Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/130

122 might be disposed to go out on strike; and it was a source of the greatest pleasure to the proprietor, "when looking round the warehouses and factories, to see the intelligent, steady energy that pervaded every department, from the highest to the lowest." Other features of the Bridgewater factory were the manufacture of small engines for various purposes, in which a large business was done; the utilization of waste steam for heating and drying; improvements effected in calico-printing machinery; the furnishing of machine tools to the Woolwich Arsenal, which Mr. Nasmyth had found, when he inspected it, "better fitted for a museum of technical antiquity than for practical use in these days of rapid mechanical progress"; and the supply of rope-making machinery—a new line of work—to the Russian Naval Arsenal at Nikolaiev, on the Black Sea.

In 1854 Mr. Nasmyth took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam, in which the superfluous carbon was removed by the oxygen arising from the decomposition of the steam. About a year afterward Mr. Bessemer brought out his invention for effecting the same purpose by a blast of air, and it totally eclipsed Mr. Nasmyth's process; but Mr. Nasmyth consoled himself with the thought that he was a kind of pioneer of the invention, and Mr. Bessemer offered him a third share of the interest in it. But Mr. Nasmyth "was just then taking down his signboard and leaving business," and thankfully declined the offer. He bought a place near Penshurst in Kent, and naming it Hammerfield, after his hammers and the family crest, retired to it in 1857, when he was forty-eight years old, and spent the rest of his life there.

Here he indulged himself with complete freedom in the study of astronomy, in which he had been engaged as an avocation for many years. He had made a very effective six-inch reflecting telescope as early as 1827, and had instructed Mr. Maudsley in the art three years later. He then made a speculum ten inches in diameter—composing the alloy himself—of such quality as evoked admiration from Mr. Lassell, and cast a thirteen-inch speculum for Mr. Warren de la Rue, whose interest in astronomy had been awakened by witnessing his processes. With his ten-inch telescope he began observations in a general way, which gradually became particular. In time he substituted for this a twenty-inch reflector with improvements that made it more convenient to use, and in 1843 began his systematic researches on the moon, making careful drawings in black and white of the features that attracted attention, and thereby training his eye for more accurate observation. A series of these drawings, with a large map of the whole visible surface of the moon, was first exhibited at the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association in 1850, and afterward at the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851—where, besides a council