trip up the Hudson. At one o’clock she cast off from her dock near the
State’s Prison, in what was called Greenwich Village, on the North
River. The inventor described the voyage characteristically to a
friend. He wrote, “The moment arrived in which the word was to be
given for the boat to move. My friends were in groups on the deck.
There was anxiety mixed with fear among them. They were silent, sad
and weary. I read in their looks nothing but disaster, and almost
repented of my efforts. The signal was given and the boat moved on a
short distance and then stopped and became immovable. To the silence
of the preceding moment, now succeeded murmurs of discontent, and
agitations, and whispers and shrugs. I could hear distinctly
repeated--‘I told you it was so; it is a foolish scheme: I wish we
were well out of it.’
“I elevated myself upon a platform and addressed the assembly. I
stated that I knew not what was the matter, but if they would be quiet
and indulge me for half an hour, I would either go on or abandon the
voyage for that time. This short respite was conceded without
objection. I went below and examined the machinery, and discovered
that the cause was a slight maladjustment of some of the work. In a
short time it was obviated. The boat was again put in motion. She
continued to move on. All were still incredulous. None seemed willing
to trust the evidence of their own senses. We left the fair city of
New York; we passed through the romantic and ever-varying scenery of
the Highlands; we descried the clustering houses of Albany; we reached
its shores,--and then, even then, when all seemed achieved, I was the
victim of disappointment.
“Imagination superseded the influence of fact. It was then doubted if
it could be done again, or if done, it was doubted if it could be made
of any great value.”
But the _Clermont_, in spite of all prophecies to the contrary, had
traveled under her own steam from New York to Albany, and the trip was
the crowning event in Fulton’s career as inventor. At the time she
made that first voyage the _Clermont_ was a very simple craft, decked
for a short distance at bow and stern, the engine open to view, and
back of the engine a house like that on a canal-boat to shelter the
boiler and provide an apartment for the officers. The rudder was of
the pattern used on sailing-vessels, and was moved by a tiller. The
boiler was of the same pattern used in Watt’s steam-engines, and was
set in masonry. The condenser stood in a large cold-water cistern, and
the weight of the masonry and the cistern greatly detracted from the
boat’s buoyancy. She was so very unwieldy that the captains of other
river boats, realizing the danger of the steamboat’s competition, were
able to run into her, and make it appear that the fault was hers; and
as a result she several times reached port with only a single wheel.
There were almost as many quaint descriptions of the boat as there
were people who saw it. One described it as an “ungainly craft looking
precisely like a backwoods sawmill mounted on a scow and set on fire.”
Others said the _Clermont_ appeared at night like a “monster moving on
the waters defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and
smoke.” Some of the ignorant along the Hudson fell on their knees and
prayed to be delivered from the monster. The boat must have been a
very strange sight; pine wood was used for fuel, and when the engineer
stirred the fire a torrent of sparks went shooting into the sky.
The boat was clumsy beyond question. The exposed machinery creaked and
groaned, the unguarded paddle-wheels revolved ponderously and splashed
a great deal of water, the tiller was badly placed for steering.
Fulton quickly remedied some of the defects, and the _Clermont_ that
began to make regular runs from New York to Albany a little later was
quite a different boat from that which made her maiden voyage on
August 17th.
In spite of Fulton’s gloomy tone in his letter there were many among
the men and women who made the first trip with him who were not
dubious concerning the invention. As soon as the first difficulties
were overcome and the boat was moving on a steady keel, the
passengers, most of whom were close friends of Fulton and of
Chancellor Livingston, broke into song. As they passed by the
Palisades it is said they sang “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonny Doon.”
Fulton himself could not be overlooked. A contemporary described him:
“Among a thousand individuals you might readily point out Robert
Fulton. He was conspicuous for his gentle, manly bearing and freedom
from embarrassment, for his extreme activity, his height, somewhat
over six feet,--his slender yet energetic form and well accommodated
dress, for his full and curly dark brown hair, carelessly scattered
over his forehead and falling around his neck. His complexion was
fair, his forehead high, his eyes dark and penetrating and revolving
in a capacious orbit of cavernous depths; his brow was thick and
evinced strength and determination; his nose was long and prominent,
his mouth and lips were beautifully proportioned, giving the impress
of eloquent utterance. Trifles were not calculated to impede him or
damp his perseverance.”
