Once in London I was astonished to see a man, after writing something with a lead-pencil, search through his pockets for a piece of india-rubber with which to erase an error. He had lost it, and could only smudge the paper by marking out what he had written. I said to him: "Why don't you attach the rubber to the pencil? Then you couldn't lose it." He jumped at my suggestion, took out a patent for the rubber attachment to pencils, and made money.
When Rowland Hill, the great English postal reformer, introduced penny-postage into England, he found it necessary to employ many girls to clip off the stamps from great sheets. I took a sheet of paper to him, and showed him how easy it would be by perforation to tear off the stamps as needed. He adopted my idea; and now a single machine does the whole work.
I noticed one day in England a lot of "flunkeys" rushing up to the carriages of titled ladies and busying themselves adjusting steps, which were separate from the carriage, and had been taken along with great inconvenience. I said to myself, why not have the steps attached? and I spoke about the idea to others. It was taken up, and carried out. Now every carriage has steps attached as a part of the structure.
In '50, I was with James McHenry in Liverpool, and in trying to pour some ink from a bottle into the ink-well, the bottle was upset, and the ink spilled all over the desk. This was because too much ink came from the mouth. "Give the bottle a nose, like a milk pitcher," I said; "then you can pour the ink into the well easily." Holden, of Liverpool, took up the idea, and patented it, and made a fortune out of it.
MY COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE--RETURN TO LIVERPOOL
After the first short stay in Saratoga during my vacation trip in America, I had started for a journey West; and was soon to meet with an experience that turned the current of my life. At Syracuse I saw a half dozen students talking to a lovely girl, bidding her good-by. Her appearance struck me in a peculiar way. I turned to Alfredo Ward, who, with his wife, was traveling with me, they having just come from Valparaiso, Chili. "Look at that girl with the curls," said I. "Do you know her?" he asked. "I never saw her before," I answered, "but she shall be my wife."