Rupert Sargent Holland

“ Bell knew the field of his work in a general way, but he had not yet decided which path to choose of several that looked as if they might lead across it. His far-distant goal was to construct a machine that would carry, not the dots and dashes of the telegraph, but the complex vibrations of the human voice. ”

“ The astronomer is given certain figures, and from those he intends to derive certain laws; the scientist knows the properties of certain materials and from those he is to reach some new combination that will produce a new result. He is not an inventor as much as he is a detective; he picks up the clews to certain happenings and constructs a working theory to fit them. In mechanics this theory that he constructs usually takes the form of a machine. And this machine is not so much a new discovery as it is the practical working-out of certain carefully-selected laws of nature. ”

“ When they discovered that Hargreaves could do more spinning with less work with his machine, and could supply his own loom with all the woof that was needed instead of keeping three or four spinners employed, they grew highly indignant. They did not realize that the demand for cotton cloth was far greater than the supply, and that they could all be profitably employed operating the spinning-jenny. That panic which has so often come over people when they learn of a new device entering their field of action struck the cotton-spinners, and Hargreaves was regarded as a foe rather than a friend. ”

“ Further enthusiasm will doubtless greet the gallant attempt, which was all but successful, of M. Latham yesterday, to repeat the achievement. Since the discovery of the New World no material event has happened on this earth so impressive to the imagination as the conquest of the air which is now half achieved. Indeed, the conquest of the air is likely to be more vast and bewildering in its results than even the discovery of the New World, and one is inclined to wonder that men should take it as calmly as they do. ”

“ Not Watt’s first innovations on the stationary steam-engine, nor Stephenson’s building of his original locomotive, nor Arkwright’s discovery that rollers could be used to draw the cotton, but the years of trial and improvement Watt spent at Birmingham, and Stephenson in his shops at Killingworth, and Arkwright in his factory at Cromford, have made the three men famous in history. They were the years of patience and perseverance, which must come in the life of every great inventor to test his strength. ”

“ Many men have come upon new ideas, and many have sent them forth to improve the world’s work, but only a few have developed them, day in and day out, until they stand forth as a finished achievement. That is the gauge, the test that has proved the inventor. ”

“ There is a peculiar charm attaching to the figure of Robert Fulton, the attraction that plays about the man who is many-sided, and picturesque on whatever side one looks at him. He was a man at home on both shores of the Atlantic, at a time when such men were rare. He had been taught drawing by Major André, when the latter was a prisoner of war in the little Pennsylvania town of Lancaster. He had hung out his sign as Painter of Miniatures at the corner of Second and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, under the friendly patronage of Benjamin Franklin. ”

“ He made the steamboat practicable, as Watt had the steam-engine. Above all, he was very fortunate; he found his countrymen ready to welcome the Clermont, and to fall in with his plans, an attitude which had not faced certain men in England and in France who had built similar boats earlier than Fulton. Some engineers have been tempted to call him a lucky amateur, a talented artist who happened to become interested in new methods of navigation. If one grants all this there is still the fact that it was the Clermont’s success that opened the watercourses of the world to steam. ”

“ In spite of its recognized value it looked as if the sewing-machine could not prove a financial success, and when Howe’s partner Bliss died in 1855 the inventor was able to buy his share in the business from his heirs for a very small sum.
Opposition, even of the most strenuous order, has never been able to retard for long the use of an invention that simplifies industry. If a machine is made that will in an hour do the work that formerly required several days’ hand labor that machine is certain to displace that hand labor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ True it is that neither Watt nor Stephenson were the first men to conceive of a steam-engine or a locomotive, nor even the first to build working models, but they were the first to finish what they began, and add the steam-engine and the locomotive to the other servants of men.
Dr. Arnold was doubtless right when he looked upon the railway as presaging the end of the feudal system. Its value is beyond any estimate. It has widened man’s horizon, and given him all the lands instead of only the limits of his homestead. ”

“ The laws relating to the uses of wireless, and especially the rights of governments to the sole use of the systems in case of war, are in a confused condition, but eventually order must come from this chaos as it did in the history of the telephone and telegraph.
Wireless has brought the possibility of communication between any two individuals, no matter where they may be situated, within the realm of fact. A severing of communication with any part of the world will be impossible. ”

“ By the next year McCormick was ready for a larger audience. The town of Lexington lay some eighteen miles south of his home, and he made arrangements with a farmer there, named John Ruff, to give an exhibition of his reaper in the latter’s field. Over a hundred people were present when McCormick arrived, all curious to see what could be done with the complicated-looking machine. Many of them were harvesters themselves, and none too eager to see a mechanical device enter into competition for their work. The field was hilly and rough, and the reaper careened about in it like a ship in a gale. ”

“ With improvements in safety there seems no limit to the possibilities of flight. So far a long train of casualties has marked the airship’s progress. This was inevitable when men came to imitate the birds, and trust themselves to the fickle currents of the air. But many aviators have [Pg 295] been drawn from a reckless class, and many accidents have been due to a desire to thrill an audience rather than to learn more about the laws of flight. The Wrights have held to the wise course. They care nothing for spectacular performances or establishing new records for their own glory. ”

“ To raise a chestnut on the mountain, or a palm in the plain, which may afford shade, shelter, and fruit for generations yet unborn, and which, if they have once fixed their roots, require no culture, is better than to raise annual flowers in a garden, which must be watered daily, and in which a cold wind may chill or too ardent a sunshine may dry.... The best faculties of man are employed for futurity: speaking is better than acting, writing is better than speaking.”
He was fond of travel, and after he had seen the successful use of his lamp he went abroad again. ”

