By a beautiful economy of Providence, all the useful arts, like the virtues of life, are united in a close connection; so that the advance of one necessarily carries the others with it, and a common benefit accrues to all, by an impulse that promotes the advantage of either. The account of debt and credit is kept very nearly balanced in the ledger page of mutual exchanges. If the mechanic is indebted to agriculture for producing the means of subsistence, he repays the obligation, by providing better implements of husbandry. The plough, the axe and the spade, in their present state of perfection, are among the donatives of the mechanic to the yeoman; gifts of the artificer of nature's productions to the lord of the soil. The mechanic is, no doubt, largely indebted to the merchant, in whose magnificent enterprises he finds materials, often for his industry, and always for his reward; but he repays this obligation, by presenting him with that noblest production of ingenuity and mechanic skill, that wonderful creation of intellect and strength, of more endurance than the fabled giants, of more speed than a racehorse, and of more beauty than anything of earthly creation, almost up to the present time, unrivalled in majesty and power, a sailing ship, — a contrivance of mechanic art, which broke down the barriers of nature to the enterprise of man, harnessed her elements for his coursers, and bade him, in imitation of the divine spirit, "Upon the wings of mighty winds, Come flying all abroad.” And when this imitative world of mechanic construction, freighted treasure, and crowded with human life, is launched upon the trackless ocean, "In shade and storm and frequent night," * Habent quodam commune vinculum et quasi, cognatione quadam inster se continentur. Cic pro Archias. with no star for its direction, and no voice to guide it over the wilderness of waves, the mechanic's art gives to the confiding mariner a little piece of iron, no bigger than an agate stone, that with unerring fidelity points but speaks not, yet touched with such exquisite sensibility that it trembles while it turns, as if it was a young heart whose affection hardly dared trust itself to the expression of its love; and by its side, places another little imitation of life, that sleeps not, tires not, but counts every knot of his progress, and with a prophet's miraculous foresight, tells his distance from the unseen shore. For the compass and the chronometer, in their primitive state, the world is indebted partly to science and partly to fortune; but for the perfection of these delicate instruments, which are almost endowed with reason by the extreme precision, exactness, and beauty of their workmanship, the obligation is transferred to mechanic ingenuity and skill. But this magnificent offering of mechanic art to the enterprise of commerce, fades before the more astonishing gift it has made, not to commerce merely, but to arts, arms, learning, morals, manners, and, indeed, to all the great interests of life, in its complicated and wonderful machinery for the operation of steam. The power of steam is affecting the civilized world to a degree much beyond that which resulted from the compass, the printing press, or the use of gunpowder, because, to the original potency of these great agents, it has superadded a force that cannot be expressed by any formula of arithmetic; but it is by the mechanism through which it is made to work, that it is operating to this prodigious extent, Give to science and philosophy, if you please, the glory of discovering that there was a power like an earthquake or volcano, and that it might be directed by human art. Where was the mighty magician, who could seize its elastic spirit, and confine it like the fairy of Eastern fable, sometimes in a bottle, and again to the limits of the globe? What modern Æolius could imprison it in its walls, stronger than the cavern of the winds? Where was the mighty Jupiter of the elements, "To confine its fury to its dark abodes, And weigh it down, oppressed with mountain loads, Impose a king with arbitrary sway, To loose its fetters, or its force obey ?"* This is the prerogative of mechanic art. The steam-engine, in its present most admirable and exact adjustment, in the nice adaptation of its parts, and the curious facility of its contrivance, brings into practical use this tremendous agent of nature, and compels it to become the willing slave of Philosophy could direct, but mechanic skill only could man. perform. It is among the inventions of German literature, that an ingenious investigator of the mystery of causality was enabled to form a gigantic human being, and endow him with life; but being wholly incapable of bestowing upon him a moral perception, he created a monster whose first movements were to destroy his creator. Such was steam in the hands of the philosophers; and some tricks of this kind were played off by this modern Frankiestiern, until the mechanic took him in hand, when a physical, if