Intelligence is the Basis of Character. — The more Practical the Intelligence the Higher the Development of Character. — The use of Tools quickens the Intellect. — Making Things rouses the Attention, sharpens the Observation, and steadies the Judgment. — History of Inventions in England, 1740-1840. — Poor, Ignorant Apprentices become learned Men. — Cort, Huntsman, Mushet, Neilson, Stephenson, and Watt. — The Union of Books and Tools. — Results at Rotterdam, Holland; at Moscow, Russia; at Komotau, Bohemia; and at St. Louis, Mo. — The Consideration of Overwhelming Import.

The quality of all civilizations depends upon intelligence and character, or morality, in the order stated; for morality springs from intelligence, not intelligence from morality. This is an axiomatic deduction of historic analysis.[2] Nor would it be difficult to prove that practical intelligence is more conducive to a high development of morals than mere theoretical intelligence. For is it not true that the nations most skilled in the useful arts are most highly cultured in morals? And if it be true, it constitutes a potential argument in support of joining to intellectual instruction in the schools a course of training in the elements of the useful arts. And of the fact which forms the basis of this argument there is a logical explanation.

Nothing stimulates and quickens the intellect more than the use of mechanical tools. The boy who begins to construct things is compelled at once to begin to think, deliberate, reason, and conclude. As he proceeds he is brought in contact with powerful natural forces. If he would control, direct, and apply these forces he must first master the laws by which they are governed; he must investigate the causes of the phenomena of matter, and it will be strange if from this he is not also led to a study of the phenomena of mind. At the very threshold of practical mechanics a thirst for wisdom is engendered, and the student is irresistibly impelled to investigate the mysteries of philosophy. Thus the training of the eye and the hand reacts upon the brain, stimulating it to excursions into the realm of scientific discovery in search of facts to be applied in practical forms at the bench and the anvil.

The history of invention and discovery in England affords a striking confirmation of the truth of the proposition that mechanical investigation, with tools in hand, stimulates the intellectual faculties to the highest point of activity and excellence. The germs of nearly all the great inventions in mechanics, the benefit of which the world is now enjoying in such ample measure, are directly traceable to the workshops of Great Britain during the period 1740-1840.

England had then no popular system of education, and the apprentices in her shops were poor, obscure, and, at the start, illiterate. But to those poor apprentices the honor of the great inventions and discoveries of that age is almost wholly due. And it is a notable fact that in the struggle to invent tools and machines, to master the art of mechanism, to steal from Nature her secret forces, and harness and use them for the benefit of man, the toiling workers not infrequently became highly educated, intellectual giants, familiar not alone with special studies, but masters of many branches of learning.

In 1770 the Russian Government, aware of the inferiority of English iron, and deeming Russian iron essential to England, directed the price of iron for export to be raised three hundred per cent. This arbitrary act stimulated invention. Henry Cort, the son of a brick-maker, entered upon a series of experiments, with a view to the improvement of English iron. They occupied several years, and were of a very expensive character—so expensive as eventually to bankrupt the man who made them. They were, however, so successful as to constitute a splendid epoch in the history of metallurgy. In 1786 Lord Sheffield declared that Cort’s improvements in iron, and the steam-engine of Watt, were of more value to Great Britain than the thirteen colonies of America; and in 1862 it was estimated that those improvements had added three thousand million dollars to the wealth of England alone, to say nothing of the rest of the world of iron manufacture throughout which they had been applied. But the only estate secured by this great man as a reward of his genius and a life of toil, as his biographer pathetically remarks, was “the little domain of six feet by two in which he lies buried in Hampstead churchyard.”

In 1715 Sheffield contained two thousand inhabitants, of whom one-third were beggars. Its manufactures consisted of jews-harps, tobacco-boxes, and knives. Sheffield is now the chief seat of the steel manufacture of the world. The initial step in this great transformation scene was taken by Benjamin Huntsman. He was born in 1704, and bred to a mechanical calling. The early years of his life were spent in the occupation of clock making and repairing. He was shrewd, observant, and practical, and he gradually extended the scope of his profession to repairing, and finally to making hand-tools. In this branch of his trade he detected defects in the German steel in common use. He removed from Doncaster to Sheffield, and there in the privacy of his cottage studied metallurgy, and for years labored in secret over the furnace and the crucible. His numerous failures were subsequently found chronicled in masses of metal, in various stages of imperfection, buried in the earth. But when he emerged from his long seclusion he offered to his fellow-mechanics a piece of cast-steel so hard that they declined to work it. He sent the product of his works to France, and the French knives and razors made from it and imported into England drove the Sheffield cutlery from the market. Then the Sheffield cutlers sought to have the export of steel prohibited. Failing in that they stole Huntsman’s secret. This was possible, since the process had not been patented. The story of the theft is told in a little work entitled “The Useful Metals and their Alloys.” It is in substance that one Walker, an iron-founder, “disguised himself as a tramp, and feigning great distress and abject poverty, appeared shivering at the door of Huntsman’s foundery late one night when the workmen were about to begin their labors at steel-casting, and asked for permission to warm himself by the furnace-fire.” He was permitted to enter, and when he left he carried away the secret of the inventor of cast-steel.

Huntsman was a member of the Society of Friends, and it was doubtless on that account that he declined a membership of the Royal Society tendered to him in honor of his great discovery or invention of cast-steel.

David Mushet’s discovery of the extraordinary value of black-band iron-stone in 1801 made Scotland a first-class iron-producing country; and Neilson’s invention of the hot-blast in 1828 revolutionized the processes of iron manufacture by vastly cheapening them. Both these men sprang from the labor class, and both were self-educated. Through almost superhuman efforts they rose from poverty and obscurity to fame. Mushet’s “Papers on Iron and Steel,” in the language of Smiles, “are among the most valuable original contributions to the literature of iron manufacture that have yet been given to the world;” and Neilson was made a member of the Royal Society in recognition of his distinguished ability and the great services he rendered in the cause of the useful arts.

