Bolesław Prus

“ Today people no longer believe that gods taught useful inventions to landed proprietors; they know that man invented fire, man invented agriculture, just as man invented the telegraph and the locomotive. All this notwithstanding, we too are not free of error, for we believe that the mind of an inventor differs from ordinary minds, that the so-called genius possesses a mind distinct from an ordinary mind and superior to it. ”

“ Anyone who wants to be a successful inventor, needs to know a great many things – in the most diverse fields. For if a new invention is a combination of earlier inventions, then the inventor’s mind is the ground on which, for the first time, various seemingly unrelated things combine. Example: The steam engine combines the kettle for cooking Rumford’s Soup, the pump, and the spinning wheel – if the first inventor had not been familiar with these objects, if he had not combined them in his mind, would we have had steam engines? ”

“ We know part of the universe that is home to 270 million suns, we know Earth and, in it, several great landmasses, thousands of islands, tremendous expanses of seas and oceans, a host of mountains, rivers, lakes, mines, forests, deserts – and we know not only their locations but also their dimensions, the riches they contain, the characteristic traits that differentiate one from another. We know tens of thousands of plants and animals, their external appearance, their internal structure, their way of life, and the uses that they can offer us. ”

“ In America, and still more so in Australia, there are tribes so indigent that they live in hovels, go about naked, and consume even dead rotting fish and animals. There are tribes so savage that they eat not only their enemies but even their own children. These people are so limited that their language possesses barely a few hundred words, they cannot count beyond a hundred, and in conclusion they appear incapable of accepting European civilization. Sad is the lot of these hapless and unfortunate peoples. ”

“ The foot traveler dreams of a rudimentary cart; the railroad passenger demands a heater. The infant is cramped in its cradle; the adult man is cramped in the world. In short, everyone has his needs, and everyone desires to satisfy them, and that desire is an inexhaustible source of new discoveries, new inventions, in short, of all progress.
But needs are general, such as the needs for food, sleep, and clothing; and special, such as needs for a new steam engine, a new telescope, a new hammer, a new wrench. To understand the former needs, it suffices to be a human being ”

“ Today we can hardly conceive of their poverty and of the difficulties with which they had to contend at every step: it is no exaggeration to say that each of us could saw through a steel bar more easily than they could saw through a piece of wood; that the most wretched man today is better off and happier than princes and chiefs were back then.
If we reverse direction from those remote times and move toward our present age, we shall find that with each century the number of discoveries and inventions grew, the people’s lives improved, and their knowledge broadened. ”

“ I have said that the mainspring of all discoveries and inventions is needs. Indeed, is there any work of man that does not satisfy a need? We build railroads because we need rapid transportation; we build clocks because we need to measure time; we build sewing machines because the speed of human hands does not suffice us. ”

“ Since every discovery and invention requires perfecting, let us not pride ourselves only on discovering or inventing something completely new, but let us also work to improve or get to know more exactly things that are already known and already exist. ”

“ No less imposing is the number of inventions; the machines, several of which annually augment the stock, and the new materials that greet our eyes, spread so quickly and provide such great services. It will suffice to mention here, as examples of machines: the telegraph, steam-powered machines, sewing machines; and, of materials, lighting gas, rubber, kerosene, and so on. Who of us, while watching a machine, has not marveled at the precision of its movements, of its profusion of wheels large and small, of its rods and other components? ”

“ Every time a new machine is imported from abroad, people must also be imported along with it, because the local uneducated worker cannot manage with the machine, cannot understand its movements, cannot operate it, does not know how to repair it when it breaks down. Conversely, if our craftsmen studed mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, technical drawing, if they read accounts of new machines that are invented abroad, not only would they be able to operate imported machines, but they could send their own inventions abroad. ”

“ After that, it was a relatively easy matter to perfect the new invention; someone else could discover a clay more suitable for such manufactures; someone else could invent a glaze, and so on, with nature and observation at every step pointing out to man the way to invention. If the people had not observed that clay hardens in fire, if they had not observed that water lingers longer inside a depression, if one of them had not wanted to form clay into something shaped like a tortoise shell, the first clay bowl would not have been invented. ”

“ Formerly a Venetian mirror cost a whole landed estate, today the same kind of mirror can be had for a few dozen rubles.
I would never finish, if I had to enumerate just the more outstanding and more useful inventions and discoveries that have been made by chemistry, physics, technology, medicine, in a word, by every branch of human knowledge. Here I will add only that, together with the increase in discoveries and inventions, with the improvement in living conditions, people are also becoming morally better. Let us not believe the poets who sing the praises of the good old days. ”

“ No invention or discovery, even one seemingly without value, should be dismissed, because that particular trifle may later prove very useful. There would seem to be no simpler invention than the needle, yet the clothing of millions of people, and the livelihoods of millions of seamstresses, depend on the needle’s existence. Even today’s beautiful sewing machine would not exist, had the needle not long ago been invented. ”

“ These three laws are immensely important and apply not only to discoveries and inventions, but pervade all of nature. An oak does not start out as an oak but as an acorn, then becomes a seedling, later a small tree, and finally a mighty oak: we see here, thus, the law of gradualness. A sown seed will not germinate until it finds sufficient heat, water, soil, and air: here we see the law of dependence. Finally, no animal or plant, or even stone, is something homogeneous and simple but is composed of various organs: here we see the law of combination. ”

