Armstrong

ARMSTRONG, ARCHIBALD (d. 1672), court jester, called " Archy," was a native of Scotland or of Cumberland, and according to tradition first distinguished himself as a sheepstealer; afterwards he entered the service of James VI., with whom he became a favourite. When the king succeeded to the English throne, Archy was appointed court jester. In 1611 he was granted a pension of two shillings a day, and in 1617 he accompanied James on his visit to Scotland. His influence was considerable and he was greatly courted and flattered, but his success appears to have turned his head. He became presumptuous, insolent and mischievous, excited foolish jealousies between the king and Henry, prince of Wales, and was much disliked by the members of the court. In 1623 he accompanied Prince Charles and Buckingham in their adventure into Spain, where he was much caressed and favoured by the Spanish court and, according to his own account, was granted a pension. His conduct here became more intolerable than ever. He rallied the infanta on the defeat of the Armada and censured the conduct of the expedition to Buckingham's face.

Buckingham declared he would have him hanged, to which the jester replied that " dukes had often been hanged for insolence but never fools for talking." On his return he gained some complimentary allusions from Ben Jonson by his attacks upon the Spanish marriage. He retained his post on the accession of Charles I., and accumulated a considerable fortune, including the grant by the king of 1000 acres in Ireland. After the death of Buckingham in 1628, whom he declared " the greatest enemy of three kings," the principal object of his dislike and rude jests was Laud, whom he openly vilified and ridiculed. He pronounced the following grace at Whitehall in Laud's presence: " Great praise be given to God and little laud to the devil," and after the news of the rebellion in Scotland in 1637 he greeted Laud on his way to the council chamber at Whitehall with: " Who's fool now ?

Does not your 59' Grace hear the news from Stirling about the liturgy?" On Laud's complaint t» th<- i .HIM. il, \i. hy was scntem nl tin- same day " to have his coal pullnl nvrr his hra<l ami IK- discharged the king's service and banishc<l the king's court." He settled in .Ion as a money-lender, and many complaints were made to tin- privy council and Mouse of Lords of his sharp practices. In 164 1 on the occasion of Laud's arrest, he enjoyed a mean revenge by publishing Areky's Dream; sometimes Jester to his Majestic, but exiled Ike Court by Ciinlfrhurir's miilire. Subsequently he resided at Arthun-t in Cumberland, according to some accounts his birthplace, where he possessed an estate, and where he died in 1672, his burial talcing place on the ist of April. He was twice married, his second wife being Sybilla Bell. There is no record of any legal offspring, but the baptism of a " base son " of Archibald Armstrong is entered in the parish register of the lyth of December 1643. •'• Banquet of Jests: A change of Ckeare, published about 1630, a collection chiefly of dull, stale jokes, is attributed to him, and with still less reason probably A choice Banquet of Witty Jests . . .

Being an addition to Archee's Jests, taken out of his Closet out never published in his Lifetime (1660). ARMSTRONG, JOHN (1700-1779), British physician and writer, was born about 1709 at Castletown, Roxburghshire, where his father was parish minister. He graduated M.D. (1732) at Edinburgh University, and soon afterwards settled in London, where he paid more attention to literature than to medicine. He was, in 1746, appointed one of the physicians to the military hospital behind Buckingham House; and, in 1760, physician to the army in Germany, an appointment which he held till the peace of 1763, when he retired on half-pay. For many years he was closely associated with John Wilkes, but quarrelled with him in 1763. He died on the 7th of September 1779. Armstrong's first publication, an anonymous one, entitled An Essay for Abridging the Study of Physic (1735), wasasatireon the ignorance of the apothecaries and medical men of his day. This was followed two years after by the Economy of Love, a poem the indecency of which damaged his professional practice. In 1744 appeared his Art of Preserving Health, a very successful didactic poem, and the one production on which his literary reputation rests.