“ As time went on the messages came with such lightning speed that the whole force gathered about to see the new man work. They had never seen such quickness. At the end of the last message came the words, “Who the devil are you?” “Tom Edison,” the operator ticked back. “You are the first man in the country,” wired the man in New York, “that could ever take me at my fastest, and the only one who could ever sit at the other end of my wire for more than two hours and a half. ”

“ But the great press we have is the direct descendant of the little one that John Gutenberg built in the Zum Jungen at Mainz, and the letters we read on the printed page are after all only another form of those he cut out with so much patient labor on his wooden blocks in Strasburg. Printing is one of the greatest inventions the world has ever seen, but it had its beginning in the simple fact that a young German polisher of gems fell to wondering how a rude playing-card had been made. ”

“ The problem of aerial navigation was to master the currents of the air as the sailing-vessel and the steamship had overcome the waves and tides at sea.
The history of invention often shows that some great thinker, or school of thinkers, has stated a scientific conclusion that generations of later men have never dared to question. The laws of Aristotle in regard to falling bodies were never doubted until Galileo began to wonder if they could be true. Sir Isaac Newton had stated, and mathematical computations had proved his words, that a mechanical flying-machine was an impossibility. ”

“ The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age. ”

“ The morning following that Sunday afternoon on which the idea of the condenser had occurred to Watt he borrowed a brass syringe from a college friend, and using this as a cylinder and a tin can as a condenser tried his experiment. The scheme worked, albeit in a primitive way, and Watt saw that he was on the track of an engine that would revolutionize the labor of men. But he saw also that it would take both time and money to bring his invention to its most efficient form.
His instrument-making business had prospered, he had taken in a partner, and the firm now employed sixteen workmen. ”

“ My first impulse upon taking any apparatus into my hand, from an egg-beater to an electric motor, is to seek a way of improving it. Therefore, as soon as I have finished a machine I am anxious to take it apart again in order to make an experiment. That is a costly mania for a manufacturer.”
In his Newark shop Edison now turned his attention to improvements on the telegraph. His first important invention was the duplex, by which two messages could be sent over the same wire in opposite directions at the same time without any confusion or obstruction to each other. ”

“ The coal mines of the Midlands and the north of England had been the original inducement to inventors to build engines that would draw cars, and the manufacturing needs of Manchester and Liverpool were now gradually inducing promoters to consider building railroads. The growth of Manchester and the towns close to it was tremendous, the cotton traffic between Manchester and Liverpool had jumped to enormous figures, and men felt that some new method of communication must be found. ”

“ There he stayed until the Grand Duke Cosimo, who had stood by him, persuaded the Church that Galileo’s health required that he be allowed to join his friends. At last he reached his home, and again took up his studies. His eyesight was failing, and eventually he became entirely blind, but meanwhile his speculations covered the widest fields of science, he studied the laws of motion and equilibrium, the velocity of light, the problems of the vacuum, of the flight of projectiles, and the mathematical theory of the parabola. ”

“ But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can hear you!” he cried. “I can hear the words!”
“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. ”

“ He took out his first patent on the sewing-machine toward the end of 1845. But when he tried to introduce his invention he met the same difficulties that had faced all men who tried to supplant hand labor by any mechanical process. The tailors of Boston to whom he showed it were willing to admit its efficiency, but told him that he could never secure its general use, as such a proceeding would ruin their business. Every one admired the sewing-machine and praised Howe’s ingenuity, but no one would buy one. ”

“ It seemed impossible for anything to go wrong. I never knew an hour to pass so quickly as that one up in the air. The first half seemed like ten minutes, and the second scarcely longer. I hardly felt the vibrations of the engine, but at first the rising and dipping were hard to get used to. The only disagreeable sensation I experienced was a deafness from the whirring motor. Sometimes the undulating movement was noticeable, but that was all. The sensation of riding the air in an aeroplane is indescribable.”
The speed test came on the day following the endurance flight. ”

“ It was this fact that Professor Hertz discovered, and the waves are sometimes called the Hertzian waves. Light is one variety of wave motion, and heat another. The ether must be distinguished from the air, for science means by it a medium which exists everywhere and is to be regarded as permeating all space and all matter. The ether exists in a vacuum, for, although all the air may have been withdrawn, an object placed in a vacuum can still be seen from outside, and hence the wave motions of light are traveling through a space devoid of air. ”

“ The Wrights had now solved the real problem of aviation, equilibrium. They were ready to try mechanical flights in places where the wind-conditions were less favorable than at Kitty Hawk. They secured a swampy meadow eight miles east of Dayton, and, using that secrecy which they have always believed was necessary to the protection of their interests, began to fly there. Their airship flew well in a straight course, but there was difficulty in turning corners. Sometimes it could be done, but occasionally the plane would lose its balance as it turned, and have to be brought to the ground. ”

“ Any such machine must be heavier than the air it flew in. The weight of Newton’s authority and the weight of figures were compelling facts, such as scientists had no mind to doubt. But in spite of [Pg 274] these facts men could see that birds flew, although they were often a thousand times heavier than the air they went through. And that sight kept men speculating, in spite of all the figures and scientific dicta of the ages.
It was known for centuries that if a kite was held in position by a string reaching to the ground the wind blowing against it would keep it supported in the air. ”

“ It is estimated that in the United States as many messages are sent by telephone as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad passengers. The telephone wires are eight times greater than the telegraph wires, and their earnings six times as great. It is true that the telephone is vastly more used in America than in other parts of the world, and yet it is figured that in the world at large almost as many messages are now telephoned as are sent by post. ”