telephone, a fortune has had to be spent in order to protect the patent
rights; but in Bell's case the inventor's money reward has been ample
and is now said to amount to more than $1,000,000 a year. Just at
present Mr. Bell is engaged upon a modification of the phonograph, which
may enable persons not wholly deaf to hear a phonographic reproduction
of the human voice, even if they cannot hear the voice itself. Honors
have poured in upon him within the last fifteen years. In 1880 the
French Government awarded him the Volta prize of $10,000, which Mr. Bell
devoted to founding the Volta Laboratory in Washington, an institution
for the use of students. In 1882 he also received from France the ribbon
of the Legion of Honor.
XI.
AMERICAN INVENTORS, PAST AND PRESENT.
There are now in force in this country nearly three hundred thousand
patents for inventions and devices of more or less importance and aid to
everyone. To how great a degree the world is indebted to the inventor,
very few of us realize. The more we think of the matter, however, the
more are we likely to believe that the inventor is mankind's great
benefactor. Watt should stand before Napoleon in the hero-worship of the
age, and the man who perfected the friction-match before the author of
an epic. Some day this redistribution of the world's honors will surely
take place, and it should be a satisfaction to us Americans that our
country stands so high in the ranks of inventive genius. Within the last
half century Americans have contributed, to mention only great
achievements, the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the
sewing-machine, the reaper, and vulcanized rubber, to the world's
wealth--a far larger contribution than that of any other nation. What
may not the next generation produce? Some people seem to believe that so
much has already been invented as to have exhausted the field. In this
connection I have quoted in another place some remarks Mr. Edison once
made to me as to what the next fifty years might bring forth. Still more
astonishing than our past fecundity in invention would be future
barrenness. This century has done its work and produced its marvels with
comparatively blunt tools, or no tools at all. The next century will be
able to work with superb instruments of which our grandfathers knew
nothing. The school-boy to-day knows more of the forces of nature and
their useful application than the magician of fifty years ago. It has
been said that the fifteen blocks in the "Gem" puzzle can be arranged in
more than a million different ways. The material in the game at which
man daily plays is so infinitely more complex that the number of
combinations cannot be written out in figures. The rôle played by
invention in modern life is infinitely greater than during preceding
ages. One invention, by affording a new tool, makes others possible. The
steam-engine made possible the dynamo, the dynamo made possible the
electric light. In its turn the electric light may lead to wonders still
more extraordinary.
The degree to which invention has contributed to civilization is far
from suspected by the careless observer. Almost everything we have or
use is the fruit of invention. Man might be defined as the animal that
invents. The air we breathe and the water we drink are provided by
Nature, but we drink water from a vessel of some kind, an invention of
man. Even if we drink from a shell or a gourd, we shape it to serve a
new purpose. If we want our air hotter or colder, we resort to
invention, and a vast amount of ingenuity has been expended upon putting
air in motion by means of fans, blowers, ventilators, etc. We take but a
small part of our food as animals do--in the natural state. The savage
who first crushed some kernels of wheat between two stones invented
flour, and we are yet hard at it inventing improvements upon his
process. The earliest inventions probably had reference to the procuring
and preparing of food, and the ingenuity of man is still exercised upon
these problems more eagerly than ever before. During the last fifty
years the power of man to produce food has increased more than during
the preceding fifteen centuries. Sixty years ago a large part of the
wheat and other grain raised in the world was cut, a handful at a time,
with a scythe, and a man could not reap much more than a quarter of an
acre a day. With a McCormick reaper a man and two horses will cut from
fifteen to twenty acres of grain a day. In the threshing of grain,
invention has achieved almost as much. A man with a machine will thresh
ten times as much as he formerly could with a flail.
It is less than sixty years since matches have come into common use.
