FOREIGN MECHANICS. JOHN SMEATON. JOHN SMEATON was born the 28th of May, 1724, at Austhorpe, near Leeds. The strength of his understanding and the origin ality of his genius appeared at an early age. His playthings, it is said by one long well acquainted with him, were not the playthings of children, but the tools men work with, and he appeared to derive more pleasure from seeing the men in the neighborhood work, and asking them questions, than from any thing else. When not quite six years old, he was seen one day, much to the alarm of his friends, on the top of his father's barn, fixing up something like a windmill. Not long after he attended some men fixing a pump at a neighboring village, and observing them cut off a piece of bored pipe, he was so lucky as to procure it, and actually made with it a working pump that raised water. In his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he made for himself an engine to turn rose-work, and presented his friends with boxes turned in ivory or wood. At the age of eighteen he had acquired by the strength of his genius and indefatigable industry, an extensive set of tools, and the art of working in most of the mechanical trades, without the assistance of any master, and this with an expertness seldom surpassed. His father was an attorney, and intended to bring up his son to his own profession; but the latter finding, to use his own words, "that the law did not suit the bent of his genius," obtained his parent's consent that he should seek a more congenial employment. Accordingly he came to London, where he established himself as a mathematical instrument maker, and soon became known to the scientific circles by several ingenious inventions; among which were a new kind of magnetic compass, and a machine for measuring a ship's way at sea. In 1753, he was elected a member of the Royal Society, and contributed several papers to their philosophical transactions. In the succeeding year he visited Holland, travelling mostly on foot and in passage-boats, to make himself master, with greater ease, of the mechanical contrivances of those countries. A few years after his return he was applied to, to rebuild the Eddystone lighthouse, a structure which has rendered his name so celebrated. To more fully illustrate the difficulties he had to surmount, we give in connection a brief history of the lighthouse. Eddystone lighthouse is erected on one of the rocks of that name, which lie in the English Channel about fourteen miles S.S.W. from Plymouth. The nearest land to the Eddystone rocks is the point to the west of Plymouth called the Ram Head, from which they are about ten miles almost directly south. As these rocks (called the Eddystone, in all probability, from the whirl or eddy which is occasioned by the waters striking against them) were not very much elevated above the sea at any time, and at high water were quite covered by it, they formed a most dangerous obstacle to navigation, and several vessels were every season lost upon them. Many a gallant ship which had voyaged in safety across the whole breadth of the Atlantic, was shattered to pieces on this hidden source of destruction as it was nearing port, and went down with its crew in sight of their native shores. It was therefore very desirable that the spot should, if possible, be pointed out by a warning light. But the same circumstances which made the Eddystone rocks so formidable to the mariner, rendered the attempt to erect a lighthouse upon them a peculiarly difficult enterprise. The task, however, was at last undertaken by a Mr. Henry Winstanley, of Littlebury in Essex, a gentleman of some property, and not a reg. ularly-bred engineer or architect, but only a person with a natural turn for mechanical invention, and fond of amusing himself with ingenius experiments, and withal was somewhat of an excentric character. In his house at Littlebury, a visiter would enter a room where he saw an old slipper on the floor; he would kick away the slipper, and a figure with the appearance of a being from the other world would start up before him. He would sit down in a chair, and immediately a pair of arms would clasp him around the waist. He would go into an arbor in the garden, by the side of a canal, and straightway he would find himself afloat in the middle of that piece of water, without the power of getting ashore, until a person in the secret had moved certain machinery. Mr. Winstanley also contrived some ingenious water-works. The fabric erected by this amateur engineer, upon the Eddy. stone, was of timber, sixty feet high, and was four years in build. ing; during which time the workmen suffered much from bad weather, and were once or twice taken off in a state of starvation, after having been for weeks debarred all intercourse with the land. Finding that the waves often rose so high as to bury the lantern, Mr. Winstanley, in the fourth year, enlarged the base and added forty feet to the height; and yet in violent weather the sea would seem to fly a hundred feet above the vane; and it was generally said that a six-oared boat might have been directed on the top of a wave through the open gallery of the lighthouse. In November, 1703, some repairs being required, Mr. Winstanley went down to Plymouth to superintend the performans of them. The general opinion was, that the building would not be of long duration; but the builder held different sentiments. As he was about to embark with his workmen, the danger was intimated to him in friendly manner, and it was remarked that one day or other the lighthouse would certainly overset. To this he replied, that he was so well assured of its stability, "that he should only wish to be there in the greatest storm that ever blew." In this wish he was but too soon gratified; for on the 26th of the month just mentioned, while he was still superintending the repairs, there occurred one of the severest storms within the memory of the oldest inhabitants; being the same which Defoe thought proper to chronicle in a volume under the title of "THE STORM." When the people looked abroad the next morning, not a trace of the Eddystone lighthouse was to be seen. The whole fabric, with its ingenious architect, and many other persons, had perished. As if to show the necessity of instantly rebuilding it, the Winchelsea, a homeward-bound Virginiaman, almost immediately after, struck upon the rock, and was lost, with most of the crew. It was not, however, till 1706, that a new work was commenced. The second Eddystone lighthouse was built as the private undertaking of a Captain Lovett. The immediate architect was Mr. John Rudyard, a linen draper, who, like Winstanley, seems to have had a taste for mechanical pursuits. The building was in the lower part constructed of alternate courses of granite and oak timber; in the upper part, of timber alone: the whole being cased in timber very carefully jointed. The light-room was sixty-one feet above the rock, and the whole height to the ball at the top was ninety-two. The general form was circular, and there were no projections of any kind, in both of which respects it improved upon the former building, which was heavy cornered, with many superfluous ornaments. During the progress of the work, a French privateer took the men upon the lighthouse, together with their tools, and carried them to France, where the captain, it is said, expected a reward for his exploit. While the captives lay in prison, the transaction reached the ears of Louis XIV. who immediately ordered them to be released, and the captors to be |