baskerville was not contented to confine his time and talent to the instruction of boys in writing. By dint of practising in scroll works and in the diversified emblems and imagery of monumental carving, he had acquired a taste and genius for more ambitious designs for ornamentation. The canvas on which he exhibited them for public use and admiration was papier-maché trays. If he did not invent this material, he became to it what Wedgwood was to the ware that bears his name. He accumulated a large fortune by the manufacture of these novel and beautiful articles; built a mansion, and settled down to the enjoyment of literature and the fine arts with a relish which his pursuits had stimulated and fostered. But his ambition and genius for the formation of beautiful letters, which his early lessons on monumental marble had developed, now took wider scope and higher flight. The celebrated letter-founder, William Caslon, had won a world-wide reputation for the beautiful type he produced at his foundry in Finsbury, and Baskerville, who admired his genius as well as coveted his fame, determined to enter the lists with him as a competitor. To this end he went to work with extraordinary energy and enthusiasm. He spared no money or labour in bringing the art to its highest perfection. As Boulton expended £50,000 on Watt's steam-engine before it was fully developed, so Baskerville, it is said, expended £600 before he produced a letter to satisfy himself. His success brought him fame but not fortune. He printed various works, which, however, did not repay him the amount he had expended on the art. Like other inventors and public benefactors he incurred many losses and disappointments, which the enviable reputation he acquired probably made him feel all the more keenly. He expresses this feeling in a letter to Horace Walpole, in which he said he was heartily tired of the business of printing, and wished to retire from it. The masterpiece of his typography was what was called "The Baskerville Bible," a few copies of which are still extant. It is a noble specimen of type and printing, showing to what perfection he raised the art in his day. But he seems to have been better pleased with the estimation in which the type and paper of his Bible were held than with the acceptance and practice of the holy principles of the volume by those who professed to preach and live them. Indeed the moralities even of professedly religious men were at a low ebb at the time, and his spirit seems to have taken a bitter vein at their practices. He converted an old windmill standing in his grounds into a monument for himself, surmounting it with an urn bearing this inscription: "Stranger! beneath this stone, in unconsecrated ground, a friend to the liberties of mankind directed his body to be inurned. May the example contribute to emancipate thy mind from the fears of superstition and the wicked arts of priestcraft." Whether this epitaph drew upon him the fury of the mob that set upon Priestley, or whether the illumination emanating from his printing press had been too bright for the eyes of bigots jealous of popular blindness, his monument was destroyed and not a stone was left to indicate where his ashes lay. About thirty years after this work of fury and destruction, his body was discovered accidentally by some workmen employed in constructing the canal that runs through the grounds belonging to his estate. It was found in excellent preservation, and now lies in a catacomb under Christ Church. After his death his widow endeavoured to dispose of his splendid founts of type, but found no purchaser in England ready to buy them, notwithstanding they had become so famous for their elegance. Finally they went into the hands of a literary association in Paris for £3,700, who purchased them for the object of bringing out a magnificent edition of Voltaire's works under the editorship of Beaumarchais, the French clockmaker's son who came to such celebrity as a musician, humourist, and writer, especially as the author of the "Barber of Seville." The versatility of these three apprentices to mechanical trades—Benjamin Franklin, John Baskerville, and Peter Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais-and the simultaneous attraction of their genius to the art and power of the Press, are interesting coincidences, and all the more so in their being aware of it at the time, though belonging to different countries. Indeed. Franklin was one of the circle of friends and correspondents whom Baskerville drew around him. One can hardly refrain from a feeling of regret, however, that no printer in his own country had the mind and means to purchase the beautiful types on which he had expended so many years and such a fortune in elaborating. And this regret may well be deepened by the circumstance that the same type that produced "The Baskerville Bible" should next be employed to give additional attraction to the works of Voltaire.
Five years after the death of Baskerville, in 1775, a man of still greater celebrity as a luminary of science and philosophy, took up his residence in Birmingham, and soon made a great reputation and a great movement in philosophical and theological circles. Although he may be regarded as holding out too many different lights at the same time, few will be disposed to dispute his rank as an illuminator of the public mind, and as such to be classed with the men who have made their mark upon the world from Birmingham as their standpoint. This was Joseph Priestley, who was born near Leeds in 1733, and who worked his way up through various occupations and professions to great eminence in several departments of science, philosophy, and literature. In America his name is principally, or popularly, associated with Unitarianism, as its practical founder in England. His writings or his reputation as an advocate and expounder of that system of religious faith have created this impression, while what he was else is not so well known to the reading public. But in the midst of his theological controversies, he pursued his philosophical investigations with great depth of research; and the theories he developed, even if erroneous or incapable of being worked to practical and utilitarian results, were useful to those more successful in applying science to the every-day necessities and purposes of common life. His works in this department were varied and valuable, and entitled and admitted him to the front rank of the savans of the day. They were especially esteemed in France, and they brought him into intimate correspondence with the most illustrious scholars of that and other countries. It may serve to denote the versatility of his genius, and the varied fields of learning he explored, to give the titles of some of his works: "Charts of History and Biography;" "History of Electricity;" "Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours;" "Lectures on the Theory and History of Language;" "Principles of Oratory and Criticism." Here were fields enough, one might have thought, to engage and satisfy all the speculations and capacities of the most active mind. But they were all too narrow for Priestley, or were occupied by him merely as the side-grounds of mental recreation wherein his intellectual powers were recruited for the more arduous campaigns of theological and political controversy. His religious and political opinions brought down upon him the fury of the mob's fanaticism in 1781, which all his learning as a philosopher could not avert. His house was burnt, and with it—what was worth the value of a whole town of more brick and mortar—his library, his philosophical apparatus, and manuscripts, including his correspondence with the most illustrious men in the world of science. He retired to London from Birmingham, where he received addresses of sympathy and admiration from different parts of his own country and also from France. But these rather fanned the flame of prejudice against him in the opponents of his religious and political opinions, and its steady burning finally drove him to America, where he settled down, and died in a retired town in Pennsylvania at the age of eighty years. The celebrated Cuvier pronounced an eulogy upon him after his death before the National Institute of France.