Fulton was now forty-two years old, and famous on both sides of the
Atlantic. He asked Harriet Livingston, a near relation of his friend
the Chancellor, to become his wife. She accepted him, and he was
warmly welcomed into that rich and influential family.
On September 2, 1807, Fulton advertised regular sailings of the
_Clermont_ between New York and Albany. These proved popular, and
other routes were soon planned. That winter he made many changes in
the vessel and worked out certain devices that he wished to patent.
The name of _Clermont_ was changed to the _North River_ the following
spring, and the reconstructed steamboat continued in regular service
on the Hudson for a number of years. In the succeeding year he built
other boats, the _Rariton_, to run from New York to New Brunswick, and
_The Car of Neptune_ as a second Hudson River boat. He was very much
occupied perfecting new commercial schemes, protecting his patents
from a horde of pirates, and planning to introduce his invention into
Europe. Before his death in 1815, eight years after the _Clermont’s_
first trip, he had built seventeen boats, among them the first steam
war frigate, a torpedo boat, and the first steam ferry-boats with
rounded ends to be used for approaching opposite shores.
A century has not dimmed Fulton’s fame, nor set aside his claim to be
the practical inventor of the steamboat. He built the first one to be
used in American waters, and his model was copied in all other
countries. He carried his ideas to completion, and that, with his
talent to observe and improve upon other men’s work, gave him his
leading place among the world’s pioneers.
VIII
DAVY AND THE SAFETY-LAMP
1778-1829
Humphrey Davy, according to his contemporaries, could have chosen any
one of several roads to fame. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of him,
“Had not Davy been the first chemist, he probably would have been the
first poet of his age.” Among many activities he invented the
safety-lamp, the object of which was to protect miners from the perils
of exploding fire-damp. George Stephenson invented a similar device at
about the same time, or a little earlier, but Davy’s lamp was the one
most generally adopted, and his claim as inventor is commonly
recognized, while Stephenson’s fame is secure with the perfection of
the steam-locomotive and the railroad.
Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall December 17, 1778, the eldest
son in a family of five children. More alert and imaginative than
other boys, and with an uncommonly good memory, he made great headway
at Mr. Coryton’s grammar school, where he went when he was six.
Coleridge’s opinion of him may have been correct, for history says
that he was a fluent writer of English and Latin verses while still a
schoolboy, and that he could tell stories well enough to hold an
audience of his teachers and neighbors. He liked fine language and
the arts of speech, and, according to his brother, Dr. John Davy, he
cultivated those arts in his walks. Once when he was taking a bottle
of medicine to a sick woman in the country he began to declaim a
stirring speech, and at its climax threw the bottle away. He never
noticed its loss until he reached the patient, and then wondered what
could have become of the vial. The bottle was found next morning in a
hay-field adjoining the path Davy had taken.
When he was fourteen he left Mr. Coryton’s school for the Truro
Grammar School, where he stayed for a year. Here he was famed for his
good-humor and a very original turn of mind. A school friend,
reminiscing about Humphrey, told of a walk several of them took one
hot day. “Whilst others complained of the heat,” said he, “and whilst
I unbuttoned my waistcoat, Humphrey appeared with his great-coat
close-buttoned up to his chin, for the purpose, as he declared, of
keeping _out_ the heat. This was laughed at at the time, but it struck
me then, as it appears to me now, as evincing originality of thought
and an indisposition to be led by the example of others.”
This originality of thought and love of experiment for its own sake
were to be chief characteristics of the future scientist.
