BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM FAIRBAIRN.•
IT is a great pleasure to meet with a biography so modest, so compact, and in every way so worthy of praise as this. The chief duty Mr. Pole had to discharge was to revise and condense the autobiography of Sir William Fairbairn, so far as he had been enabled to write it, and to supplement it, from what Mr. Pole styles "an immense mass of correspondence and papers put into my hands, from information furnished to me by relatives and friends, and from facts within my own knowledge." In short, Mr. Pole has given us Fairbairn the man and also Fairbairn the engineer, and yet not too much of either. Fairbairn was not a Goethe, whose every word or act is of the highest value, because it is certain to be a perfect work of art ; or a Macaulay, every line in whose diary infects us with his own "go ;" or even a Rajah Brooke, whose letters are instinct with the spirit of the Vikings. He was hardly a genius in his own profession ; he had not the calibre of a Watt, of a George, or even of a Robert, Stephenson. He belonged to what Mr. Carlyle calls the "beaver" order of human labourers, and in a mathematical tripos examination among beavers would probably have been Senior Wrangler. Certainly no engineer who was not a pure inventor has done so much for his profession simply by means of the energy which he was able to devote to the improvement of the patents, and the carrying out of the ideas, of others. It will be remembered of him that he was one of the first men to advocate the construction of iron ships, and certainly one of the first constructors of them ; that though Robert Stephenson has the honour of the conception of iron tubular bridges, it was William Fairbairn who worked it out, by building most of these bridges, both in the United King- dom and on the Continent. The benefit Fairbairn did to his pro- fession and the public by improving the driving mechanism of factories, by not only writing about the consumption of smoke, but actually showing how it can be consumed, by almost revolu- tionising hydraulic machinery and the construction of steam- boilers, and by a thousand other things, may be appreciated by any one who chooses to read even the titles of the eighty-five essays and treatises which he published,—not for the sake of publishing, but to inform the public.
One cannot read Sir William Fairbairn's account of his own early days without recalling to mind Lord Shelburne's description of Scotsmen, as given in the last volume of his life. He detested
• The We of Sir William Pairtairn, Bare, .tc. Edited and completed by William Pole, F.R.S. London: Longman and Co. 1877.
them, but admitted their power of " application." Sir William Fairbairn seems to have had all the virtues and none of the vices of the Scotsmen so disliked by the friend of Bentham. He was born at the Border town of Kelso in 1789. He was favoured, like most of his countrymen who rise to eminence, with excellent parents. His father, originally a ploughman, was a bard-working, intelligent, after a manner, self-cultured man, who, although he belonged to the Church of Scotland, was, his son thinks, some-
what sceptical in his religious opinions ; while he was certainly Liberal, almost Jacobinical, in his politics. The Conservative element in the Fairbairn househould was the mother, whose earnest piety was too strong for her husband's mild rationalism, and made him, in appearance at least, a good Churchman ; and whose industry may be judged by the fact that up to the time when William Fairbairn had reached the age of fourteen, she not only manufactured the materials of which her household's clothes were composed, but performed the duties of dressmaker and tailor. Fairbairn was also as well educated as the son of any Scotsman who could not afford to send his boys to Eton could be. His father, Andrew Fairbairn, removed from Kelso to the position of farm-manager near Dingwall, and in both places he had school- masters who not only gave him knowledge, but implanted in him the love of it. Finally, the father, who had all the pride of a Scotch Radical, and would stand no " landlord nonsense," and conse- quently differed with many of his employera, settled as a farm- steward at Percy Main Colliery, near North Shields. There Fair- bairn's life really begins. Hitherto he had been the industrious son of an industrious Scotsman, and an athlete of consider- able strength, but had shown no particular capacity for engineering, beyond that indicated in his saving himself the trouble of carrying an invalid brother by inventing a machine for- taking him about in. At Percy Main he became apprenticed to Mr. Robinson, a millwright, and in a short time was able to assist his parents, while he defended himself against the insults of opponents of his own age by knocking them down. Here he commenced and carried out a course of self-culture during his evenings of leisure. This course was the reverse of Puritanical, or even mechanical, for we find that Tuesday was in his time-table devoted to " reading history and poetry," Wednesday to " re- creation, reading novels and romances," Saturday to " recreation and sundries," and Sunday to "church, Milton, and recreation.' A transient love-affair Fairbairn utilised by learning to write decent English. About the same time he in a measure learned to play the violin, although characteristically he did so because he found' he had not enough of money to construct an orrery. He himself tells a good-natured story of his musical performances :— " The violin became my constant travelling-companion for a number of years. I could play half-a-dozen Scotch airs, which served as an occasional amusement, not so much for the delicacy of execution as for the sonorous energy with which they were executed. For several' years after my marriage, my skill was put to the test for the benefit of the rising generation ; and although duly appreciated by the children,. the fiddle was