lates
independent of the refractory men, and the work was executed with a
despatch, accuracy, and excellence that would not otherwise have been
possible. Only a few years since Mr. Roberts added a useful companion
to the Jacquard punching machine, in his combined self-acting machine
for shearing iron and punching both webs of angle or T iron
simultaneously to any required pitch; though this machine, like others
which have proceeded from his fertile brain, is ahead even of this
fast-manufacturing age, and has not yet come into general use, but is
certain to do so before many years have elapsed.

These inventions were surely enough for one man to have accomplished;
but we have not yet done. The mere enumeration of his other inventions
would occupy several pages. We shall merely allude to a few of them.
One was his Turret Clock, for which he obtained the medal at the Great
Exhibition of 1851. Another was his Prize Electro-Magnet of 1845.
When this subject was first mentioned to him, he said he did not know
anything of the theory or practice of electro-magnetism, but he would
try and find out. The result of his trying was that he won the prize
for the most powerful electro-magnet: one is placed in the museum at
Peel Park, Manchester, and another with the Scottish Society of Arts,
Edinburgh. In 1846 he perfected an American invention for making
cigars by machinery; enabling a boy, working one of his cigar-engines,
to make as many as 5000 in a day. In 1852 he patented improvements in
the construction, propelling, and equipment of steamships, which have,
we believe, been adopted to a certain extent by the Admiralty; and a
few years later, in 1855, we find him presenting the Secretary of War
with plans of elongated rifle projectiles to be used in smooth-bore
ordnance with a view to utilize the old-pattern gun. His head, like
many inventors of the time, being full of the mechanics of war, he went
so far as to wait upon Louis Napoleon, and laid before him a plan by
which Sebastopol was to be blown down. In short, upon whatever subject
he turned his mind, he left the impress of his inventive faculty. If
it was imperfect, he improved it; if incapable of improvement, and
impracticable, he invented something entirely new, superseding it
altogether. But with all his inventive genius, in the exercise of
which Mr. Roberts has so largely added to the productive power of the
country, we regret to say that he is not gifted with