We know more of the life of Nasmyth than of any of the other tool builders. Not only did Smiles give an account of him in “Industrial Biography,”[81] but fortunately Nasmyth was induced in later life to write his recollections, which were published in the form of an autobiography, edited by Smiles.[82] With the exception of Sir William Fairbairn, he is the only great engineer who has done this. His intimate knowledge of the rise of tool building, the distinguished part he himself had in it, and his keen and generous appreciation of others, make his record valuable. We have already quoted him in connection with Maudslay, and wherever possible will let him tell his own story.

Unlike most of the early mechanics, James Nasmyth came from a family of distinction dating from the thirteenth century. They lost their property in the wars of the Covenanters and his direct ancestors took refuge in Edinburgh, leaving their impress on the city as the architects and builders of many of its most famous and beautiful buildings. Alexander Nasmyth, the father of James, was a well-known artist, the founder of the Scotch School of Landscape Painting, and a friend of Burns, Raeburn and Sir Walter Scott. He was a landscape architect and enough of an engineer to be included in Walker’s engraving of “The Eminent Men of Science Living in 1807-1808,” reproduced in Fig. 8. He invented the “bow-string” truss in 1794, the first one of which was erected over a deep ravine in the island of St. Helena, and also the setting of rivets by pressure instead of hammering. This last, by the way, was the result of trying to do a surreptitious job on Sunday without outraging the fearsome Scotch “Sawbath.” Alexander Nasmyth was one of the six men on the first trip made on Dalswinton Loch, October 14, 1788, by the steamboat built by Symington for Patrick Miller. This was the second trip of a steam-propelled vessel, the first one being that of John Fitch on the Delaware, August 22, 1787. It was an iron boat with double hulls and made about five miles an hour. It barely escaped being the first iron vessel, as Wilkinson’s iron boat on the Severn was launched less than a year before. The picture of this trial trip which has come down to us was made by Alexander Nasmyth at the time.[83]

James Nasmyth was born in 1808, the tenth in a family of eleven children. Like all of his brothers and sisters, he inherited his father’s artistic tastes. If he had not been an engineer he would probably have become distinguished as an artist. He was ambidextrous, and to the end of his life his skill with his pencil was a constant source of pleasure and convenience. The notebook in which the later record of his mathematical ideas is contained, is crowded with funny little sketches, landscapes, little devils and whimsical figures running in and out among the calculations. The leaf in this book on which he made his first memorandum of the steam hammer is shown in Fig. 23. In 1817, Watt, then in his eighty-first year, visited Edinburgh and was entertained at the Earl of Buchan’s, where Alexander Nasmyth met him at dinner. Watt delighted all with his kindly talk, and astonished them with the extent and profundity of his information. The following day Watt visited Nasmyth to examine his artistic and other works. James Nasmyth, a nine-year-old boy, returning from school, met him at the doorstep as he was leaving, and never forgot the tall, bent figure of “the Great Engineer.”

Nasmyth’s father had a private workshop which was well equipped for those days. Nasmyth played there from childhood and had mastered the use of all the tools while still a schoolboy. “By means of my father’s excellent foot lathe,” he says, “I turned out spinning tops in capital style, so much so that I became quite noted amongst my school companions. They would give any price for them. The peeries were turned with perfect accuracy, and the steel shod, or spinning pivot, was centered so as to correspond with the heaviest diameter at the top. They could spin twice as long as the bought peeries. When at full speed they would ‘sleep,’ that is, turn round without a particle of waving. This was considered high art as regarded top-spinning.”[84] He established a brisk business in these, in small brass cannon, and especially in large cellar keys, which he converted into a sort of hand cannon, with a small touch-hole bored into the barrel and a sliding brass collar which allowed them to be loaded, primed, and then carried around in the pocket.

He haunted all the shops and foundries in the neighborhood, making friends with the skilled workmen and absorbing the mysteries of foundry work, forging, hardening and tempering, and those arts which were handed down from man to man. Speaking of Patterson’s old shop, Nasmyth says: “To me it was the most instructive school of practical mechanics. Although I was only about thirteen at the time, I used to lend a hand, in which hearty zeal made up for want of strength. I look back on these days, especially to the Saturday afternoons spent in the workshops of this admirably conducted iron foundry, as a most important part of my education as a mechanical engineer. I did not read about such things; for words were of little use. But I saw and handled, and thus all the ideas in connection with them became permanently rooted in my mind....

