t a good investment to surround his employees with comforts and
beauty and good sanitary conditions, and so the town of Pullman is a
model of cleanliness, order, and comfort.

It has ever been the man with an idea, which he puts into practical
effect, who has changed the face of Christendom. The germ idea of the
steam engine can be seen in the writings of the Greek philosophers, but
it was not developed until more than two thousand years later.

It was an English blacksmith, Newcomen, with no opportunities, who in
the seventeenth century conceived the idea of moving a piston by the
elastic force of steam; but his engine consumed thirty pounds of coal
in producing one horse power. The perfection of the modern engine is
largely due to James Watt, a poor, uneducated Scotch boy, who at
fifteen walked the streets of London in a vain search for work. A
professor in the Glasgow University gave him the use of a room to work
in, and while waiting for jobs he experimented with old vials for steam
reservoirs and hollow canes for pipes, for he could not bear to waste a
moment. He improved Newcomen's engine by cutting off the steam after
the piston had completed a quarter or a third of its stroke, and
letting the steam already in the chamber expand and drive the piston
the remaining distance. This saved nearly three-fourths of the steam.
Watt suffered from pinching poverty and hardships which would have
disheartened ordinary men; but he was terribly in earnest, and his
brave wife Margaret begged him not to mind her inconvenience, nor be
discouraged. "If the engine will not work," she wrote him while
struggling in London, "something else will. Never despair."

"I had gone to take a walk," said Watt, "on a fine Sabbath afternoon,
and had passed the old washing-house, thinking upon the engine at the
time, when the idea came into my head that, as steam is an elastic
body, it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made
between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it,
and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder." The idea
was simple, but in it lay the germ of the first steam engine of much
practical value. Sir James Mackintosh places this poor Scotch boy who
began with only an idea "at the head of all inventors in all ages and
all nations."

See George Stephenson, working in the coal pits for sixpence a day,
patching the clothes and mending the boots of his fellow-workmen at
ni