BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL
INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED
BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE OF
THE 18TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN
THE greatest benefactor of the human race died more than half a million
years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low brow and sunken eyes, a
heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth. He would not have looked well in
a gathering of modern scientists, but they would have honoured him as
their master. For he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift
up a heavy boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our
first tools, and he did more than any human being who came after him
to give man his enormous advantage over the other animals with whom he
shares this planet.
Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use of a
greater number of tools. The first wheel (a round disc made out of an
old tree) created as much stir in the communities of 100,000 B.C. as the
flying machine did only a few years ago.
In Washington, the story is told of a director of the Patent Office
who in the early thirties of the last century suggested that the Patent
Office be abolished, because "everything that possibly could be invented
had been invented." A similar feeling must have spread through the
prehistoric world when the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the
people were able to move from place to place without rowing or punting
or pulling from the shore.
Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is the effort of
man to let some one else or something else do his work for him, while he
enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun or painting pictures on rocks,
or training young wolves and little tigers to behave like peaceful
domestic animals.
Of course in the very olden days; it was always possible to enslave a
weaker neighbour and force him to do the unpleasant tasks of life. One
of the reasons why the Greeks and Romans, who were quite as intelligent
as we are, failed to devise more interesting machinery, was to be
found in the wide-spread existence of slavery. Why should a great
mathematician waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill
the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the marketplace and buy
all the slaves he needed at a very small expense?
And during the middle-ages, although slavery had been abolished and
only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds discouraged the idea of
using machinery because they thought this would throw a large number
of their brethren out of work. Besides, the Middle-Ages were not at all
interested in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and
butchers and carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small
community in which they lived and had no desire to compete with their
neighbours, or to produce more than was strictly necessary.
During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church against
scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as rigidly as
before, a large number of men began to devote their lives to mathematics
and astronomy and physics and chemistry. Two years before the beginning
of the Thirty Years War, John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his
little book which described the new invention of logarithms. During the
war it-self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system
of infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of Westphalia,
Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was born, and in that
same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, died. Meanwhile the Thirty
Years War had destroyed the prosperity of central Europe and there was
a sudden but very general interest in "alchemy," the strange
pseudo-science of the middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base
metals into gold. This proved to be impossible but the alchemists in
their laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped the
work of the chemists who were their successors.
The work of all these men provided the world with a solid scientific
foundation upon which it was possible to build even the most complicated
of engines, and a number of practical men made good use of it. The
Middle-Ages had used wood for the few bits of necessary machinery.
But wood wore out easily. Iron was a much better material but iron was
scarce except in England. In England therefore most of the smelting was
done. To smelt iron, huge fires were needed. In the beginning, these
fires had been made of wood, but gradually the forests had been used up.
Then "stone coal" (the petrified trees of prehistoric times) was used.
But coal as you know has to be dug out of the ground and it has to be
transported to the smelting ovens and the mines have to be kept dry from
the ever invading waters.
These were two problems which had to be solved at once. For the time
being, horses could still be used to haul the coal-wagons, but the
pumping question demanded the application of special machinery. Several
inventors were busy trying to solve the difficulty. They all knew that
steam would have to be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam
engine was very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century
before Christ, has described to us several bits of machinery which
were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance had played with
the notion of steam-driven war chariots. The Marquis of Worcester, a
contemporary of Newton, in his book of inventions, tells of a steam
engine. A little later, in the year 1698, Thomas Savery of London
applied for a patent for a pumping engine. At the same time, a
Hollander, Christian Huygens, was trying to perfect an engine in which
gun-powder was used to cause regular explosions in much the same way as
we use gasoline in our motors.
All over Europe, people were busy with the idea. Denis Papin, a
Frenchman, friend and assistant of Huygens, was making experiments with
steam engines in several countries. He invented a little wagon that was
driven by steam, and a paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a
trip in his vessel, it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint
of the boatmen's union, who feared that such a craft would deprive them
of their livelihood. Papin finally died in London in great poverty,
having wasted all his money on his inventions. But at the time of his
death, another mechanical enthusiast, Thomas Newcomen, was working
on the problem of a new steam-pump. Fifty years later his engine was
improved upon by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year
1777, he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of real
practical value.
But during the centuries of experiments with a "heat-engine," the
political world had greatly changed. The British people had succeeded
the Dutch as the common-carriers of the world's trade. They had opened
up new colonies. They took the raw materials which the colonies produced
to England, and there they turned them into finished products, and
then they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the world.
During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia and the Carolinas
had begun to grow a new shrub which gave a strange sort of woolly
substance, the so-called "cotton wool." After this had been plucked, it
was sent to England and there the people of Lancastershire wove it into
cloth. This weaving was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen.
Very soon a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving.
In the year 1730, John Kay invented the "fly shuttle." In 1770, James
Hargreaves got a patent on his "spinning jenny." Eli Whitney, an
American, invented the cotton-gin, which separated the cotton from its
seeds, a job which had previously been done by hand at the rate of
only a pound a day. Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund
Cartwright invented large weaving machines, which were driven by water
power. And then, in the eighties of the eighteenth century, just when
the Estates General of France had begun those famous meetings which were
to revolutionise the political system of Europe, the engines of Watt
were arranged in such a way that they could drive the weaving machines
of Arkwright, and this created an economic and social revolution which
has changed human relationship in almost every part of the world.
