Tom, Tom the Piper’s son, kissed the girls and away he run.
But our Tom didn’t seem to have much luck with the girls. He married twice, losing one wife in childbirth and a second to the divorce courts.
Allegedly his behaviour was boorish, his manners less then desirbable, if at all.
The son of a corset maker managed to sashay his way through life as a swashbuckling fighter, anti-establishment soup stirrer, orator, scribe, journalist, rebel, revolutionary, prisoner and inventor.
Er, excuse me? Tom Paine, an inventor?
Pull the other one.
‘Now would I joke you’ as an Ulsterman might be heard to say.
Indeed, I would not. With no more training than making stays for ladies’ corsets produced by his father, Tom became an exceptional engineer and yes, at the forefront of designing many early versions of contraptions we take for granted today.
Lewes has been a melting pot for creative souls. Many great concepts and ideas have emanated from Lewes inventors.
But few of Tom Paine’s supporters’ dwell on the genius of the passionate and vibrant man who developed single-span bridges, a candle that didn’t smoke, a version of the steam engine and a crane for lifting heavy objects.
A wide and varied range of articles you may think, and certainly not the sort of things to come out of the imagination of one inventor.
But if you had crossed Sunderland’s bridge over the River Wear before 1927, you’d have marvelled at the structure’s engineering brilliance, and it’s unique design and its place in bridge building history. It was built of iron, was single span, 240 feet long and revolutionary in concept. And it was a Tom Paine special.
Yes, this bridge was designed by one of the world’s great revolutionaries, who set the world on fire from…. yes, Lewes.
It is well documented that it was in Lewes as a customs agent that Paine’s revolutionary thoughts and rebellious ideas were conceived, ideas that lit the fire of independence in America.
But after his adventures in the colonies and his disputes with arch French revolutionary Robespierre, he returned to England because the Americans were sceptical of his mind-boggling ideas.
Paine’s life is well documented as a writer, orator and rabble-rouser, activities which got him into more trouble because he couldn’t shut his mouth.
After triggering the American War of Independence, naming the new country the ‘United States’ and then falling out with his supporters, he narrowly escaped the guillotine after decamping to France and joining its revolution. His mouth again got him into bother. Quarrelling with Robespierre over arguing against the execution of King Louis XVI, he was thrown into the Bastille.
Condemned to death, he was talking to his fellow prisoners when the jailer chalked crosses on the cell doors of those who were to die. Because Paine’s cell door was open, the cross showed toward the inside when it closed, not into the corridor and Paine was saved by luck.
Later, his lungs again got him into trouble and his demands for the ordinary man to have a voice in government, calling for a chamber called ‘The House of Commons’, gave his enemies, especially the King a reason to charge him with seditious libel. His defence, drawn up by top lawyer Thomas Erskine later a Lord Chancellor of England, is considered to be the first ever defence based on freedom of the press. Erskine’s speech received rapturous applause. But Paine was found guilty anyway, in absentia.
Paine was no coward and wanted to stand trial, but his friends persuaded him he couldn’t win, and he went back to America.
But it was his American friends who drove him away commercially.
Paine joined several different engineering groups who were developing new means of locomotion.
Very soon after the revolution, an American John Fitch started to build steam-driven riverboats. He heard rumours that another group were doing the same thing.
He tracked down the miscreants to a boarding house in Philadelphia where a ‘limey’ John Hall was busy experimenting with similar designs, aided and abetted by Tom Paine.
They became allies and worked together on a propulsion system that pumped water through the boat to drive it along. Paine is said to have also experimented with gunpowder, a crude forerunner of the internal combustion engine.
While considering the problems of shipping on America’s mighty rivers, Tom’s fertile mind took up the issue of bridges being swept away by raging ice and dangerous currents in the early spring.
So he invented a single span bridge to be made of iron.
A model of the bridge sat in Benjamin Franklin’s yard, but investors were thin on the ground, and they didn’t understand iron construction as well as they might.
Paine returned to Britain with plans to build a bridge over the Thames. The idea was enthusiastically embraced initially, but the cost was deemed prohibitive, and eventually, Paine went to the north of England where he successfully persuaded engineers to construct the Sunderland span.
Paine’s love affair with iron resulted in several new ideas, among them a metal warship.
There is no evidence that Paine invented indoor plumbing, the need to visit the loo in the middle of the night did lead to another Paine invention.
The use of chamber pots was widespread but often caused an obstacle in the dark when left peeking out from under the bed frame.
So, it was that Tom following the call of nature stumbled out of bed and put his foot in it. The chamber pot that is.
Determined not to fall foul of such trauma again, Paine set out to find a solution.
Sleeping with a candle burning was a nonstarter in Georgian England. The smoke given off by candle fat was obnoxious and would choke anyone to death, literally, if used for too long.
Tom staggered round to the nearest barbers’ shop, which in those days was also the local surgeon’s practice, and had the offending object painlessly removed.
But he was determined to avoid similar adventures in the middle of the night, so set about inventing a smokeless candle, the first of its kind and aid to lying in bed, imagining what invention he should think up next while reading back copies of the Beano.
The visit to the surgeon was one such spur.
Paine, with no medical experience that’s documented, came up with a cure for yellow fever, and thinking of how to use his metal boats in a practical sense, invented a crane that could lift heavy loads and move them to new destinations.
Many contemporary inventors praised Paine. Apart from Franklin, Thomas Edison was so impressed as indeed were several American Presidents.
Paine never made vast sums of money from his inventions. But he never gave up trying.
Indeed, his love of the barley and grape, for which he was thrown out of Lewes’s Crown Hotel, dogged him all his life.
That life ended in June 1809. Paine had become a drunkard and something of a hermit, and at the end, only six people turned up at his funeral, two of them slaves.
But such was his love of wine, a maid clearing out the chamber pot of his room in the New Rochelle farm where he died, discovered plans for what turned out to be a grape picking machine.
Oh, Bliss. But wait, she didn’t show it to anyone, and so it was lost to posterity. A famous invention went to waste.
Well, she might have done!!!