His school education was finished when he was fifteen, and he returned
home, where he studied French in a desultory fashion, and devoted most
of his time to fishing, of which he was always very fond. His father’s
death made him realize that as the eldest of the sons he must shoulder
the responsibility for the family’s support, and, all his natural
tastes lying in that direction, he decided to become a physician.
A practicing surgeon and apothecary of Penzance, Bingham Borlase, was
willing to take Davy as an apprentice, and the youth began work and
study in his office. But the boy was no ordinary apprentice. He became
almost at once an omnivorous student and writer. He laid out a plan of
study that included theology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, Latin,
Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, and he wrote essays, remarkably
mature and well-phrased, in a series of note-books that he kept in the
office. Poetry he wrote also, filled with love of the sea that circled
his native Cornwall, and the great cliffs and moorlands that make that
part of England one of the most picturesque spots in the world.
His work with Mr. Borlase brought him into the field of chemistry when
he was nineteen. It was a field of magic to him. He read two books,
Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry,” and Nicholson’s “Dictionary of
Chemistry,” and rushed from them to experiment for himself. His
bedroom was his laboratory. His tools were old bottles, glasses,
tobacco-pipes, teacups, and such odds and ends as he could find. When
he needed fire he went to the kitchen. The owner of the house, Mr.
Tonkin, was an old friend of the Davy family, and very fond of
Humphrey, but the amateur experiments were almost too much for him.
Said he, after he had watched some more than usually noisy combustion
at the fire, “This boy, Humphrey, is incorrigible. Was there ever so
idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.” But Humphrey minded no
arguments nor objections; he was studying the effects of acids and
alkalies on vegetable colors, the kind of air that was to be found in
the vesicles of common varieties of seaweed, and the solution and
precipitation of metals. The work was all-engrossing; it occupied
every spare moment of his time and thought.
If any greater stimulus to scientific study had been needed it would
have been supplied to young Davy by his acquaintance with Gregory
Watt, the son of the inventor James Watt. Gregory came to board at
Mrs. Davy’s house when he was twenty-one, and Humphrey nineteen. He
was a splendid companion, and possessed of a remarkably brilliant
mind. In a short time the two youths had become inseparable friends,
experimenting together, and taking walks to the mines and quarries in
the neighborhood of Penzance in search of minerals for study. It was
an ideal friendship, incomparably valuable for Davy. But Gregory Watt
died when he was twenty-eight. “Gregory was a noble fellow,” Davy
wrote to a friend, “and would have been a great man.”
In the meantime the young physician’s apprentice had been lured away
from Penzance. Dr. Beddoes had established what he styled a Pneumatic
Institution at Clifton, the object of which was to try the medicinal
effects of different gases on consumptive patients. Davy, only twenty,
had been offered the position of director, and had accepted. His old
friend Mr. Tonkin, who had thought to see Humphrey become the leading
physician of Penzance, was so much put out with this change of plan
that he altered his will and revoked a legacy he had intended for
Davy.
Filled with the ardor of research Davy went on with his experiments at
Clifton. He discovered silica in the epidermis of the stems of weeds,
corn, and grasses. He experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas)
for ten months until he had thoroughly learned its intoxicating
effects. Often he jeopardized his life, and once nearly lost it, by
breathing carburetted hydrogen. He published the results of his more
important experiments. When he was twenty-one he issued his “Essays on
Heat and Light.” He experimented with galvanic electricity, and
increased the powers of Volta’s Galvanic Pile. Moreover he outlined
and partly drafted an epic poem on the deliverance of the Israelites
from Egypt. The total is a surprising catalogue of industries for the
young Clifton Director.
His ardor had worn him out, and he was forced to take a holiday at
Penzance. His reputation as a rising scientist had reached the little
Cornish town, and he was given a hearty welcome. He loved his own
country and never lost his delight in her natural beauties. Nor did he
ever forget his own days in the grammar school, and in his will he
directed that a certain sum of money should be paid to the master each
year “on condition that the boys may have a holiday on his birthday.”