His Miscellanies (1770) contains some shorter poems displaying considerable humour. ARMSTRONG. JOHN (1758-1843), American soldier, diplomatist and political leader, born at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the 25th of November 1758. His father, also named John Armstrong (1725-1795), a native of the north of Ireland, who had emigrated to the Pennsylvania frontier between 1745 and 1748, served successively as a brigadier-general in the Continental army (1776), as brigadier-general and then major-general of the Pennsylvania militia (1777-81), during the War of Independence, and was a member of the Continental Congress in 17791780 and again in 1787-1788. The son studied for a time at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and served as a major in the War of Independence. In March 1783, while the Continental army was stationed at Newburgh (q.v.), New York, he wrote and issued, anonymously, the famous " Newburgh Addresses." In 1784 he led a force of Pennsylvania militia against the Connecticut settlers in Wyoming Valley, and treated them in such a high-handed manner as to incur the disapproval even of the Pennsylvania legislature. In 1789 he married the sister of Chancellor Robert R.

Livingston of New York, and removed to New York city, where his own ability and his family connexion gave him great political influence. In 1801-1802 and again in 1804 he was a member of the United States Senate. From 1804 to 1810 he was the United States minister to France, and in March 1806 he was joined with James Bowdoin as a special minister to treat through France with Spain concerning the acquisition of Florida, Spanish spoliations of American commerce, and the " Louisiana " boundary. During the War of 1812, he was a brigadier-general in the United States army from July 1812 until January 1813, and from then until August 1814 secretary of war in the cabinet of President Madison, when his unpopularity forced him to resign. " In spite of Armstrong's services, abilities and experience," say* Henry Adams, " §omething in his character always created distrust.

He had every advantage of education, social and political connexion, ability and self-confidence; . . . but he suffered frum the reputation of indolence and intrigue." Nevertheless, he " introduced into the army an energy wholly new," an energy the results of whii li apparent " for half a century." After bit resignation he lived in retirement at Red Hook, New York, where he died on the ist of April 1843. He published Notices of the War of (2 vols., 1836; new ed., 1840), the value of which u greatly impaired by its obvious partiality. The best account of Armstrong's career as miniiter to France and as secretary of war may be found in Henry Adami'i History of the United States, 1801-1817 (9 vols., New York, 1880-1890). ARMSTRONG, SAMUEL CHAPMAN (1839-1893), American soldier, philanthropist and educator, was born on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands, on the 3oth of January 1839, his parents, Richard and Clarissa Armstrong, being American missionaries. He was educated at the Punahou school at Punahou, at Oahu College, into which the Punahou school developed in 1853, and at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he graduated in 1862.

He served in the Civil War, on the Union side, from 1862 to 1865, rising in the volunteer service to the regular rank of colonel and the brevet rank of brigadier-general, and, after December 1863, acted as one of the officers of the coloured troops commanded by General William Birney. In November 1865 he was honourably mustered out of the volunteer service. His experience as commander of negro troops had added to his interest, always strong, in the negroes of the south, and in March 1866 he became superintendent of the Ninth District of Virginia, under the Freedman's Bureau, with headquarters near Fort Monroe. While in this position he became convinced that the only permanent solution of the manifold difficulties which the freedmen encountered lay in their moral and industrial education. He remained in the educational department of the Bureau until this work came to an end in 1872; though five years earlier, at Hampton, Virginia, near Fort Monroe, he had founded, with the aid principally of the American Missionary Association, an industrial school for negroes, Hampton Institute, which was formally opened in 1868, and at the head of which he remained until his death, there, on the nth of May 1893.

After 1878 Indians were also admitted to the Institute, and during the last fifteen years of his life Armstrong took a deep interest in the " Indian question." Much of his time after 1868 was spent in the Northern and Eastern states, whither he went to raise funds for the Institute. See Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a Biographical Study (New York, 1904), by his daughter, Edith Armstrong Talbot. His brother, WILLIAM N. ARMSTRONG, was attorney-general in the cabinet of the Hawaiian king Kalakaua I. He accompanied that monarch on a prolonged foreign tour in 1881, visiting Japan, China, Siam, India, Europe and the United States, and in 1904 published an amusing account of the journey, called Round the World with a King. ARMSTRONG. WILLIAM GEORGE ARMSTRONG. BARON (1810-1900), British inventor, founder of the Elswick manufacturing works, was born on the 26th of November 1810, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and was educated at a school in Bishop Auckland. The profession which he adopted was that of a solicitor, and from 1833 to 1847 he was engaged in active practice in Newcastle as a member of the firm of Donkin, Stable & Armstrong.

