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saving devices of his invention. He married
thrice, his third wife having been
Marie Trudeau, a French-Canadian,
whose forebears were of the French no-
bility. She bore him thirteen children,
one of the younger being the distinguished
inventor to record whose
achievements is the main purpose of this
article. Gregoir Des Jardins was seventyseven
years of age when he died at Tyre
in 1888. His third wife, nee Marie Tru-
deau, lived to attain the age of eighty-
four, her death occurring in 1903. At the
time of her death, all her many children
yet lived, as also did forty-seven of her
fifty grandchildren.
It can be imagined that the educational
facilities open to her son, Benjamin Myr-
rick Des Jardins, in the vicinity of their
frontier home were meagre. He absorbed
all the learning the little district school
of Tyre afforded, and readily assimilated
what supplementary knowledge was ten-
dered him by his gifted mother, and elder
brothers, one of whom became an eminent
divine of the Methodist church, whilst
another won prominent place among the
architects of Cincinnati, but Benjamin M.
soon grew beyond the educational facili-
ties of his home, and determined to jour~
ney to Kalamazoo, and there work his
way through Kalamazoo College, which
he did, but during which experience he
was called upon to taste the bitternesses
which result from an insufficiency of
money. He maintained himself during
his undergraduateship mainly by his
writings, having fortunately merited and
gained place on the staff of one of the
Kalamazoo daily newspapers. He like-
wise fortunately cultivated another price-
less association during that period, in
gaining the appreciative acquaintance of
Senator Julius C. Burrows, a lawyer and
politician of prominence, and in becom-
ing a member of his household, which cir-
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIOGRAPHY
98
cumstance, coupled with his newspaper
connection, probably influenced appreciably
the trend of his later endeavors. His
journalistic affiliation brought him into in-
timate touch with appliances then avail-
able to printers, and in the home of Sen-
ator Burrows he had access to a splendid
private library, embracing many volumes
on mechanics, which facility considerably
aided the young thinker in his earnest re-
search into the principles of mechanics,
whereby he might acquire technical
knowledge with which to develop a mechanical
means to meet a handicap he had
noted in the operation of printing at the
Kalamazoo printing plant. The labori-
ousness, the uncertainty and unevenness
in execution, and the slow monotony of
the compositor's hand-setting of type im-
pressed him as glaringly inconsistent,
when compared with the accuracy and
rapidity of the mechanical devices and
equipment of the press-room, and he con-
ceived an idea which inspired him to acquire
a general knowledge of mechanics
with the least possible delay, so that he
might hasten to perfect the mechanical
type-setting means his brain had embryon-
ically planned to displace the hand proc-
ess, and his energetic and persistent ap-
plication to the project during the winter
of 1882 brought him very substantial encouragement.
His study and experiments
on the subject continued almost inces-
santly for eighteen years, until complete
success had crowned his efforts, and he
had given to the world a machine which
added very materially to the present day
perfection of the printing art, but only
he knows the full extent of his struggles
during that arduous and apparently interminable
period of experiment and disap-
pointment. The typesetting machine he
constructed in 1882-1883 and his first
computing instrument to justify the lines
of type failed to attract the financial sup-