George Iles

“ To those hardy adventurers swiftness and seaworthiness meant nothing less than life and victory, their eyes perforce were keen to note what craft sped fastest through the water, what new curves kept waves from coming aboard. Perchance as they refined upon keel and rib they took golden hints from the shapes of gulls and fish. To be sure, long before science was dreamt of, they had to work by rule-of-thumb, but the thumb was joined to brains that did honor to human nature. ”

“ Light may have great brilliancy and yet be undesirable from its color; we are all familiar with the havoc that gas light may play with hues of blossom and leaf that in sunshine are beautiful. Through ages untold the human eye has been seeing by rays from the sun, and from immemorial habit is best served by light of similar quality. A simple instrument, the spectrometer, casts upon a screen the spectrum from a mercury tube, a Nernst lamp, a Welsbach mantle, or other illuminant, and enables us to compare it with the spectrum of sunshine. ”

“ The beauty of tools is not accidental but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship’s sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adze-head or of a plowshare. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plowshare is less destructible than the metal, yet pliant, within the limits of its type. ”

“ Its tanks display a varied and superb collection of fish, whose beauty of form and color heightened by swift and graceful motion, fascinates the eye as no museum of dead things, however splendid, ever does. When a tank is still, or nearly still, and a gold-fish or a perch is quietly resting near the surface of the water, one may see its form reflected from that surface as perfectly as if by a mirror. The point of view must be close to the tank, with the eye somewhat lower than the fish. ”

“ At this hour physicists and chemists, with electricity their new servant at command, are gathering proof that what have long been called “elements,” are probably one substance, variously assembled, moving at speeds and in paths infinitely diverse, repeating in little the mighty swings of suns and planets. Throughout these researches a constant spur is the thought that here may be traced such processes of development as have been laid bare in every other province of nature. From circumference to centre, evolution is the master key of each keen questioner. ”

“ You may go beyond that necessary point for your own pleasure and amusement, and still be in the right way; but if you go on after that merely to make people stare at your dexterity in dealing with a difficult thing, you have forgotten art along with the rights of your material, and you will make not a work of art, but a mere toy; you are no longer an artist, but a juggler. ”

“ In his heart he believes every engine, machine, and process to be improvable without limit. He is thoroughly dissatisfied with things as they are and alert to detect where an old method can be bettered, or a gift wholly new be conferred on mankind, as in the telephone or the phonograph. His uncommon faculty of observation we have had occasion to remark. Another talent as much in evidence, and quite irrepressible even in early life, impels him to make, weave, and build. ”

“ Its metal stands forth as so much sheer muscle kept to the most telling lines, unencumbered by a single pound of idle substance. A designer of such a fabric is an artist skilled in disengaging from masses of material every ounce that can be wisely removed. In some cases, as when Roebling linked together New York and Brooklyn, a bridge is created as much a thing of beauty as of use, as graceful as it is strong. ”

“ There is gain, as we have seen, when an inventor takes a familiar process, like planing, and reverses it, so that instead of the plane moving across a board, the board is moved beneath a planer. Not seldom, too, profit has followed upon adopting a plan just the contrary of a time-honored practice, as when a Frenchman pierced a needle with an eye near its point instead of away from its point, taking a step that did much to make the sewing-machine a possibility. ”

“ Gas-grates, in uncounted thousands [117] throughout our cities every winter, offer us flames which flicker and leap over asbestos and clay molded into the semblance of maple or charcoal. Nor is the engineer himself, for all his sternness of discipline, quite free from prolonging the reign of the past, even at unwarrantable cost. When steel was first used for steam boilers there was a period of hesitation during which the metal was used unduly thick, as if to maintain the long familiar massiveness of iron structures. ”

“ One of the remarkable attributes of a crystal is its ability to grow and act as a unit, as if it had a life of its own, despite the evident variety and great number of its parts. Take a crystal of alum, break off a corner and then immerse the broken mass in its mother liquor; at once the crystal will repair itself, new molecules building themselves into its structure as if they knew where to go. ”

“ When an inventor builds an engine to drive a huge ship across the sea, he has created a motor vastly larger than his own frame, but much inferior in economy. At a temperature little higher than that of a summer breeze the human mechanism transmutes the energy of fuel into mechanical toil: for the same duty, less efficiently discharged, the steam engine demands a blaze almost fierce enough to melt grate bars of iron. ”

“ Yet every thoughtful man of science who has looked round on what others beside himself are doing will tell you that nothing weighs more heavily on his mind than this: the multitude of questions crying aloud to be answered, the fewness of those who have at once the ability, the means, and the opportunity of attempting to find the answers. Among the many wants of a needy age, few, if any, seem to him more pressing than that of the adequate encouragement and support of scientific research. ”

“ Under a scheme of subdivided toil the factory hand succeeded to the journeyman who, with a few mates, had split nails or drawn wire in a shop no bigger than some day he might own for himself. With the need to occupy large premises, to install engines and elaborate machinery, the capital of an employer has to be vastly more than of old, creating a new dependence on the part of the workman, and rendering it all but impossible that he should ever have a factory of his own. While the factory system of production is general in America, it is far from universal. ”

“ Organic nature to the modern interpreter is thus alive through and through. In his view atom and molecule are also alive in a subordinate, elemental degree. Indeed, he thinks, it is their life borne in air, water and food which in plant or animal rises to new planes of dignity. He looks afresh at the broken alum crystal which repairs itself in a solution, and sees there the removal of the imaginary fence which long divided organic nature from inorganic. ”