Davy had already made influential friends, and one of them, Dr. Hope,
the professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, was to give
him his next step forward. Dr. Hope knew Davy’s works on heat,
nitrous oxide, and galvanic electricity, and he recommended the young
scientist to Count Rumford for the professorship of chemistry in the
Royal Philosophical Institution in London, which Count Rumford had
been instrumental in founding. Davy wrote to his mother that this was
“as honorable as any scientific appointment in the kingdom, with an
income of at least five hundred pounds a year.”
He went to London in 1801, and there he had the great satisfaction of
meeting many scientific men whose names and work were well known to
him. Six weeks after he arrived he began his first course of lectures,
taking for his subject the history of galvanism, and the various
methods of accumulating galvanic influence. The _Philosophical
Magazine_ said of the new lion, “The sensation created by his first
course of lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration
which they obtained, is at this period hardly to be imagined. Men of
the first rank and talent,--the literary and the scientific, the
practical and the theoretical,--blue-stockings and women of fashion,
the old and the young, all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture-room.
His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical
knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments,
excited universal attention and unbounded applause. Compliments,
invitations, and presents were showered upon him in abundance from all
quarters; his society was courted by all, and all appeared proud of
his acquaintance.”
Davy was an eloquent, enthusiastic, forceful speaker. He prepared his
lectures with the greatest care, and he delivered them with that
attention to dramatic effect which is instinctive in all really great
speakers. Coleridge said, “I attend Davy’s lectures to increase my
stock of metaphors,” and there were many others who went to hear the
young chemist for other reasons than a liking for science. He had his
own theories of the arts of public address. “Great powers,” said he,
“have never been exerted independent of strong feelings. The rapid
arrangement of ideas from their various analogies to the equally rapid
comparisons of these analogies, with facts uniformly occurring during
the progress of discovery, have existed only in those minds where the
agency of strong and various motives is perceived--of motives
modifying each other, mingling with each other, and producing that
fever of emotion which is the joy of existence and the consciousness
of life.”
In addition to his lectures Davy worked hard in the well-stocked
laboratory of the Institution, where he was supplied with a corps of
capable assistants. His researches covered a very large part of the
field of chemistry, and he was indefatigable in running down any new
idea which his active brain chanced to hit upon. In his vacations from
London he went to the farthest regions of the British Isles, spending
considerable time in the north of Ireland and the Hebrides. Here he
studied the geological structures, and collected all the information
he could in regard to agriculture. Anything to do with natural science
interested him. He sketched a great deal, and he was forever asking
questions of all the countrymen he met. His questions made him famous
in many a hamlet, where such inquisitiveness had never been known
before.
Shortly after he had moved to London he had been asked to investigate
astringent plants in connection with tanning. To this end he visited
tan-yards and farmers, and in 1802 began to deliver a course of
lectures on “The Connection of Chemistry with Vegetable Physiology.”
These lectures proved remarkably popular, and for ten years he
repeated them at the meetings of the Board of Agriculture. They were
later published in book form, and so great was their interest that
they were translated into almost every European language. _The
Edinburgh Review_, that dean of British critics, said, “We feel
grateful for his having thus suspended for a time the labors of
original investigation, in order to apply the principles and
discoveries of his favorite science to the illustration and
improvement of an art which, above all others, ministers to the wants
and comforts of man.”
When his agricultural researches were finished he went back to his
studies with the voltaic pile or battery. He discovered that potash
and soda can be decomposed, with the resultant metals of potassium and
sodium. When he made this discovery he was so delighted that he danced
about the room, and was too excited to finish the experiment for some
time.
He had worked too hard, and soon after this discovery he fell ill. For
days all London watched for the bulletins of the young chemist’s
condition. Fortunately he recovered, and in time went back to the
work which was proving so invaluable for the world of science.
The Royal Institution now provided him with a voltaic battery that was
four times as powerful as any that had previously been constructed.
