Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/119

Rh and prosecuted, must have constituted a kind of normal school for artisans in all the other crafts subsequently introduced into the town. Indeed. Matthew Boulton and his copartners made Soho a kind of Mecca to Mechanism. From it has radiated a power which no mechanical dynamics can measure—a power which has taken rank with the great moral forces of mankind. When Boulton planted his establishment at Soho, water and wind were the only motive forces that propelled wheel or keel the world around. For years he propelled his machinery by water alone. Watt came with his great idea. He came to the right place and the right man; and the two, representing the best perceptive and executive faculties ever united in a private firm, worked out and gave to mankind that million-handed giant of the world, the Steam Engine What is Mecca or a hundred Mahomets to that mechanical power for human progress and happiness! Currens e Soho, the steam-engine was soon succeeded by another currency from the same establishment. The copper coinage of England up to Boulton's day had not only been coarse and common, but ununiform and uncertain. Boulton set at work to devise machinery for the manufacture of better pennies. He succeeded in producing them greatly improved in style and material; striking off twenty tons of copper, or 716,000 pennies a week