Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/125

Armstrong city council should memorialise parliament to open the ports for the free admission of grain, he spoke strongly in favour of the corn laws. He attended to his public duties till within a few weeks of his death, which took place on 2 June 1857, in the eightieth year of his age. He had desired that the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle should select from his library such scientific works as it did not already possess. This wish was so liberally interpreted by his son that in 1858 as many as 1,284 mathematical works and local tracts, most of them of great value, were added to the society’s library, which thus obtained ‘a more complete mathematical department than any other provincial institution in the kingdom’ (, Hist. of the Literary and Philosophical Soc. of Newcastle-upon-Tyne).

The elder Armstrong married Ann, eldest daughter of William Potter of Walbottle House, a highly cultured woman. By her he had two children, a son and a daughter. The son was the future Lord Armstrong. The daughter Ann married on 17 Aug. 1826 (Sir) [q. v.], subsequently a baron of the exchequer; she died at Hastings on 1 June 1828, leaving an only child, John William Watson, of Adderstone Hall, Belford, whose son became her brother’s heir.

William George Armstrong was a delicate child. Left to follow the natural bent of his mind, he never failed to amuse himself with mechanical combinations. When only five or six he showed considerable ingenuity in constructing childish imitations of machines which had attracted his attention. With a few discarded spinning wheels and common household articles he played at pumping water, grinding corn, and doing other useful work. He set his machinery in motion by strings attached to weights hung over the handrail of the staircase, so as to descend freely from the top to the bottom of the house. In the fine summer days he often visited the shop of a joiner, John Fordy, in the employment of his maternal grandfather, William Potter; there he spent many happy hours learning the use of tools, making fittings for his engines, and copying the joiner’s work.

After attending private schools, first in his native city, and afterwards at Whickham, Northumberland, his health sufficiently improved to enable him, in 1826, the year of his sister’s marriage, to enter the grammar school at Bishop Auckland. There he remained for two years as a boarder with the head-master, the Rev. R. Thompson. During this period he paid a visit to the engineering works in that town of William Ramshaw, who, impressed with the intelligent interest the youth took in the machines, invited him to his house. He thus made the acquaintance of Ramshaw’s daughter Margaret, whom he afterwards married.

Meanwhile, upon leaving school, Armstrong became an articled clerk in the office of Armorer Donkin, a solicitor of standing in Newcastle. He applied himself with characteristic earnestness to the study of law, and, having duly served his clerkship, he completed his preparation for the legal profession in London under the guidance of his brother-in-law, W. H. Watson, at that time a special pleader of Lincoln’s Inn. He returned to Newcastle in 1833, and became a partner in the legal firm to which he had been articled, the style being altered to Messrs. Donkin, Stable, & Armstrong. Their business was a flourishing one, and the interests of many important families, estates, and companies were entrusted to their charge. In 1834 Armstrong married Miss Margaret Ramshaw. Three years his senior, she was a lady of great force of character, who sympathised with her husband’s labours, and loyally aided him in philanthropic work.

In later years Armstrong named as his recreations ‘planting, building, electrical and scientific research;’ but in early life he was an enthusiastic fisherman. This pastime afforded opportunities for his inventive genius. He contrived a new bait-basket, and his tackle was continually being improved. Haunting the Coquet from morning to night, he became so skilful that he was known in the district as ‘the Kingfisher.’ While after trout in Dentdale (Yorkshire, 1835), his attention was attracted to an overshot water-wheel, supplying power for some marble works. He observed that only about one twentieth of the energy of the stream was utilised, and from that time his thoughts were engrossed by the possibilities of water-worked machines as motors.

After his return to Newcastle to devote himself to law, scarcely a day passed without his visiting Watson’s High Bridge engineering works. On 29 Dec. 1838 he published in the ‘Mechanics’ Magazine’ the outcome of his observations, in an article ‘on the application of a column of water as a motive power for driving machinery.’ In the autumn of 1839, with Watson’s help, he made an improved hydraulic wheel, with discs fixed on the periphery, arranged to enter successively a tube of corresponding section bent into the arc of a circle. A full account of ‘Armstrong’s water-pressure wheel’ is contained in the ‘Mechanics’ Magazine’ for