SMEATON. 
stone was called smaragdite, by M. Saus- 
sure, from some resemblance which it has 
to the emerald. Never crystallized. Its 
texture is foliated. Easily divided into 
plates. The lamin® are inflexible. , Frac- 
ture even. Specific gravity 3. Colour , in 
some cases, fine green ; in others it has the 
grey colour and metallic lustre of mica : it 
assumes all the shades of colour between 
these two extremes. 
SMEATON (John), in biography, an 
eminent civil engineer, was born the 28th 
of May, 1724, O. S. at Austhorpe, near 
Leeds, in a house built by his grandtather, 
and where his family have resided ever 
Since. The strength of his understanding 
and the originality of his genius appeared 
at an early age ; his playthings were not the 
playthings of children, but the tools which 
men employ ; and he appeared to have 
greater entertainment in seeing the men in 
the neighbourhood work, and asking them 
questions, than in any thing else. One day 
he was seen, to the distress of his family, 
on the top of his father’s barn, fixing up 
something like a windmill. Another time 
he attended some men fixing a pump at a 
neighbouring village, and observing them 
cut off a piece of hored pipe, he was so 
lucky as to procure it, and he actually made 
with it a working pump that raised water. 
These auecdotes refer to circumstances that 
are said to have happened while he was in 
petticoats, and most likely before he attained 
his sixth year. 
About his fourteenth and fifteenth year he 
had made for himself an engine for turning, 
and wrought several presents to his friends 
of boxes in ivory or wood, very neatly 
turned. He forged his iron and steel, and 
melted his metal ; he had tools of every sort 
for working in wood, ivory, and metals. 
He had made a lathe, by which he had cut 
a perpetual screw in brass, a thing little 
known at that day, which was the invention 
of Mr. Henry Hindley, of York, with whom 
Mr. Smeaton soon became acquainted, and 
they spCnt many a night at Mr. Hindley’s 
house till day light, conversing on those 
subjects. Thus had Mr. Smeaton, by the 
strength of his genius and indefatigable in- 
dustry, acquired, at the age of eighteen, an 
extensive set of tools, and the art of working 
in most of the mechanical trades, without 
the assistance of any master. A part of 
every day was generally occupied in form- 
ing some ingenious piece of mechanism. 
Mr. Sraeaton’s father was an attorney, 
and desirous of bringing him up to the same 
profession ; Mr. Smeaton therefore came up 
to London in 1742, and attended the courts 
in Westminster Halt ; but finding, as his 
common expression was, that the law did ' 
not suit the bent of his genius, he wrote a 
strong memorial to his father on that sub- 
ject ; whose good sense from that moment 
left Mr. Smeaton to pursue the dictates of 
his genius in his own way. 
In 1751, he began a course of experi- 
ments to ti-y a machine of his invention to 
measure a ship’s way at sea, and also made 
two voyages in company with Dr. Knight, 
to try it, and a compass of his own inven- 
tion and making, which was made magne- 
tical by Dr. Knight’s artificial magnets. The 
second voyage was made in the Fortune 
sloop of war, commanded at that time by 
Captain Alexander Campbell. 
In 1763, he was elected member of the 
Royal Society : the number of papers pub 
lished in their Transactions will show the 
universality of his genius and knowledge. 
In 1759, he was honoured by an unani- 
mous vote with their gold medal, for his 
paper intitled “ An experimental Inquiry 
concerning the natural Powers of Water 
and Wind to turn Mills, and other Machines, 
depending on a circular Motion.” This 
paper, he says, was the result of experi- 
ments made on working models in the year 
1752 and 1753, but not communicated to 
the Society till 1759 ; before which time he 
had an opportunity of putting the effect of 
these experiments into real practice, in a 
variety of cases, and for various purposes, 
so as to assure the Society he had found 
them to answer. 
In December, 1755, the Eddystone light- 
house was burnt down. Mr. Weston, the 
chief proprietor, and flie others, being de- 
sirous of rebuilding it in the most substan- 
tial manner, inquired of the Earl of Maccles- 
field, then President of the Royal Society, 
whom he thought the most proper to re- 
build it ; his Lordship recommended Mr, 
Smeaton. Mr. Smeaton undertook the 
work, and completed it in the summer of 
1759. Of this Mr. Smeaton gives an am- 
ple description in the volume he published 
in 1791. 
Though Mr. Smeaton completed the 
building of the Eddystone light-house in 
1759, a work that docs him so much credit, 
yet it appears he did not soon get into full 
business as a civil engineer ; for in 1764, 
while in Yorkshire, he offered himself a 
candidate for one of the receivers of the 
Derwentwater estate ; and on the thirty. 
