Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science Part 14

To control a "power that in its tremendous effects seems to emulate the lightning and the earthquake," and to enclose it in a net of the most slender texture, was indeed a grand achievement; and when we consider the many thousand lives which it has been the means of saving from a sudden and cruel death, it must be acknowledged to be one of the n.o.blest triumphs, not only of science, but of humanity, which the world has ever seen. Honours were showered upon Davy, from the miners and coal-owners, from scientific a.s.sociations, from crowned heads; but all must agree with Playfair in thinking that "it is little that the highest praise, and that even the voice of national grat.i.tude when most strongly expressed, can add to the happiness of one who is conscious of having done such a service to his fellow-men." Davy himself said he "valued it more than anything he ever did." When urged by his friends to take out a patent for the invention, he replied,--"No, I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity, and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded by the gratifying reflection of having done so."

The honours of knighthood and baronetage were successively conferred on Davy as a reward for his scientific labours; and the esteem of his professional brethren was shown in his election to the President-ship of the Royal Inst.i.tution, in which, oddly enough, he was succeeded by his old friend Mr. Gilbert, who had first taken him by the hand, and whom he had got ahead of in the race of life.

Davy died at Geneva before he had completed his fifty-first year, no doubt from over-exertion and the unhealthy character of the researches he prosecuted so recklessly. a.s.siduous as he was in his devotion to his favourite science, he found time also to master several continental languages; to keep himself well acquainted with, and also to contribute to the literature of the day; and to indulge his pa.s.sion for fly-fishing, at which he was a keen and practised adept.

Eminent as were the talents of Sir Humphrey Davy, and valuable as his discovery of the safety-lamp has proved, it is but fair to own that his credit to the latter has been very openly denied. Two persons of scientific celebrity have been put forward as the real inventors of the safety-lamp--namely, Dr. Reid Clanny of Newcastle, and the great railway-engineer, George Stephenson. Of Clanny's safety-lamp a description appeared in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1813--that is, ten years before Sir Humphrey made his communication to the Royal Society. However, it was a complicated affair, which required the whole attention of a boy to work it, and was based on the principle of forcing in air through water by the agency of bellows.

Stephenson's was a very different apparatus. In its general principle it resembled Davy's, the chief difference being, that he inserted a gla.s.s cylinder inside the wire-gauze cylinder, and inside the top of the gla.s.s cylinder a perforated metallic chimney--the supply of air being kept up through a triple circle of small holes in the bottom.

Stephenson's claim has, of course, been disputed by the friends and admirers of Sir Humphrey Davy; but Mr. Smile has conclusively proved that his lamp, the "Geordy," was in use at the Killingworth collieries at the very time that Davy was conducting the experiments which led to his invention. It is not to be inferred, however, that Davy knew aught of what Stephenson had accomplished. It seems to be one of those rare cases in which two minds, working independently, and unknown each to the other, have both arrived simultaneously at the same result.

Penny Postage.

SIR ROWLAND HILL.

Penny Postage.

"He comes, the herald of a noisy world, News from all nations lumb'ring at his back,-- Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks; Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks Fast as the periods of his fluent quill; Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive."

COWPER.

The growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of civilization; and there is no more striking ill.u.s.tration to be found of the strides which our country has made in that direction since the century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented.

Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even of the Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of these times and of our own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us, we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our appet.i.te for them is so ravenous, that we wonder how people got on in the days when the postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty was so badly served that, as one old postmaster[D] wrote in self-exculpation of some delay, "when placards are sent (to order the immediate forwarding of some state despatches) the constables many times be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes, wherein," he gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) found it worth while to establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the post office for 10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to the throne, and more than doubled again before the close of the seventeenth century. The country has kept on growing out of system after system, like a lad out of his clothes, and at different times has had new ones made to its measure.

