Ray Stannard Baker

“ The chief pursuit of science and invention in this day of wonders is the electrical conquest of the world, the introduction of the electrical age. The electric motor is driving out the steam locomotive, the electric light is superseding gas and kerosene, the waterfall must soon take the place of coal. But certain great problems stand like solid walls in the way of development, part of them problems of science, part of mechanical efficiency. ”

“ As long as the shoal remains the light will stand. In the course of half a century, perhaps less, the sea-water will gnaw away the iron of the cylinder, but there will still remain the core of concrete, as hard and solid as the day on which it was planted.
It is fitting that work which has drawn so largely upon the highest intellectual and moral endowments of the engineer and the builder should not serve the selfish interests of any one man, nor of any single corporation, nor even of the Government which provided the means, but that it should be a gift to the world at large. ”

“ And I do not believe that without such previous study and experience a man is capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the trip. ”

“ Who has not sympathised with his effort to perfect his devices, to produce a tuning apparatus by means of which messages flying through space could be kept secret? And here at last has come the invention which science most needed to complete and vitalise Marconi's work. By means of Mr. Hewitt's interrupter, the simplicity of which is as astonishing as its efficiency, the whole problem has been suddenly and easily solved. ”

“ Coal is nothing but stored-up, bottled sunshine. The sunlight of a million years ago produced forests, which, falling, were buried in the earth and changed into coal. So when we put coal in the cook-stove we may truthfully say that we are boiling the kettle with million-year-old sunshine. Similarly there would be no waterfalls for us to chain and convert into electricity, as we have chained Niagara, if the sun did not evaporate the waters of the sea, take it up in clouds, and afterward empty the clouds in rain on the mountain-tops from whence the water tumbles down again to the sea. ”

“ Hewitt might have led a life of leisure and ease, but he has preferred to win his successes in the American way, by unflagging industry and perseverance, and has come to his new fortune also like the American, suddenly and brilliantly. As a people we like to see a man deserve his success! The same qualities which made Peter Cooper one of the first of American millionaires, and Abram S. Hewitt one of the foremost of the world's steel merchants, Mayor of New York, and one of its most trusted citizens, have placed Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt among the greatest of American inventors and scientists. ”

“ His patience and perseverance through years of hard work have produced something that will make life easier and happier for millions of people, that will open great new avenues for human effort and human achievement, build up new fortunes; often, indeed, change the whole course of business affairs in the world, if not the very channels of human thought. Think what the steam-engine has done, and the telegraph, and the sewing-machine! All this wonder lies to-day in the brain of the inventor ”

“ Peter Cooper Hewitt and His Three Great Inventions—The Mercury Arc Light—The New Electrical Converter—The Hewitt Interrupter
It is indeed a great moment when an inventor comes to the announcement of a new and epoch-making achievement. He has been working for years, perhaps, in his laboratory, struggling along unknown, unheard of, often poor, failing a hundred times for every achieved success, but finally, all in a moment, surprising the secret which nature has guarded so long and so faithfully. ”

“ And some of these earthquake waves which sweep over the solid earth are three feet high, so that the whole of New York, perhaps, rises bodily to that height and then slides over the crest like a skiff on an ocean swell. ”

“ I was constantly taken up with the desire to lighten their parts; and I dreamed of air-ships and flying machines. The fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century those who occupied themselves with aërial navigation passed for crazy, rather pleased than offended me. It is incredible and yet true that in the kingdom of the wise, to which all of us flatter ourselves we belong, it is always the fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfière was thought a fool until the day when he stopped his insulters' mouths by launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens. ”

“ What was only a scientific and inventive novelty a few years ago has become a great practical enterprise, giving promise of changing the whole world of men, drawing nations more closely together, making us near neighbours to the English and the Germans and the French—in short, shrinking our earth. There may come a time when we will think no more of sending a Marconigram, or an etheragram, or whatever is to be the name of the message by wireless telegraphy, to an acquaintance in England than we now think of calling up our neighbour on the telephone. ”

“ Fixing of Nitrogen—Experiments of Professor Nobbe
No lad of to-day, ambitious to become a scientist or inventor, reading of all the wonderful and revolutionising discoveries and inventions of recent years, need fear for plenty of new problems to solve in the future. No, the great problems have not all been solved. We have the steam-engine, the electric motor, the telegraph, the telephone, the air-ship, but not one of them is perfect, not one that does not bring to the attention of inventors scores of entirely new problems for solution. ”

“ Think what such an invention means, if practically successful, to the vast stretches of our arid Western land, valueless without water. Spread all over this country of Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and other States are thousands of miles of canals to bring in water from the rivers for irrigating the deserts, and there are untold numbers of wind-mills, steam and gasoline pumps which accomplish the same purpose more laboriously. Think what a new source of cheap power will do—making valuable hundreds of acres of desert land, providing homes for thousands of busy Americans. ”

“ The heat vibrations at 7,000° are so intense that nickel and platinum, the most refractory, the most unmeltable of metals, burn like so much bee's-wax; the best fire-brick used in lining furnaces is consumed by it like lumps of rosin, leaving no trace behind. It works, in short, the most marvellous, the most incredible transformations in the substances of the earth. ”

“ Heavy copper wires carrying a current of 2,200 volts lead from the power-house to Mr. Acheson's furnaces, where the electrical energy is transformed into heat.
There are ten furnaces in all, built loosely of fire-brick, and fitted at each end with electrical connections. And strange they look to one who is familiar with the ordinary fuel furnace, for they have no chimneys, no doors, no drafts, no ash-pits, no blinding glow of heat and light. The room in which they stand is comfortably cool. Each time a furnace is charged it is built up anew ”

