280 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
successful application for these tires in connection with his road- 
steamer. At this period of comparative leisure, he read much, and 
probably laid the foundation for that great cultivation and wide 
range of information which were so remarkable in the later years 
of his life. 
When railway business revived, he did not seek to re-enter on 
the practice of this branch of his profession, which had no attrac- 
tions for him, partaking as it does more of the nature of commerce 
than science. As a boy he nearly lost his place in the workshop 
by refusing to repeat some operation with which he was familiar, 
and as a man he never cared for the familiar routine which is 
most profitable. He sent in a creditable design for the great 
Exhibition of 1851, and a little invention of his, “the fountain 
pen,’’ was sold in the building. In 1852 he went as agent for 
an engineering firm to Java, to erect some sugar machinery, and 
here he found a new field in which his powers could be worthily 
exerted. Although without capital, he was offered and he accepted 
a partnership in an important house shortly after his arrival. He 
then designed machinery for the manufacture of sugar so greatly 
superior to anything previously in use in the island, as to give 
a great impulse to the production of that commodity; and up to 
the time of his death he continued to supply the best machinery 
used in Java, where his honourable character commanded the 
unbounded confidence of the Dutch planters. 
We owe perhaps the most universally useful of Mr Thomson’s 
inventions to the refusal of the Dutch authorities to allow him 
to erect a waterside- crane, unless it could be removed every night, 
lest the natives should stumble over it. Mr Thomson hereupon 
designed the first portable steam-crane. He did not patent the 
idea, but Messrs Chaplin, who made the first small steam-crane 
for him, had, when he next re-visited England, two large factories 
engaged in the manufacture of these now indispensable appliances. 
The invention consisted mainly in employing the boiler as a 
counterpoise. In 1860 he re-visited Europe, to order a hydraulic 
dock consisting of a few types or classes of plates, each plate being- 
interchangeable with every other plate of its class. He by this 
plan avoided the expense of double erection in England and 
abroad. The first dock thus made sunk when erected, in Mr 
