WHAT SOME INVENTIONS HAVE PAID
One of the most alluring and sky-blue delights, next to working out
a big idea of your own, is to read about the fortunes that other
inventors have piled up by the simple use of their _grey matter_.
The stories of what they did and how they did it are far redder blooded
and more gripping than any old sleuth yarn ever put between paper
covers; but different from this kind of yellow fiction they are all
true, their heroes are all real and each one had a great idea burning
in his brain, like St. Elmo’s fire, and each had the business ability
to transmute it into solid gold, twenty-four carats fine.
And it is not time wasted in harking back to what other inventors have
done if you will but heed the lesson that they teach for their works
stand out like guide-posts by day and signal-lights by night which
point the way for you to go and do the same thing if you will only quit
dreaming, get busy with your experiments and be careful not to run into
any open switches.
~A Tour of the Inventive World.--~Nor need an invention be a large
one to make money though of course the great inventions--those that
have given the world all the civilization it has had or is likely to
have for some centuries to come--have, as a rule, been the greatest
producers of wealth for those who worked them out.
So now suppose we make a personally conducted tour around the world of
inventions and take a look at a few of the wonders which prove that
_thoughts are things_ and that _things are money_, that is when you
know how to convert one into the other. And the route we will take will
show us some small inventions as we go and we will see a few of the big
inventions on our return to home and laboratory.
~Little Inventions.--~To begin with let us lead off with the smallest
and least important inventions, though they also serve a purpose, and
these are to be found in toys, games and other things for pleasure.
First is the return ball, which consisted of a piece of rubber strand
fastened to a wooden ball; this simple invention, so ’tis said, paid
its inventor $50,000 a year in royalties for a long time, and so he
waxed fat and grew rich.
Such toys as the dancing dolls, the wheel of life and the chameleon
top brought their respective inventors even larger sums, while the
roller skate which Plimpton improved and made popular by his invention
of _cramping_ the wheels netted him $1,000,000 in royalties and so you
need not feel sorry for him.
~Simple Inventions.--~The next class of inventions I shall call your
attention to is just as simple but they are different from toys in that
they are useful.
Among them may be named our friend of infant days, the safety pin, the
rubber tip for lead pencils, the cork nose shield for eyeglasses, the
grooved steel rib for umbrellas, the stylographic pen, the glass lemon
squeezer, paper clips, hook fasteners for shoes and the shipping tag
reinforced around the hole which Dennison invented and still sells by
the carload.
All of these little things and ten thousand others which you would
hardly think were worth inventing have built up fortunes for those who
thought of them and, more to their credit, were able to see that a
future awaited them.
~Real Inventions.--~In passing we come to some small but none-the-less
real inventions such as the spring roller window shade, automatic ink
stand in which the ink is always at the same level, barbed wire fences,
Mrs. Potts’ sad iron--the one with the attachable and detachable
handle, the paragon umbrella frame, etc.
To the right you will see some inventions of a more complex kind
such as the check protector, mimeograph, time stamp, combination
lock, fountain pen, computing scale, compressed air rock drill, cash
register, the comptometer and a thousand other devices we see in use or
use ourselves every day. Many of them are small but each and every one
produced anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 for its inventor.
~Great Inventions.--~_The Steam Engine, Locomotive, and
Steamboat._--How the steam engine was invented by Watt, how the
locomotive was invented by Stephenson and how the steamboat was
invented by Fulton are pretty well known.
Just how much these great pioneer inventors received in actual cash for
their efforts I cannot say offhand but it was not large when compared
with the fortunes inventors have since made. But their names are writ
large in the hall of fame, not the one at the New York University which
doesn’t count, but in the hall of fame of progress and civilization
which is the only one that really matters.
_The Telegraph._--The _telegraph_ was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse
in 1832 but it was not until 1844 that he had a line working from
Washington to Baltimore. After long years of _litigation_ his patent
rights were upheld by the courts and much wealth and more fame accrued
to him.
_The Perfecting Press._--The first _web printing press_, that is a
press using a web, or continuous strip of paper, was invented by
Bullock in 1845 and this the Hoe Brothers improved upon until the _web
perfecting press_ was evolved by them in 1846 and which revolutionized
the printing of newspapers. The Hoe factory is the largest maker of
printing presses in the world to-day.
_The Sewing Machine._--After many experiments by others the _sewing
machine_ was invented by Elias Howe and patented by him in 1846. Like
every other inventor who has a really great thing his patents were
attacked in the court and for eight years he lived in poverty. When the
courts finally found in his favor he made millions out of the royalties
on his labor saving invention.