“ And while we know that this whole vastness of knowledge is not yet a complete understanding of life and the world, and while we are sure that in tens of thousands of years people will still be needing to study nature and make discoveries, in any case we must own that all this knowledge greatly exceeds the powers of a single mind. ”

“ It’s true that it takes many very educated people to make discoveries and inventions; still, these educated people are only material – tools – used for making inventions. But what force drives their toilsome, often frustrated efforts? What thread clews these people through these recondite areas of research hitherto untraversed by the human mind? ”

“ This example, too, shows us that observation leads man by the hand to inventions. This example again demonstrates the truth of gradualness in the development of inventions, but above all also the fact that education amplifies man’s inventiveness. A simple lens-grinder formed two magnifying glasses into a toy – while Galileo, one of the most learned men of his time, made a telescope. As Galileo’s mind was superior to the craftsman’s mind, so the invention of the telescope was superior to the invention of the toy. ”

“ Not only that naturalist makes a contribution who travels to distant lands in order to there discover some hitherto unknown animal or plant, but also he who locally studies in greater depth the life of earlier-known beings. Let us not necessarily exert ourselves to construct a clock or other machine that the world has never seen, but let us also work to improve presently-existing machines so as to make them cheaper, more durable, less complicated, and so on. ”

“ An invention or discovery is conditioned on the prior existence of certain known discoveries and inventions. America would not have been discovered had ships and compasses not been known; the locomotive would not have been built had iron, water, and coal not been known, had wheels, rods, and boilers not been known, and so on. If potatoes grew only in America, they could not have been discovered before America had been; if the black swan lives only in Australia, the black swan could not have been seen before Australia had been. ”

“ I repeat once again, therefore, that today's inventor must be a highly and comprehensively educated person. Inspiration, and the genius who was even reputed to abide in idleness, are illusions that only provincial aunties and grannies can embrace. ”

“ Today, when railroad cars have replaced wagons, and the locomotive has replaced horses, the driver is being replaced by the engineer, who is a mechanic of sorts, above all a good metalworker.
The same is happening in every trade. A steam-hammer operator has to be much more educated than a worker who uses an ordinary hammer. A steamship engineer has to know incomparably more than a boatman. ”

“ If we learn, we will make inventions, we will raise up an industry which will suffice not only for our own needs but also for trade abroad. But never mind our immediately making discoveries and inventions; we must without delay set about learning, not so much for renown as for bread because, given the present state of things, in a dozen or so years today's craftsmen may find themselves without a livelihood... ”

“ We say that Columbus had discovered America because America had already long existed on Earth.
Invention is the making of a thing that has not previously existed, and which nature itself cannot make. Example: As late as 500 years ago, gunpowder was unknown in Europe, and it was only about 1379 that Berthold Schwarz, a Freiburg monk, on mixing saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, found that these three materials could be made into an explosive substance. Since gunpowder does not form, of itself, in nature and must be made by man, we say that Schwarz invented gunpowder. ”

“ We have found, secondly, that the number of inventions grows amazingly with each century, and at present even with each year, and as a result the civilized peoples are bettering themselves with extraordinary speed. Thirdly and finally, we have seen that savage peoples incapable of accepting civilization, incapable of understanding and profiting from discoveries and inventions, perish and give place to civilized tribes.
A curious feeling overcomes us when our thoughts course over the enormous expanses of today's human knowledge. ”

“ Inventions heighten our dexterity and correct our disabilities: today we can divide a human hair into several dozen if not into a hundred parts by thickness; we can measure the thickness of a spider’s thread; we can measure a weight down to 1/800,000th of a pound; we can roll gold leaf so thin that 130,000 leaves make an inch. As to correcting defects and disabilities of the human body, we all know that people can be fitted with artificial teeth and with artificial hands with which to write and paint, and so on. ”

“ The point is not that John or Paul, because they want to make an invention and because they work on it, shall make an invention; but where thousands want an invention and work on it, the invention must appear, as surely as an unsupported rock must fall to the ground. ”

“ The law of dependence teaches us that what cannot be done today, might be done later. People give much thought to the construction of a flying machine that could carry many persons and parcels. The inventing of such a machine will depend, among other things, on inventing a material that is, say, as light as paper and as sturdy and fire-resistant as, for example, steel. ”

“ The same law of gradualness demonstrates the necessity of expert training. Who can perfect a watch, if not a watchmaker with a good comprehensive knowledge of his métier? Who can discover new characteristics of an animal, if not a naturalist? ”

“ The conclusion is quite clear: a society that wants to gain renown with its discoveries and inventions has to have a great many persons working in every branch of knowledge. One or a few men of learning and genius mean nothing today, or nearly nothing, because today everything is done by large numbers. I would like to offer the following simile: Inventions and discoveries are like a lottery; not every player wins, but from among the many players a few must win. ”

“ If each of us performed just 10 combinations a day, together we would finish them all in less than a year and a half: 1,000 people would make an invention which a single man would have to spend more than 110 years to make... ”

“ The greater the number of inventions that come into being, the more things a new inventor must know how to do; the first, earliest, and simplest inventions were made by completely uneducated people – but today’s inventions, particularly scientific ones, are products of the most highly educated minds. ”