r was increased about eleven times. A good
workman could make five or six hundred pounds a day by it. By another
improvement which Washburn adopted the product was increased to
twenty-five hundred pounds a day.

He was now in his element. He always had a partner to manage the
counting-room part of the business, which he disliked.

"I never," said he, "had taste or inclination for it, always preferring
to be among the machinery, doing the work and handling the tools I was
used to, though oftentimes at the expense of a smutty face and greasy
hands."

His masterpiece in the way of invention was his machinery for making
steel wire for pianos,--a branch of the business which was urged upon
him by the late Jonas Chickering, piano manufacturer, of Boston. The
most careless glance at the strings of a piano shows us that the wire
must be exquisitely tempered and most thoroughly wrought, in order to
remain in tune, subjected as they are to a steady pull of many tons.
Washburn experimented for years in perfecting his process, and he was
never satisfied until he was able to produce a wire which he could
honestly claim to be the best in the world. He had amazing success in
his business. At one time he was making two hundred and fifty thousand
yards of crinoline wire every day. His whole daily product was seven
tons of iron wire, and five tons of steel wire.

This excellent man, in the midst of a success which would have dazzled
and corrupted some men, retained all the simplicity, the modesty, and
the generosity of his character. He felt, as he said, nowhere so much at
home as among his own machinery, surrounded by thoughtful mechanics,
dressed like them for work, and possibly with a black smudge upon his
face. In his person, however, he was scrupulously clean and nice, a
hater of tobacco and all other polluting things and lowering influences.

Rev. H. T. Cheever, the editor of his "Memorials," mentions also that he
remained to the end of his life in the warmest sympathy with the natural
desires of the workingman. He was a collector of facts concerning the
condition of workingmen everywhere, and for many years cherished a
project of making his own business a cooeperative one.

"He believed," remarks Mr. Cheever, "that the skilled and faithful
manual worker, as well as the employer, was entitled to a participation
in the net proceeds of business, over and above his actual wages. He
held that in this country the entire people are