‘There is no new thing under the sun,’ says a proverb which is itself perhaps only the rehabilitation of some antediluvian precept to the same effect; and nothing so powerfully argues in favour of the truth of the statement as a little pamphlet written by the eccentric though clever Marquis of Worcester, and printed in London by J. Grismond in 1663. It is entitled, ‘A Century of the Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected, which, my former Notes being lost, I have, at the instance of a powerful friend, endeavoured now, in the year 1655, to set these down in such a way as may sufficiently instruct me to put any of them in Practice.’ Who the ‘powerful friend’ may have been it is impossible to say. The published catalogue was, however, dedicated to Charles II. by His Majesty’s ‘passionately devoted, or otherwise disinterested, subject and servant,’ the Marquis.

This dedication is followed by a quaintly worded address to the two Houses of Parliament, craving patronage for the author’s investigations, thanking the Lords and Commons for past favours, ruefully stating that the inventor had already spent ten thousand pounds on his experiments, and promising to prosecute his researches by the aid of one Casper Kaltoff, who for five-and-thirty years had been employed under him. The Marquis, in stating his merits, is not too modest, for he belauds his inventions and his disinterestedness to the skies, and in well-chosen words suggests that if the government refuse him its patronage, the government, and not he, will suffer. Then, after the custom of the age, he subscribes himself, ‘Your most passionately bent fellow-subject in His Majesty’s service, compatriot for the publick good and advantage, and a most humble servant to all and every of you,

Worcester.’

So far the Marquis is, comparatively speaking, plain-spoken and straightforward; but when he begins to catalogue his discoveries, the reader feels bound to confess that though the noble peer may have set down his notes in such a way as might sufficiently instruct him to put any of them in practice, he scarcely amplified them sufficiently to instruct other people. Doubtless he was intentionally vague in the specifications or explanations of his inventions; for when he wrote, he still cherished a hope that he would reap some substantial fruits from his ingenuity; but in spite of his vagueness, he wrote at least enough to shew that many things even now regarded as new, had been roughly thought out by his fertile brain.

The specification first on the list is decidedly mysterious. It is entitled ‘Seals abundantly significant,’ and professes to describe an invention whereby accounts may be kept mechanically, and a letter, ‘though written but in English, may be read and understood in eight several languages, and in English itself to a clean contrary and different sense, unknown to any but the correspondent, and not to be read or understood by him neither, if opened before it arrive unto him.’ Presumably this ambiguous statement alludes to an instrument for writing accounts and letters in cipher, for the four specifications that follow, treat of that hackneyed subject, and one of them of a system of short-hand which seems to be not without a modern representative. Next comes a plan for telegraphing by means of coloured flags and lights; and then ‘A way how to level and shoot cannon by night as well as by day and as directly.’ The ninth specification is terribly pertinent to the tragic event that happened at Bremerhafen in December 1875. It speaks of ‘An engine, portable in one’s pocket, which may be carried and fastened on the inside of the greatest ship, and at any appointed minute, though a week after, either of day or night, it shall irrecoverably sink that ship.’ The note immediately following suggests torpedoes, and relates to a plan for diving and fastening a similar engine to a vessel.

Nor were Admiral Hobart Pacha’s attempts to ward off the attacks of these submarine monsters without a prototype; for the inventive Marquis at once goes on to hint at a method whereby a ship may be guarded from such a catastrophe either by day or by night. Specification number twelve is scarcely less suggestive of water-tight compartments, for it alludes to ‘A way to make a ship not possible to be sunk, though shot an hundred times betwixt wind and water by cannon.’ The next note does not seem to have prompted the exertions of modern inventors; but who shall say whether number fourteen is not responsible for the employment of steam, or even of hydraulic power, for the working of a vessel? At all events, it hints at the economisation of labour, and at the multiplication of force without the intervention of a capstan or of similar machinery. Number fifteen palpably suggests the application of some motive-power very like steam to boats. The Marquis speaks of ‘A way how to make a boat work itself against wind and tide, yea, both without the help of man or beast; yet so that the wind or tide, though directly opposite, shall force the ship or boat against itself.’