“ Hewitt's scientific work of recent years has been done after business hours—the long, slow, plodding toil of the experimenter. There is surely no royal road to success in invention, no matter how well a man may be equipped, no matter how favourably his means are fitted to his hands. Mr. Hewitt worked for seven years on the electrical investigations which resulted in his three great inventions; thousands of experiments were performed; thousands of failures paved the way for the first glimmer of success. ”

“ And the time is coming—long-headed inventors saw it many years ago—when some device for the direct utilisation of the sun's heat will be a necessity. The world is now using its coal at a very rapid rate; its wood, for fuel purposes, has already nearly disappeared, so that, within a century or two, new ways of furnishing heat and power must be devised or the human race will perish of cold and hunger. Fortunately there are other sources of power at hand; the waterfalls, the Niagaras, which, converted into electricity, may yet heat our sitting-rooms and cook our dinners. ”

“ But the nitrates now in sight and available are estimated good for only another fifty years, even at the present low rate of consumption. Hence, even if famine does not immediately impend, the food problem is far more serious than is generally supposed.
Now nitrogen, it will be seen, is one of the most precious and necessary of all substances to human life, and it is one of the most common. If the world ever starves for the lack of nitrogen it will starve in a very world of nitrogen. For there is not one of the elements more common than nitrogen, not one present around us in larger quantities. ”

“ But greater than either of these sources is the unlimited potentiality of the tides of the sea, which men have sought in vain to harness, and the direct heat of the sun itself. Some time in the future these will be subdued to the purpose of men, perhaps our main dependence for heat and power.
When we come to think of it, the harnessing of the sun is not so very strange. In fact, we have had the sun harnessed since the dawn of man on the earth, only indirectly. Without the sun there would be nothing here—no men, no life. ”

“ The other method, that of a hard-working German professor, is the cunning utilisation of one of nature's marvellous processes of taking the nitrogen from the air and depositing it in the soil—for nature has its own beautiful way of doing it. I will describe the second method first because it will help to clear up the whole subject and lead up to the work of the American inventor and his extraordinary machinery.
Nearly every farmer, without knowing it, employs nature's method of fixing nitrogen every year. ”

“ Every one will recall the astonishment that swept over the country in December, 1901, when there came the first meagre reports of Marconi's success in telegraphing across the Atlantic Ocean between England and Newfoundland. At first few would believe the reports, but when Thomas A. Edison, Graham Bell, and other great inventors and scientists had expressed their confidence in Marconi's achievement, the whole country, was ready to hail the young inventor with honours. ”

“ Every one who is at all familiar with farming operations has heard of seeding down an old field to clover and then ploughing in the crop, usually in the second year.
The great importance of this bit of the wisdom of experience was not appreciated by science for many years. Then several German experimenters began to ask why clover and lupin and beans should flourish on worn-out land when other crops failed. All of these plants are especially rich in nitrogen, and yet they grew well on soil which had been robbed of its nitrogen. ”

“ His Newfoundland experiments have also convinced him that one of the secrets of successful long-distance transmission is the use of a more powerful current in his transmitter, and this he will test in his next trials between the continents.
And now we come to the most important part of Mr. Marconi's work, the part least known even to science, and the field of almost illimitable future development. This is the system of "tuning," as the inventor calls it, the construction of a certain receiver so that it will respond only to the message sent by a certain transmitter. ”

“ Science predicts the exhaustion of nitrogen and consequent failure of the food supply, and science promptly finds a way of making plants draw nitrogen from the boundless supplies of the air. The time may come when every farmer will send for his bottles or cakes of bacteria culture every spring as regularly as he sends for his seed, and when the work of inoculating the soil will be a familiar agricultural process, with discussions in the farmers' papers as to whether two bottles or one is best for a field of sandy loam with a southern exposure. ”

“ The further we advance in science and mechanics the further we see into the marvels of our wonderful earth and of our life, and the more there is for us to do.
As population increases and people become more intelligent there is a constant demand for new things, new machinery which will enable the human race to move more rapidly and crowd more work and more pleasure into our short human life. ”

“ When Marconi's discoveries were first announced in 1896, there existed no method of tuning, though the inventor had its necessity clearly in mind. Accordingly the public inquired, "How are you going to keep your messages secret? Supposing a warship wishes to communicate with another of the fleet, what is to prevent the enemy from reading your message? How are private business despatches to be secured against publicity?" Here, indeed, was a problem. Without secrecy no system of wireless telegraphy could ever reach great commercial importance, or compete with the present cable communication. ”

“ One man working to-day with machinery can accomplish as much as many men of a hundred years ago; he can live in a house that would then have been a palace; enjoy advantages of education, amusement, luxury, that would then have been possible only to kings and princes.
And the very greatest of all the problems which the inventors and scientists of coming generations must solve is the question—seemingly commonplace—of food. ”

“ The typical inventor—at least so we think—is poor, starts poor at least, and has a struggle to rise. M. Santos-Dumont has always had plenty of means. The inventor is always first a dreamer, we think. M. Santos-Dumont is first a thoroughly practical man, an engineer with a good knowledge of science, to which he adds the imagination of the inventor and the keen love and daring of the sportsman and adventurer, without which his experiments could never have been carried through. ”