_The Ice Machine._--The first machine for making ice was invented by
A. C. Twining in which _ethyl ether_ was used for the compressed gas
and for which a patent was granted in 1850. In 1867 an _ice machine_
was made by Ferdinand Carré which used _liquid ammonia_ for the
compressed gas and from that date on the artificial production of
ice on a commercial scale really began. Whether these two inventors
made fortunes out of their brain children I cannot say, but this I
know, that tens of millions have flowed into the coffers of those who
commercialized their work.
_The Steel Process._--The process of converting iron into steel cheaply
and in quantities was invented by Henry Bessemer who patented it in
1855. It was the _Bessemer process_ which made it possible to use
steel for rails and structural purposes generally. The inventor grew
rich beyond the dreams of the romancer and the steel industry has made
multimillionaires of all its captains.
_The Gas Engine._--Many inventions for using gas as the motive power
for engines were made before 1861 but it was not until that year
that N. A. Otto built a working model of a _gas engine_ in which the
explosive gases were mixed, compressed, and ignited in one cylinder
when the waste gases were exhausted from it. The Otto gas engine became
a commercial success in 1878 and netted the inventor many millions.
_The Dynamo and Motor._--The principle on which the _dynamo electric
machine_ works was discovered by Faraday in 1831. In 1866 both Wilde
and Siemens built _dynamos_, but it was Gramme who made the dynamo a
commercial machine by inventing the _ring armature_, which he did in
1870. Then some genius, or bonehead, no one seems to know which, found
that when a current was passed through a dynamo it became a _motor_.
From 1880 inventions for electric light, heat and power advanced by
leaps and bounds and everybody that invented anything at all worth
while in the electrical line got rich quick.
_The Air Brake._--The _air brake_ to stop and control the speed of
trains was invented by Westinghouse in 1869. He had hard work getting
any railroad to give it a trial but once that this was done it very
quickly came into general use. Next to the _safety valve_ it was the
first important safety device applied to railroads. It has in the past
and is still piling up millions for its inventor.
[Illustration: FIG. 121. THE FIRST TELEPHONE]
_The Telephone._--The first use of the word _telephone_ was made by
Charles Wheatstone in 1834, who applied it to a musical instrument
otherwise known as the _magic lyre_. In 1854 Charles Bourseul suggested
a way to make a speaking telephone, and in 1860 Johanne Phillip Reis
constructed a telephone apparatus along the line of Bourseul’s idea;
while this instrument reproduced musical tones it would not reproduce
the human voice.
[Illustration: FIG. 122. THE ORIGINAL TYPEWRITING MACHINE PATENTED BY
W. A. BURT, JULY 23, 1829]
Alexander Graham Bell began working on the problem in 1874 and invented
the first electric speaking telephone which he patented, showed in
operation at the _Centennial Exhibition_ at Philadelphia in 1876 and
shortly after a company was formed to float it. Edison made a big
improvement in the telephone in 1878 when he invented the _carbon
transmitter_. Other rivals appeared in the field and after long years
of costly law suits the rights of Bell were sustained by the courts and
the Bell Telephone Company has had a practical monopoly of the business
in this country ever since. The invention made Bell and its owners
enormously wealthy.
_The Typewriter._--This useful machine was invented by Charles Thurber
in 1843, but it was not until about 1875 that a practical machine
was put on the market. Millions of dollars have been made out of the
typewriter industry, subsequent inventors coming in for their big
shares, but it is doubtful if the original inventor received anything
more than honorable mention in the _encyclopædias_ and a monument in
some cemetery for the great benefit he conferred on mankind.
[Illustration: FIG. 123. THE FIRST PHONOGRAPH]
_The Phonograph._--This wonderful instrument for recording and
reproducing speech and other sounds was invented by Edison in 1877 and
improved by him in 1888. In 1887 Emile Berliner invented and patented
the _graphophone_ in which the vibrations are recorded on a disk
instead of on a cylinder as it is in the Edison phonograph.
The phonograph was placed on the market in 1888 and the manufacture
of graphophones began in 1897 when both the machines and the records
became popular and rapidly grew into a great industry. The phonograph
is only one of Edison’s 700 inventions and from some or all of them he
has amassed a fortune of $10,000,000, and Berliner, who is also an
inventor of renown, is very wealthy.
