At the age of eleven his education was still more broken in upon, for he was called upon to assist his father and his elder brothers in teaching. “Young and inexperienced as I was,” he wrote, “I had inferiors both in age and knowledge; some of the pupils not being more than six or seven years old.”[24] At the age of twelve his school education came almost entirely to an end. He was, it is true, somewhat longer enrolled among the boys, and he still received some instruction. But henceforth he was much more a teacher than a pupil. One day in every week, for a few years of his boyhood, his employment lay altogether outside school-work. His second brother, Edwin, had been engaged every Wednesday in the Assay Office. But he got a better appointment. “Rowland,” wrote his father, “succeeds Edwin at the Assay Office. So that you see preferment goes on among us, and I will answer we think ourselves as happy on such occasions as our virtuous Governors fancy themselves, even in their sinecures, which our posts certainly cannot be called.” The best part of his education he got from his father, not in class-hours, but in the daily intercourse of their home life. This went on for many a year after he left off receiving from him regular instruction. “His children were,” Rowland wrote, “though in an irregular and desultory manner, his private pupils, and as a private teacher he was very successful.”[25] In the year 1807 his father gave a series of lectures on electricity, mechanics, astronomy, pneumatics, and the gases. “These lectures, to which I paid a fixed attention, gave me a new impulse. I resolved to make an electrical machine for myself, and speedily went to work. The cylinder (plate-glass machines were yet unknown) I got blown at a glass-house in the town, paying for it the sum of sixteen shillings. Of course, to a child, there was much difficulty at almost every step, but my hardest task was to make a pattern for the caps. My first attempt was sufficiently primitive, viz., to cut one out from a large turnip. Not succeeding in this, I resorted to casting. Lead was the metal I naturally chose, as most easily melted; and having, after many attempts, at length succeeded in bringing my sand into due shape, I emptied my ladle into the mould and brought out my pattern cap, which, when duly smoothened in the lathe of a friendly workman in the neighbourhood, I bore, with no small pride and satisfaction, to the founder’s, that it might be cast in brass. One serious difficulty in construction I avoided by carrying the axle, which was a strong iron rod, right through the cylinder, instead of attempting to break it off, as usual, just within the caps. The prime conductor, too, I did not attempt to make hollow, but satisfied myself with bringing a piece of wood into the proper cylindrical shape, and then covering it over, first with paper, and afterwards with tinfoil.