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He at once stripped the subject of all unnecessary complications; for he possessed a wonderful faculty of KNOWING WHAT TO DO WITHOUT the result of his clearness of insight into mechanical adaptations, and the accurate and well-defined notions he had formed of the precise object to be accomplished. "Every member or separate machine in the system of block-machinery," says Mr.
"My first thought of the block-machinery," he once said, "was at a dinner party at Major-General Hamilton's, in New York; my second under an American tree, when, one day that I was carving letters on its bark, the turn of one of them reminded me of it, and I thought, 'Ah! my block! so it must be. And what do you think were the letters I was cutting?
Arrived in America, he succeeded in finding employment as assistant surveyor of a tract of land along the Black River, near Lake Ontario. In the intervals of his labours he made occasional visits to New York, and it was there that the first idea of his block-machinery occurred to him.
He then invented a machine for trimmings and borders for muslins, lawns, and cambrics, of the nature of a sewing machine. His famous block-machinery formed the subject of his next patent. It may be explained that the making of the blocks employed in the rigging of ships for raising and lowering the sails, masts, and yards, was then a highly important branch of manufacture.
There he went on improving his old tools and inventing new ones, as the necessity for them arose, until the original slide-lathes used for making the block-machinery became thrown into the shade by the comparatively gigantic machine-tools of the modern school.
The satisfactory execution of the block-machinery brought Maudslay a large accession of fame and business; and the premises in Margaret Street proving much too limited for his requirements, he again resolved to shift his quarters. He found a piece of ground suitable for his purpose in Westminster Road, Lambeth.
A great deal, however, remained to be done before he could bring his ideas of the block-machinery into a definite shape; for there is usually a wide interval between the first conception of an intricate machine and its practical realization.
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