Philip Gengembre Hubert

“ A remarkable man in every respect, his ingenuity, perseverance, courage under injustice, and generosity finally won him not only the material rewards that were his by right, but the esteem and honor of the civilized world.
Like Fulton and Morse, Cyrus Hall McCormick came of Scotch-Irish blood, a race marked by fixed purpose, untiring industry in carrying out that purpose, a strong sense of moral obligation, and an unswerving determination to do right by the light of conscience though the heavens fall. ”

“ To anyone accustomed to the orderly appearance of the ideal machine-shop, it presented a curious appearance, for evidently half the machines in it—forges, lathes, furnaces, retorts, etc.—were dismantled for the moment and useless. Half a dozen workmen were busy in an apparently aimless manner.
Upstairs, in a room devoted to chemical experiments, I found Edison himself. He is to-day just what he was then. Prosperity has not changed him in the least, except perhaps in one particular. In those days of struggle the inventor was far less affable with visitors than he is to-day. ”

“ My one ambition is to be able to work without regard to the expense. What I mean is, that if I want to give up a whole month of my time and that of my whole establishment to finding out why one form of a carbon filament is slightly better than another, I can do it without having to think of the cost. My greatest luxury would be a laboratory more perfect than any we have in this country. I want a splendid collection of material—every chemical, every metal, every substance in fact that may be of use to me, and I hardly know what may not be of use. ”

“ The galvanic battery resulted. Years later another observer discovered that if a wire carrying a current of electricity was wound around a piece of soft iron the latter became a magnet. Out of these simple discoveries have arisen the telegraph, the telephone, and a host of inventions depending upon electricity. And to-day, with all the wonders accomplished in this field, we are yet upon the threshold of the enchanted palace that electricity is about to open to us. Through its aid we shall one day enjoy light, heat, and power almost as freely as we now enjoy air. ”

“ Thomas A. Edison is sometimes spoken of rather as a master mechanic than as a master inventor or discoverer, and with regard to some of his work—I might even say most of it—this characterization holds true. Edison's fame is chiefly associated in the popular mind with the electric light. Yet it is perfectly well known to every student of the matter, that in all that he has done toward making the electric light a useful every-day—or perhaps I should say every-night—affair, he has simply made practicable what other men had invented or discovered before him. ”

“ It is hard to say into what field of inquiry Edison has not dipped. He told me once that whenever he travelled he carried a note-book with him, in which he jotted down suggestions for experiments to be made. Railway journeys, at a time when Edison was a constant traveller, were productive of much material of this kind, for the inventor never sleeps when travelling, and his brain works, going over, even in a doze, the thousand and one aspects of his work, and evolving theories to be dismissed almost as soon as evolved. ”

“ Alas! my dear sir, what encouragement is there to an inventor if, after years of toil and anxiety, he has only purchased for himself the pleasure of being a target for every vile fellow to shoot at, and in proportion as his invention is of public utility, so much the greater effort is to be made to defame that the robbery may excite the less sympathy? ”

“ It is not therefore surprising that the greatest labor-saving machine of domestic life, the sewing-machine, should have been received with anything but thanks. Howe was abused, ridiculed, and denounced as the enemy of man, and especially of poor sewing-women, the very class whose toil he has done so much to lighten. Curses instead of blessings were showered upon him during the first years that followed the successful working of his wonderful machine. Fortunately for the inventor, the age of persecution had almost passed, and Howe lived to receive the rewards he so fully deserved. ”

“ Chief Engineer Stimers, who was on the Monitor during her battle with the Merrimac, wrote to Ericsson: "I congratulate you on your great success. Thousands have this day blessed you. I have heard whole crews cheer you. Every man feels that you have saved this place to the nation by furnishing us with the means to whip an iron-clad frigate that was, until our arrival, having it all her own way with our most powerful vessels." ”

“ Edison once made to me as to what the next fifty years might bring forth. Still more astonishing than our past fecundity in invention would be future barrenness. This century has done its work and produced its marvels with comparatively blunt tools, or no tools at all. The next century will be able to work with superb instruments of which our grandfathers knew nothing. The school-boy to-day knows more of the forces of nature and their useful application than the magician of fifty years ago. ”

“ From the end of the first half of this century date movements of extraordinary importance in the world of American invention. The locomotive, the steam-engine and steam-boat, the telegraph, reaping-machine, the printing-press, all seemed to reach an era of wide usefulness at about the same time. ”

