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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Benjamin Wardhaugh 2019
Cover illustrations: engraved illustrations of Artillery Carriages © bauhaus1000/Getty Images; engraving of Charles Hutton © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.
Benjamin Wardhaugh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008299958
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008299972
Version: 2019-01-11
In memory of Jackie Stedall
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
August 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne. In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight, or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour.
Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, choked with dust, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he has been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad – gifted at maths and languages – and for a time he hoped for a different life.
Many hoped. Charles Hutton, astonishingly, would actually live the life he dreamed of. Twenty years later you would have found him in Slaughter’s coffee house in London, eating oysters with the president of the Royal Society. By the time he died, in 1823, he was a fellow of scientific academies in four countries, while the Lord Chancellor of England counted himself fortunate to have known him. Hard work, talent, and no small share of luck would take Charles Hutton out of the pit to international fame, wealth, admiration and happiness. The pit boy turned professor would become one of the most revered British scientists of his day.
This book is his incredible story.
Newcastle upon Tyne occupies a fine site for a town: a long south-facing slope, down towards the river. The Great North Road runs through it: 90 miles north to Edinburgh, 250 south to London. And the river joins the town to the world. As the old song goes,
Tyne river, running rough or smooth,
Brings bread to me and mine;
Of all the rivers north or south
There’s none like coaly Tyne.
By the time coaly Tyne passes under the bridge at Newcastle it has seen the Pennines and the wild country of Northumbria: land fought over by the Romans and the Picts, the English and the Scots. If the water had once been dyed with their blood, by now it was dyed with coal.
The town was spacious and populous. Only three English towns were bigger; but still Newcastle was no sprawl early in the eighteenth century. Just five main streets within the old town walls, and open country beyond them to east and west.