M. Grace Fickett

“ Jimmie, then an experienced newspaper man, watched the four sets of folders pouring out thirty-two-page papers at the rate of 75,000 an hour, until he turned away, saying, "Can it be possible that printing will ever be easier? How I wish Benjamin Franklin could see this press! How he would glory in its possibilities! It is perfectly true that the printing press is to literature what the steam engine is to the industries, and what the locomotive is to traffic." ”

“ Nearly every train that stopped brought delegations of sightseers till the depot was overrun and the narrow plank walk leading to the laboratory became alive with people. In the laboratory the throngs practically took possession of everything in their eager curiosity to learn all about the great invention. Four new street lamps were added last night, making six in all, which now give out the horse shoe light in the open air. Their superiority to gas is so apparent, both in steadiness and beauty of illumination, that every one is struck with admiration. ”

“ Getting money to push them is the task I dread. Still I have already raised a hundred dollars to get my machine and letters patent out of pawn in London; and I have every hope that Mr. Anson Burlingame, who is soon to sail for England, will deliver them safely to me in the fall.
The next step is to see if the lawyers can find any flaws in my claims. If they can't, the suit I propose to bring is already in my favor; and I am sanguine enough to believe that the Howe sewing machine will yet be a household convenience. ”

“ Ezra thought it strange they should oppose the invention for he knew how anxious his father was [Pg 129] that it should be a success. His father said machinery meant the possibility of larger crops, and therefore not less work, but more work and more wealth for all. Ezra was puzzling over the strange stupidity of these men who could not see what larger crops would mean, and who seemed to want to go on in their old back-breaking toil, at the same pitifully small wages,—for the pay of these days was actually less than a nickel an hour,—when the machine came in view drawn by two horses. ”

“ Before he was an old man the reaper had proved itself worth more millions than the predicted thousands, and Ezra and his father had many a laugh over Mr. Harding's criticism of Professor Bradshaw. However, at the time the astounding remark was made, not even the inventor himself dreamed of the complete change in methods of farming which the reaper would make all over the country. Nobody, indeed, could realize that within the life time of the inventor it would be possible for the farmers of the United States to raise enough wheat to feed the whole world. ”

“ Everybody laughed to think how the car had run away and left the astonished conductor in the road unable to stop it; but Grandma said, "Runaways or no runaways, the electric car is the marvel of the age. It does not seem as if the mind of man could devise anything more wonderful than this harnessing of electricity; but yet it may be that Harriet will sometime ride in one of the horseless carriages her father spoke of yesterday. ”

“ It was the custom to tie the sheaves with a crude rope made of the grain. This hard, back-breaking work required both strength and skill and could be endured only by the strongest men. Even Ezra Harding said:
"No genius will ever live who can make a machine throw a cord around a bundle of wheat and knot that cord securely." ”

“ Help was so scarce that even Ezra, the youngest of the five Harding boys, though he was only fifteen, had to do a man's work. It made Ezra feel almost eighty to think about the back-breaking work that was to begin the next morning.
At that time all the wheat in the world was cut by hand, and on that account there was not enough raised so that everybody could have white bread. In the old world the peasants used chiefly the sickle to cut the wheat; in the new world the farmers preferred the scythe and cradle. ”

“ However, before she had watched the electric cars a half day Grandma went so far as to say, "If you could be sure there would be no danger from electricity and be sure of power enough I don't know why these wouldn't do just as well as the cable cars."
"Tell me about the cable cars, won't you, Grandma? What makes them go?" asked Harriet, now old enough to be interested in the difference between the systems.
"The cable makes them go," answered her grandmother. "It is an endless iron chain which the engine at the central station keeps running all the time. ”

“ An hour before the time set for the trial of the reaper Ezra Harding and his brothers were at the appointed place. They watched the crowd gather. There were Negroes, and farm laborers, and some owners of farms. Most of the people around Ezra, to his surprise, not only seemed to expect the machine to fail, but actually hoped it would. He could not understand why until he heard two rough, ignorant fellows talk about losing their chance to earn their bread if machines could be made to do the work of men. ”

