Towns > Helensburgh > 1875 - Battrum's guide and directory to Helensburgh and neighbourhood

HENRY BELL. 125
HENRY BELL.
It seems to be only a fitting appendix to a Guide Book to
Helensburgh to add a notice of one whose labours had given
it much of the eminence it enjoys. Helensburgh and Henry
Bell will ever be associated in the history of the industrial
commerce of our land. It was not his birth place, but it
was the field of his labours and the scene of his triumphs ;
and the " mad innkeeper," as those who failed to understand
him, called him, has stamped his name indelibly on the
place. Henry Bell was born at Torphichen, in the neigh-
bourhood of Linlithgow, in the year 1767, of humble
parentage. He was first apprenticed to a stone mason. We
afterwards find him working as a millwright, and after a
short interval acquiring a measure of engineering knowledge
with Mr. Inglis, at Bellshill, and more fully, when he was
about 22 or 23 years of age, with the celebrated Sir John
Bennie, of London. He never, however, obtained a thorough
knowledge of mechanical science, and all through his subse-
quent life com^plained of the disadvantage this defect placed
him under. After leaving London, where his stay was com-
paratively short, he entered into business in Glasgow with a
Mr. Paterson, under the firm of Bell and Paterson, builders,
and undertook and successfully completed several large and
very important contracts. During this period his fertile mind
seems to have run in engineering enterprises and projects.
About the end of last or beginning of the present century
his thoughts were directed to the propulsion of vessels by
steam. The subject was not entirely a new one, for it had
received the attention of other scientific men, and various
experiments had been made, all demonstrating its feasibility.
But it had been abandoned by the earliest pioneers, and was
even denounced by Watt and other eminent engineers as
impracticable to any extent, when Bell took it up. In 1803,
we find him bringing a scheme for steam navigation under
notice of the Board of Admiralty, but with that wisdom and
foresight which have eminently characterised this depart-
ment of Government, they condemmed the scheme as purely