“One of these excellent men, with whom I was frequently brought into contact, was William Watson. He took special charge of all that related to the construction and repairs of steam engines, waterwheels, and millwork generally. He was a skillful designer and draughtsman and an excellent pattern maker. His designs were drawn in a bold and distinct style, on large deal boards, and were passed into the hands of the mechanics to be translated by them into actual work.”[85]

After telling of various workmen, Nasmyth says: “One of the most original characters about the foundry, however, was Johnie Syme. He took charge of the old Boulton & Watt steam engine, which gave motion to the machinery of the works.... Johnie was a complete incarnation of technical knowledge. He was the Jack-of-all-trades of the establishment; and the standing counsel in every out-of-the-way case of managing and overcoming mechanical difficulties. He was the superintendent of the boring machines. In those days the boring of a steam engine cylinder was considered high art in excelsis! Patterson’s firm was celebrated for the accuracy of its boring.

“I owe Johnie Syme a special debt of gratitude, as it was he who first initiated me into that most important of all technical processes in practical mechanism—the art of hardening and tempering steel.”[86] From another of his friends, Tom Smith, Nasmyth picked up the rudiments of practical chemistry, as it was then understood.

Traveling with his father from time to time, he had good opportunities for meeting many distinguished engineers and of visiting the great iron works, the most famous of which was the Carron Iron Works. “The Carron Iron Works,” he writes, “are classic ground to engineers. They are associated with the memory of Roebuck, Watt, and Miller of Dalswinton. For there, Roebuck and Watt began the first working steam engine; Miller applied the steam engine to the purposes of navigation, and invented the Carronade gun. The works existed at an early period in the history of British iron manufacture. Much of the machinery continued to be of wood. Although effective in a general way it was monstrously cumbrous. It gave the idea of vast power and capability of resistance, while it was far from being so in reality. It was, however, truly imposing and impressive in its effect upon strangers. When seen partially lit up by the glowing masses of white-hot iron, with only the rays of bright sunshine gleaming through the holes in the roof, and the dark, black, smoky vaults in which the cumbrous machinery was heard rumbling away in the distance—while the moving parts were dimly seen through the murky atmosphere, mixed with the sounds of escaping steam and rushes of water; with the half-naked men darting about with masses of red-hot iron and ladles full of molten cast-iron—it made a powerful impression upon the mind.”[87]

By the time he was seventeen Nasmyth had become a skilled model maker. While he was still attending lectures in the Edinburgh School of Arts and in the University, he had built up quite a brisk business in engine models, for which he charged £10 each. He made his brass castings in his own bedroom at night, arranging a furnace in his grate. He had a secret box of moulding sand and rammed his patterns gently so as not to awaken his father who slept below. In the morning the room would be all clean and gave no indication that it was serving for a foundry as well as a bedroom, and by some miracle he managed to complete his practical education without burning down the house. In 1827, when he was nineteen, he built a steam road carriage which ran about the streets of Edinburgh for many months, but the condition of the Scotch roads was such as to make a machine of this kind almost useless. When he went to London he broke it up, and sold the engine and boiler for £67.

From inspecting the engines constructed by different makers, Nasmyth became impressed with the superiority of those turned out by the Carmichaels of Dundee. “I afterwards found,” he writes, “that the Carmichaels were among the first of the Scottish engine makers who gave due attention to the employment of improved mechanical tools, with the object of producing accurate work with greater ease, rapidity, and economy, than could possibly be effected by the hand labor of even the most skillful workmen. I was told that the cause of the excellence of the Carmichaels’ work was not only in the ability of the heads of the firm, but in their employment of the best engineers’ tools. Some of their leading men had worked at Maudslay’s machine shop in London, the fame of which had already reached Dundee, and Maudslay’s system of employing machine tools had been imported into the northern steam factory.”[88] These reports built up an ambition, which developed into a passion, to go to London and work in Maudslay’s shop under “this greatest of mechanics.”