_The Storage Battery._--Like many other great inventions the _storage
battery_ has made millions, but from the time it was invented by Gaston
Planté in 1860 until it became a commercial product in 1880 was too
long a stretch for the originator to have received his just reward.
But those who followed with their little and big improvements made
small and large fortunes out of them when the Electric Storage Battery
Company of Philadelphia was organized to take over all the smaller
concerns.
_The Snap-Shot Camera._--The snap-shot camera, or _kodak_, is not
an invention of magnitude but Eastman who invented it about 1880
has through his business ability made it a money-maker second only
to inventions of great utility. So rich is his company that it paid
$300,000 for the simple invention of enabling a kodak user to write a
record on each film when it was exposed.
_The Steam Turbine._--The steam turbine dates back to the time of Hero,
that is 120 years B. C., and the place of its birth was Alexandria,
Egypt. It consisted of a copper ball pivoted on trunnions. Projecting
from opposite sides of its equator were two bent pipes and when the
ball was partly filled with water and heated the steam would spout
out of the bent pipes and on striking the air it reacted on the ball
and this caused it to revolve at a high-speed. For this reason Hero’s
engine was called a _reaction_ turbine.
In 1705 Branca, an Italian, invented a steam turbine in which a jet
of steam was forced through a nozzle and impinged on the vanes of a
paddle-wheel, the impact of the steam causing it to revolve. Hence this
kind of a turbine is called an _impact_ turbine.
The first steam turbine to be built and operated as a competitor of the
_reciprocating_ engine was made by De Laval in 1883. It was a reaction
turbine and it revolved at a tremendously high speed. Parsons of
England brought out in 1884 the first multiple expansion turbine which
combined the reaction and the impulse types. It made 18,000 revolutions
per minute and was directly connected to an electric lighting dynamo.
In a little over thirty years the steam turbine reached a degree of
perfection and economy not attained in the two hundred odd years of
development of the reciprocating engine and it is now used for driving
the largest steamships.
_The Automobile._--The so-called daddy of the _automobile_ is George
B. Selden; he built his _first self-moving wagon_ in 1878 and applied
for a patent on it. He did not let this patent issue, however, but kept
it alive in the Patent Office until 1895 when in that year automobiles
began to be made and used and he then had the patent granted to him.
His next step was to sell licenses to the various gasoline engine
automobile manufacturers who paid him a royalty on each machine sold
and in this very easy and genteel manner he accumulated much money.
But there were some manufacturers who refused to recognize his patent
rights and hence refused to pay him royalty. Henry Ford of Detroit was
the leader of these rebellious souls and a bitter patent suit resulted
in which the courts first decided for Selden and then against him and
this ended his monopoly.
Ford organized the Ford Motor Company and at this writing it is the
largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world. It employs 16,000 men
and turns out 1000 automobiles a day. Mr. Ford has so much money he
doesn’t know what to do with it, but his great wealth is based upon his
business ability and not upon any patents he may have.
[Illustration: FIG. 124. FIRST INCANDESCENT LIGHT]
_The Incandescent Light._--The first electric _incandescent_ lamp
that was made used a _platinum_ wire for the filament. J. W. Starr
substituted a _carbon filament_ for the platinum wire, but the first
successful incandescent lamp was produced by Edison in 1879 after he
had made over 2000 experiments in order to find a suitable fiber for
the filament. In order to be able to use the incandescent lamps, Edison
designed a new system of distributing the current through several
circuits and between any number of lamps.
The lamps of to-day have filaments of _tungsten_ and these are sealed
in bulbs filled with nitrogen and which together greatly increases the
candle-power and at the same time uses less current. In 1882 the Pearl
Street Edison station in New York was put into service and was the
first of the great central stations. The Commonwealth Edison Company of
Chicago is the largest electric lighting system in the world. There are
four stations and together they have an output of 320,000 kilowatts, or
430,000 horsepower.
_The Electric Railway._--The first attempt to build a railway operated
by electricity was made by Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith in
1835. Next, C. T. Page made a sixteen horsepower electric locomotive in
1850 and when it was tried out on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad it
ran at a speed of nineteen miles an hour. Batteries were used in both
cases to supply the current.
_The Trolley Car._--The first practical overhead electric line was
shown in Chicago in 1883 by C. J. Van Depoele and about the same time
Leo Daft built a third-rail line from Saratoga Springs, N. Y., to
Mount McGregor, while a conduit line was built by Bently and Knight in
Cleveland, Ohio. In 1884 the first practical trolley line was built
in Kansas City and from this time on horse- and mule-drawn cars were
doomed, except on West Street in New York City where they are still
used to hold down a _franchise_.
