Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
Watt describes, as his hobby, a _machine to copy sculpture_,
suggested to him by an implement he had seen and admired in Paris in
1802, where it was used for tracing and multiplying the dies of
medals. He foresaw the possibility of enlarging its powers so as to
make it capable of working even on wood and marble, to do for solid
masses and in hard materials what his copying machine of 1782 had
already done for drawings and writings impressed upon flat surfaces
of paper--to produce, in fact, a perfect fac-simile of the original
model. He worked at this machine most assiduously, and his "likeness
lathe," as he termed it, was set up in a garret, which, with all its
mysterious contents, its tools, and models included, have been
carefully preserved as he left them.
It is gratifying to find that the charm of Watt's presence was not
dimmed by age. "His friends," says Lord Jeffrey, speaking of a visit
which he paid to Scotland when upward of eighty, "in that part of
the country never saw him more full of intellectual vigor and
colloquial animation, never more delightful or more instructive." It
was then also that Sir Walter Scott, meeting him "surrounded by a
little band of northern literati," saw and heard what he felt he was
never to see or hear again--"the alert, kind, benevolent old man,
his talents and fancy overflowing on every subject, with his
attention alive to everyone's question his information at everyone's
command." Campbell, the poet, who saw him later, in the beginning
of 1819 (he was then eighty-three), describes him as so full of
anecdote, that he spent one of the most amusing days he had ever had
with him. Lord Brougham, later still, in the summer of the same
year, found his instructive conversation and his lively and even
playful manner unchanged. But in the autumn of this year, on August
19th, he expired tranquilly at his house at Heathfield. He was
buried at Handsworth. A tribute to his memory was but tardily
rendered by the nation.
Jeffrey and Arago added more elaborate tributes to Watt's genius;
and Wordsworth has declared that he looked upon him, considering his
magnitude and universality, "as perhaps the most extraordinary man
that this country has ever produced." His noblest monument is,
however, his own work.
DR. EDWARD JENNER
By JOHN TIMBS, F.S.A.
(1749-1823)
[Illustration: Dr. Edward Jenner.]
Few of the many thousand ills which human flesh is heir to, have
spread such devastation among the family of man as small-pox. Its
universality has ranged from the untold tribes of savages to the
silken baron of civilization; and its ravages on life and beauty
have been shown in many a sad tale of domestic suffering. To stay
the destroying hand of such a scourge, which by some has been
identified with the Plague of Athens, was reserved for Edward
Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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