It is not surprising that, in the middle of the seventeenth century, this, among many other alleged inventions, was regarded as somewhat chimerical; and indeed, at the present moment, if we except steam, it is hard to believe that the noble lord was not solemnly joking with Charles II. and the two Houses of Parliament. But a subsequent specification, which we shall notice in its due order, proves that the Marquis knew of the power of steam, and had practically experimented with it; and there are therefore some grounds for thinking that, had he been properly subsidised and assisted, the name of Worcester might have been as intimately associated with the great modern means of locomotion as are those of Watt and Fulton. Unfortunately the Marquis was too much in advance of his age, and thus his genius was lost upon it.

A very common table ornament of the present day is hinted at in number eighteen, which speaks of ‘An artificial fountain to be turned like an hour-glass by a child in the twinkling of an eye.’ And number nineteen plainly suggests the carriage-brake as now applied by every coachbuilder. The two succeeding notices relate to the use of water as a motive-power. And number twenty-three tells of a water-clock intended not only to shew the time, but also the motions of the heavenly bodies. Number twenty-four is a plan for discharging bullets by means of a silent spring, ‘admirable for fire-works and astonishing of besieged cities.’ And number twenty-six is a method for the more effectual employment of the lever as a mechanical force. Then follows a dark hint at the employment of pontoons for the formation of military bridges over broad rivers; and another specification, number thirty, speaks of a system for enabling four pieces of cannon ‘to discharge two hundred bullets each hour’—a thing which, under the old system of loading by manual power at the muzzle, would have been quite impossible. This is followed by a number of different plans for writing in cipher, and for communicating by means of various objects, such as knotted strings, fringes, bracelets, gloves, &c., and by the smell, taste, and touch. Number forty-four is a way ‘To make a key of a chamber-door which to your sight hath its wards and rose-pipe but paper-thick, and yet at pleasure in a minute of an hour shall become a perfect pistol, capable to shoot through a breast-plate commonly of carbine-proof, with prime, powder, and firelock, undiscoverably in a stranger’s hand.’ Such a diabolical machine in the possession of one of the many unscrupulous gentlemen of the period, would indeed have been a murderous weapon if used freely in the dimly lighted streets of London. Scarcely less unpleasant must have been the Venetian instrument for noiselessly discharging a poisoned needle at an unsuspecting enemy.

Next come specifications headed respectively ‘A most conceited tinder-box,’ ‘An artificial bird,’ and ‘An hour water-ball;’ the last of which speaks of a ball of any metal, ‘which, thrown into a pool or pail of water, shall presently rise from the bottom, and constantly shew, by the superficies of the water, the hour of the day or night, never rising more out of the water than just to the minute it sheweth of each quarter of the hour; and, if by force kept under water, yet the time is not yet lost, but recovered as soon as it is permitted to rise to the superficies of the water.’ Number forty-eight is the description of an improved staircase, and number forty-nine of ‘A portable engine, in way of a tobacco tongs, whereby a man may get over a wall, or get up again being come down, finding the coast proving unsecure unto him.’ Then there is ‘A pocket ladder,’ ‘A rule of gradation’ useful for cipher-writing, ‘A mystical jangling of bells’ for the conveyance of private intelligence, and three notices relating to ‘water-scrues.’ Number fifty-six is entitled ‘An advantageous change of centers;’ and respecting it the Marquis says: ‘A most incredible thing if not seen, but tried before the late king of blessed memory, in the Tower by my directions, two extraordinary ambassadors accompanying His Majesty, and the Dukes of Richmond and Hamilton, with most of the court, attending him. The wheel was fourteen feet over, and forty weights of fifty pounds apiece. Sir William Balfore, then lieutenant of the Tower, can justify it with several others. They all saw that no sooner these great weights passed the diameter line of the lower side but they hung a foot further from the center, nor no sooner passed the diameter line of the upper side but they hung a foot nearer. Be pleased to judge the consequence.’ In this modest request the Marquis appears to shroud a hint that he has discovered the secret of perpetual motion, which, however, has like all other perpetual-motion schemes, failed in practice.

