JOSEPH CLEMENT.
"It is almost impossible to over-estimate the importance of these inventions. The Greeks would have elevated their authors among the gods; nor will the enlightened judgment of modern times deny them the place among their fellow-men which is so undeniably their due."--Edinburgh Review.
That Skill in mechanical contrivance is a matter of education and training as well as of inborn faculty, is clear from the fact of so many of our distinguished mechanics undergoing the same kind of practical discipline, and perhaps still more so from the circumstance of so many of them passing through the same workshops. Thus Maudslay and Clement were trained in the workshops of Bramah; and Roberts, Whitworth, Nasmyth, and others, were trained in those of Maudslay.
Joseph Clement was born at Great Ashby in Westmoreland, in the year 1779. His father was a hand-loom weaver, and a man of remarkable culture considering his humble station in life. He was an ardent student of natural history, and possessed a much more complete knowledge of several sub-branches of that science than was to have been looked for in a common working-man. One of the departments which he specially studied was Entomology. In his leisure hours he was accustomed to traverse the country searching the hedge-bottoms for beetles and other insects, of which he formed a remarkably complete collection; and the capture of a rare specimen was quite an event in his life. In order more deliberately to study the habits of the bee tribe, he had a number of hives constructed for the purpose of enabling him to watch their proceedings without leaving his work; and the pursuit was a source of the greatest pleasure to him. He was a lover of all dumb creatures; his cottage was haunted by birds which flew in and out at his door, and some of them became so tame as to hop up to him and feed out of his hand. "Old Clement" was also a bit of a mechanic, and such of his leisure moments as he did not devote to insect-hunting, were employed in working a lathe of his own construction, which he used to turn his bobbing on, and also in various kinds of amateur mechanics.
His boy Joseph, like other poor men's sons, was early set to work. He received very little education, and learnt only the merest rudiments of reading and writing at the village school. The rest of his education he gave to himself as he grew older. His father needed his help at the loom, where he worked with him for some years; but, as handloom weaving was gradually being driven out by improved mechanism, the father prudently resolved to put his son to a better trade. They have a saying in Cumberland that when the bairns reach a certain age, they are thrown on to the house-rigg, and that those who stick on are made thatchers of, while those who fall off are sent to St. Bees to be made parsons of. Joseph must have been one of those that stuck on--at all events his father decided to make him a thatcher, afterwards a slater, and he worked at that trade for five years, between eighteen and twenty-three.