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Updated: June 22, 2025
As we have already seen in the memoirs of Nasmyth, Roberts, and Whitworth, Manchester offered great attractions for highly-skilled mechanics; and it was as fortunate for Manchester as for William Fairbairn himself that he settled down there as a working millwright in the year 1814, bringing with him no capital, but an abundance of energy, skill, and practical experience in his trade.
But at the moment when England was just plunging into the Seven Years' War the enterprise of a duke and a millwright solved this problem of carriage, and started the country on a mighty course of industry which was to change both its social and its political character.
Benjamin Franklin Hunt, a distinguished lawyer of Charleston, upon whose plantation, the machine was built, and to whom it belonged. Anthony Weston, is the greatest Millwright in the South, being extensively employed far and near, and by Southern people, thought the best in the United States.
The machinery was all made with a knife, the water-spouts being formed by the bark of a tree, and the millstones represented by round discs of the same material. Such were the first constructive efforts of the future millwright and engineer. When the family removed to Allengrange in 1801, the boys were sent to school at Munlachy, about a mile and a half distant from the farm.
Determined as was his nature, he wept hot tears upon the books, and was immeasurably more wretched that afternoon than the unwelcome millwright.
He worked at his father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer a profession on which his heart was set.
Having finished his five years' apprenticeship at Percy Main, by which time he had reached his twenty-first year, William Fairbairn shortly after determined to go forth into the world in search of experience. At Newcastle he found employment as a millwright for a few weeks, during which he worked at the erection of a sawmill in the Close. From thence he went to Bedlington at an advanced wage.
The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brickmaker, the bricklayer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them.
About this time he became absorbed in the hard work of writing a book, the "Millwright and Miller's Guide", which he published in 1795, but at a heavy sacrifice to himself in time and money. A few years later he had an established engine works in Philadelphia and was making steam engines of his own type that performed their work satisfactorily.
The wheelwright, said that he did not think there was any job to be had in the town; but if the two young men pushed on to Cheshunt, he thought they might find work at a windmill which was under contract to be finished in three weeks, and where the millwright wanted hands. Here was a glimpse of hope at last; and the strength and spirits of both revived in an instant.
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