Brian Tuke's easy plan of borrowing farmers' horses on which to mount his emissaries, gave place to regular relays of post-boys and post-horses; and, in course of time, when the robbery of the mails by st.u.r.dy highwaymen had become almost the rule, and their safe conveyance the exception, post-boys were in turn supplanted by a system of stage-coaches, convoyed by an armed guard. This was thought a great advance; and so it was. A pushing, zealous man named Palmer originated the scheme. Amidst many other avocations, he found time to travel on the outside of stage-coaches, for the sake of talking with the coachmen and observing the routes, here, there, and everywhere all over England, and thus matured all the details of his plan from personal experience. "None but an enthusiast," said Sheridan in a rapture of admiration in the House of Commons, "could have conceived, none but an enthusiast could have practically entertained, none but an enthusiast could have carried out such a system."

Still, in spite of the exact.i.tude with which Palmer's scheme was declared to fit the wants of the country, it soon began to be grown out of like the rest. It became too short, too tight, too straitened every way, and impeded the circulation of correspondence,--no unimportant artery of our national system. The cost of postage was too high, the mode of delivery too slow, and the consequence was, that people either repressed their desire to write letters, or sent them through some cheaper and illegitimate channel. Sir Walter Scott knew a man who recollected the mail from London reaching Edinburgh with only a single letter. Of all the tens of thousands of the modern Babylon, only one solitary individual had got anything to say to anybody in the metropolis of the sister kingdom worth paying postage for. "We look back now,"

writes Miss Martineau, "with a sort of amazed compa.s.sion to the old crusading times, when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence! And we feel the same now about the families of Polar voyagers. But, till a dozen years ago, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest cla.s.s in our own country. The fact is, there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except between those who had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle cla.s.s who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast mult.i.tudes of the lower orders who suffered like the crusading families of old, and the geographical discoverers of all times. When once their families parted off from home it was a separation almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as if seas or deserts lay between them and home. If the shilling for each letter could be saved by the economy of weeks or months at first, the rarity of correspondence went on to increase the rarity; new interests hastened the dying out of old ones; and the ancient domestic affections were but too apt to wither away, till the wish for intercourse was gone.

The young girl could not ease her heart by pouring out her cares and difficulties to her mother before she slept, as she can now, when the penny and the sheet of paper are the only condition of the correspondence. The young lad felt that a letter home was a serious and formal matter, when it must cost his parents more than any indulgence they ever thought of for themselves; and the old fun and light-heartedness were dropped off from such domestic intercourse as there was. The effect upon the morals of this kind of restraint is proved beyond a doubt by the evidence afforded in the army. It was a well-known fact, that in regiments where the commanding officer was kind and courteous about franking letters for the privates, and encouraged them to write as often as they pleased, the soldiers were more sober and manly, more virtuous and domestic in their affections, than where difficulty was made by the indolence or stiffness of the franking officer."

Under the costly postal system, the revenue of the post office did not, as it had hitherto done, and should have continued to do, keep pace with the progress of the country. The appet.i.te for communication between distant friends or men of business was evidently either decaying, or finding vent in an unlawful way. The latter was chiefly the case. There were vast numbers of people separated from each other by long weary miles, too many to permit of visits, who could not resist writing to each other,--the doating parent to the child, the lover to his mistress, the merchant to his agents, the lawyer to his clients. Those who could not afford postage, were the very cla.s.s who could not get franks; for the principle was, that those who could best afford postage money should have plenty of franks, which were, of course, quite out of the way of poor, humble folks,--the fat sow had his ear well greased, the lean, starving one had to consume his own fat, like the bear, or go without. The consequence was, that those who were eager to write and could not get letters through the post, found other means of forwarding them to the evasion of the law. There was no limit to the exercise of ingenuity in this direction. Three or four letters were written on one piece of paper, to be cut up and distributed separately by one of the recipients; newspapers were turned into letters by underscoring or p.r.i.c.king with a pin the letters required to form the various words of the communication; some peculiarity in the style of address on the outside was arranged between correspondents, the sight of which was enough to indicate a message, and the letter was then rejected, having served its purpose; and so on, in a hundred other ways, fraudulent means were found of evading the law. Some carriers had a large and profitable business in smuggling letters. In many populous districts the number of letters conveyed by carriers at a penny each in an illegal way far exceeded those sent through the post. In Manchester, for every letter that went by the postman, six went by the carrier; and in Glasgow the proportion was as one to ten. All this was notorious. The most honourable people saw no great harm in cheating the post to send a word of comfort or encouragement to an absent friend,--it was a vice that leaned to virtue's side. But it was a bad thing for the country that people should be driven to such devices, in obeying a natural and proper impulse. The man who began by smuggling letters, might end by smuggling tobacco or brandy; and the system was morally pernicious. All felt the evil, but remedy seemed impossible. As the urgency for a change grew to a head, the man came to effect it,--a man "of open heart, who could enter into family impulses; a man of philosophical ingenuity, who could devise a remedial scheme; a man of business, who could fortify such a scheme with impregnable accuracy"--that man was Rowland Hill.