Many old men remember the time in this country when a fire could be
kindled only with the embers from another fire, as there were no such
things as matches. Most of us who have reached the age of forty
remember the abominable, clumsy sulphur-matches of 1860, as bulky as
they were unpleasant. And yet the first sulphur-matches, made about
1830, cost ten cents a hundred. To-day the safety match, certain and
odorless, is sold at one-tenth of this price. The introduction of
kerosene was one of the blessings of modern life. It added several hours
a day to the useful, intelligent life of man, and who can estimate the
influence of these evening hours upon the advance of civilization? The
evening, after the day's work is done, has been the only hour when the
workingman could read. Before cheap and good lights were given him,
reading was out of the question. Gas marked a step in advance, but only
for large towns, and now electricity bids fair soon to displace gas; and
we hear vague suggestions of a luminous ether that will flood houses
with a soft glow like that of sunlight.
TOWNSEND AND DRAKE--THE INTRODUCTION OF COAL OIL.
In 1850 sperm oil, then commonly used in lamps, had become high-priced,
owing to the failure of the New Bedford whalers, and cost $2.25 a
gallon. Oil obtained by the distillation of coal was tried, but was also
too costly--not less than $1 a gallon. It burned well, but its odor was
frightful. The problem of a cheap and pleasant light was solved by James
M. Townsend and E.L. Drake, both of New Haven. In 1854 a man brought to
Professor Silliman, of Yale, some oil from Oil Creek, Pa., to be tested.
His report was so favorable that a company was formed, which leased all
the land along Oil Creek upon which were traces of the new rock oil. The
hard times of 1857 came before any headway had been made, and the
company tried to find some way of ridding itself of the lease. At this
time Townsend, who knew something about the property, undertook to get
possession. Boarding in the same house in New Haven was E.L. Drake, once
a conductor on the New York & New Haven Railroad, who had been obliged
to give up work on account of ill-health. Townsend proposed that as
Drake could get railroad passes as an ex-employee, he should go to
Pennsylvania and look into the property. He did so, and reported that a
fortune might be made by gathering the oil and bottling it for medicinal
purposes. Drake and Townsend organized the Seneca Oil Company. The oil
was gathered by digging trenches, and was sold at $1 a gallon. Drake
suggested that it might be well to bore for oil. A man familiar with
salt-well boring was brought from Syracuse, and in 1850 the first well
was begun at Titusville under the supervision of Drake. He was commonly
considered by the neighbors to be insane. The work was costly and slow.
When many months and about $50,000 had been spent, the stockholders in
the company refused to go any further--all except Townsend, who sent his
last $500 to Drake, with instructions to use it in paying debts and his
expenses in reaching home. On the day before the receipt of this
money--August 29, 1859--the auger, which was down sixty-eight feet,
struck a cavity, and up came a flow of oil that filled the well to
within five feet of the surface. Pumping began at the rate of five
hundred gallons a day, and a more powerful pump doubled this flow. As
this oil was worth a dollar a gallon, fortune was within sight. But the
very quantity of the oil proved to be the company's ruin. Their works
were destroyed by fire in the winter of 1859-60, and before they could
be rebuilt, scores of other wells, some of them requiring no pumping
apparatus, had been sunk in the neighborhood. The supply was soon far in
excess of the demand, which was limited by the small number of
refineries, the want of good lamps in which to burn the oil, and the
attacks by manufacturers of other oils. Such was the effect of these
causes that the new oil fell to a dollar a barrel, a price so low that
it did not pay for the handling. The Seneca Oil Company was so much
discouraged that they sold out their leases and disbanded. Both Townsend
and Drake would have died richer men had they never heard of the
Pennsylvania rock oil.
THE CLARKS AND THE TELESCOPE.
[Illustration: Alvan Clark.]
