, a very celebrated mechanic and civil engineer, was born May 28,
, a very celebrated mechanic and
civil engineer, was born May 28, 1724, at Austhorpe near
Leeds, where his relations still reside. From his early
childhood he discovered a strong propensity to the arts in
which he afterwards excelled, was more delighted in talking with workmen than in playing with other boys; and
surprised, or occasionally alarmed his friends by mechanical efforts disproportioned to his years; sometimes being
at the summit of a building to erect a kind of mill, and
sometimes at the side of a well, employed in the construction of a pump. When he was about fourteen or fifteen
he had constructed a lathe to turn rose-woik, and presented many of his friends with specimens of its operation
in wood and ivory. “In the year 1742,
” says his biographer, “I spent a month at his father’s house, and being
intended myself for a mechanical employment, and a few
years younger than he was, J could not but view his works
with astonishment. 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, and which, I believe, was the invention of Mr.
Henry Hindley of York, with whom I served my apprenticeship. Mr. Hindley was a man of the most communicative disposition, a great lover of mechanics, and of the
most fertile genius. Mr. Srneaton soon became acquainted
with him, and they spent many a night at Mr. Hindley ‘s
house, ’till day-light, conversing on those subjects.
”