The Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer: With an Introductory History of Roads and Travelling in Great BritainSmiles, Samuel
History
The Life of Thomas Telford, Civil Engineer: With an Introductory History of Roads and Travelling in Great Britain
Smiles, Samuel
Civil engineers -- Great Britain -- Biography; Roads -- Great Britain; Telford, Thomas, 1757-1834
When engaged upon his surveys, our engineer was the same simple,
cheerful, laborious man. While at work, he gave his whole mind to
the subject in hand, thinking of nothing else for the time;
dismissing it at the close of each day's work, but ready to take it
up afresh with the next day's duties. This was a great advantage to
him as respected the prolongation of his working faculty. He did
not take his anxieties to bed with him, as many do, and rise up
with them in the morning; but he laid down the load at the end of
each day, and resumed it all the more cheerfully when refreshed and
invigorated by natural rest, It was only while the engrossing
anxieties connected with the suspension of the chains of Menai
Bridge were weighing heavily upon his mind, that he could not
sleep; and then, age having stolen upon him, he felt the strain
almost more than he could bear. But that great anxiety once fairly
over, his spirits speedily resumed their wonted elasticity.
When engaged upon the construction of the Carlisle and Glasgow
road, he was very fond of getting a few of the "navvy men," as he
called them, to join him at an ordinary at the Hamilton Arms Hotel,
Lanarkshire, each paying his own expenses. On such occasions
Telford would say that, though he could not drink, yet he would
carve and draw corks for them. One of the rules he laid down was
that no business was to be introduced from the moment they sat down
to dinner. All at once, from being the plodding, hard-working
engineer, with responsibility and thought in every feature, Telford
unbended and relaxed, and became the merriest and drollest of the
party. He possessed a great fund of anecdote available for such
occasions, had an extraordinary memory for facts relating to
persons and families, and the wonder to many of his auditors was,
how in all the world a man living in London should know so much
better about their locality and many of its oddities than they did
themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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