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OF THE

MOST EMINENT

AMERICAN MECHANICS:

ALSO,

LIVES OF DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN MECHANICS;

TOGETHER WITH A COLLECTION OF

ANECDOTES, DESCRIPTIONS, ETC., ETC.,

RELATING TO THE MECHANIC ARTS.

ILLUSTRATED BY FIFTY ENGRAVINGS.

BY HENRY HOW E.

"The due cultivation of practical manual arts in a nation, has a greater tendency
to polish and humanize mankind, than mere speculative science, however refined
and sublime it
may
be."

NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY W. F. PECKHAM.

HITCHCOCK & STAFFORD, PRINT., NEW HAVEN.

1840.

ENTERED,

According to Act of Congress, in the year 1839, by

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In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District

of New York.

SBD 9483

PREFACE.

u

It is singular that so little interest should heretofore have been taken in the history of those to whom we are indebted for the arts and inventions constituting the glory of our time. The pen has ever been more ready to record the brilliant than the useful. To this is to be attributed the neglect heretofore manifested in relation to these subjects. Indeed, so little regard has been evinced, that a late foreign writer, who happened incidentally to be thrown upon" some incidents in the life of an eminent mechanician, considered it due to the fastidiousness of public faste, to claim indulgence for diverging into so obscure and tasteless a path of biographical research. But, thanks to the more general diffusion of knowledge and the light of Christianity, this false taste is rapidly dissipating, and mankind are beginning to appreciate the labors of those to whom we are indebted for our present unparalleled state of intellectual and social advance

ment.

The memoirs of the benefactors of our race, in past ages, are often histories of wrong; and those who have labored in the department of mechanical invention, may truly be termed the martyrs of civilization! The causes producing this state of

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