When quite a young man, on a pedestrian excursion through the lake district, Rowland Hill, pa.s.sing a cottage door, observed the postman deliver a letter to a woman, and overheard her, after looking anxiously at the envelope, and then returning it, say she had no money to pay the postage. The man was about to put it back in his wallet and pa.s.s on, for it was an every-day thing for him to receive such a reply from the poor countryfolk, when Mr. Hill in his goodness of heart, out of compa.s.sion for the woman, stepped forward and paid the shilling, regardless of many shakes of the head, and hints of remonstrance from her, which he interpreted as merely unwillingness to trespa.s.s on a stranger's bounty.

As soon as the postman was out of sight she broke the seal, and showed him why she did not want him to pay for the letter. The sheet was a blank, and the envelope had served as a means of communication between her and her correspondent. It appeared that she had arranged with her brother, that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in that way once a quarter, and thus she had tidings of him without paying the postage.

As he pursued his walk, Mr. Hill could not help meditating on the incident, which had made a deep impression on his mind. He could not blame the poor woman and her brother for the trick they had played upon the post office in order to correspond with each other; and yet he felt there must be something wrong in a system which put it out of their reach, and of others similarly circ.u.mstanced, to do so in a lawful manner. Every country post-master had a budget of touching stories of poor folk who were tantalized with the sight of a letter from some dear one, full, perhaps, of kind words and cheering news, or asking sympathy and condolence in misfortune, or transmitting money to help them in their straits; as well as of countless little frauds of the sort described, which they could not always harden themselves to circ.u.mvent and punish, so piteously eager did the poor souls appear to be to get word of their friends. And yet, in spite of all sorts of frauds, to people in humble life letters came like "angels' visits, few and far between."

Mr. Hill asked himself whether there was no means of lessening the cost of postage, whether the government could not afford to charge a lower rate, or manage to get the work done more cheaply? Keeping his ears and eyes open, always on the alert to pick up a fact as regarded the present, or a hint for the future, examining the mode of carriage and delivery, the routes chosen, and the time occupied, Mr. Hill, after a while, arrived at the conviction, that the postage rates might not only be reduced, but that the transmission of letters might be more quickly performed by a remodelling of the system. He ascertained that the cost of mere transit incurred upon a letter sent from London to Edinburgh, a distance of 400 miles, was not more than a thirty-sixth part of a penny, and that, therefore, there was a margin, under the existing charge, of 11-35/36d. for extra expenses and profit. He observed that the twopenny posts of London and other large towns were found to answer very well, although people, being within easy distances of each other, did not need so much as in the country to correspond in writing, and that the carriers, in spite of the illegality of the traffic, had loads of letters to deliver at a penny each, and that penny paid them for their trouble, as well as their risk of detection. He therefore came to the conclusion, that what was wanted, and what it was quite possible to establish, was a uniform penny postage rate over the whole of the United Kingdom. He calculated that if that were adopted, the number of people then in the habit of writing letters would write a great many more than ever; that others, who had been precluded by the expense from corresponding, would come into the field; and that hundreds of letters forwarded illegally would now pa.s.s through the post, so that the number of letters sent by post would be increased fourfold, and the revenue, at first, perhaps a trifle curtailed, would soon mount up again.

The post-office authorities were greatly shocked and disgusted at so audacious and utopian a proposal. But the public were greatly delighted with it, only doubting whether it was not too good news to be true.