not a moral restraint was imposed upon him by the ingenious enginery in which he is confined; and although now he would be a terrible master, he is humble and obedient in his chains. It is therefore not so much steam, as the steam-engine that is working miracles; for steam was no available agent so long as it * Sed Pater omnipotens speluncis abdidit atris, was free. And such is heaven's lightning, which already the intrepidity of mechanic art aspires to confine and control, and which it is very possible may be made subservient to the purposes of man. Some future Fulton may chain it to the ship, or the car, and Yankee impatience, not then contented with riding on the thunderbolt, may exert itself to contrive new means of accelerating its velocity. It is not, however, to fable that we need go for his prototype, although he outstrips, in sober reality, all former fiction, as well as truth. When Whittemore's patent for his card-machine was about expiring, a contrivance of mechanic skill, which, at the time, seemed as miraculous as the rod of Moses, he was advised to erect one in an anti-chamber of the House of Representatives of the United States, with a view of obtaining an extension of his grant. It was accordingly put in operation in presence of many members of Congress. One of the honorable body, not much inclined to admire northern men or northern manufacturing establishments, gazed at it for some time, with the utmost surprise. At length, stretching out his bony arm, he exclaimed, in his peculiar intonation : "These Yankees have made an iron creature, with hands and fingers as delicate as a woman's, and with almost as much sense." Whoever examines the improved steam-engine will find not fingers only, but head, heart and limbs, a circulation of fluids as exact as the arterial system, and, seemingly, every thing that belongs to man, but his soul. Look at the graphic picture of a single form of it, lately given by an elegant writer on the subject of rail-roads : "The tearing and deafening noise with which this noble animal of man's creation advances to his work, demonstrates that it has no fear itself, but comes rejoicing like a giant to run his course. If the character of the noble creature be considered for a moment with that of a horse, the comparison is curious. With sufficient coals and water in his manger, which, it must be observed, whenever he travels he takes with him, he can, if the aggregate of his day's work be considered, carry every day, for ten miles, at the rate of sixteen miles an hour, the weight of an army of twenty-one thousand, five hundred and four men, of ten stone ten pound, each, whereas, a good horse could not, at the same pace, and for the same distance, continue to carry every day more than one such man. For a distance of eighty miles, he can carry two thousand six hundred and eightyeight, at a rate (sixteen miles an hour) that neither the hare, the antelope, nor the race-horse could keep up with him. No journey ever tires him. He is never heard to grumble or hiss, but for want of work; the faster he goes, the more ravenously he feeds, and for two years he can thus travel without medicine or surgery.” The steam-engine* of the mechanic is to become the pacificator of the world, by making war so obviously ruinous, and confounding victory and defeat in one general and inevitable destruction of the combatants, that there can be neither motive nor object in the contest. There can be no naval warfare, when ships of the line are driven from the ocean by steam frigates. Naval tactics, which heretofore have witched the world with noble seamanship, become useless before a power which takes the weather-guage In the course of a well digested lecture on the steam-engine, by Mr. Síms, of Chacewater, delivered at the Truro Institution, a comparison was drawn between the engines of Watt's time, and those of the present day. As nearly as the average of the former could be obtained, their duty could not be more than 15,000,000 lbs., lifted a foot high by the consumption of a bushel of coal; while in Messrs. Lean's report of the last month, the average duty of sixty-one pumping engines were found to be 54,000,000 lbs. Those sixty-one engines consumed for a month, 4,283 tons of coal, and lifted 41,000,000 tons of water 100 fathoms high. The same number of engines in Watt's time would, to do the same work, consume 15,418 tons of coal, which at 15s. would be £11,563; from which deducting £3,211, the cost of working at the present day, there would remain £8,352 per month, or upwards of £100,000 a year, saved in fuel on sixty-one engines. The greatest load lifted by any engine now at work in this country was by one in the consolidated mines, which raised a load of 9,000 lbs. every double stroke it made, and did this nine times a minute, amounting to 567,022 tons, lifted 7 feet 6 inches in twenty-four hours; and this astonishing machine could be started, stopped, or regulated, by a little boy.-Mechanic's Magazine. |