“ For twenty years Franklin continued to work at electricity, devoting most of his leisure to his beloved study. The great practical value of the lightning-rod, at one time in the early part of this century somewhat exaggerated, as a perfect protection against harm by lightning, just as electricity was at one time heralded as a panacea for all bodily ailments, has of late years been questioned, but the consensus of scientific opinion still attributes much merit to the device, and the extent of Franklin's services to science in the matter cannot be called into doubt. ”

“ We ought to be ashamed of ourselves if we are content to fold our hands and say that the telegraph, telephone, steam-engine, dynamo, and camera having been invented, the field has been exhausted. These inventions are so many wonderful tools with which we ought to accomplish far greater wonders. Unless the coming generations are particularly lazy, the world ought to possess in 1993 a dozen marvels of the usefulness of the steam-engine and dynamo. The next step in advance will perhaps be the discovery of a method for transforming heat directly into electricity. ”

“ The time will come when people will travel in stages, moved by steam-engines, from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly, fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Passing through the air with such velocity, changing the scene with such rapid succession, will be the most rapid, exhilarating exercise. A carriage (steam) will set out from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day. ”

“ A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident. A man walks along the road intending to catch the train. On the way his foot kicks against something, and looking down to see what he has hit, he sees a gold bracelet embedded in the dust. He has discovered that, certainly not invented it. He did not set out to find a bracelet, yet the value of it is just as great to him at the moment as if, after long years of study, he had invented a machine for making a gold bracelet out of common road metal. Goodyear discovered the way to make hard rubber. ”

“ One invention, by affording a new tool, makes others possible. The steam-engine made possible the dynamo, the dynamo made possible the electric light. In its turn the electric light may lead to wonders still more extraordinary.
The degree to which invention has contributed to civilization is far from suspected by the careless observer. Almost everything we have or use is the fruit of invention. Man might be defined as the animal that invents. The air we breathe and the water we drink are provided by Nature, but we drink water from a vessel of some kind, an invention of man. ”

“ Within the last half century Americans have contributed, to mention only great achievements, the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the sewing-machine, the reaper, and vulcanized rubber, to the world's wealth—a far larger contribution than that of any other nation. ”

“ The quotations of New York gas stocks rose again.
The next time I visited the laboratory, a few256 days later, Edison was up again and talking cheerfully. But he had grown five years older in five months. "I shall succeed," he said to me, "but it may take me longer than I at first supposed. Everything is so new that each step is in the dark; I have to make the dynamos, the lamps, the conductors, and attend to a thousand details that the world never hears of. ”

“ During the last fifty years the power of man to produce food has increased more than during the preceding fifteen centuries. Sixty years ago a large part of the wheat and other grain raised in the world was cut, a handful at a time, with a scythe, and a man could not reap much more than a quarter of an acre a day. With a McCormick reaper a man and two horses will cut from fifteen to twenty acres of grain a day. In the threshing of grain, invention has achieved almost as much. A man with a machine will thresh ten times as much as he formerly could with a flail. ”

“ So the reaper of 1831, as improved in 1845, achieved for its inventor a triumph which all then felt and acknowledged was not more a personal one than it was a national one. It was justly so regarded. No general or consul, drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome by order of the Senate, ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus vindicated the genius of our country208 at the World's Exhibition of Art in the metropolis of the British empire in 1851. ”

“ This is a marvellous development from the little Virginia shop of 1840, with its output of one machine a week, and the growth means far more for the country at large than might be inferred from these figures; the farmers of the world owe more to the McCormick reaper than they can repay. The whir of the American reaper is heard around the world. In Egypt, Russia, India, Australia the machine is helping man with more than a giant's strength. ”

“ In a remarkable sketch of the history of civilization, Professor Huxley remarked, in 1887, that the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, constitutes the most salient feature of the world's progress during the last fifty years. ”

“ When the first thunder-laden clouds reached the kite, there were no signs of electricity from Franklin's key, but just as he had begun to doubt the success of the experiment, he saw the fibres of the hempen string begin to rise. Approaching his hand to the key, he got an electric spark, and was then able to charge the Leyden jar and get a stronger shock. Then the happy philosopher drew in his wet kite and went home to write his modest account of one of the most notable experiments made by man. ”

“ I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country. ”

