Several engines were sent to New York. The men in charge of one found on
shipboard a pattern-maker going to America named John Hewitt. He settled
in America January 12th, 1796, and became the father of the late famous
and deeply lamented Hon. Abram S. Hewitt, long a member of Congress and
afterward mayor of New York, foremost in many improvements in the city,
the last being the Subway, just opened, which owes its inception to him.
For this service, the Chamber of Commerce presented him with a memorial
medal. Mr. Hewitt married a daughter of Peter Cooper, founder of the
Cooper Institute, which owes its wonderful development chiefly to him.
His children devote themselves and their fortunes to its management. At
the time of his death in 1902, he was pronounced "the first private
citizen of the Republic." Small engine-shops (of which the ruins still
remain), called "Soho" after their prototype, were erected by his father
near New York city, on the Greenwood division of the Erie Railroad. The
railroad station was called "Soho" by Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, who was then
president of the railroad company. Upon Mr. Hewitt's eightieth birthday
congratulations poured in from all quarters. One cable from abroad
attracted attention as appropriate and deserved: "Ten octaves every
note truly struck and grandly sung." No man in private life passed away
in our day with such general lamentation. The Republic got even more
valuable material than engines from the old home in the ship that
arrived on January 12, 1796.
We must not permit ourselves to forget that it was not until the Watt
engine was applied to steam navigation that the success of the latter
became possible. It was only by this that it could be made practicable,
so that the steamship is the product of the steam-engine, and it is to
Watt we owe the modern twenty-three-thousand-ton monster (and larger
monsters soon to come), which keeps its course against wind and tide,
almost "unshaked of motion," for this can now properly be said.
Passengers crossing the Atlantic from port to port now scarcely know
anything of irregular motion, and never more than the gentlest of slight
heaves, even during the gale that
"Catches the ruffian billows by their tops,
Curling their monstrous heads."
The ocean, traversed in these ships, is a smooth highway--nothing but a
ferry--and a week spent upon it has become perhaps the most enjoyable
and the most healthful of holiday excursions, provided the prudent
excursionist has left behind positive instructions that wireless
telegrams shall not follow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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