Two Views of a Polymath
Today, two views of a polymath. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Samuel Smiles, born in 1812, was many things. A British political liberal, a newspaper editor, a railway executive, and an author. I’m old enough to’ve been familiar with his books. Their lingering currency lasted into the 20th century.
Smiles was a vocal advocate of Victorian social reform. But his social views had another edge that we can read in his books. The first of these bore the title, Self Help. And it set out his conviction that anyone could rise to the top with hard work and good character.
More books followed. Each celebrated the lives of great inventors and industrialists. He cast each in the mold of the dedicated young man rising to great success. Of course he bent those narratives slightly to fit his beliefs. Now I find, on my shelf, a dusty old edition of a Smiles book first released in 1863. Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers. It includes a chapter devoted to James Nasmyth – a personal hero of mine.
Smile’s Industrial Biography, first printed in 1863
Nasmyth invented (or perhaps perfected) the steam hammer. It was a machine that did in one stroke, what a blacksmith would’ve sweated over all day. Others had made precursors of it. But Nasmyth brought it to its full functionality.
But Smiles’s Nasmyth is not the Nasmyth I know. Smiles sees in him an illustration of his mantra – that focus and hard work inevitably mean success. I have little to quarrel with that much. But what does he see of James Nasmyth’s other face? Of Nasmyth as a painter in the Romantic period.
Left: Samuel Smiles, Right: James Nasmyth’s self portrait (Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
His paintings of every kind of subject are still on display – landscapes, machinery, the moon, ... Even the steam hammers that he built were subjects of his art! And he seems to summon up the Greek idea that art and mechane (or mechanics) were inseparable.
Smiles necessarily celebrates Nasmyth for his steam hammer. But as for his art ... well ... he does mention his having painted what he saw in a telescopic view of the moon. And that he once ground paints for his father.
We know that Nasmyth’s father was an important artist. That art shaped his young life. And I know from my own experience that helped make an engineer of him. Helped him see shape and form as central to whatever we make. Esthetics certainly drew me into engineering. The visual pleasure of drafting – the shape, the form, and the function of model airplanes. All the esthetics of making things. Make no mistake – we engineers feast on such imagery.
James Nasmyth painting of an Alchemist in his Laboratory (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Of course we cannot forget Smiles’s focus on determination and grit. But Nasmyth’s life echoes the Greek orator Antiphon who once told us – “Mastered by nature, we o’ercome by art.”
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Samuel Smiles, Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers. Belford, Clarke & Co., Chicago 1883. Originally published in London in 1863. Read the entire book here.
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help. Belford, Clarke & Co., Chicago 1883. Originally published in London in 1863. Read the entire book here.
James Nasmyth | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
James Nasmyth Auction Results: Past Sales & Hammer Prices
We O'ercome by Art | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
This Episode first aired on August 11, 2026.