Consequently, in the spring of 1829, he went with his father to London and made application to Maudslay to work with him as an apprentice. Maudslay told them in the friendliest way, but unmistakeably, that he had had no satisfaction from gentleman apprentices and that he had definitely settled that he would never employ one again. He showed them about his shop, however, and began to melt when he saw the boy’s keen interest and intelligent appreciation of everything about him. Nasmyth had brought with him some of his drawings and one of his engine models. At the end of the visit he mustered courage to ask Maudslay if he would look at them. The next day Maudslay and his partner looked them over. “I waited anxiously. Twenty long minutes passed. At last he entered the room, and from a lively expression in his countenance I observed in a moment that the great object of my long cherished ambition had been attained! He expressed, in good round terms, his satisfaction at my practical ability as a workman engineer and mechanical draughtsman. Then, opening the door which led from his library into his beautiful private workshop, he said, ‘This is where I wish you to work, beside me, as my assistant workman. From what I have seen, there is no need of an apprenticeship in your case.’[89]

“Mr. Maudslay seemed at once to take me into his confidence. He treated me in the most kindly manner—not as a workman or an apprentice, but as a friend. I was an anxious listener to everything that he said; and it gave him pleasure to observe that I understood and valued his conversation. The greatest treat of all was in store for me. He showed me his exquisite collection of taps and dies and screw-tackle, which he had made with the utmost care for his own service. They rested in a succession of drawers near to the bench where he worked....

“He proceeded to dilate upon the importance of the uniformity of screws. Some may call it an improvement, but it might almost be called a revolution in mechanical engineering which Mr. Maudslay introduced. Before his time no system had been followed in proportioning the number of threads of screws to their diameter. Every bolt and nut was thus a specialty in itself, and neither possessed nor admitted of any community with its neighbors. To such an extent had this practice been carried that all bolts and their corresponding nuts had to be specially marked as belonging to each other....

“None but those who lived in the comparatively early days of machine manufacture can form an adequate idea of the annoyance, delay, and cost of this utter want of system, or can appreciate the vast services rendered to mechanical engineering by Mr. Maudslay, who was the first to introduce the practical measures necessary for its remedy.”[90]

There was no place in all England where Nasmyth could have learned more. He was in close personal contact with one of the best mechanics in the world. He had Maudslay’s warmest personal interest and heard all the discussions of the engineers and famous men who used to come to the workshop. “Among Mr. Maudslay’s most frequent visitors was Gen. Sir Samuel Bentham, Mr. Barton, director of the Royal Mint, Mr. Bryan Donkin, Mr. Faraday, and Mr. Chantrey, the sculptor. As Mr. Maudslay wished me to be at hand to give him any necessary assistance, I had the opportunity of listening to the conversation between him and these distinguished visitors. Sir Samuel Bentham called very often. He had been associated with Maudslay during the contrivance and construction of the block machinery. He was brother of the celebrated Jeremy Bentham, and he applied the same clear common sense to mechanical subjects which the other had done to legal, social and political questions.

“It was in the highest degree interesting and instructive to hear these two great pioneers in the history and application of mechanics discussing the events connected with the block-making machinery. In fact, Maudslay’s connection with the subject had led to the development of most of our modern engineering tools. They may since have been somewhat altered in arrangement, but not in principle. Scarcely a week passed without a visit from the General. He sat in the beautiful workshop, where he always seemed so happy. It was a great treat to hear him and Maudslay fight their battles over again, in recounting the difficulties, both official and mechanical, over which they had so gloriously triumphed.”[91]

While with Maudslay, Nasmyth designed and built an index milling machine for finishing the sides of hexagon nuts. After Maudslay’s death in 1831, he remained a few months with Mr. Field to finish some work in hand, and then left to start in business for himself. Nasmyth speaks in the kindliest terms of Mr. Field, and doubtless would have had more to say about him if his relationship with Maudslay had not been so close.

Joshua Field was a man to be appreciated. He was a draftsman at the Portsmouth dockyard when the block machinery was being built, and showed so clear a grasp of the work in hand that Bentham had him transferred to the Admiralty at Whitehall. In 1804 he left the service and went to Maudslay’s, when he was at Margaret Street and employed about eighty men. He rose steadily, was taken into partnership in 1822, at the same time as Maudslay’s eldest son, and was the senior partner after Maudslay’s death when the firm was at the height of its long prosperity. He was one of those consulted in the laying of the Atlantic cable and in the designing of machinery for doing it.

“Mr. Field was one of the founders of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the origin of which was very humble. About the year 1816, Mr. Henry Robinson Palmer, who was then a pupil of the late Mr. Bryan Donkin, suggested to Mr. Field the idea of forming a society of young engineers, for their mutual improvement in mechanical and engineering science; and the earliest members were Mr. Henry Robinson Palmer, Mr. William Nicholson Maudslay, and Mr. Joshua Field. To these three were shortly added Mr. James Jones, Mr. Charles Collinge, and Mr. James Ashwell. They met occasionally in a room hired for the purpose, and to them were soon attracted others having the same objects in view. Mr. Field was the first chairman of the Institution, being elected to that post on the sixth of January, 1818. Subsequently he became, in 1837, a vice-president, an office he filled until he was elected president in 1848, and in 1849, and he continued to the last to be an active member and warm supporter of the Institution.”[92] Mr. Field did everything in his power to give Nasmyth a start, allowing him to make the castings for some machine tools which he proposed to finish later for use in his own plant.

Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh and took temporary quarters in a little outbuilding 16 feet by 24 feet, within a few minutes’ walk of his father’s home. He hired one mechanic, Archie Torry, who remained with him the rest of his life and became one of his principal foremen. His power plant consisted of one husky laborer who turned a crank. Together they finished up the castings brought from Maudslay & Field’s, making first a lathe, then a planer 20 inches by 36 inches, and with these a few boring and drilling machines. He carried the expense of this by doing some work for an enthusiastic inventor of a wonderful rotary steam engine. Nasmyth honorably informed the inventor that his machine would not work, but as the inventor was bent on spending his money, Nasmyth executed the work for him, and the proceeds enabled him to build his machinery.

In a few months he was ready to begin. He went to Liverpool and Manchester looking for a location, and soon made many powerful friends in both cities. In 1831 he rented a single floor in Manchester, 27 feet by 130 feet, with power, and ten days later Archie followed with the tools. It was a particularly fortunate time and place for starting such an enterprise. The success of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, just opened, created a great demand for locomotives and for machine tools. Orders came in fast, and the planer especially was busy all the time. If its profits were anything like those of Clement’s planer, it must have been a very heavy earner. As the business grew, Nasmyth added more tools, always making them himself and steadily improving their design and construction.

He soon outgrew his quarters; and in 1836 he secured land at Patricroft, a mile or so outside of the city, admirably located between the new railway and the Bridgewater Canal, and built a new plant which he called the Bridgewater Foundry. In the new foundry he used the first worm-geared tilting pouring-ladle. As it eliminated a common and very dangerous source of accidents, he refrained from patenting it and in a short time its use was universal. He formed a partnership with Holbrook Gaskell, who took the business end of the enterprise, and the firm of Nasmyth & Gaskell had a very prosperous career until, sixteen years later, Mr. Gaskell was forced to retire on account of ill health.

Nasmyth built machine tools of all kinds. In 1836 he invented the shaper which was long known as “Nasmyth’s Steel Arm.”

Descriptions and illustrations of some of Nasmyth’s tools may be found at the end of his autobiography,[93] in Buchanan’s “Mill Work,”[94] and in the American Machinist.[95] He patented but few of his inventions, relying for protection mainly upon the reputation which he soon established. “In mechanical structures and contrivances,” he says, “I have always endeavored to attain the desired purpose by the employment of the fewest parts, casting aside every detail not absolutely necessary, and guarding carefully against the intrusion of mere traditional forms and arrangements. The latter are apt to insinuate themselves, and to interfere with that simplicity and directness of action which is in all cases so desirable a quality in mechanical structures. Plain common sense should be apparent in the general design, as in the form and arrangement of the details; and a character of severe utility pervade the whole, accompanied with as much attention to gracefulness of form as is consistent with the nature and purpose of the structure.”[96] This was written in later life. While his later work was in thorough conformity with these principles, it was some time before he freed himself from the tradition of Greek style in machine frames. He was one of those, however, who led the way into the more correct practice indicated above, though he was probably not so influential in this direction as Whitworth.

His greatest invention unquestionably was that of the steam hammer, which came about in an interesting way. He had built a number of locomotives for the Great Western Railway. This railway operated a line of steamers from Bristol to New York and was planning a ship larger and faster than any then built, to be called “The Great Britain.” It was to be a side-wheeler and the plans called for a large and heavy paddle shaft, 30 inches in diameter. Mr. Humphries, its designer, wrote to Nasmyth asking for help, saying so large a shaft could not be forged with any of the hammers then in use. Nasmyth saw at once the limitations of the prevailing tilt hammer—which was simply a smith’s hand hammer, enlarged, with a range so small that it “gagged” on large work,—and that the design of large hammers must be approached in an entirely new way. “The obvious remedy was to contrive some method by which a ponderous block of iron should be lifted to a sufficient height above the object on which it was desired to strike a blow, and then to let the block fall down upon the forging, guiding it in its descent by such simple means as should give the required precision in the percussive action of the falling mass. Following up this idea,” he writes, “I got out my ‘Scheme Book,’ on the pages of which I generally thought out, with the aid of pen and pencil, such mechanical adaptations as I had conceived in my mind, and was thereby enabled to render them visible. I then rapidly sketched out my steam hammer, having it all clearly before me in mind’s eye. In little more than half an hour after receiving Mr. Humphries’s letter narrating his unlooked-for difficulty, I had the whole contrivance, in all its executant details, before me in a page of my Scheme Book, a reduced photograph copy of which I append to this description. (See Fig. 23.) The date of this first drawing was the twenty-fourth of November, 1839....”[97]