First by means of an anonymous pamphlet, then by direct and personal application to the government, Mr. Hill endeavoured to get his plans taken into consideration--no easy matter, for circ.u.mlocution officials had pa.s.sed from contemptuous indifference to active hostility, as they gradually discovered how formidable an antagonist in the truth and accuracy of his calculations, the sincerity and earnestness of his purpose, they had to deal with. It was a great national cause Mr. Hill was fighting, and he was not to be put down. The people took his side, Parliament granted an inquiry, and the result was a report in favour of his scheme. On the 17th of August 1839--why is not the anniversary kept with rejoicings?--penny postage became the law of the land.

During the last weeks of the year a uniform fourpenny rate was charged by way of accustoming people to the cheap system, and saving official feelings from the rude shock of a sudden descent from the respectable rate of a shilling, to the vulgar one of a penny. On the 10th January 1840 the penny system came into force. At first Mr. Hill availed himself of a suggestion thrown out some years before by Mr. Charles Knight, that the best way of collecting the penny postage on newspapers would be to have stamped covers; but subsequently stamped envelopes were done away with, and queen's heads introduced. The franking privilege, of course, died with the dear postage.

Upon the adoption of the scheme, Mr. Hill received an appointment in the post office in order to superintend its working; but he had an uneasy berth of it. His plan was adopted only in part,--the postage rate was lowered, while the other compensating and essential features were thrown aside; official jealousy of reform showed itself in various attempts to thwart his efforts, and to fulfil its prediction of failure to the scheme. The consequence was, that the immediate results were not so satisfactory as could have been wished. The increase in the number of letters was certainly very great. During the last month of the old system the total number of letters pa.s.sing through the post office was little more than two millions and a half, of which only a fifth were paid letters; while a twelvemonth after the introduction of the new system the total number of letters had risen to nearly six millions per month, of which the unpaid letters formed less than a twelfth part. Very heavy expenses, however, not connected with the new plan, had been incurred; and the consequence was, that the profits of the post office were only a fourth of what they had been. Advantage was taken of this to get Mr. Hill ousted from his post; but, after he had transferred his services for some years to the management of the London and Brighton Railway, the authorities were glad to receive him back again, to place the remodelling of the system in his hands, and to allow him to introduce the other parts of his scheme which had before been neglected.

In this work Mr. Hill was busily engaged for a number of years, and most of his plans were gradually carried out with great advantage to the public. In 1846 a public testimonial of 13,360 was presented to Mr.

Hill in acknowledgment of his distinguished services to the country; and at a later date he was made a Knight of the Bath.

Cheap postage has now been fairly tried, and must be p.r.o.nounced a grand success. It has become part and parcel of our national life, and has been found precious as the gift of a new faculty. We should miss the loss of cheap and rapid correspondence with our friends and acquaintances almost as much as the loss of speech or the loss of sight.

The postman has now to find his way to the humblest, poorest districts, where twenty years back his knock was never heard; and what was once a rare luxury, has now come to be considered a common necessary of life.

Instead of only seventy-six millions of letters pa.s.sing through the post in a year, as in 1838, the number has risen to between seven and eight hundred millions. On the average every individual in England receives twenty-eight letters a-year (in London the individual average is forty-six), in Scotland eighteen, and in Ireland nine.

The gross revenue derived from these sources is over four millions; and some of the railway companies each make more money out of the conveyance of the mails in a year, than the annual revenue of the whole kingdom in the days of William and Mary.

The moral and social effects of the cheap postage are incalculable. It has tended to strengthen and perpetuate domestic ties, to bring the most scattered and distant members of a family under the benign influences of home, and to foster feelings of friendship and sympathy between man and man. Upon the education and intelligence of the people, too, it has had, concurrently with other causes, a marked effect. Many who looked upon the art of writing as only a temptation to forgery, were induced to take pen in hand and master the science of pot-hooks and hangers, for the sake of corresponding with their friends, and of being able to read the letters they received. In 1839 a third of the men and half of the women who were married, according to the registrar's returns, could not sign their own names; in 1857 that was the case with only a seventh of the men, and a fifth of the women; and not a little of this advanced education may be attributed to the impulse given by the introduction of cheap postage.