“ But the friends who knew him pitied him, trusted him, and honored him to the end; and though Lucy Hobart is now almost seventy-eight years old and has seen most of the prominent Americans of the later nineteenth century, she remembers no one who worked harder or suffered more for the good of humanity than the undaunted Goodyear who insisted, "If it is to be done, it must be done and it will be done. ”

“ How can it be possible to get power enough to drive a big car like that!"
"It comes right along that overhead wire," answered Harriet's father.
"Oh, yes, I know that from what I have read," continued Grandma. "And it is conducted to the car along that long iron rod which runs from the overhead wire to the car. What is it you call that?"
"The trolley," said Mr. Lewis.
"Then what really happens after the electricity has reached the car?"
"This current of electricity runs to those cylinders in front of the motorman. Then it is where it can be controlled. ”

“ The credit for all this surely belongs to the far-seeing inventor who asked that he might give to the public all that he had found out, in order that other men might build on his discoveries.
After seeing three of these new pictures, it was no wonder that Anna could hardly wait until the next day to go to the photographer's herself. That night at bedtime she said to her mother, "I suppose, if my hair is going to look black in the picture, I could have black curls if you were willing to do up my hair on rags." ”

“ He considers the electric railway a success and he is working now on something which his friends say will make it possible to run a horseless carriage without the help of either rails or a trolley."
"Oh, surely that never can be, John," said Grandma.
"I don't know. I should have said the same thing ten years ago about a horseless street car, I think. Edison's friends remind us that first it was the horse without the carriage, then it was the horse and the carriage, and now they say it is surely going to be the carriage without the horse. Wonders do not seem to cease; it may come true." ”

“ Howe worked steadily but carefully.
"If he wins, how many times as fast as each girl is he sewing?" asked Jonathan's uncle suddenly, of the little fellow. Jonathan was too bright to be caught and answered quickly, "More than five, isn't he?"
"That's right, Jonathan. And he really is sewing more than five times as fast. Look!"
It was true. Mr. Howe held up his finished seam. Every girl was still at work. "The machine has beaten," announced the umpire. "And moreover," he added after careful inspection, "the work on the machine is the neatest and strongest." ”

“ THE TRIUMPH OF GOODYEAR PART I
In March, 1852, Lucy Hobart began a six months' visit with her grandparents who lived just outside Trenton, New Jersey. One morning at the breakfast table, Grandfather Hobart, whom most people called Lawyer Hobart, said to Lucy, "Little girl, a most important case is being tried at the court house this week. It may not be very interesting to a child, but I think that you, as well as Grandmother, ought to attend this morning. I want you to be able to say that you have heard the great Daniel Webster make a plea." ”

“ But it has nothing to do with teaching deaf mutes to speak. It is more wonderful than that. It speaks itself; that is, it reproduces sounds. It is the improvement on the telegraph that the world has awaited for years.
"You see, I found in my experiments that I could transmit spoken words by electric current through a telegraph wire so that those words could be reproduced by vibrations at the other end of the wire. I suppose my invention might be called a speaking telegraph." ”

“ He saw the wheat crop of this country doubled and trebled and quadrupled; he saw the time when even a poor man could have white bread to eat, because the cost of a loaf had been cut in two; he saw the reaper bring millions and millions of dollars to its inventor; and he saw [Pg 137] not only this great wealth come to the man he himself had long admired, but also, while Cyrus McCormick was still in the prime of life, the honor and fame which have been denied many of the great inventors until after death. ”

“ Two of these were pictures of her Grandfather and Grandmother Holman, whom she had never seen. These pictures always interested her, though for a certain reason she did not like them.
Anna had been told that her grandmother was a great beauty in her day, and she often tried to see if she could tell how her grandmother had looked. This she never felt sure she knew, as the picture was only a silhouette. Of all the different kinds of pictures that people have had made, the silhouette, surely, is the most unsatisfactory. ”

