The Hillyars and the Burtons (Volume 3); A Story of Two Families (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. James Burton's Story: The Beginning Of The Bad TIMES. " The Simultaneity of certain Crises in Human Thought; more especially relating to the Eesults of Investigation into Mechanical Agencies," would form a capital title for a book, as yet to be written. As good a title as could be found (if you don't mind a little American, and follow Sir Walter Scott's dictum about the title of books), because no one could by any possibility gather from it what the deuce the book was about, until they had read it. The writer of this book would have to take notice that, for the last hundred years (say), intelligence has been so rapidly circulated, that the foremost thinkers in all civilized countries are at work for the same end at one and the same time. He would have to point out as examples (I merely sketch his work out for him) the simultaneous invention of steamboats on the Clyde andin New York; the nearly simultaneous invention of the Electric Telegraph in England and in America (though Cook and Wheatstone were clicking messages to Camden Town three months before the Yankees got to work). Again, for instance, the discovery of the planet Neptune by Adams and Leverrier; and last, not least, the syn- chronic invention of the centrifugal bucket-lifter for emptying cesspools?claims for which were sent in at the same time by Ebenezer Armstrong, of Salford, and by James Burton, of Church Place, Chelsea. What actually ruined us was, that none of us would go near the machine after it was made, and that it had to be worked by third parties. In his enthusiasm for science, I believe that my father would have gone and superintended, but his proposition was met by flat rebellion of the whole family. My father demanded whether or no he was master in his own house; whereto Emma, ...