The Hillyars and the Burtons by Henry Kingsley

"THE Simultaneity of certain Crises in Human Thought, more especially relating to the Results of Investigation into Mechanical Agents," would form a capital title for a book, as yet to be written. As good a title as could be found (if you don't mind a little American, and follow Sir Walter Scott's doctrine about the title of books), because no one could by any possibility gather from it what the deuse the book was about, until they had read it.

The writer of this book would have to take notice that, for the last hundred years (say), intelligence has been so rapidly circulated, that the foremost thinkers in all civilized countries are at work for the same end at one and the same time. He would have to point out as examples (I merely sketch his work out for him) the simultaneous invention of steamboats on the Clyde and in New York; the nearly simultaneous invention of the Electric Telegraph in England and in America (though Cook and Wheatstone were clicking messages to Camden Town three months before the Yankees got to work). Again, for instance, the discovery of the planet Neptune, by Adams and Leverrier; and last, not least, the synchronic invention of the centrifugal bucket-lifter for emptying cesspools,--claims for which were sent in at the same time by Ebenezer Armstrong, of Salford, and by James Burton, of Church Place, Chelsea.