17. A Visit to England. IV: 

 Perkins's Adelaide Gallery 



The actors in this scene we have met before in 

 Philadelphia. Jacob Perkins, now in his 67th 

 year, had been in London for 1 3 years. Joseph 

 Saxton, who was 33, had been there for about 4 

 years, and during much of that time he had been 

 working for Perkins in his National Gallery of 

 Practical Science, in Adelaide Street, West 

 Strand. 



To the dozens of mechanical-wonder exhibits 

 that fairly showered from Perkins's hyperactive 

 brain Saxton had added some of his own. His 

 "paradoxical head" was the carved bust of a Turk 

 so contrived that it remained intact even after a 

 sword, wielded by an attendant, had apparently 

 severed the head from the neck. He built a 

 magnet that sustained a "weight of 525 pounds. 

 He devised a huge magnetic needle, several feet 

 long, with a mirror mounted at one end, which 

 by means of a reflected light beam demonstrated 

 (in the words of Joseph Henry) "on a magnificent 

 scale, the daily and hourly variations of the mag- 

 netic force of the earth." 1M 



Saxton's "package express," mentioned below 

 by Sellers, was called by its creator a "locomotive 

 differential pulley." The full-scale system con- 

 templated a railway, a carriage, a horse, and a 

 differential pulley device so arranged that the 



horse, pulling on the disadvantageous end of a 

 rope, could propel the carriage some ten times as 

 far as he moved, and thus at ten times his own 

 velocity. Patented by Saxton in 1832, " ,5 the 

 invention was seized upon by John Isaac Hawkins, 

 who laid down in Regent's Park an experimental 

 railway upon which to try the scheme. 



An indignant correspondent of the London 

 Mechanics' Magazine characterized the contraption 

 as a "friction machine" but the guantlet was 

 caught up by the mechanically inclined Benjamin 

 Cheverton, who, while admitting that Saxton's 

 scheme might not be economically sound, thought 

 that mechanically it was the best locomotive system 

 for railroads that had yet been devised. Perhaps 

 the horse had the last word. At any rate, the 

 idea produced a fortune neither for its inventor 

 nor for its promoter. 160 



A fundamental contribution to the progress of 

 electrical machinery was made by Saxton in 1833 

 when he devised a practical commutating system 

 for a "magneto-electrical machine," which was 

 the prototype of electrical generators." 57 It is 

 possible that his commutator, which consisted of 

 of wire-ends dipping successively into a small pool 

 of mercury, was already at work in the "electric 

 magnetic motor" noticed by Sellers. 



When i went to London in the fall of 1832 I took 

 a letter from father to Jacob Perkins. I found him at 

 the Adelaide Gallery where he seemed to have found 

 his true level, the typical showman of that period. 



184 Joseph Henry, "Memoir of Joseph Saxton, 1799-1873," 

 Biographical Memoirs (Washington: National Academy of 

 Sciences, 1877), vol. 1, p. 295. 



165 British patent 6351, December 20, 1832. 



166 Mechanics' Magazine (London, 1834), vol. 21, pp. 3-6, 

 106-108. 



He received me very kindly, said he would have 

 known me as the man grown from the boy who asked 

 questions and would have an explanation of every- 

 thing. He had at that time Joe Saxton as his right 



167 Ibid., pp. 66, 96, 333. Mechanics' Magazine reprinted Un- 

 report from the Journal <>f tin- Franklin Institute that told of Isaiah 

 Lukens's building a Saxton machine for the Peale Museum and 

 of substitution (by Jacob Green?) of a solid metallic commuta- 

 tor for Saxton's. A careful account of Saxton's machine is in 

 Henry (cited in note 164 above). 



131 



