Popular journals introduced departments dealing with "aerostatic experiments.” A play produced at Covent Garden in 1784 was entitled Aerostation, and the plot centered around “the passion of a lady of fortune for balloons.” According to a rimester of the time, "admirals forsake the swelling tide,” and “surgeons leave their patients to their fate,” in order "high on the wings of mighty winds to ride.” The “celebrated aeronauts” of the time were “sumptuously entertained.” The exploits of a balloonist in 1785 were said to have been witnessed by more than 40,000 persons. Not content with the amusement thus afforded, those of prophetic inclinations foresaw the time when “the inquisitive turn of mind which distinguishes the present era will improve ... the art of ascending and exploring the upper regions [so as to apply it] to many useful purposes of which at present we have no conception." 16

Two other inventions not successfully developed till much later times—the submarine and the "horseless carriage”—also exercised over ingenious minds a fascination

a which seems to have been little abated by the not infrequent fatality of the hazards of experiment.17

Not the least important of the varied manifestations of mechanical interest was connected with popular amusements. Readers of Edmund Cartwright's account of the origin of the power loom will recall how he refuted the arguments of the Manchester manufacturers against the possibility of a power loom "by remarking that there had lately been exhibited in London an au

Some typical passages on "aerial navigation”: New London Magazine, I (1785), 93, 301; European Magazine, VI, 394; Gazetteer, April 2, 1785; Gentleman's Magazine, LV, 522, 1002; Annual Register, 1784-5, 223 (Chron.), 323 (Chron.). An interesting flight of imagination in connection with aerial navigation is in Darwin's Botanic Garden.

16

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tomaton figure which played at chess. Now you will not assert, gentlemen, said I [he continues), that it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave, than one which shall make all the variety of moves which are required in that complicated game. * 18 The outcome of this unique idea, he asserted, was his power loom. During the rise of inventive activity, there seems to have been a veritable vogue of exhibits such as that referred to by Cartwright. In periodicals and in booklets and circulars, varied and elaborate mechanical shows were extensively advertised. In one of these booklets, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Several Superb and Magnificent Pieces of Mechanism and Jewelry Exhibited at Mr. Cox's Museum (London, 1772), twenty-two exhibits are described. The following is an illustrative quotation from this curious document:"Piece the Fifteenth" is a chronoscope in the form of an obelisk under a great and magnificent canopy, with profuse ornaments and with "a prodigious variety of motions. It stands in the center of a rich gallery, upon a table, .. upon which an elephant ... moves round the obelisk; upon his back is a castle of gold; . . . within the castle is a curious clock, with three dials; above the clock, on the top of the castle, . . . are automaton figures, playing various tunes on twelve bells; over the music gallery is a figure that strikes the hours and quarters; above that, a pyramid of moving stars, which terminate with four dolphins, in the middle of which is an animated dragon, dropping pearls into one of the dolphin's mouths, moving his wings at the same time. The pedestal consists of four bulls, in contrary directions, . . . upon a ground ... upon which dragons, storks, lizards, and various ornaments are placed.”

It is probable that the prevailing ideas and interests

.

18

Quoted in Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 229, 230. Dr. W. Hooper's popular Rational Recreations was based largely on mathematical and mechanical knowledge.

of a given period, especially those that are of relatively recent and sudden development, find spontaneous and therefore significant expression in the popular amusements of the period. An ingenious student might profitably try to test the validity of such a generalization in wider fields. In any case, the extensive patronage given to these "museums" and traveling shows seems to have been an unconscious reflection, during the period of the present study, of popular mechanical interest.

The prevailing spirit of technical progress, while more or less active throughout the country, found most intensive and successful expression in the regions of Birmingham and Manchester.

A rimester of Birmingham, writing as early as 1751, described "beneath a fable's thin disguise the virtues its inhabitants display"; these virtues were the "spirit of industry" and "bright inventive genius." 19

The "inventive genius," particularly of the north of England, found expression in the work of a large number of men interested in a wide variety of projects-men whose obscurity is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that they were in most cases members of the so-called lower classes) "It is generally allowed," wrote Richard Townley of Manchester in 1784, "that more ingenious improvements and useful inventions in machinery have taken their rise in these northern parts . . . than in all others throughout the kingdom; . . . [and] that most of these inventions and improvements have been struck out by such as are usually denominated the inferior ranks of mankind." 20 To recount briefly the work of two or three north-of-England mechanics of this obscure type will perhaps not be without significance as illustrating an

"Industry and Genius; or, the Origin of Birmingham," in Birmingham Gazette, January 28, 1751. (Reprinted in Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, I, 38-40.)

"In Manchester Mercury, January 6, 1784.

important phase of popular interest in problems of technical advance.

One of these was a tenant farmer of Belford, Cuthbert Clarke, whose work was recorded by Arthur Young in his Northern Tour. This man, wrote Young, “is very famous in the north for his knowledge of mechanics." Among his inventions were a machine for draining • swamps, for which he received an award from the Society of Arts; a mechanical turnip slicer (important on account of the prevalent feeding of turnips to live stock); and "the grand machine on which he builds his reputation,

one for the threshing of corn." To his various activities in connection with mechanics he added another, -experimentation with electricity for stimulating the growth of plants; and Young declared that his experiments afforded "strong proof that the electric fire had a remarkable power in promoting and quickening the vegetation.” The mechanical and experimental interests of Farmer Clarke are not without interest in themselves; but they are mentioned here because they illustrate the "great spirit of improvement” and experimentation which Young and others found to be characteristic of the region.21

Young's tour of the north, when the observations just mentioned were recorded, was made before Arkwright's cotton factories were built. The mechanical interests of the people in the newly developing northern industrial regions before the introduction of machinery are illustrated even more significantly by the career of another self-taught mechanic of that part of the country, Adam Walker. At his home on the border between Westmoreland and Lancaster counties, he was set to work at a very early age, but while a boy he found time to acquire (according to a contemporary) a remarkable mechanical ability by making devices for his own amusement. “He

* Young, Northern ur, III, 44-52, 194.

a

copied corn mills, paper mills, fulling mills, etc., and had them all going in model in the brook near his father's dwelling, to the great terror of strangers who passed them in the night.” Though deprived by his father's poverty of schooling (so we are told), he nevertheless by his own efforts prepared himself by the age of fifteen to begin his career as a teacher; and at the age of eighteen, “was elected writing master and accomptant to the free school of Macclesfield in Cheshire.” This was about 1750. Later he located at Manchester and "conceived a system of education more adapted to a town of trade than the monkish system still continued in our public schools (at least thought so by many)," and he put his ideas into effect in the form of a course of lectures which met with popular approbation. He continued his studies along mechanical and scientific lines, and at length embodied his knowledge in a series of public lectures which he gave in the regions of Manchester, Liverpool, Halifax, Leeds and Birmingham, his fame in the provinces preparing him at length, by 1778, for a successful career in the metropolis. So popular were his lectures in the north of England that in some of the smaller towns rooms large enough to accommodate his audiences could not be secured. By 1792, eight editions of his published lectures on mechanics had been issued. Nor was he merely a theorist and lecturer; his knowledge of mechanics he applied in the field of invention. Contemporaneous records attribute to him more than a score of inventions, some of them extremely elaborate, only two of which are said to have been patented.22

The high esteem enjoyed by Clarke and Walker was shared quite generally by men of their type. On many occasions and in varied ways the country was urged “to record and publish inventions ... and to take care that

“ European Magazine, XXI, 411-413; Langford, Century of Birmingham Life, I, 252.