There were in 1912 about 41,000 miles of track operated by electricity
in the United States; over 76,000 passenger cars were in service and
12,100,000 passengers were carried, all of which goes to show that
there is money in electrical inventions for somebody.
_The Electric Locomotive._--The 1913 type of _electric locomotive_ used
on the New York Central is fifty-seven feet long, weighs 110 tons, has
eight motors of 325 horsepower each, which are mounted on four trucks
and driving eight axles. This powerful locomotive is capable of hauling
a train of 1200 tons at a speed of sixty miles an hour on a straight
level track. The stockholders of the General Electric Company of
Schenectady, N. Y., profited by their building.
_The Linotype._--The _linotype_ is a machine that is operated like
a typewriter and makes a _slug_ or a solid line of type from metal
type-bars each of which has a letter on it. These type-bars are then
properly spaced and melted type metal is run into the matrix they
form. This wonderful machine is the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler
who began working on it in 1876 and completed the machine in 1886.
Thousands of linotype machines are in use at the present time and it
goes without saying that the inventor was richly rewarded for his hard
labors.
_Moving Pictures._--The _moving-picture_ industry, which is the third
largest in the United States, came into being through the following
inventions: In 1845 a toy called the _zoetrope_, or wheel-of-life,
was invented; it was so made that when a series of drawings showing
the different positions of, say, a horse in motion was viewed through
a number of vertical slits in a rapidly revolving cylinder the horse
would appear to be running. It was truly a moving picture.
The next step was taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1877, who was the
first to make a series of instantaneous photographs of a horse in
motion, and in this way he showed the true position of the animal at
different instants of its gait, but since there was no exactness in
timing the intervals between the exposures of the dry plates--the film
had not yet been invented--they could not have been used for moving
pictures.
The photographic gelatine film having come into use, Edison, in 1893,
invented two machines, the _kinetograph_ which was a camera for taking
successive pictures of moving objects, and the _kinetoscope_ which
allowed the pictures made on the film by the kinetograph to be viewed.
The kinetoscope showed each picture on the film to the eye for about
¹/₄₀th of a minute, so that the figures seemed to move as in actual
life. And this is the way the moving-picture industry was born. It was
easy to combine a projecting lantern and a kinetoscope so that the
little photographs on the film could be thrown on a screen and enlarged
and this is the principle of all moving-picture machines as they are
now constructed.
The moving-picture business has taken a tremendous hold on the public
all over the world. This is shown by the fact that in 1914 the
distributers for three of the largest film makers handled 75 per cent.
of the films released and are said to have received $15,000,000 for
them. In 1915 the daily average attendance of moving-picture shows in
the United States was about 5,000,000 people.
[Illustration: FIG. 125. THE COLLINS WIRELESS TELEPHONE. SHOWN AT THE
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NEW YORK, ELECTRICAL SHOW, OCTOBER, 1908]
_The Wireless Telegraph._--The _wireless telegraph_ was invented by
William Marconi, who showed a set in operation, in 1896, between the
General Postoffice and the Thames embankment in London, the distance
being about 300 feet. Since that time he has been almost constantly
engaged in patent suits with infringers.
Since then the signaling range has been increased until now a regular
telegraph service without wires is carried on across the Atlantic. I
do not know how well the inventor fared financially but whatever the
amount he got, it was not nearly enough for his great work.
_The Wireless Telephone._--The _wireless telephone_ was invented by the
author of this book in 1899 when he telephoned without wires between
two stations in Narberth, Pa., a distance of about three blocks. During
the past year the human voice has been transmitted without wires from
Arlington, near Washington, D. C., eastward to Paris, France, and from
Arlington as far westward as Honolulu, Hawaii. Patent litigation,
patent hold-ups and government persecution have been my lot. I know
about the amount I made out of my invention but I won’t tell.
_The Aeroplane._--The _aeroplane_ was invented by the Wright Brothers,
Wilbur and Orville. They began their experiments in flying on the
sand-dunes of Kitty Hawk, N. C., in 1900. Their first efforts were made
with a glider fitted with elevation planes and after having developed
the balancing instinct they installed a gasoline motor in the glider
and this drove two propellers at the rear of the machine.
With this new born aeroplane they made the first motor-driven,
man-carrying flight in 1903--a flight that lasted a small fraction of a
minute. From this time on records and necks were broken by other fliers
who tried to outdo their rivals and undo themselves.