He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat
of his brother-in-law, the Marquis of Stafford.
When he retired from the pleasures of the fashionable world, his attention
was directed to a rich bed of coal on his estate at Worsley, the value of
which was almost nominal in consequence of the expense of carriage. He
determined to have a canal, and, if possible, a perfect canal, and who to
carry out this object he selected Brindley, who had been born in the station
of an agricultural labourer, and was entirely self-educated. To the last he
conducted those engineering calculations, which are usually worked out on
paper and by rule, by a sort of mental arithmetic. Brindley must have been
about forty years of age when he joined the Duke. He died at fifty-six,
having laid the foundation of that admirable system of internal commerce
which is better described in Baron Charles Dupin's Force Commerciale de la
Grande Bretagne than in any English work.
One often-told anecdote well illustrates the characters of the nobleman and
his engineer, if we remember that no such works had ever been erected in
England at that time. "When Brindley proposed to carry the canal over the
Mersey and Irwell Navigation, by an aqueduct 39 feet above the surface of the
water, he desired, for the satisfaction of his employer, to have another
engineer consulted.
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