ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
country.
In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote:
Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
brief chapter out of his own history.
He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
away.
Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all
facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to
have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
phase of the evolution of mind.
[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]
A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
change; unique among the nations.
Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
_Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
mechanical skill.
It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might
be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
was very glad to get."
The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
France.
One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
_is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
idea begins again.
Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
those arrangements now in use.
All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
science.
It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers
are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
régime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
operation.
I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the
_Guerriere_.
And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a
measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
directed at the object.
So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance
to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man
at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
by a concealed and silent wire.
This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
leave that service possible in the future without any question.
Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_,
were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
understand her voltage and her Ampères as she now does her drafts and
dampers and the quality of her fuel.
It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
presence of electrical science.
Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
preceding chapters, to explain.
There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
present human investigation. _Force_ has innumerable manifestations
that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
_origin_ is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
what of interest or value may be found.
End of Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele