A. Frederick Collins

“ THE NEW SUBMARINE CHASERS
It is the boast of Germany that she will win the present war by sinking not only all of the ships of the Allies, but those of any other country which may trade with them.
Now, the United States demands the freedom of the seas for every American citizen and for every ship that flies the stars and stripes and to make good this demand is what brought us into the war.
If Germany could destroy all of the merchantmen of the Allies—and we are now one of them—as she wants to do, she would doubtless be the victor. She hopes to but will never be. ”

“ Nor would it do us any good to cry out or whistle, for, since sound waves are carried by the air, and since there is no air on the Moon, all our efforts to make ourselves heard would be useless, even if we were only a few feet from each other. The Moon is just as silent and cold and still as it looks, for, though it serves the Earth well as a mirror to reflect the Sun’s light, it is, after all, only a great, burned-out cinder. ”

“ In this book I have tried to point out to you not only how to invent, but how to make money out of your invention as well, and so, I say unto you, from the moment the big idea strikes you be as gentle as a dove and as wise as a serpent, to the end that your days as an inventor may be long and that any profits which may accrue from your invention will be yours instead of some one’s else. ”

“ If I wasn’t too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work I’d get a job on the docks myself. As things now stand I’m going to Alaska and I’ll bring back so much gold that if I threw it on the market there’d be a slump in the price of it,” orated Jack boastfully, as he rubbed his hands together in pleasurable anticipation like a miserable young Shylock. But the magic of gold is apt to make misers of even the most generous folks. ”

“ When I was chief wireless operator on the Andalusian I met operators from all over the world. Once when I was in London I scraped up an acquaintance with a young Swede and he had about half-a-dozen pairs of head-phones that he had picked up in different countries. Telephone receivers for wireless work are like violins in that no two of them are alike and you can’t tell by their appearance what they are really worth; like violins, too, telephone receivers improve with age provided the magnets are made of the right kind of steel and properly tempered. ”

“ You cannot do better than to point your little homemade telescope at the Moon, stop, look and rediscover the mountains on it and be as surprised and delighted as Galileo was, three hundred years ago. To see the mountains at their best do not wait until the Moon is full, for the sunlight then shines directly on top of the mountains and there are no shadows to help the eye to gauge breadths and heights. ”

“ These are the real pleasures of inventing but to make a success of it you have to drop back to earth again and take up the mean, the sordid part, and that is to try to make money out of it. And if you have an invention of merit you will have to forget that you are a demi-god and become a hard and fast mortal again or it will not be long before some other body owns it lock, barrel and stock; and then you will have a chance to start another idea rolling and to build up another invention. ”

“ We followed her at a distance of about a mile and as long as there were no other ships in sight we ran light, though the way the waves broke over her she seemed to be running awash most of the time. This made no difference to us and it was a great relief to come up from our stuffy holes and walk the deck. Of all my sea-going experiences I liked this much the best.
Why? You know how a city chap with a drop of red blood in his veins likes to get out in the woods and walk, eat and sleep on the ground. He does it simply because he gets as close to nature as he ever can and know about it. ”

“ A few nights later the Moon will be seen, over in the sky toward the east; its crescent shape grown into the first quarter, and the Moon looks as if it was split in two. As the nights go by the Moon waxes until it is gibbous and finally the full Moon—with the man in it—stands out round and clear and bright. ”

“ No one I’ll say, no not even a bookmaker could think up such an outlandish name as Yeehat even to splice it to a redskin for a name, but any one who couldn’t think about gold in chunks would be lonesome if he had a brain,” argued Bill.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” called out Jack. “First of all never call a man who writes books a bookmaker. A man who puts his pen to paper and writes down various things for other folks to read is a maker of books while a man that takes bets at a race track is a bookmaker. ”

“ In making a machine from your own ideas and plans no one can do the work so well as yourself provided you can do the work at all and besides it is cheaper and far more satisfactory.
Should you have a fat pocket-book and at the same time a taste for inventing and the sciences—these elements seldom go hand in mind—but if they should get close together in your case I say, the right way to make a model is to hire skilled men to do the work while you do the thinking and the assembling in your private lab. ”

“ But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge shell. ”

“ The stars are the friends of everyone who knows them.
If you have never stood out in the open and watched the stars on a clear night, you have missed the most wonderful sight to be seen from this little old mud ball of ours, and my advice to you is not to let another night go by without making friends with the stars.
By the stars I mean everything in the far off sky that we can see, and this includes the white hot points of light we call the fixed stars, the blazing sun, the bright planets, the pale, cold moon, the fiery comets and the burning meteors. ”

“ Eileen was so weak and dazed she seemed hardly to realize what it was all about. As she lay on her bunk she only stared with wide-open, pathetic eyes at these last sad arrangements. It was merciful that she did not understand to the full.
The boys gave her all the food they could scrape together and did without themselves for they had to get her strong enough to travel. Starvation was close on their heels. Bill’s solution for the shortage of food was that they kill one of the sled-dogs but Jack would not listen to such a thing. ”

“ We say dangerous because wireless messages flashed forth and back would betray its presence to an enemy ship, and we say impossible in virtue of the fact that the craft often has to run under water for as long a time as she can stay down.
When cruising on the surface the sharpest lookout must be kept every moment of the time for an enemy ship, which may be torpedoed if it is a merchant vessel, or the submarine must dive and get away from it, if it should be a chaser or other kind of armed and armored boat that is looking to sink her. ”

“ Certainly since you know that inventors like Edison, Brush, Weston, Thompson, Tesla, and a hundred other men almost as big, had applied themselves with diligence to dynamo problems during the last 40 years you would not care to go very far in spending your time or your money working on it until you learned whether or not some one before you had thought of and used the same principle.
Yet hundreds of beginners in the field of inventing work along in the dark because they do not know the state of the art, and always to their sorrow. ”

“ We know that, roughly, a year is the time it takes the four seasons to come and go, and that this is done when the Earth travels once round the Sun; that the month is based on the time it takes the Moon to travel once round the Earth; that the week has nothing to do with the Sun, Earth, Moon or Stars, but is a pure invention, and, finally, that the day is the time it takes the Earth to turn once round on its axis. ”

“ On returning one day from a hunting trip that had lasted longer than-any of the others I had ever made, I found they had killed one of the rubber men and were cooking him en casserole.
That evening at sundown the ceremonies began and when it had grown dark great bonfires were lit and the cannibals, with hideous painted faces and bodies were dancing as if their very lives depended on it to the bombastic beating of tom-toms, Old King Oopla had on his dress suit which consisted of a pair of long horns projecting from either side of his head, a red undershirt, and a celluloid cuff on each ankle. ”

“ Then Whitehead did a little thinking on his own account and he built the automobile torpedo in 1868, the cleverest and most diabolical destroyer that man has ever yet been guilty of.
The automobile torpedo is one that not only runs under its own power but that steers itself as well after it has left the torpedo tube of the submarine. To Whitehead, then, must be given the credit not only of having invented the submarine torpedo that is used with such telling effect in the present war, but of making a success of it. ”

“ From the Pacific Ocean on up to the Arctic Ocean there’s gold. In every stream and river, as well as the land between them, this precious metal is found in either particles or in nuggets. Take the Klondike! it’s not much larger than the Rat River here and yet so much gold was found there its name became known all over the world. Every river in Alaska and the Yukon, I suppose, is just as rich but you don’t hear much about them because the Klondike was the first and so outshone all the rest. We’ll get ours yet, don’t worry,” said Jack hopefully. ”

“ Almost every one has had, at some time or other an idea for a new invention or of how some old device could be improved.
To get an original idea for an invention is in itself a mark of genius, but it is not enough to make it a success and if you do not know how to develop it you are almost certain to give up before you have completed it. ”

“ When I tell you that waves in the ether which are sent out by the light of a candle or the Sun are only about 15 ten-millionths to 30 ten-millionths of an inch in length, and that the holes, or pores, in the glass and the cornea and lens of the eye, and which are full of ether, are much larger, you can readily understand that the ether waves which we call light can merrily pass through either glass or the eye and that there is nothing in the way to stop them. ”

“ Many men may work on a device and none of them hit upon the thing that is needed to make it practical; then some fine day a genius will happen along and see just what the device lacks and add it to the general collection, or he will put something to it, perhaps accidentally, that does the business, and this last touch which enables it to be used gives the man who does it the right to be called its inventor.
Now, dozens of men, including Morse, Edison and Tesla in this country, and Hughes, Pierce and Lodge in England, worked on the scheme of sending messages without wires ”