As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the inventors
turned their attention to the problem of propelling boats and carts with
the help of a mechanical contrivance. Watt himself designed plans for
a "steam locomotive," but ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year
1804, a locomotive made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty
tons at Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.
At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter by the name
of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince Napoleon that with
the use of his submarine boat, the "Nautilus," and his "steam-boat," the
French might be able to destroy the naval supremacy of England.
Fulton's idea of a steamboat was not original. He had undoubtedly copied
it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of Connecticut whose cleverly
constructed steamer had first navigated the Delaware river as early as
the year 1787. But Napoleon and his scientific advisers did not believe
in the practical possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the
Scotch-built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the
great Emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable weapon which
might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar.
As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being a practical
man of business, he organised a successful steamboat company together
with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
who was American Minister to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying
to sell his invention. The first steamer of this new company, the
"Clermont," which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York
State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of Birmingham
in England, began a regular service between New York and Albany in the
year 1807.
As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before any one else had used
the "steam-boat" for commercial purposes, he came to a sad death. Broken
in health and empty of purse, he had come to the end of his resources
when his fifth boat, which was propelled by means of a screw-propeller,
had been destroyed. His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a
hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his funny flying
machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country an easy access to the
broad rivers of the west and his countrymen preferred to travel in
flat-boats or go on foot. In the year 1798, in utter despair and misery,
Fitch killed himself by taking poison.
But twenty years later, the "Savannah," a steamer of 1850 tons and
making six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just four times as fast,)
crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool in the record time of
twenty-five days. Then there was an end to the derision of the multitude
and in their enthusiasm the people gave the credit for the invention to
the wrong man.
Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had been building
locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from the mine-pit to
smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his famous "travelling
engine" which reduced the price of coal by almost seventy per cent and
which made it possible to establish the first regular passenger service
between Manchester and Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to
city at the unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years
later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour. At the
present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant of
the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler and Levassor of the
eighties of the last century) can do better than these early "Puffing
Billies."
But while these practically-minded engineers were improving upon their
rattling "heat engines," a group of "pure" scientists (men who
devote fourteen hours of each day to the study of those "theoretical"
scientific phenomena without which no mechanical progress would be
possible) were following a new scent which promised to lead them into
the most secret and hidden domains of Nature.
Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman philosophers
(notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny who was killed while trying
to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the year 79 when Pompeii and
Herculaneum were buried beneath the ashes) had noticed the strange
antics of bits of straw and of feather which were held near a piece of
amber which was being rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the
Middle Ages had not been interested in this mysterious "electric" power.
But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the private
physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treatise on the character
and behaviour of Magnets. During the Thirty Years War Otto von
Guericke, the burgomaster of Magdeburg and the inventor of the air-pump,
constructed the first electrical machine. During the next century
a large number of scientists devoted themselves to the study of
electricity. Not less than three professors invented the famous Leyden
Jar in the year 1795. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin, the most
universal genius of America next to Benjamin Thomson (who after his
flight from New Hampshire on account of his pro-British sympathies
became known as Count Rumford) was devoting his attention to this
subject. He discovered that lightning and the electric spark were
manifestations of the same electric power and continued his electric
studies until the end of his busy and useful life. Then came Volta with
his famous "electric pile" and Galvani and Day and the Danish professor
Hans Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and Faraday, all of them
diligent searchers after the true nature of the electric forces.
They freely gave their discoveries to the world and Samuel Morse (who
like Fulton began his career as an artist) thought that he could use
this new electric current to transmit messages from one city to another.
He intended to use copper wire and a little machine which he had
invented. People laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance
his own experiments and soon he had spent all his money and then he was
very poor and people laughed even louder. He then asked Congress to help
him and a special Committee on Commerce promised him their support. But
the members of Congress were not at all interested and Morse had to wait
twelve years before he was given a small congressional appropriation. He
then built a "telegraph" between Baltimore and Washington. In the year
1887 he had shown his first successful "telegraph" in one of the lecture
halls of New York University. Finally, on the 24th of May of the
year 1844 the first long-distance message was sent from Washington to
Baltimore and to-day the whole world is covered with telegraph wires
and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few seconds. Twenty-three
years later Alexander Graham Bell used the electric current for his
telephone. And half a century afterwards Marconi improved upon these
ideas by inventing a system of sending messages which did away entirely
with the old-fashioned wires.
While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his "telegraph," Michael
Faraday, the Yorkshire-man, had constructed the first "dynamo." This
tiny little machine was completed in the year 1881 when Europe was
still trembling as a result of the great July revolutions which had so
severely upset the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo
grew and grew and grew and to-day it provides us with heat and with
light (you know the little incandescent bulbs which Edison, building
upon French and English experiments of the forties and fifties, first
made in 1878) and with power for all sorts of machines. If I am not
mistaken the electric-engine will soon entirely drive out the "heat
engine" just as in the olden days the more highly-organised prehistoric
animals drove out their less efficient neighbours.
Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will make me very
happy. For the electric engine which can be run by waterpower is a clean
and companionable servant of mankind but the "heat-engine," the marvel
of the eighteenth century, is a noisy and dirty creature for ever
filling the world with ridiculous smoke-stacks and with dust and soot
and asking that it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at
great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people.
And if I were a novelist and not a historian, who must stick to facts
and may not use his imagination, I would describe the happy day when the
last steam locomotive shall be taken to the Museum of Natural History to
be placed next to the skeleton of the Dynosaur and the Pteredactyl and
the other extinct creatures of a by-gone age.