Work and Wait : Part 1

Architects of Fate: Steps to Success and Power
by Orison Swett Marden

(Page 9 of 21)

What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline. - H. P. Liddon.

In all matters, before beginning, a diligent preparation should be made. - Cicero.

I consider a human soul without education like marble in a quarry which shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher sketches out the colors, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot, and vein that runs throughout the body of it. - Addison.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed. - George Henry Lewes.

Use your gifts faithfully, and they should be enlarged; practice what you know, and you should attain to higher knowledge. - Arnold.

All good abides with him who waited wisely. - Thoreau.

The more haste, ever the worse speed. - Churchill.

Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself. - Seneca.

How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had the seed-time of character? - Thoreau.

I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war. - Milton.

The safe path to excellence and success, in every calling, is that of appropriate preliminary education, diligent application to learn the art and assiduity in practicing it. - Edward Everett.

The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you, and do more work with less effort. - Charles Kingsley.

"I was a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise," said Henry Bessemer, speaking of his arrival in London in 1831. Although but eighteen years old, and without an acquaintance in the city, he soon made work for himself by inventing a process of copying bas-reliefs on cardboard. His method was so simple that one could learn in ten minutes how to make a die from an embossed stamp for a penny. Having ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document. At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps from old parchments and using them again. The chief also appreciated the new danger of easy counterfeiting. So he offered Bessemer a definite sum for his process of perforation, or an office for life at eight hundred pounds a year. Bessemer chose the office, and hastened to tell the good news to a young woman with whom he had agreed to share his fortune. In explaining his invention, he told how it would prevent any one from taking a valuable stamp from a document a hundred years old and using it a second time.

"The Wizard of Menlo Park."

"What the world wants is men who have the nerve and the grit to work and wait, whether the world applaud or hiss."

"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used without detection."

This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed, that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year. And the same little word, if published in its connection, would render Henry's perforation device of far less value than a last year's bird's nest. Henry felt proud of the young woman's ingenuity, and suggested the improvement at the stamp office. As a result his system of perforation was abandoned and he was deprived of his promised office, the government coolly making use from that day to this, without compensation, of the idea conveyed by that little insignificant word.

So Bessemer's financial prospects were not very encouraging; but, realizing that the best capital a young man can have is a capital wife, he at once entered into a partnership which placed at his command the combined ideas of two very level heads. The result, after years of thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the world. His method consists simply in forcing hot air from below into several tons of melted pig-iron, so as to produce intense combustion; and then adding enough spiegel-eisen (looking-glass iron), an ore rich in carbon, to change the whole mass to steel. He discovered this simple process only after trying in vain much more difficult and expensive methods.

"All things come round to him who will but wait."

Copyright, 1895 by Orison Swett Marden.
All Rights Reserved.