“ When in weaving silk or linen there may be two hundred threads to the running inch instead of ten, the designer can introduce curves almost as flowing as if he were a painter. So too in architecture: the log hut was perforce straight in its every line; stone and brick made possible the arch; iron and steel are bringing in a free choice of the best lines, whether straight or curved, all with a new sprightliness, as witness the best of our office-buildings in New York, such as the Whitehall, Trinity, and Empire Buildings. ”

“ Photography is shown to be the one radical advance in depiction since art began. In days of old an object had to be seen before it could be pictured; to-day new heavens and a new earth impress their images first in the camera, to declare themselves only afterward to the eye. ”

“ A careful workman uses a steel die for only a short service before he returns it to the annealer, well assured that the metal, despite its seeming wholeness, has suffered severe internal strain at every blow, which, were no caution exercised, would soon reveal itself in fracture of the die, or ruined work. Facts of this kind, which every day confront the mechanic and engineer, convey a prophecy of the sensibility and memory which dawn with life. ”

“ Thus Helmholtz, at once a physician and a physicist, devised the ophthalmoscope, that simple instrument for observing the interior of the eye. On a plane less lofty an inventor’s success may turn on his width of outlook, his intimacy with fields remote from the home acre, so that he may gainfully ally two arts or processes that, to a casual glance, seem utterly unrelated or unrelatable. When a pneumatic tube between a post-office and a railroad station is obstructed, there would seem to be no promise of aid in a fire-arm. ”

“ The organization of the power of invention in manufactures on a large scale in Germany is, as far as I know, unique in the world’s history, and is the very marrow of our splendid triumphs. Each large works has the greater part of its scientific staff—and there are often more than [276] a hundred doctors of philosophy in a single manufactory—occupied not in the management of the manufacture, but in making inventions. The research laboratory in such works is only different from one in a university from its being more splendidly and sumptuously fitted. ”

“ When an arrowmaker in striking flint against flint kindled flame, and repeated the feat at will, he opened at once a new world for humankind, incomparably higher and broader than if he had simply acquired a nicer touch, a steadier aim, a quicker ear for the rustle of leaf or wing. It is the like maturing of old resources into new, of infinitely greater scope, that has brought man to the supremacy of Nature, while his next of kin remain beasts of the glade. ”

“ And a notable group of artisans, few in number but steadily increasing, with electric motors at their elbows, to-day enjoy complete emancipation from the factory bell. A woodcarver, bookbinder, leather stamper, forger of ornamental iron, rug weaver, potter, lens grinder, or printer, can have to-day a shop of his own and take pleasure in the chosen and constantly varied toil that gives him bread. In their simpler forms the modern lathe, loom, printing press, are cheap enough to be within the means of poor men, while their product when it displays taste and originality is sure of a market. ”

“ Mechanic art, indeed, is for the most part but a copy of nature, as when the builder repeats the mode in which rocks are found in caves, in ridges at the verge of a cliff, or in the stratifications which underlie a county, all conducing to permanence of form, to [250] resistance against abrading sand or dissolving waters. What ensures the stability of a lighthouse but its repetition of a tree-trunk in its contour? ”

“ In such fields as those of the cheapening of light and motive power, the utilization of electricity, the production of metals, it would seem that the day of the solitary researcher or inventor is drawing to a close. To-day the man of original ideas, of combining faculty, of uncommon deftness, of rare visual accuracy, is mated with his peers for a group attack on a many-sided problem where each man’s resources will find their special play. ”

“ Stone and brick-work, in their rectilinear shapes, impose a rigidity in architectural design from which modern bricks, in their rich variety of flat and curved surfaces, have wrought emancipation. In the new residential streets of St. Louis, for example, the architecture owes much of its freedom and beauty to the new shapes in which brick is now manufactured. Even wider liberty than now falls to the lot of the brick-maker has always been enjoyed by the potter. In his hands clay lends itself to any desired imitation, to any fresh design however fanciful ”

“ A cavern in Kentucky, or Virginia, slowly broadening and deepening through uncounted rills which dissolve its limy walls, comes at last to utter collapse: the breach marking exactly where an ounce too much pressed the roof at its frailest seam. In these cases as in all others, however complex, matter moves inevitably in the path of least resistance. To imitate that economy of effort is from first to last the inventor’s task. ”

“ Work a good deal commoner and vastly more important consists in taking a process begun by nature and carrying it many steps further, so as to break up masses of earth again and again. The plow, the harrow, the sharp-toothed cultivator, divide and subdivide the soil of farm and garden so as to offer rootlets new surfaces at which rain may be drunk in with its nourishing food. ”

“ Lord Kelvin, a master in the art of measurement, an inventor of electrical measuring instruments of the highest precision, as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871, said: “Accurate and minute measurement seems to the non-scientific imagination, a less lofty and dignified work than looking for something new. But nearly all the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement and patient, long-continued labor in the minute sifting of numerical results. ”

“ Fire enabled man to melt metals as if they were wax, to soften iron or copper which a deftly swung hammer shaped as he willed. Here, too, opened the whole world of chemistry, one of its first gifts the power to take an ore worthless when unchanged, and gain from it a battle-axe, a knife, an arrowhead. ”

“ Be that as it may, we must remember that often chemical action is much more intricate than it seems to be at first sight. Thus in dry air, or even in dry oxygen, iron is unattacked; but bring in a little moisture and at once oxidation proceeds with rapid pace. So with the combustible gases emerging from the throat of a blast furnace; they refuse to burn until they meet a whiff of steam, when they instantly burst into flame. Chemical energy usually moves in a labyrinth which the chemist may be able to thread only in one direction. ”