122 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



might be disposed to go out on strike ; and it was a source of the 

 greatest pleasure to the proprietor, "when looking round the 

 warehouses and factories, to see the intelligent, steady energy 

 that pervaded every department, from the highest to the lowest." 

 Other features of the Bridge water factory were the manufacture 

 of small engines for various purposes, in which a large business 

 was done ; the utilization of waste steam for heating and drying ; 

 improvements effected in calico-printing machinery; the furnish- 

 ing of machine tools to the Woolwich Arsenal, which Mr. Nas- 

 myth had found, when he inspected it, "better fitted for a museum 

 of technical antiquity than for practical use in these days of rapid 

 mechanical progress " ; and the supply of rope-making machinery 

 a new line of work to the Russian Naval Arsenal at Nikolaiev, 

 on the Black Sea. 



In 1854 Mr. Nasmyth took out a patent for puddling iron by 

 means of steam, in which the superfluous carbon was removed by 

 the oxygen arising from the decomposition of the steam. About 

 a year afterward Mr. Bessemer brought out his invention for 

 effecting the same purpose by a blast of air, and it totally eclipsed 

 Mr. Nasmyth's process; but Mr. Nasmyth consoled himself with 

 the thought that he was a kind of pioneer of the invention, and 

 Mr. Bessemer offered him a third share of the interest in it. But 

 Mr. Nasmyth " was just then taking down his signboard and 

 leaving business," and thankfully declined the offer. He bought 

 a place near Penshurst in Kent, and naming it Hammerfield, after 

 his hammers and the family crest, retired to it in 1857, when he 

 was forty-eight years old, and spent the rest of his life there. 



Here he indulged himself with complete freedom in the study 

 of astronomy, in which he had been engaged as an avocation for 

 many years. He had made a very effective six-inch reflecting tele- 

 scope as early as 1827, and had instructed Mr. Maudsley in the art 

 three years later. He then made a speculum ten inches in diameter 

 composing the alloy himself of such quality as evoked admira- 

 tion from Mr. Lassell, and cast a thirteen-inch speculum for Mr. 

 Warren de la Rue, whose interest in astronomy had been awak- 

 ened by witnessing his processes. With his ten-inch telescope he 

 began observations in a general way, which gradually became 

 particular. In time he substituted for this a twenty-inch reflector 

 with improvements that made it more convenient to use, and in 

 1842 began his systematic researches on the moon, making care- 

 ful drawings in black- and white of the features that attracted 

 attention, and thereby training his eye for more accurate observa- 

 tion. A series of these drawings, with a large map of the whole 

 visible surface of the moon, was first exhibited at the Edinburgh 

 meeting of the British Association in 1850, and afterward at the 

 Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 where, besides a council 



