IxXXvi REPORT — 1875. 



of the power-loom, which led eventually to the substitution of steam for manual 

 labour, and enabled a boy with a steam-loom to do fifteen times the work of 

 a* man with a hand-loom. 



Eor complex ingenuity few machines wiU compare with those used in the 

 manufacture of lace and bobbin net. Hammond, in 17G8, attempted to adapt 

 the stocking-frame to this manufacture, which had hitherto been conducted 

 by hand. It remained for John Heathcote to complete the adaptation in 1809, 

 and to revolutionize this branch of industry, reducing the cost of its produce 

 to one-fortieth of what the cost had been before Heathcote's improvements 

 were effected. 



- Most of these ingenious machines were in use before Watt's genius gave the 

 world a new motive power in the steam-engine ; and, had the steam-engine 

 never been perfected, they would still have enormously increased the pro- 

 ductive power of mankind. Water-power was applied to many of them ; in 

 the first silk-thread mill erected at Derby in 1738, 318 million yards of silk 

 thread were spun daily with one water-wheel. 



These are happier times for inventors : keen competition among manufac- 

 turers does not let a good invention lie idle now. That which was rejected 

 by old machines as waste is now worked up into useful fabrics by new ones. 

 Prom aU parts of the world new products come — -jute from India, flax from 

 New Zealand, andmany others which demand new adaptations of old machines, 

 or new and untried mechanical arrangements to utilize them. Time would 

 fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate one tithe of these rare combinations 

 of mechanical skill ; and, indeed, no one will ever appreciate the labour and 

 supreme mental efi'ort required for their construction who has not himself seen 

 them and their wondi'ous achievements. 



Steamboats, the electric telegraph, and railways are more within the cog- 

 nizance of the world at large ; and the progress that has been made in them in 

 little more than one generation is better known and appreciated. 



It is not more than forty years since one of our scientific men, and an able 

 one too, declared at a meeting of this Association that no steamboat would 

 ever cross the Atlantic, founding his statement on the impracticability, in his 

 view, of a steamboat carrying sufficient coal (profitably, I presume) for the 

 voyage. Yet soon after this statement was made, the ' Sirius ' steamed to 

 Few York in seventeen days*, and was soon followed from Bristol by the 

 ' Great Western,' which made the homeward passage in thirteen days and a 

 half; and with these voyages the era of steamboats may be said to have 

 begun. Like most important inventions, that of the steamboat was a long 

 time in assuming a form capable of being profitably utilized ; and even when 

 it had assumed such a fonn, the objections of commercial and scientific men 

 had still to be overcome. 



* Fii'st steamer crossed the Atlantic by steam alone in 1838, 



