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[Illustration: THE FIRST SHEET FROM THE PRINTING PRESS]
Graded Supplementary Reading Series
GREAT INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES
by
WILLIS DUFF PIERCY
New York
Charles E. Merrill Company
Copyright, 1911
By Charles E. Merrill Co.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introduction 7
II. The Printing Press 15
III. The Steam Engine 30
IV. Electricity: The Telegraph and the Telephone 56
V. Electricity: Lighting, Transportation, and Other Uses 78
VI. The Discovery of America 92
VII. Weapons and Gunpowder 108
VIII. Astronomical Discoveries and Inventions 127
IX. The Cotton-gin 138
X. Anaesthetics 147
XI. Steel and Rubber 154
XII. Stenography and the Typewriter 164
XIII. The Friction Match 169
XIV. Photography 177
XV. Clocks 182
XVI. Some Machines 188
The Sewing Machine 188
The Reaper 192
Spinning and Weaving Machines 197
XVII. Aeronautics 203
GREAT INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Tens of thousands of years ago, when the world was even then old,
primitive man came into existence. The first men lived in the branches
of trees or in their hollow trunks, and sometimes in caves. For food
they chased horses or caught fish from the streams along whose shores
they lived. If they had clothing, it was the skins of wild beasts. Life
was simple, slow, and crude. There were no cities, books, railroads,
clocks, newspapers, schools, churches, judges, teachers, automobiles,
or elections. Man lived with other animals and was little superior to
them. These primitive men are called cave-dwellers.
A resident of modern New York sits down to a breakfast gathered from
distant parts of the earth. He spreads out before him his daily
newspaper, which tells him what has happened during the last
twenty-four hours all over the world. Telegraph wires and ocean cables
have flashed these events across thousands of miles into the newspaper
offices and there great printing presses have recorded them upon paper.
After breakfast he gets into an electric street car or automobile and
is carried through miles of space in a very short time to a great steel
building hundreds of feet high. He steps into an electric elevator and
is whirled rapidly up to his office on the twentieth floor. The postman
brings a package of letters which fast-flying mail trains have brought
him during the night from far-away places. He reads them and then
speaks rapidly to a young woman who makes some crooked marks on paper.
After running her fingers rapidly over the keyboard of a little
machine, she hands him type-written replies to the letters he has
received. A boy brings him a little yellow envelope. In it he finds a
message from Seattle or London or Hong Kong or Buenos Ayres sent only a
few moments ago. He wishes to talk with a business associate in Boston
or St. Louis. Still sitting at his desk, he applies a small tube to his
ear and speaks to the man as distinctly and as instantaneously as if he
were in the next room. He finds it important to be in Chicago. After
luncheon, he boards a train equipped with the conveniences of his own
home, sleeps there comfortably, and flies through the thousand miles of
distance in time to have breakfast in Chicago the next morning.
What is the difference between the life of the cave-dweller and the
life of the modern New Yorker? We call it _civilization_. It is not at
one bound or at one thousand that we pass from the primitive cave to
New York City. Civilization is the accumulation of centuries of
achievement. It is builded, in the language of Isaiah, "line upon
line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little."
Different nations have accomplished different things and have scattered
the seeds of these accomplishments among other nations. Certain
individuals have seen farther in certain directions than their fellows
and have contributed to civilization the results of their vision.
Whoever has added to the safety, the happiness, the power, or the
convenience of society; whoever discovers a star or a microbe; whoever
paints a picture or plants a tree, builds a bridge or fights a
righteous battle; whoever makes two ears of corn grow where there grew
but one before; whoever lets the light shine in upon a darkened street
or a darkened spirit is an agent of civilization.
The history of civilization is largely a history of man's struggle
against the forces of nature and of his victory over them. Nature is
always saying to man, "Thou shalt not"; and man is always replying, "I
will." If diseases lurk in air and water, cures are ready in the mind
of man. Nature shoves men apart with lofty mountains; but man drives
his iron horse over the mountains or through them. Vast oceans roll and
mighty winds blow between continents; but steam laughs at stormy seas.
The moon's light is not sufficient for man's purposes and he makes a
brighter one. When winter blows his icy breath, man warms himself with
coal and fire. The South pours down upon him her scorching summer; but
he has learned how to freeze water into ice. Time and space conspire
together for human isolation; man conjures with electricity and with it
destroys both. The stars seek to hide their secrets behind immeasurable
distances; but an Italian gives man a glass that brings the heavens
closer before his vision. History tries to conceal itself in the
rubbish of ages; but with ink man preserves the past. His asylums,
hospitals, churches, schools, libraries, and universities are lights
along the shore guiding the human race in its voyage down the ever
widening stream of growth and possibility.