His sympathies, however, were always with mechanical and scientific pursuits, and several of his inventions date from a time anterior to his final abandonment of the law. In 1841-1843 IK published several papers on the electricity of effluent steam. This subject he was led to study by the experience of a colliery engine-man, who noticed that he received a sharp shock on exposing one hand to a jet of steam issuing from a boiler with which his other hand was in contact, and the inquiry was followed by the invention of the " hydro-electric " machine, a powerful generator of electricity, which was thought worthy of careful investigation by Faraday. The question of the utilization of water-power ARMY had engaged his attention even earlier, and in 1839 he invented an improved rotary water motor. Soon afterwards he designed a hydraulic crane, which contained the germ of all the hydraulic machinery for which he and Elswick were subsequently to become famous. This machine depended simply on the pressure of water acting directly in a cylinder on a piston, which was connected with suitable multiplying gear.

In the first example, which was erected on the quay at Newcastle in 1846, the necessary pressure was obtained from the ordinary water mains of the town; but the merits and advantages of the device soon became widely appreciated, and a demand arose for the erection of cranes in positions where the pressure afforded by the mains was insufficient. Of course pressure could always be obtained by the aid of special reservoirs, but to build these was not always desirable, or even practicable. Hence, when in 1850 a hydraulic installation was required for a new ferry station at New Holland, on the Humber estuary, the absence of water mains of any kind, coupled with the prohibitive cost of a special reservoir owing to the character of the soil, impelled him to invent a fresh piece of apparatus, the " accumulator," which consists of a large cylinder containing a piston that can be loaded to give any desired pressure, the water being pumped in below it by a steam-engine or other prime mover. This simple device may be looked upon as the crown of the hydraulic system, since by its various modifications the installation of hydraulic power became possible in almost any situation.

In particular, it was rendered practicable on board ship, and its application to the manipulation of heavy naval guns and other purposes on warships was not the least important of Armstrong's achievements. The Elswick works were originally founded for the manufacture of this hydraulic machinery, but it was not long before they became the birthplace of a revolution in gunmaking; indeed, could nothing more be placed to Armstrong's credit than their establishment, his name would still be worthy of remembrance. Modem artillery dates from about 1855, when Armstrong's first gun made its appearance. This weapon embodied all the essential features which distinguish the ordnance of to-day from the cannon of the middle ages — it was built up of rings of metal shrunk upon an inner steel barrel; it was loaded at the breech; it was rifled; and it threw, not a round ball, but an elongated projectile with ogival head. The guns constructed on this principle yielded such excellent results, both in range and accuracy, that they were adopted by the British government in 1859, Armstrong himself being appointed engineer of rifled ordnance and receiving the honour of knighthood.

At the same time the Elswick Ordnance Company was formed to manufacture the guns under the supervision of Armstrong, who, however, had no financial interest in the concern; it was merged in the Elswick Engineering Works four years later. Great Britain thus originated a principle of gun construction which has since been universally followed, and obtained an armament superior to that possessed by any other country at that time. But while there was no doubt as to the shooting capacities of these guns, defects in the breech mechanism soon became equally patent, and in a few years caused a reversion to muzzle-loading. Armstrong resigned his position in 1863, and for seventeen years the government adhered to the older method of loading, in spite of the improvements which experiment and research at Elswick and elsewhere had during that period produced in the mechanism and performance of heavy guns. But at last Armstrong's results could no longer be ignored; and wire-wound breechloading guns were received back into the service in 1880. The use of steel wire for the construction of guns was one of Armstrong's early ideas.

He perceived that to coil many turns of thin wire round an inner barrel was a logical extension of the large hooped method already mentioned, and in conjunction with I. K. Brunei, was preparing to put the plan to practical test when the discovery that it had already been patented caused him to abandon his intention, until about 1877. This incident well illustrates the ground of his objection to the British system of patent law, which he looked upon as calculated to strifle invention and impede progress; the patentees in this case did not manage to make a practical success of their invention themselves, but the existence of prior patents was sufficient to turn him aside from a path which conducted him to valuable results when afterwards, owing to the expiry of those patents, he was free to pursue it as he pleased. Lord Armstrong, who was raised to the peerage in 1887, was the author of A Visit to Egypt (1873), and Electric Movement in Air and Water (1897), besides many professional papers. He died on the 27th of December 1900, at Rothbury, Northumberland. His title became extinct, but his grand-nephew and heir, W. H. A. F. Watson-Armstrong (b. 1863), was in 1903 created Baron Armstrong of Bamburgh and Cragside.