HENRY DEACON 159 



which are happily preserved, are similarly 

 numbered; their last paragraph bears the 

 figure 16,041. What an inestimable privilege 

 it was for the boy, Henry Deacon, at the 

 most impressionable period of his life, to have 

 enjoyed the intimacy and to have had the 

 instruction of such a master. 



Misfortune overtook the firm to which 

 Deacon was apprenticed ; the business 

 collapsed, and the works were closed. With 

 the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester 

 Railway, on the I5th September, 1830, a new 

 era dawned on the engineering trades, 

 especially in Lancashire. 



In 1836 James Nasmyth had started his 

 new engineering works on the banks of the 

 Bridgewater Canal, at Patricroft. For five 

 years he had been at work in Manchester, 

 in a building in Dale Street, Piccadilly, where 

 his business had very rapidly grown from the 

 smallest of beginnings. The premises had 

 been an old cotton mill ; a glass cutter 

 tenanted the floor beneath Nasmyth's fitting 

 shop, and one day the floor gave way under 

 the weight of a piece of machinery that was 

 being constructed, and the landlord and 

 tenants agreed that the building was not 

 suitable for the work. The Bridgewater 