“ Mr. Howe's darkest days were over; but even then success came slowly and in rather a strange way. Mr. Howe's chief enemy was a Mr. Singer, who built machines and advertised them with remarkable success.
"You are infringing my patent," wrote Howe to Singer, upon hearing of the latter's activity.
"But you are not the inventor," replied Singer. "The Chinese have had a sewing machine for ages; an Englishman made one in 1790; a Frenchman built one in 1830; and what is more to the point, in 1832, a man named Walter Hunt, living in New York, invented a sewing machine with a shuttle stitch like yours. ”

“ He got off the car and said that, as he had a wife and children, he did not think it would be right for him to take the car down such a hill. The passengers said it was not a case of right or wrong but a case of being scared, and they insisted upon his getting on again and taking them to their journey's end."
"There goes another electric car, Grandma!" said Harriet who was looking out the window. "It goes a good deal faster than a horse car, doesn't it?" ”

“ But Goodyear will never be an enormously rich man. He's been wickedly cheated and his patents have been infringed again and again. Of course he's been fighting for his rights, but the case has been dragging on these seven years. His opponent is a man named Day, who is trying to prove that, although he once promised Goodyear not to manufacture any such articles of rubber as must be completed by the use of artificial heat and sulphur, that agreement is invalid because Goodyear is not the inventor of the process. ”

“ In these days in the big offices after the real type is set letter by letter it isn't used for the printing at all. It wears it out too fast to print 50,000 newspapers from it each day, and besides it takes too much type. Instead of using the movable type for the printing, we cover the type with a soft substance like soaked up pasteboard, press it hard on the type, dry it, and have a perfect copy of the type except that the letters are little hollows instead of raised pieces. ”

“ The day before his uncle's next visit Jimmie set his type to say, "Much interest is felt in the new Hoe press which will be installed in the Record office early next month. It is the first of the kind to be used by any newspaper in the city and will mark a revolution in newspaper printing. This new 'perfecting press' will make it possible to print 24,000 eight-page papers an hour—a thing not dreamed of a few years ago. People are anxious to see this [Pg 101] fast press printing, cutting, folding, and delivering the papers all ready for the newsboys." ”

“ Most were content to ejaculate "Wonderful!" But no amount of explanation would persuade one old gentleman that it was not an iron wire that was inside the glass tube. "It could not be the carbon filament of a piece of paper, for," said he, "I have seen some red hot, white hot iron wire, only it was not quite so bright, but it looked just like that. That's no filament!"
"This is a bad time for sceptics," I said to Edison.
"There are some left," he answered. "They die harder than a cat or a snake."
Dora's New York visit colored all the next five years that she worked and waited for college. ”

“ Jimmie asked his uncle the first time he came out after Jimmie became a printer.
"Yes, just that way," answered his uncle. "In Benjamin Franklin's time and most of the time ever since, each letter has had to be picked up by hand and put in place. There is a little type-setting machine now which is quite a help, but we need something better."
"I don't see how you ever get a daily paper ready," exclaimed Jimmie. "It must take millions of letters."
"Not so many, I think," replied his uncle, "but [Pg 98] enough so that it does take a good many girls to set the type. ”

“ When Grandma reached Portland, Harriet and her father met her at the station, and drove her home behind steady old Prince, who had drawn the family carriage for years. As they jogged along on the way to the house they met an electric car.
"I really don't see why it should go, but it is plain that it does go. If they keep on going for another twenty-four hours, I am going to have a ride in one to-morrow morning," said Grandma.
"Oh Mother, Mother!" exclaimed the son. "You do like to try new things, don't you? ”

“ But a lamp like that, though it makes a fine street lamp, is not suitable for lighting a house. It's too bright and too big. Edison says it needs to be subdivided so that it can be distributed to houses just as gas is now.
"That's Edison's present problem, Dora. He is such an untiring worker that I don't believe it will take many months; and when the process is perfected and the implements for generating the electricity can be secured, I mean to make my hotel the prettiest place at night on the Maine coast. ”