United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The buildings at Portsmouth were finished by the end of 1786, when Telford's duties there being at an end, and having no engagement beyond the termination of the contract, he prepared to leave, and began to look about him for other employment. Mr.
If I can accomplish this, I shall have done my duty; and if the project is not executed now, some future period will see it done, and I shall have the satisfaction of having followed you and promoted its success." We may here state that Telford's survey agreed with Watt's in the most important particulars, and that he largely cited Watt's descriptions of the proposed scheme in his own report. Mr.
The work will require great labour and exertions, but it is worthy of them all."* Telford's appointment was duly confirmed by the next general meeting of the shareholders of the Ellesmere Canal. An attempt was made to get up a party against him, but it failed.
The scheme, for some good reason, doubtless, was not adopted; but it is impossible to look at Telford's grand drawing of the proposed bridge a single bold arch, curving across the Thames from side to side, with the dome of St. Paul's rising majestically above it without a feeling of regret that such a noble piece of theoretical architecture was never realized in actual fact.
Such a step is all the more remarkable, because Telford's own education had lain entirely in what may fairly be called the "stone age" of English engineering; while his natural predilections as a stonemason might certainly have made him rather overlook the value of the novel material.
But the ingenious design of this bridge will be better explained by the following representation than by any description in words.* The bridge at Buildwas, however, was not Telford's first employment of iron in bridge-building; for, the year before its erection, we find him writing to his friend at Langholm that he had recommended an iron aqueduct for the Shrewsbury Canal, "on a principle entirely new," and which he was "endeavouring to establish with regard to the application of iron."* This iron aqueduct had been cast and fixed; and it was found to effect so great a saving in masonry and earthwork, that he was afterwards induced to apply the same principle, as we have already seen, in different forms, in the magnificent aqueducts of Chirk and Pont-Cysylltau.
When work of importance is required, nobody cares to ask where the man who can do it best comes from, or what he has been, but what he is, and what he can do. Nor did it ever stand in Telford's way that his father had been a poor shepherd in Eskdale, and that he himself had begun his London career by working for weekly wages with a mallet and chisel.
There were at that time throughout the country plenty of skilled labourers and contractors, many of them trained by their experience upon Telford's own works, where as Brindley had in a great measure to make his workmen out of the rawest material.
A close observer would occasionally have found something cynical even sinister in Mark Telford's clear cut, smoothly chiseled face, but at the moment when he wheeled slowly and faced these two there was in it nothing but what was strong, refined and even noble.
Altogether, on Telford's Highland roads alone, there are no fewer than twelve hundred bridges. Nor were these the only important labours by which Telford ministered to the comfort and well-being of his Scotch fellow-countrymen. Scotland's debt to the Eskdale stonemason is indeed deep and lasting.
Word Of The Day