At this time Smeaton was only thirty-two years of age, having been born at Ansthorpe Lodge, near Leeds, on the 8th of June 1724. His father was a respectable attorney, but, from his earliest youth, John Smeaton had exhibited a natural predisposition for the engineer’s business. In truth, he was a mechanic born; in his childhood his playthings were mechanical tools; and before his sixth year he had designed a windmill and the model of a pump. He was sent to school at Leeds, but seems to have made no progress in any other branches than geometry and arithmetic. He occupied his holidays with mechanical pursuits, and on one occasion constructed a forcing-pump, which exhausted all the water in his father’s fish-pond. At the age of fourteen he was an adept at smithery and turnery. He forged his iron and steel, and melted his metal. Tools had he in abundance, and of every kind, for working in metals, wood, or ivory. What was to be done with such a lad? His father wished him to be a “gentleman,” and follow his own profession; Smeaton was content to become an “operative,” and apprenticed himself to a mathematical instrument maker. He soon attained to such proficiency, that, in 1750, he commenced business on his own account. In 1751 he invented a machine to measure a ship’s way at sea, as also a compass of peculiar construction. Enlarging the range of his studies, he submitted to the Royal Society, in 1752, some improvements which he had contrived in the air-pump, and experiments on the natural power of water and wind to turn mills and other machines dependent on circular motion.
Such was the man—ingenious, able, earnest, patient, and persevering—to whom was entrusted the erection of the _third_ lighthouse upon the Eddystone rock.
On examining into the nature of the work he was required to undertake, his first conclusion was, that both Winstanley’s and Rudyerd’s lighthouses had been deficient in want of _weight_, and he announced it as his intention to build a structure of such solidity that the sea should give way to the lighthouse, and not the lighthouse to the sea. He therefore resolved to build it of stone.
His predecessors had lost much valuable time from the difficulty of landing on the rock, and of working on it continuously for any considerable period. To obviate this, Smeaton decided on mooring a vessel within a quarter of a mile of it, which should accommodate the workmen and their tools, and enable them to seize every favourable opportunity of putting out their boat and carrying their materials to the Eddystone, instead of making a long voyage from Plymouth on each occasion.