The fame of American telescopes is due to the work and inventions of the
Clark family of Cambridgeport, Mass., the descendants of Thomas Clark,
the mate of the Mayflower. The founder of the great--in a scientific
sense--house of Alvan Clark & Sons, telescope-makers, was a remarkable
man. Until after his fortieth year he devoted himself to
portrait-painting. In 1843 his attention was accidentally turned toward
telescope-making. One day the dinner-bell at Phillips Academy, Andover,
Mass., happened to break. The pieces were gathered up by one of Clark's
boys, George, who proceeded to melt them in a crucible over the kitchen
fire, declaring that he was going to make a telescope. His mother
laughed, but his father was deeply interested and helped the boy make a
five-inch reflecting telescope which showed the satellites of Jupiter.
This was the beginning of telescope-making in the Clark family, an
industry which has given to the scientific world its most remarkable
lenses. Alvan Clark dropped his paintbrushes, never to take them up
again until at the age of eighty-three he made an excellent portrait of
his little grandson. To Alvan G. Clark, the present head of the house,
are chiefly due the scores of devices by which American ingenuity has
surpassed the slower European methods. The delicacy required in the
manipulation and grinding of the immense lenses made by the Clarks is
almost incredible. The latest triumph of the firm--a forty-inch lens for
the Spence Observatory at Los Angeles, Cal.--required two years of
grinding and polishing after a piece of glass perfect enough had been
obtained. So delicately finished is it that half a dozen sharp rubs with
the soft part of a man's thumb would be sufficient to ruin it. Alvan G.
Clark is now a man sixty-one years-old. He has lived all his life at the
home in Cambridgeport. His greatest sorrow is that there is no son of
his to carry on the work after his death. His only son died a few years
ago, just as he was beginning to show wonderful aptitude in the art
which has made the family famous in all the great observatories of the
world.
JOHN FITCH AND OLIVER EVANS--STEAM TRANSPORTATION.
In looking over the work done by American inventors, the great names are
those to be found at the heads of the preceding chapters. But the list
is by no means exhausted. Among the early men of achievement in the
field of invention I have had to omit at least a dozen whose work
deserves more than a paragraph. The history of the steamboat is not
complete without reference to John Fitch.
Fulton was fortunate in making the first really successful attempt at
propelling boats by steam, but Fitch came very near reaping the honors
for this invention. The account of Fitch's life and experiments, written
by himself and now in the possession of the Franklin Library of
Philadelphia, clearly shows that this unhappy genius really deserves to
share in Fulton's glory. Fitch was born in Connecticut, in January,
1743, more than twenty years before Fulton. He was a farmer's boy and
picked up knowledge as best he could. Before he was twenty he had
learned clock-making and then button-making. It was in 1788 that he
obtained his first patent for a steamboat. His experimental boat was an
extraordinary affair, fully described in the _Columbian_ (Philadelphia)
_Magazine_ for December, 1786. Its motive power consisted of a clumsy
engine that moved horizontal bars, upon which were fastened a number of
oars or paddles. So far as possible the machine imitated the movements
of a man rowing. This boat made eight miles an hour in calm water.
Finding nothing but ridicule for his project here, as his steamboat cost
too much money to run as a commercial undertaking, Fitch went to Europe,
and was equally unsuccessful there. There is still in existence a letter
from him in which he predicts that steam would some day carry vessels
across the Atlantic. He died in 1796, without having contributed more
than a curiosity to the art of steam navigation.
Another early inventor was Oliver Evans, who has been called the Watt of
America. In 1804 Evans offered to build for the Lancaster Turnpike
Company a steam-carriage to carry one hundred barrels of flour fifty
miles in twenty-four hours. The offer was derided. Here is one of
Evans's predictions written at about this time: "The time will come when
people will travel in stages, moved by steam-engines, from one city to
another, almost as fast as birds fly, fifteen or twenty miles an hour.
