Page:Notes and Queries - Series 4 - Volume 4.djvu/118

110 NOTES AND QUERIES. . IV. AUGUST 7, '69. to executions at Tyburn, it seems probable. About 1763, after Shipley, Henry Pars, brother of the artist above named, managed the school, but he retired from it before his death, which did not occur till May 7, 1806, in the seventy-third year of his age, according to his epitaph in the burial-ground of Pentonville Chapel. The room was later known as the British Forum while it was used by John Thelwall for his elocutionary lec- tures. When those exhibitions of political oratory were stopped by Government in October 1794, the lease was purchased by Mr. Ackermann, and the room was again used as a school for drawing. A master for figures, another for landscape, and a third for architecture, were required by the eighty pupils who were resorting to it when Mr. Ackermann closed it about 1806, and there was not perhaps anything of the sort in London again, until Henry Sass opened his school at 50, Great Russell Street, in 1819. His exertions in forming a business as a publisher, printseller, and a dealer in fancy articles, such as papers, medal- lions (of which he had upwards of 4000 patterns in 1810), and materials for artists, had been so rewarded that his success rendered the conveni- ence of this room as a warehouse a more desirable object than the profit derived from the school, which wag superseded by a portfolio of examples on loan. During the period in which the French emi- grants were numerous in this country, Mr. Acker- mann was one of the first to find a liberal employ- ment for them. He had seldom less than fifty nobles, priests, and ladies engaged upon screens, card-racks, flower-stands, and other ornamental work. This manufacture was so well-established in favour that after 1802, when the emigrants could return to France, it furnished employment for a great number of our compatriots in transfer- work and other means of decoration which have since reappeared as decalcomanie, diaphanie, poti- chomanie, c. At the beginning of the century he was one of the first who arrived at a method of waterproofing paper, leather, woollen stuffs, and felted fabrics, in which he obtained for some time considerable traffic that was conducted in his factory at Chel- sea. In 1805 the preparation of the car that served as a hearse at the funeral of Lord Nelson was entrusted to him ; this was an opportunity, which he did not fail to turn to account, for showing his taste. For counteraction to Napoleon's endeavours, by bridling the newspapers, to keep his subjects in ignorance of events that were disadvantageous to him, Mr. Ackermann bethought himself of re- viving, to the inconvenience of the enemy, the use made by the French in 1794-6 of aerostation in L'Entreprenant and Le Te*le*maque ; and he con- trived a simple mechanism which would every minute detach thirty printed placards from a packet of 3000. Three such parcels were attached each to a balloon thirty-six inches in diameter, made of goldbeater's-skin, and committed to the air in the summer of 1807. The success of the machinery was evinced by the return of several of the placards to London from various parts of the courrtry ; for, as the experiment had been tried at Woolwich, in presence of a government com- mission, with a southerly wind, the balloons had passed over Salisbury and Exeter. A change in the ministry set aside this scheme of annoyance. Before any person, except Mr. Lardner in Pic- cadilly, Mr. Winger in Pall Mall, and Mr. Atkins in Golden Lane, he adopted the use of gas as a means of artificial light to his premises. He showed his judgment by selecting Mr. Clegg of Manchester for the maker of the necessary appa- ratus to be erected at 101, Strand (at that time each consumer had to make the gas for himself) ; and his liberal zeal in furnishing Mr. Clegg with the means of making experiments in manufacture, application, and remedy of failures, cleared Mr. Clegg's path to success with the Westminster Gas Company. The patent for a movable axle for carriages engaged much of his attention during the years 1818-20; and in the latter year a picture by Nigg, in enamel on china, of the then large size of fifteen inches by twelve inches, as a present from the Archduke John of Austria, testified that prince's estimate of the position which Mr. Ac- kermann occupied amongst the promoters of art, commerce, literature, manufactures, and science. The establishment of lithography in England was another example of his patient and persevering expenditure of money and time in the introduc- tion and improvement of a novelty. He was not content with translating Alois Senefelder's trea- tise in 1819, but made a journey to the residence of that inventor in order to exchange the results of their theory and practice before producing in 1822 a Complete Course. The business relations between leading artists and Mr. Ackermann en- abled him to induce them to touch the litho- graphic chalk; so in 1817, through Prout and others, the process became an acceptable, or rather a fashionable, mode of multiplying drawings : for want of such an advantage, "the process, when introduced into this country by Mr. Andree of Offenbach in its original and rude state, had re- ceived no improvement; and all its subsequent success may be attributed to Mr. Ackermann's personal emulation of the progress in it made at Munich. Upon receiving, especially from Count Schon- feld, an authentic account of the misery produced in Germany, particularly in Saxony, and by the affair of Leipzig during the five days (October 15-19, 1813) as well as by the course'of the war,