never taken from the shelf without creating alarm in the mind of their mother, who was in fear that some one might hear it. A dancing-master, who was giving lessons in the country, borrowed the- fiddle, and to the great relief of the family, it was never returned.. Some years after this I was present at the starting of the cotton-mill for Messrs. Gros, Deval, and Co., Wesserling, in Alsace, where we had exe- cuted the water-wheel and millwork (the first wheel on the suspension principle in France). After a satisfactory start, a great dinner was given by M. Gros on the occasion to the neighbouring gentry. During. dinner I had been explaining to M. Gros, who spoke a little English,, the nature of home-brewed ale, which he had tasted and much admired in England. In the evening we had music, and perceiving me admire- his performance on the violin, he inquired if I could play, to which I answered in the affirmative, when his instrument was in a moment in my hands, and I had no alternative but one of my best tunes, the Keel Row,' which the company listened to with amazement, until my career was arrested by M. Gros calling out at the pitch of his voice, ' Top, top, monsieur! by gad, dat be home-brewed music.'" A new and deciding epoch in Fairbairn's history came• when he was removed from his workshop to take charge of the• pumps and steam-engine of Percy Main Colliery. Now he found work to his taste, abundant leisure for reading, and a congenial friend in George Stephenson, who had charge of an engine only a mile or two from Percy Main Colliery. The friendship thus made lasted throughout life, and it is amusing to find the two men when grey-headed veterans challenging each other in bantering style to a wrestling-match. His apprenticeship over, Fairbairn went to New- castle, where he obtained employment, and above all, made the acquaintance of his future wife, then a Miss Dorothy Mar. Here Fairbairn read a little, philandered much, and pictured to himself the true Scottish paradise of the orthodox order. " It was to be a neat parlour, every corner filled with books ; and I painted my smiling wife, with a couple of pledges of our mutual love, as promi- nent objects in the foreground, to give force and colouring to the
picture. Fortunately this " John Anderson my Jo " dream was realised, when Fairbairn, after encountering severe hardships in London, in which he remained for two years, settled in Manchester, and married. After a term of three years as a journeyman engineer, Fairbairn determined to become an employer, and entered into partnership with Mr. James Lillie, a shop-mate, in a " miserable shed, at a rent of twelve shillings a week." Happily, however, the firm had not long to wait for a reasonable measure of success. Their first order was for the renewal of the mill-work in a cotton- factory, and here Fairbairn showed so much ingenuity that the fortune of the partners was made. Fairbairn having now found himself in the swim that leads on to fortune, the interest in his life as one of straggle necessarily decreases, and we do not care to dwell at length upon the vicissitudes of the Fairbairn firm at Manchester and Millwall. It is sufficient to say that, as already noticed, the chief of the firm rose to the highest rank as a mechanical engineer and builder of iron ships and tubular bridges, that he was one of the most popular of Manchester citizens, that he was on one occasion President of the British Association in Manchester, that he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and received various other foreign and home honours, and that finally, having declined knighthood in 1861, he was created a baronet in 1869. In August, 1874, he died, at the age of eighty-five, ready for the last enemy, as he had always been for every difficulty that met him. Mr. Pole's chapters narrating the achievements of Sir William Fairbairn, as well as his two pre- liminary ones, containing a history of mechanical and civil ehgineering, and a survey of the stage of development it had reached when Fairbairn entered upon it, are very interesting, and no one will seek to skip them. Yet one cannot help thinking more of the man than the engineer. He preserved his natural simplicity to the last ; he liked pleasant company, and hated nothing but bigotry and incompetence. All things considered, we cannot do better than conclude a notice of a valuable and honourable life than by quoting two of his roughest letters. The one is to a person who had virtually swindled him :—
" have paid X.— for your defective work and unprincipled
Character. I do not envythe saving you have effected, when attained at the expense of equity and justice, and I offer no apology for remaining, with unqualified contempt, yours, W. FAIRRATotr "
The other is to a young lady-friend who had married a Scotchman so narrow in his views as to have declined, in angry terms, visit- ing Sir William Fairbairn, on the ground that the engineer attended a Unitarian chapel :-
" MY DEAR Mss. —, I do not wish to say a single word against the husband of your choice, but if I am to judge of his character by a letter received this morning, I should certainly arrive at conclusions anything but favourable to his discretion. He may be a good man, and have all the conditions you require, but he is assuredly devoid of the feeling of what is due from one gentleman to another. You may inform Mr. that I do not envy his religious convictions, but I do most earnestly pray that I may never possess them. I may be wrong in this, but I am quite able to judge for myself in matters of faith, without calling upon Mr. — as my father confessor. I regret, my dear madam, that your promised visit to the Polygon should have had such a termi- nation. Both Mrs. Fairbairn and myself retain a lively recollection of your former self, and with every good wish, believe me, most sincerely yours, W. FAIRBAIRN. P.S.—Mr. —'s letter requires no answer."
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