Nor have the advantages derived from the post office by the great body of the public ended here. It has shown itself the most progressive department of the government, and has undertaken many benevolent branches of work which were never contemplated by Sir Rowland Hill. Thus it carries on an extensive savings-bank system, worked out by Mr. Frank Ives Scudamore, adopted by Mr. Gladstone when Chancellor of the Exchequer, and established by Act of Parliament in 1861. This valuable department, whose operations are now of a very extensive character, keeps a separate account for every depositor, acknowledges the receipt, and, on the requisite notice being furnished, sends out warrants authorizing post-masters to pay such sums as depositors may wish to withdraw. The deposits are handed over to the Commissioners for the reduction of the National Debt, and repaid to the depositors through the post office. The rate of interest payable to depositors is two and a half per cent. Each depositor has his savings-bank book, which is sent to him yearly for examination, and the increasing interest calculated and allowed.

The post office now acts, too, as a life-insurance society, offering advantages to the operative which no other society can offer, and which the public are beginning to appreciate.

In 1869 the entire telegraphic system of the United Kingdom pa.s.sed into the hands of the post office, whose administrators have shown themselves anxious to offer increased facilities to the public for the transaction of business. The number of telegraphic stations has been greatly increased, and the rate reduced at which messages are flashed from one part of the island to the other.

Finally, a recent innovation, made entirely in the interest of the public weal, is the introduction of _Halfpenny Post Cards_. On one side of these missives the sender writes the name and address of his correspondent; on the other, the communication intended for him. The card already bears a halfpenny stamp impressed, and nothing more remains to be done but to deposit it in the nearest office or pillar-post. We think, then, it may fairly be said that the post office has shown itself anxious to "keep abreast" with the ever-increasing wants of the commercial cla.s.ses of Great Britain.

While these pages are pa.s.sing through the press, the following particulars, apparently issued under official direction, have attracted our attention. We append them here, as they cannot fail to interest the reader:--"It appears that there are in the United Kingdom 6 miles 712 yards of _pneumatic tubes_ in connection with the postal telegraphic system (1871). Of these, 4 miles 638 yards exist in London, and 2 miles 74 yards in the provinces--the latter being confined to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Of the total length of tubes now existing, only 2 miles 1324 yards existed prior to the transfer of the telegraphs to the post office; so that no less than 3 miles 1148 yards have been laid since that date; or, in other words, the system has been considerably more than doubled in less than a year. The total length of new tubes ordered and in progress exceeds 3 miles, and when these are completed, the system will be nearly 10 miles in length. All of the tubes in the provinces, and all but two of those in London, are worked on Clark's system. The two which form an exception are those between Telegraph Street and St. Martin's-le-Grand, which are worked on Siemens'

system. The former are made of lead, with a diameter varying from 1-1/4 to 2-1/4 inches--the more frequent size being 1-1/2 inches. The latter are made of iron, and have a diameter of 3 inches. The idea of iron tubes worked on Siemens' principle is derived, we believe, from Berlin, where the system is entirely of this description; and of the new tubes in progress, that from St. Martin's-le-Grand to Temple Bar will be of this kind. All of the tubes now in existence are worked in both directions by means of alternate pressure and vacuum; the motive power, in the shape of a steam-engine, being stationed at the central office, with which the out-stations have communication by this means. It is interesting to note the difference of time occupied by the different tubes in London in pa.s.sing the 'carriers' through from one end to the other--the speed being governed by the length and diameter of the tube, and by the circ.u.mstance whether it is carried in a straight line, or has to encounter sharp curves and bends on its way. The great advantage of this means of communication, for short distance, over the electric is, that the tubes are not liable to sudden blocks of work as the wires are, and that a dozen or more messages may be sent through, at one blow, if desired. For local telegraphs in great towns the pneumatic system is invaluable, and is certain to be greatly extended under the postal administration."

FOOTNOTES:

[D] Brian Tuke, master of the post to King Henry VIII.

The Overland Route.

LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.

The Overland Route.

LIEUTENANT WAGHORN.