The founder of this great enterprise, in the early days of the Company, built for his workpeople schools, library, and reading rooms, as well as dwellings, and met them personally at their social gatherings and entertainments—generally provided by himself; but the increasing size of the concern, the excellence and capability, amounting to genius, of the various heads of departments chosen by him, and his own increasing years and failing health, led to his gradual withdrawal from personal attendance at Elswick. The last time he appeared there officially was when the King of Siam visited the works in 1897. One who knew him well has written of him, “His mind was at the same time original and strictly practical; he noticed with a penetrating observation, and drew conclusions with intuitive genius. Abstract speculation had no charm for him; he never cherished wild dreams or extravagant ideas. But if his conception was thus wisely restricted, his execution of an idea was unrivalled in its thoroughness. Whether he was founding an industrial establishment, or building a house, or making a road, the hand of the man is quite unmistakable. There is the same solid basis, the same enduring superstructure. Every stone that is laid at Cragside or Bamburgh seems to be stamped as it were with the impression of his great personality, and the thoroughness of his work.” All his life long, the thoroughness with which he was able to concentrate his mind on the one subject which occupied it at the time, was a marked feature of Lord Armstrong’s character. In the early period of his career, while he was still in a solicitor’s office, and when the study of hydraulics was absorbing all his leisure hours, he was quizzically said to have “water on the brain.” Electrical problems also engaged his attention, and in 1844 he lectured at the Lit. and Phil. rooms on his hydro-electric machine, on which occasion the lecture room was so tightly packed that he had to get in through the window. In the following year he explained to the same society his hydraulic experiments and achievements; in 1846 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; and the next summer, 1847, saw the Elswick Works begun.