e removed all the men who were engaged in
assisting James Watt and Matthew Boulton in their great works. The numerous
mechanical trades in coining, plating, and other Birmingham manufactures, in
addition to the construction of steam engines, which first turned the waste
of Soho into the largest workshop in Europe, have passed into other hands,
and been transplanted. The manufactory of steam engines, removed to another
site, still exists under the name of the old firm; but within a very recent
period the pleasure grounds in which James Watt often walked, in earnest
converse with the partner to whose energetic and appreciative mind he owed so
much, have been invaded by the advances of the neighbouring town, and sliced
and divided into building lots. Aston Hall and Park must soon suffer the
same fate.

[ASTON VIADUCT: ill14.jpg]

Very soon there will be no vestiges of the homes of these great men, but they
need no monuments, no shrines for the reverence of admiring pilgrims. Every
manufactory in the town of Birmingham is a monument of the genius which first
fully expanded within the precincts of Soho. Thousands on thousands find
bread from inventions there first perfected or suggested.

When Watt explained to Smeaton, the architect of Eddystone Lighthouse and the
greatest engineer of the day, the plan of his steam engine, he doubted
whether mechanics could be found capable of executing the different parts
with sufficient precision; and, in fact, in 1769, when Watt produced, under
the patronage of Dr. Roebuck, his third model, with a cylinder of block tin
eighteen inches in diameter, there were only one or two men capable of giving
the requisite truth of workmanship to air-pump cylinders of two inches in
diameter. At the present day, as before observed in reference to Wolverton,
there are thousands of skilled workmen employed at weekly wages, to whom the
most difficult problems of Watt's early experiments are familiar handiwork.

At Handsworth, too, working for a long life in the Soho manufactories as the
servant, confidential assistant, and friend, lived another remarkable man,
William Murdoch, the inventor of illumination by gas, and the author of the
first locomotive steam engine, and of several important contributions to
practical science, to which justice has scarcely been done.

William Murdoch employed coal gas so early as 1792, for the purpose of
lighting his house and offices at Redruth, in Cornwall, when h