Walks in the Black Country And Its Green Border Land
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BIRMINGHAM MEN OF SCIENCE?INVENTORS ? PIONEERS IN THB MECHANIC ARTS ?BASKERVILLE, WATT, BOULTON, COX, KTC. N" OT 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 encountere
...d much of that souring and fretting experience through which all the pioneers of invention have passed to their fame or failure. Like them he hadexhausted 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 ...
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