Passing through the air with such velocity, changing the scene with such
rapid succession, will be the most rapid, exhilarating exercise. A
carriage (steam) will set out from Washington in the morning, the
passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in
New York the same day. To accomplish this, two sets of railways will be
laid so nearly level as not in any way to deviate more than two degrees
from a horizontal line, made of wood, or iron, or smooth paths of
broken stone or gravel, with a rail to guide the carriages so that they
may pass each other in different directions and travel by night as well
as by day. Engines will drive boats ten or twelve miles per hour, and
there will be many hundred steamboats running on the Mississippi." In
1805 Evans built a steam-carriage propelled by a sort of paddle-wheel at
the stern, the paddles touching the ground. This apparatus he named the
"Oructor Amphibolis," and it is believed to have been the first
application of steam in America to the propelling of land carriages. He
died in 1819 without having seen his steam-carriage come to anything
practicable. He made a fortune, however, from some patents upon
flour-mill improvements.
AMOS WHITTEMORE AND THOMAS BLANCHARD.
In the domain of textile fabrics Amos Whittemore, the Massachusetts
inventor of the card-machine, which did away with the old-fashioned
method of making cards for cotton and woollen factories, must be
mentioned. Before Whittemore's machine came into use, about 1812, such
cards were made by hand, the laborer sticking one by one into sheets of
leather the wire staples, which operation gave work to thousands of
families in New England early in the century. Whittemore made a fortune
by his invention, and devoted the last years of his life to astronomy.
Another Massachusetts boy, Thomas Blanchard, invented the lathe for
turning irregular objects, and well deserves mention. Born in 1788, he
was noted as a boy for his efficiency in the New England accomplishment
of whittling, making wonderful windmills and water-wheels with his
knife. When thirteen years old he made an apple-paring machine, with
which at the "paring bees" held in the neighborhood he could accomplish
more than a dozen girls. Soon after this achievement he began helping
his brother in the manufacture of tacks. The operation consisted in
stamping them out from a thin plate of iron, after which they were taken
up, one at a time, with the thumb and finger and caught in a tool worked
by the foot, while a blow given simultaneously with a hammer held in the
right hand made a flat head of the large end of the tack projecting
above the face of the vise. This was the only method then known, and it
was so slow and irksome that young Blanchard often grew disgusted. As a
daily task he was given a certain quantity of tacks to make, which
number was ascertained by counting. Finding this much trouble, he
constructed a counting-machine, consisting of a ratchet-wheel which
moved one tooth every time the jaws of the heading tool or vise moved in
the process of making a tack. From this achievement he passed to a tack
machine, and after six years of hard work turned out an apparatus that
made five hundred tacks a minute. He sold his patent for the trifle of
$5,000.
With part of this money he began his experiments in turning
musket-barrels, an operation that was simple enough except at the
breech, where the flat and oval sides had to be ground down or chipped.
Blanchard made a lathe that turned the whole barrel satisfactorily.
While exhibiting his new lathe at the United States Armory at
Springfield, occurred the incident that led to Blanchard's great device
for turning irregular forms. One of the men employed in cutting
musket-stocks remarked that Blanchard could never spoil his job, for he
could not turn a gun-stock. The remark struck Blanchard, who replied, "I
am not so sure of that, but will think of it a while." The result of six
months' study was the lathe with which such articles as gun-stocks,
shoe-lasts, hat-blocks, tackle-blocks, axe-handles, wig-blocks, and a
thousand other objects of irregular shape may now be turned. While at
Washington getting his patent, Blanchard exhibited his machine at the
War Office, where many heads of departments had assembled. Among the
rest was a navy commissioner, who, after listening to Blanchard,
remarked to the inventor: "Can you turn a seventy-four?"
"Yes," was the reply, "if you will furnish the block." Blanchard
afterward made many interesting experiments in steam-carriages, but his
chief claim to fame rests upon his lathe.
RICHARD M. HOE AND THE WEB-PRESS.