The centuries do not yield to man equal advancement. Some are very
fertile; others are almost, if not quite, barren. The entire period of
a thousand years stretching from the fall of Rome to the discovery of
America was as sterile as a heath. On the other hand, the nineteenth
century was the greatest in history in point of human progress,
especially in the field of inventions. It alone gave to man far more of
civilization than the whole ten centuries before the discovery of
America or indeed any other period of a thousand years. One hundred
years ago there was not a mile of railroad, ocean cable, or telegraph
wire in the world; not a telephone, automobile, electric light, or
typewriter. The people were then deriding the new-born idea of the
steamboat, and wireless telegraphy had not been dreamed of.
Even up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War, less than one
hundred fifty years ago, no man in America had ever seen an envelope, a
match, a stove, a piece of coal, a daily newspaper, a sewing machine, a
reaper, a drill, a mowing machine, ether, chloroform, galvanized iron,
India-rubber, or steam-driven machinery. We who are alive to-day are
fortunate more than any other generation thus far in the world's
population.
"We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time;
In an age on ages telling--
To be living is sublime."
The horse and the dog of to-day are not very different from the horses
and the dogs of a thousand years ago. From the beginning they have done
about all they can ever do. Not so with man. He is a progressive
animal. He is always reaching outward and upward for broader and higher
things. Tennyson sings,
"For I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."
The difference between the lives of the primitive cave-dweller and the
modern American is unspeakably vast. But looking far down the vista of
future ages, who shall say that the fortieth century may not as far
surpass the twentieth as the twentieth does the sleepy dawn of man's
existence on the earth? We are packing more of life into a day than our
ancestors could put into a month. And the hours of the centuries to
come hold a fuller experience than our days.
Thomas Carlyle calls man a "tool-using animal." Throughout all time man
has made and used tools. These tools are the best measure of his
civilization. According to the material out of which they have been
made, man's progress has been divided into epochs or ages.
Primitive man made a few implements of bone, horn, and stone. They were
few and crude. This period is called the Stone Age. During it men dwelt
in caves or huts, dressed themselves in skins, and lived by catching
fish, chasing wild animals, and gathering wild fruits. By and by man
learned how to make tools out of bronze, an alloy composed of copper
and tin. These bronze implements were more numerous and more efficient
than the stone tools and gave man a higher degree of power and
workmanship. With them he cut down trees or carved stone for his
dwellings and acquired generally a higher order of life. This era is
named the Bronze Age. Finally the use of iron was discovered. This
metal afforded many tools that could not be made of stone or
bronze--tools that were much stronger and more efficient. Man became
correspondingly more powerful and his life more complex. The period
during which iron was used is called the Iron Age.
_Invention_ is the making of some new thing not previously existing.
_Discovery_ is the finding of something already in existence but not
known before. There was no electric telegraph until Samuel Morse made
or invented it; America has always existed, but was not known until
Christopher Columbus found or discovered it.
Among all the builders of civilization, not the least are the inventors
and discoverers. High up on the page of those who have made the world
great will always stand the names of Gutenberg or Coster, Watt,
Stephenson, Morse, Edison, Fulton, Galileo, Newton, Columbus, Morton,
Bell, Marconi, and others who have invented new machines and discovered
new processes for making life more happy, safe, and powerful.
Regarding the influence of inventions upon civilization, Lord Salisbury
says: "The inventors and even the first users of the great discoveries
in applied science had never realized what influence their work was to
have upon industry, politics, society, and even religion. The discovery
of gunpowder simply annihilated feudalism, thus effecting an entire
change in the structure of government in Europe. As to the discovery of
printing, it not only made religious revolutions possible, but was the
basis on which modern democratic forms of government rested. The steam
engine not only changed all forms of industry and the conditions under
which industries were prosecuted, but it made practically contiguous
the most distant parts of the world, reducing its vastness to a
relatively contracted area. And now the introduction of electricity as
a form of force seems destined, as its development proceeds, to bring
about results quite as important in their way, though but yet dimly
seen by the most far-sighted."
Secretary Seward pays this tribute to invention: "The exercise of the
inventive faculty is the nearest akin to the Creator of any faculty
possessed by the human mind; for while it does not create in the sense
that the Creator did, yet it is the nearest approach to it of anything
known to man."
And Lord Bacon tells us: "The introduction of new inventions seemeth
to be the very chief of all human actions. The benefits of new
inventions may extend to all mankind universally; while the good of
political achievements can respect but some particular cantons of men;
these latter do not endure above a few ages, the former forever.
Inventions make all men happy, without injury to any one single
person. Furthermore, they are, as it were, new creations, and
imitations of God's own works."