George Stephenson rose from the coal-mine to the summit of renown as a theoretical and practical mechanic. While employed in various collieries as “fireman” and “plugman,” he acquired a thorough knowledge of the engines then in use, taking them apart, repairing, and putting them together again. At eighteen years of age he could not read. In the course of two years attendance at night-schools he learned to read, write, and cipher.[3] Continuing to work in collieries, he employed his leisure hours in studying mechanics and engineering, and in mending clocks and shoes. When thirty-one years of age he was appointed “enginewright” at Killingworth Colliery, at a salary of £100 a year. From this point of time dates his career as an inventor. His first locomotive was completed in 1814, and the “Rocket” made its trial trip in 1829. During the intervening fifteen years Stephenson was largely engaged in the engineering department of railway enterprises as well as in the prosecution of experiments for the perfecting of locomotive engines. The most eminent engineers of the time doubted the practicability of the locomotive, and continued to recommend stationary engines, while Stephenson was leading up to the “Rocket.” The success of the “Rocket” made its inventor the most famous mechanic in the world. For the next fifteen years he was the leading spirit in all the great railway enterprises of England, besides being called repeatedly to Belgium and Spain as consulting engineer. He was offered a fellowship of the Royal Society, also one in the Civil Engineers’ Society, also knighthood by Sir Robert Peel. All these empty honors he declined. “I have to state,” he said, in reply to a request for his “ornamental initials,” “that I have no flourishes to my name, either before or after, and I think it will be as well if you merely say George Stephenson.” He may justly be styled the founder of the existing railway system of the world, which undoubtedly exerts more influence upon civilization than any other one cause or set of allied causes; and to have risen from the humblest station in a colliery to the dignity of founding such a system is sufficient evidence of a gigantic intellectual growth.

James Watt was an extremely fragile child, and hence unable to join in the rude sports of robust children. Thus confined within-doors he early amused himself by drawing “with a pencil upon paper, or with chalk upon the floor.” He was also supplied with a few tools from his father’s carpenter’s shop, “which he soon learned to handle with considerable expertness.” Mr. Smiles, in his biography of Watt, says, “The mechanical dexterity he acquired was the foundation upon which he built the speculations to which he owes his glory, nor without this manual training is there the least likelihood that he would have become the improver and almost the creator of the steam-engine.”[4] In the parrot-power of learning or memorizing Watt was a dull boy, and he left the grammar-school of his native town at an early age, never to return to the “halls of learning.” But while engaged in humble mechanical employments he perfected his education, studying after work-hours. He nearly starved his body, but constantly added to his intellectual stores. He mastered the principles of engineering, civil and military, studied natural history, criticism, art, and acquired several modern languages. In a word, without the aid of the schools, but under the stimulating influence of mechanical investigation and work, Watt became an accomplished and scientific man. When nearly eighty years of age he and Sir Walter Scott met. Referring to the occasion, and speaking of Watt, Sir Walter is reported to have said, “The alert, kind, benevolent old man had his attention alive to every one’s question, his information at every one’s command. His talents and fancy overflowed on every subject. One gentleman was a deep philologist—he talked with him on the origin of the alphabet as if he had been coeval with Cadmus; another a celebrated critic—you would have said the old man had studied political economy and belles-lettres all his life; of science it is unnecessary to speak—it was his distinguished walk.”

These examples of remarkable intellectual development in connection with tool-practice are not phenomenal. From the annals of invention and discovery numerous instances might be cited in support of the proposition of this chapter, that tool-practice stimulates intellectual growth.

In the Artisan’s School at Rotterdam, Holland, an experience of seven years has demonstrated that “boys who are occupied one-half the day with books in the school, and the remaining half with tools in the laboratories, make about as rapid intellectual progress as those of equal ability who spend the whole day in study and recitation.” The testimony of Dr. Woodward, director of the St. Louis (Mo.) Manual Training School, is to the same effect. And in one of his reports he says, “Success in drawing or shop-work has often had the effect of arousing the ambition in mathematics and history, and vice versa.... The habit of working from drawings and to nice measurements has given the students a confidence in themselves altogether new. This is shown in the readiness with which they undertake the execution of small commissions in behalf of the school.... In fact, the increased usefulness of our students is making itself felt, and in several instances the result has been the offer of business positions too tempting to be rejected.”

Of the results achieved by the Imperial Technical School, Moscow, Russia, M. Victor Della-Vos, director, speaks with the utmost confidence. He says, “And now (1878) we present our system of instruction, not as a project, but as an accomplished fact, confirmed by the long experience of ten years of success in its results.” The methods of instruction of the school at Moscow were introduced into all the technical schools of Russia in 1870.

A similar degree of success has attended the Royal Mechanic Art School at Komotau, Bohemia. The management says, “The school has shown the most brilliant proofs of usefulness, and the ends gained have been acknowledged at home and abroad. One proof is that in spite of the hard times all the pupils from Komotau have found occupation in different manufacturing establishments; and another that England, a country unsurpassed in the manufactures of iron and steel, has already sent some students to the school.”

If the pupil in the Manual Training School makes as rapid progress intellectually as the pupil in the public or private school of corresponding grade, it follows that whatever skill in the use of tools is acquired, and whatever knowledge of practical mechanics is gained—these stand for the net gain of the pupil of the new system of education. But much more follows by implication. For if the few pupils of the world’s few manual training schools are making equal intellectual progress with the many pupils of the many schools of the old régime, and making such progress in a little more than half the study-hours, the consideration of overwhelming import is the loss sustained by the millions of pupils being trained under the old system.