With this he made numberless chemical discoveries. The Royal Society
had made him a fellow when he was twenty-five years old, and one of
its secretaries when he was twenty-nine. His London lectures grew
continually more popular. The Dublin Society invited him to lecture in
that city, and his course at once attracted the greatest attention. He
was already the scientific lion of England, but withal a very modest
and unassuming lion. Cuvier said, “Davy, not yet thirty-two, in the
opinion of all who could judge of such labors, held the first rank
among the chemists of this or of any other age.” The National
Institute of France awarded him the prize that had been established by
Napoleon for the greatest discovery made by means of galvanism. Then,
in 1812, when he was thirty-three, he was knighted by the Prince
Regent.
Sir Humphrey Davy, as he now was, married Mrs. Appreece, a woman of
many talents and unusual intelligence. She was rich, and soon after
their marriage Davy was able to resign his professorship at the Royal
Institution, which he had held for twelve years, and devote himself to
original research and to travel. Carrying a portable chemical
apparatus for his studies, Sir Humphrey and Lady Davy went first to
Scotland, and then to France, Italy, and Germany. They met the most
prominent men of the age in those countries. These men found the
famous chemist interested in everything about him, as much of a poet
as a scientist. In Rome he wrote a sonnet to the sculptor Canova, and
the literary circles of Italy proclaimed him a poet after their own
heart.
Davy was now one of the foremost chemists of the world, but he could
as yet hardly lay claim to the title of inventor. He had been an
ambitious man, and had once said that he had escaped the temptations
that lay in wait for many men because of “an active mind, a deep ideal
feeling of good, and a look toward future greatness.” That future
greatness had always been in his thoughts, and had been one of the
compelling powers in his great chemical discoveries. But beyond this
thought of greatness was a very deep and earnest desire to help his
fellow men. So when the chance to do this offered he took advantage of
it at once.
Explosions of coal-gas were only too common in the mines of England.
They were almost always fatal to the miners, and formed the greatest
peril of those who labored underground. In 1812 a terrible explosion
occurred in a leading English mine, and caused the death of almost a
hundred miners. The mine had caught on fire, and had to be closed at
the mouth, which meant certain destruction to those within. The
catastrophe was so great that the biggest mine-owners met to see
whether some protection against such accidents could not be devised.
After much discussion they appointed a committee to call on Sir
Humphrey Davy and ask him to investigate the possibilities for them.
Davy realized that here lay his opportunity to be of real service to
men, the goal he had always had in mind. He took up the question,
experimented with fire-damp, and found that it was in reality light
carburetted hydrogen. He visited many mines, and took into careful
consideration the conditions under which the men worked. For months he
investigated and experimented, and at length, in 1815, he constructed
what he called the safety-lamp. This was an oil lamp which had a
chimney or cage of wire gauze. The gauze held the flame of the lamp
from passing through and igniting the fire-damp outside. It was only
possible for a very little of the fire-damp to penetrate the gauze and
such as did was held harmless prisoner. The cage allowed air to pass
and light to escape, and although by the combustion of the fire-damp
the wire gauze might become red hot, it was still efficient as a
safety-lamp.
Davy’s safety-lamp proved exactly what was needed to act as protection
from exploding fire-damp. It was tried under all conditions and served
admirably. George Stephenson had worked out a somewhat similar
safety-lamp at about the same time, and his was used in the collieries
around Newcastle. In the rest of England Davy’s lamp was at once
adopted. All miners were equipped with either the Davy lamp or the
“Geordie” lamp, as the other was called, and the mine fatalities from
fire-damp immediately decreased. This lamp is still the main safeguard
of those who have to contend with dangerous explosive gases in mines
all over the world.
Friends urged Davy to patent his lamp, and thus ensure himself a
very considerable income from its sale. But he said, “I never thought
of such a thing: my sole object was to serve the cause of humanity;
and if I have succeeded, I am amply rewarded in the gratifying
reflection of having done so. I have enough for all my views and
purposes; more wealth could not increase either my fame or my
happiness. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses to my
carriage; but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey
drives his carriage and four?”
[Illustration: THE DAVY SAFETY LAMP]