“ The green seed is a species much more productive than the black, and by nature adapted to a much greater variety of climate, but by reason of the strong adherence of the fibre to the seed, without the aid of some more powerful machine for separating it than any formerly known among us, the cultivation of it would never have been made an object. The machine of which Mr. Whitney claims the invention so facilitates the preparation of this species for use that the cultivation of it has suddenly become an object of infinitely greater national importance than that of the other species ever can be. ”

“ It may seem impossible that the suggestions of one man can keep busy a big workshop upon experiments the year round, but Edison says that the temptation is always to increase the force. When it is remembered that the list of Edison's patents reaches to seven hundred and forty, and that on the electric light alone he has worked out several hundred theories, the wonder ceases. Ten minutes' work with a pencil may sketch an apparatus that a dozen men cannot finish inside of a fortnight. ”

“ The person who contributed most to the success of the undertaking, after the inventor, was his friend, Miller, a native of Connecticut and, a graduate of Yale. Like Whitney, he had come to Georgia as a private teacher, and after the death of General Greene he married the widow. He was a lawyer by profession, with a turn for mechanics. He had some money and proposed to Whitney to become his partner, he to be at the whole expense of manufacturing the invention until it should be patented. If the machine should succeed, they agreed that the profits and advantages should be divided between them. ”

“ I will devote all my time, all my thoughts, all my exertions, and all the money I can earn or borrow to encompass and complete the business we have undertaken; and if fortune should, by any future disaster, deny us the boon we ask, we will at least deserve it. It shall never be said that we have lost an object which a little perseverance could have attained. ”

“ In a discovery there must be an element of the accidental, and an important one, too; while an invention is purely deductive. In my own case but few, and those the least important, of my inventions owed anything to accident. Most of them have been hammered out after long and patient labor, and are the result of countless experiments all directed toward attaining some well-defined object. All mechanical improvements may safely be said to be inventions227 and not discoveries. The sewing-machine was an invention. So were the steam-engine and the typewriter. ”

“ On board the ship Sully, in which Morse sailed from Havre to New York, in the autumn of 1832, the recent discovery in France of the means of obtaining an electric spark from a magnet was a favorite topic of conversation among the passengers, and it was during the voyage that Morse conceived the idea of an electro-magnetic and chemical recording telegraph. Before he reached New York he had made drawings and specifications of his conception, which he exhibited to his fellow passengers. Few great inventions that have made their authors immortal were so completely grasped at inception as this. ”

“ When the new Orange laboratory was finished and Edison found himself with time and means at his disposal, his first thought was to take up his phonograph. The history of the great hopes built upon the phonograph and the bitter disappointment that followed is too familiar to need repetition here. As may be imagined, Edison is most keenly bent upon tightening the loose screw that has prevented it from doing all that its friends predicted for it. He still works at other problems, but chiefly as relaxation. He rests from inventing one thing by inventing something else. ”

“ With regard to Edison's work upon the telegraph, telephone, electric railway, dynamo, the ore-extracting machines, the electric pen, and a score of other inventions which have made him the most profitable customer of the United States Patent Office in this or any other generation, the labor of this remarkable genius has also been largely that of one who made practical and useful the dreams of others. ”

“ Edison, as a master mechanic, furnished all this, or at least so nearly solved the problem as to entitle him to claim credit for having given the electric light to the world—a better illuminant than gas in every way, and destined some day to be infinitely cheaper. ”

“ The present number of reapers in operation to-day, all of them based upon the McCormick patents, is estimated at about two million, so that, counting a man's labor at $1 a day, here is a yearly saving of more than $100,000,000. The reaper thus stands beside the steam-engine and the sewing-machine as one of the most important labor-saving inventions of our time, relieving210 millions of men from the most arduous drudgery and increasing the world's wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars every year. ”

“ If we want our air hotter or colder, we resort to invention, and a vast amount of ingenuity has been expended upon putting air in motion by means of fans, blowers, ventilators, etc. We take but a small part of our food as animals do—in the natural state. The savage who first crushed some kernels of wheat between two stones invented flour, and we are yet hard at it inventing improvements upon his process. The earliest inventions probably had reference to the procuring and preparing of food, and the ingenuity of man is still exercised upon these problems more eagerly than ever before. ”

“ It is objected that if the patentee succeeds in procuring the renewal of his patent he will be too rich. There is no probability that the patentee, if the term of his patent were extended for twenty years, would ever obtain for his invention one-half as much as many an individual will gain by the use of it. Up to the present time the whole amount of what he had acquired from this source, after deducting his expenses, does not exceed one-half the sum which a single individual has gained by the use of the machine in one year. ”