AARON ROBERTS, THE BLACK INVENTOR.

MR. EDITOR:—There are two points in relation to blacks, in which the whites are, almost universally, agreed. They deny our capacity for mechanical invention: and they exclude us from opportunities to exercise such inventive faculty as we may possess. Yet, occasionally, a black inventor will start up, and miraculously prove our claim to mechanical genius. Such a man is Mr. AARON ROBERTS, of Philadelphia.

He was born a slave near Trenton, in New Jersey, in 1798: at 16, he was bound to the proprietor of the celebrated flouring mills at Trenton, where he remained until he was twenty one: by some means or other he found his way from driving teams and loading, into the management of the mill itself, at the early age of 17 years: he grew to the machinery and the machinery grew to him: if it screeched or went awry, his nimble fingers and cunning head put things to rights with the case of an expert: he knew every cog and crank, and each cog and crank knew him. At twenty-one, the owner of the mill dismissed him, because he had taken to cotton spinning and given up flouring: and in dismissing him he dismissed his own fortune and crushed a genius that would have rivaled WHITNEY or ARKWRIGHT.

Young Roberts started out seeking employ as a miller: but his black skin was offered opportunity to handle bags or drive team, it was preposterous to suppose that he could understand the machinery of a flouring mill! Wasn't he black!—So he was spurned from mill to mill, until finally, in despair, or, urged by the occult influences that "shape our ends," he drifted on board the new steamer Fulton in 1819-20, (the first steamship that ever sailed boldly on the ocean) and took a job as cabin boy. HENRY ECKFORD and DUNHAM were of the proprietors. And one cannot help contrasting ECKFORD, the nation's boast, the great naval Architect of his day, with the poor, despised black cabin boy, "a pot wrestler" and "dish wiper," with a genius to the full as grasping, and an invention as cunning! There is no part of the machinery of the ship which Mr. ROBERTS cannot now—after an interval or nearly forty years—accurately describe. The boiler was of thick copper, square as a vat, and cost forty thousand dollars in London. This steamship carried passengers only from New York to Charleston, Havanna, and New Orleans. In stormy weather they stopped the engine, and used sails only, for fear of straining the machinery. Just as the old navigators used to furl sails and drop anchor at night, when crossing the Atlantic!

From 1820 until the other day Mr. ROBERTS found such vocation as servant or porter, as is meted our to the colored man in the free States.—About ten years ago his early love came back to

him; his love for invention followed him to his sleepless couch, and one contrivance after another was perfected in his busy brain: wherever he happened to be employed, if any difficult job turned up, defying the ingenuity and mechanical contrivance of the entire establishment, he was always appealed to one last resort, and never in vain: the eternal relations of contrivances to overcome difficulties lay scattered about in his brain and came readily at call. To use his own words the idea "come to him all at once."

The results of his last ten years of cogitation are, a contrivance for replacing rail cars on the track (portable.) An apparatus to prevent vessels from being driven ashore in the heaviest gale: and lastly an apparatus for throwing water on fires in every or any story of the highest buildings.

This last apparatus has been favorably noticed by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia by the Chief Engineers of New York and Brooklyn and by several of our city papers. The invention is and .

Mr. ROBERTS is endeavoring to raise five hundred dollars to build a machine of sufficient size to test the value thereof in actual practice. Our city Insurance companies have subscribed about two hundred dollars—will not some warm hearted friend of humanity send him a cheque for the other three hundred, which I will warrant will do as much for the cause of Liberty as any three thousand dollars which has been expended on the war in Kansas: since it will help prove even to the wilfully blind that a negro is "a man and a brother."

I think our friends of the who are in ignorance of what "this black African race are capable of," and are on the anxious seat as to "what the Almighty intended in creating such a type"—may advantageously give Mr. ROBERTS ten or twenty dollars: so that they may see that this race was created for something else than to give them (. and . to wit) fat salaries and glorious feed out of the mere odor of "their nationality." I am seriously distressed that your brother editors are so utterly unconscious of their own importance, as not to see that the Almighty had some great end in view, in creating "this type;" when "this type" affords them opportunity to flash their wit and their scissors over an enraptured and wonder-stricken world.

I should be happy to know from the the Almighty created "." Was it before or since the creation of the other "types of mankind?"

We hold a meeting in Shiloh Church on Monday, March 20, to hear Mr. ROBERTS explain his invention. And we also have in view a meeting to celebrate the passage of the Franchise resolutions by the Legislature. There are some of us

down here, so thick headed as not to see, how your speech April 3rd, in the Capitol, affected the Franchise Resolutions passed a week before hand: although we do understand how the Republicans are greatfully acknowledging the services you rendered them in the last campaign. STEPHEN MYERS has doubtless earned a fair share of whatever honor accrues from these resolutions.

I see they have two new hands at the bellows one who quotes Virgil, and another who "talks Congo."

Yours,

COMMUNIPAW.

NEW YORK, March 29, 1857.