From the end of the first half of this century date movements of
extraordinary importance in the world of American invention. The
locomotive, the steam-engine and steam-boat, the telegraph,
reaping-machine, the printing-press, all seemed to reach an era of wide
usefulness at about the same time. It was in 1814 that Walters first
printed the London _Times_ by steam, the sullen pressmen standing around
waiting for a pretext to destroy the machinery, and only prevented by
strategy from doing so. About thirty years afterward Richard M. Hoe
first turned his attention to the improvement of printing-presses. The
founder of the famous house of printing-press makers, Robert Hoe, was
born in England. His son, Richard March Hoe, was born in New York on the
12th of September, 1812. He made his first press in 1840, when he turned
out the machine known as "Hoe's Double-cylinder," which was capable of
making about six thousand impressions an hour, and was the admiration of
all the printers in the city. So long as the newspaper circulation knew
no great increase this wonderful press was all-sufficient; but the
greater the supply the greater grew the demand, and a printing-press
capable of striking off papers with greater rapidity was felt to be an
imperative need. It was often necessary to hold the forms back until
nearly daylight for the purpose of getting the latest news, and the
work of printing the paper had to be done in a very few hours. In 1842
Hoe began to experiment for the purpose of getting greater speed. There
were many difficulties in the way, however, and at the end of four years
of experimenting he was about ready to confess that the obstacles were
insurmountable. One night in 1846, while still in this mood, he resumed
his experiments; the more he reviewed the problem, the more difficult it
seemed. In despair he was about to give it up for the night, when there
flashed across his brain a plan for securing the type on the surface of
a cylinder. This was the solution of the problem, and within a year our
leading newspapers had their "Lightning" presses, in which from four to
ten cylinders were used to feed sheets of paper against the surface of
the type as it flew around. So recently as 1870 the ten-cylinder Hoe
press, printing twenty-five thousand sheets an hour, was considered a
marvel.
Then came the perfecting press, a far smaller machine, but capable of
five times as much work, thanks to the substitution of rolls of paper
for separate sheets fed in one by one. The device by which the web of
paper after being printed on one side is turned over and printed on the
other side in the same machine was another triumph of American
ingenuity. Stereotyping made it possible to print from a dozen presses
at the same time without the trouble of setting up new type, and
inventions for pasting, folding, and counting the papers still further
increased the speed at which papers may be issued, while at the same
time decreasing the number of men employed as pressmen. In 1865 it
required the services of twenty-six men and boys to print and fold
twenty-five thousand copies of an eight-page paper in an hour. To-day a
perfecting press, with the aid of four men, does four times as much
work. It has been recently estimated that to print, paste, and fold the
Sunday edition of one of the great newspapers with the machinery of 1865
would require the services of five hundred persons.
THOMAS W. HARVEY AND SCREW-MAKING.
The gimlet-pointed screw patented in 1838 by Thomas W. Harvey, of
Providence, R.I., is a marked instance of an improvement so useful that
we can scarcely realize that less than fifty years ago such screws were
unknown to the carpenter, for it was not until 1846 that Harvey
succeeded in getting people to abandon the old blunt-ended screw that we
now occasionally find in buildings put up before 1850. Harvey was a
Vermont boy, born in 1795. His faculty for the invention of machinery
for screw-making and other purposes gave him and his associates and
successors--Angell, Sloan, and Whipple--great fortunes according to the
estimate of that day. He died in 1856.
C.L. SHOLES AND THE TYPEWRITER.
[Illustration: C.L. Sholes.]
A great many men contributed to make the typewriter what it is
to-day--as much of an improvement upon the pen as the sewing-machine is
upon the needle. So long ago as 1843 some patents were taken out for
divers forms of writing-machines, all more or less impracticable. It was
not until C.L. Sholes, then of Wisconsin, took up the problem, in 1866,
that the present form of a number of type-bars, arranged so that their
ends strike upon a common centre, was devised. Sholes died in 1890,
having also helped by many minor devices the increase in the use of
writing-machines. From 1865 to 1873 he made thirty different working
models of writing-machines, devoting himself to the task almost day and
night for eight years.
B.B. HOTCHKISS AND HIS GUNS.
[Illustration: B.B. Hotchkiss.]