ASTONISHING PEOPLE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIX, Issue 13238, 14 January 1941, Page 2

ASTONISHING PEOPLE

A STRANGE MECHANIC One hundred years after his spirit fled, a monument was raised to his memory, a public procession following the ceremony which took place in Mottram-in-Longdendale churchyard in 1868. The son of a weaver or clothworker, Laurence Earnshaw was born at Wednescough in Cheshire early in the eighteenth century. After seven years' apprenticeship to his father's business, he went for four years to a tailor, then turning to his last trade, that of a clockmaker. With a remarkable genius for mechanism of all kinds, he made musical instruments and taught music; understood chemistry, metallurgy, and mathematics. He was an engraver, painter, a gilder, a maker of sundials and optical instruments; a bell-founder and worker in various metals. Added to all these various accomplishments, in 1753 he invented a machine to spin and reel cotton at one operation, which he exhibited to some neighbours but afterwards destroyed, under the mistaken notion that its use might deprive the poor of the benefit of their labour—certainly a wonderful sentiment for a working man to hold. His greatest work was an ingenious astronomical clock, the invention and construction of it taking several years. He made many of these clocks, one of which was sold to Lord Bute for £l5O, afterwards becoming the property of Lord Lonsdale.

Despite his great local fame as a mechanic, his earnings were small, and Laurence remained poor to the end. His privations were increased by the illness of his wife and a lameness which he suffered in his later years. He was 60 wheir-he died, a poor man who never fully received the rich reward he deserved for his cleverness.