Specification number fifty-eight is certainly in some measure responsible for the modern revolver, telling as it does of a method ‘whereby a pistol may be made to discharge a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as once new priming requisite, or to change it out of one hand into the other, or stop one’s horse.’ And the next notices are for the application of similar systems to carabines, muskets, arquebusses, and crocks or ship-muskets, and of a different method for sakers. In these ideas we may recognise indeed the first principles not only of the revolver, but also of the Winchester rifle and of the mitrailleuse in its various forms. Warfare has recently been revolutionised by inventions of this kind; and the conditions of naval warfare especially are now likely to be altered by the arrangement which practically places the whole broadside of a vessel under the control of one man. For this latter improvement we may find the idea in the Marquis’s plan by which ‘one man in the cabbin may govern the whole side of ship-muskets, to the number, if need require, of two or three thousand shots.’ After devoting several notices to the various aspects of this subject, the noble inventor complacently remarks: ‘When first I gave my thoughts to make guns shoot often, I thought there had been but one only exquisite way inventible, yet by several trials and much charge I have perfectly tried all these.’ The necessary experiments appear to have left him with an old cannon or two upon his hands, as the next and most important specification shews that the scientific nobleman nearly succeeded in blowing himself up, and so concluding his investigations. He calls it ‘A fire water-work;’ and probably that remarkable name expresses, as well as any other might, the Marquis’s ‘admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire, not by drawing or sucking it upwards, for that must be as the philosopher calleth it, intra sphÆram activitatis, which is but at such a distance. But,’ he emphatically continues, ‘this way hath no bounder, if the vessels be strong enough.’

Then he goes on to give us what seems to be the earliest record of the employment of steam-power in England. ‘I have taken,’ he says, ‘a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it three-quarters full of water, stopping and scruing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole; and making a constant fire under it, within twenty-four hours it burst and made a great crack. So that having a way to make my vessels, so that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other, I have seen the water run like a constant fountain-stream forty feet high; one vessel of water, rarefied by fire, driveth up forty of cold water. And a man that tends the work is but to turn two cocks; that, one vessel of water being consumed, another begins to force and re-fill with cold water, and so successively, the fire being tended and kept constant, which the self-same person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said cocks.’ Following this are four notices relating to improvements for locks to chests and safes, one relating to a drawbridge, and one treating of what the Marquis calls ‘A conceited door’—namely one which will open either inwards or outwards.

Two paragraphs further on comes the short specification, ‘How to make a man to fly; which I have tried with a little boy of ten years old in a barn, from one end to the other, on a hay-mow.’ The last clause is certainly acceptable; for it justifies a hope that the poor little fellow did not break his neck in the pursuit of science. The three succeeding notices are entitled respectively ‘A continually going watch,’ ‘A total locking of cabinet-boxes,’ and ‘Light pistol barrels;’ and the headings serve to demonstrate at least the versatility of the author. Next come two methods for carrying secret correspondence without observation, an idea for the economisation of labour in rasping hartshorn, and the specification of a calculating machine. These are followed by notices of two barbarous engines, respectively called ‘An untoothsome pear’ and ‘An imprisoning chair,’ of a candle-moulding machine, and of a talkative artificial head, the modus operandi of which we take the liberty of smiling at. The Marquis states that his invention would answer in French, Latin, Welsh, Irish, or English, any question put to it, and then shut its mouth until the next question was asked. It cannot be doubted that if the artificial head were so life-like as to be able to answer questions, it would also do a little talking on its own account. The noble Lord seems at this period to have been suffering from an attack of moral depravity; for the incredible notice of the brazen head is followed by two specifications of methods for cheating at cards and dice respectively; and a little lower down, we come upon ‘a little engine portable in one’s pocket, which placed to any door, without any noise but one crack, openeth any door or gate.’ Number ninety-three is the specification of an engine for raising sunken ships; and at the end of the long catalogue are some mysterious notices of a machine which the Marquis modestly calls ‘a semi-omnipotent engine,’ and of two other machines which conjointly seem to hint at some knowledge of hydraulic power of which the discoverer was particularly proud. ‘I deem this invention,’ he says, ‘to crown my labours, to reward my expenses, and make my thoughts acquiesce in way of further inventions;’ and he concludes by hinting at leaving to posterity a book wherein his inventions, ‘with the shape and form of all things belonging to them, should be printed by brass plates.’

And so we will take leave of the inventive nobleman, who, though apparently not always too veracious, was decidedly a genius. It is probably owing to the fact of his having lived in an inappreciative age that he is to this day usually placed on a level with the fabulous Academicians of Laputa, rather than among such men as Franklin, Arkwright, and Watt; but on the other hand, it is not unlikely that had his Century of Inventions been judiciously reduced to a score, or even a dozen, the Marquis of Worcester’s reputation among his contemporaries might have stood proportionately higher.