It was there that
he received, in 1820, the decoration of the Legion of Honour; and
it was there that he died and was buried in 1834. A statue was
erected to his memory, but his relatives remained in poverty; and
twenty years after his death, his two nieces were under the
necessity of selling for a few hundred francs the gold medal
bestowed upon their uncle by Louis XVIII. "Such," says a French
writer, "was the gratitude of the manufacturing interests of Lyons
to the man to whom it owes so large a portion of its splendour."
It would be easy to extend the martyrology of inventors, and to
cite the names of other equally distinguished men who have, without
any corresponding advantage to themselves, contributed to the
industrial progress of the age,--for it has too often happened that
genius has planted the tree, of which patient dulness has gathered
the fruit; but we will confine ourselves for the present to a brief
account of an inventor of comparatively recent date, by way of
illustration of the difficulties and privations which it is so
frequently the lot of mechanical genius to surmount. We allude to
Joshua Heilmann, the inventor of the Combing Machine.
Heilmann was born in 1796 at Mulhouse, the principal seat of the
Alsace cotton manufacture.
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