“Rude and rapidly sketched out as it was, this, my first delineation of the steam hammer, will be found to comprise all the essential elements of the invention.[98] Every detail of the drawing retains to this day the form and arrangement which I gave to it forty-three years ago. I believed that the steam hammer would prove practically successful; and I looked forward to its general employment in the forging of heavy masses of iron. It is no small gratification to me now, when I look over my rude and hasty first sketch, to find that I hit the mark so exactly, not only in the general structure but in the details; and that the invention as I then conceived it and put it into shape, still retains its form and arrangements intact in the thousands of steam hammers that are now doing good service in the mechanical arts throughout the civilized world.”[99]

The shaft, however, was never built. Screw propulsion was just coming into use; the design of the vessel was changed, and the whole scheme lapsed. A year or so later, M. Schneider, the French iron master of Creuzot, and his engineer, M. Bourdon, visited Bridgewater while Nasmyth happened to be away. Mr. Gaskell, after taking them about the plant, showed them the Scheme Book and pointed out the sketch of the hammer, telling them of the purpose for which it was intended. They were impressed with it and took careful notes and sketches of its details. Nasmyth was informed of their visit upon his return, but knew nothing of their having taken sketches of the hammer.

In 1842 Nasmyth visited France, and was cordially received at Creuzot and shown about the works. “On entering,” he writes, “one of the things that particularly struck me was the excellence of a large wrought-iron marine engine single crank, forged with a remarkable degree of exactness in its general form. I observed also that the large eye of the crank had been punched and drifted with extraordinary smoothness and truth. I inquired of M. Bourdon ‘how that crank had been forged?’ His immediate reply was, ‘It was forged by your steam hammer!’... He told me ... that he had taken careful notes and sketches, and that among the first things he did after his return to Creuzot was to put in hand the necessary work for the erection of a steam hammer.... M. Bourdon conducted me to the forge department of the works, that I might, as he said, ‘see my own child’; and there it was, in truth—a thumping child of my brain.”[100] Fortunately it was still time to save his patent rights. He moved rapidly and in June, 1842, two months after his visit to Creuzot, a patent was obtained.[101]. The steam hammer soon found its way into all the large shops of the world and greatly increased Nasmyth’s already comfortable fortune. Nasmyth transferred his United States patent to S. V. Merrick of Philadelphia, who introduced the hammer into the American iron works.

Besides work on the hammer and machine tools, Nasmyth made a number of inventions of interest. While still with Maudslay he invented the flexible shaft made of a coiled spring, and speaks with amusement at his finding the same idea in a dental engine many years later credited as an American invention. He invented the ball-and-socket joint for shafting hangers and also the single wedge gate valve. His steam piledriver, an adaptation of the steam hammer, was the invention in which he seems to have taken the most satisfaction. He was working out a method of puddling iron with a blast of steam when he was eclipsed by Bessemer’s brilliant invention, in 1855, of the air blast. Nasmyth was a member of the Small Arms Committee which remodeled the Small Arms Factory at Enfield. His connection with this will be taken up in the consideration of the rise of interchangeable manufacture.

Nasmyth retired from business in 1856, bought an estate in Kent, and spent the remainder of his life in travel and in his studies in astronomy. He was deeply interested in this study from boyhood. Before he was twenty he had built an excellent 6-inch reflecting telescope, and it was he who aroused Maudslay’s interest in the subject. He had a 10-inch telescope at Patricroft and a large one at Hammersfield. He began his study of the moon in 1842, and received a medal for his work at the Exhibition of 1851. His book, “The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite,” published in 1874, in conjunction with James Carpenter, the result of his thirty-two years of work, is authoritative today.

Nasmyth died in 1890 at the age of eighty-two. He was much more than a splendid mechanic. His personal charm and quality of mind can best be appreciated by reading his own story. This chapter will have served its purpose if it induces the reader to read the autobiography from which we have quoted so freely.