Fiddlebase
William Thomas
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...The year 1851 opened to the world a new volume of " great expectations.'' The first of the world's great fairs was our International Exhibition of that year. Mankind was on the very tiptoe of expectation, and every nation claiming to be civilised, from the extremest orient to the farthest Occident, came to take its part in that grand tournament, each to dispute the claim of the other to industrial supremacy. I have no more glorious memory than that associated with my first entry into the noble edifice of iron and glass erected on that most fitting site in Hyde Park. Men looked with wonder on the fairy picture. The great trees north and south, which luxuriated in magnificent foliage beneath the lofty roof of its transept, with that exquisite structure of glass in its centre sending aloft its fountain of sparkling and cooling water glistening in the glorious sunlight, was a sight once seen never to be forgotten. It might have been supposed that specimens of all the inventions in relation to sewing machines which had gone before would appear here. But it was not so.
Why William Thomas did not exhibit the productions of Howe whilst employed in his English factory I never could tell, save that they had proved so unsatisfactory to himself that they had been in fact consigned to the lumber room...
William Newton Wilson (Jan. 1892)
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Mr. Thomas, some time later, paid £2.000 to a person who made some improvement in the feeding apparatus
from English Mechanic 1865
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