One of the most alluring and sky-blue delights, next to working out a big idea of your own, is to read about the fortunes that other inventors have piled up by the simple use of their grey matter.

The stories of what they did and how they did it are far redder blooded and more gripping than any old sleuth yarn ever put between paper covers; but different from this kind of yellow fiction they are all true, their heroes are all real and each one had a great idea burning in his brain, like St. Elmo’s fire, and each had the business ability to transmute it into solid gold, twenty-four carats fine.

And it is not time wasted in harking back to what other inventors have done if you will but heed the lesson that they teach for their works stand out like guide-posts by day and signal-lights by night which point the way for you to go and do the same thing if you will only quit dreaming, get busy with your experiments and be careful not to run into any open switches.

A Tour of the Inventive World.—Nor need an invention be a large one to make money though of course the great inventions—those that have given the world all the civilization it has had or is likely to have for some centuries to come—have, as a rule, been the greatest producers of wealth for those who worked them out.

So now suppose we make a personally conducted tour around the world of inventions and take a look at a few of the wonders which prove that thoughts are things and that things are money, that is when you know how to convert one into the other. And the route we will take will show us some small inventions as we go and we will see a few of the big inventions on our return to home and laboratory.

Little Inventions.—To begin with let us lead off with the smallest and least important inventions, though they also serve a purpose, and these are to be found in toys, games and other things for pleasure.

First is the return ball, which consisted of a piece of rubber strand fastened to a wooden ball; this simple invention, so ’tis said, paid its inventor $50,000 a year in royalties for a long time, and so he waxed fat and grew rich.

Such toys as the dancing dolls, the wheel of life and the chameleon top brought their respective inventors even larger sums, while the roller skate which Plimpton improved and made popular by his invention of cramping the wheels netted him $1,000,000 in royalties and so you need not feel sorry for him.

Simple Inventions.—The next class of inventions I shall call your attention to is just as simple but they are different from toys in that they are useful.

Among them may be named our friend of infant days, the safety pin, the rubber tip for lead pencils, the cork nose shield for eyeglasses, the grooved steel rib for umbrellas, the stylographic pen, the glass lemon squeezer, paper clips, hook fasteners for shoes and the shipping tag reinforced around the hole which Dennison invented and still sells by the carload.

All of these little things and ten thousand others which you would hardly think were worth inventing have built up fortunes for those who thought of them and, more to their credit, were able to see that a future awaited them.

Real Inventions.—In passing we come to some small but none-the-less real inventions such as the spring roller window shade, automatic ink stand in which the ink is always at the same level, barbed wire fences, Mrs. Potts’ sad iron—the one with the attachable and detachable handle, the paragon umbrella frame, etc.

To the right you will see some inventions of a more complex kind such as the check protector, mimeograph, time stamp, combination lock, fountain pen, computing scale, compressed air rock drill, cash register, the comptometer and a thousand other devices we see in use or use ourselves every day. Many of them are small but each and every one produced anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 for its inventor.

Great Inventions.—The Steam Engine, Locomotive, and Steamboat.—How the steam engine was invented by Watt, how the locomotive was invented by Stephenson and how the steamboat was invented by Fulton are pretty well known.

Just how much these great pioneer inventors received in actual cash for their efforts I cannot say offhand but it was not large when compared with the fortunes inventors have since made. But their names are writ large in the hall of fame, not the one at the New York University which doesn’t count, but in the hall of fame of progress and civilization which is the only one that really matters.

The Telegraph.—The telegraph was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1832 but it was not until 1844 that he had a line working from Washington to Baltimore. After long years of litigation his patent rights were upheld by the courts and much wealth and more fame accrued to him.

The Perfecting Press.—The first web printing press, that is a press using a web, or continuous strip of paper, was invented by Bullock in 1845 and this the Hoe Brothers improved upon until the web perfecting press was evolved by them in 1846 and which revolutionized the printing of newspapers. The Hoe factory is the largest maker of printing presses in the world to-day.

The Sewing Machine.—After many experiments by others the sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe and patented by him in 1846. Like every other inventor who has a really great thing his patents were attacked in the court and for eight years he lived in poverty. When the courts finally found in his favor he made millions out of the royalties on his labor saving invention.

The Ice Machine.—The first machine for making ice was invented by A. C. Twining in which ethyl ether was used for the compressed gas and for which a patent was granted in 1850. In 1867 an ice machine was made by Ferdinand CarrÉ which used liquid ammonia for the compressed gas and from that date on the artificial production of ice on a commercial scale really began. Whether these two inventors made fortunes out of their brain children I cannot say, but this I know, that tens of millions have flowed into the coffers of those who commercialized their work.

The Steel Process.—The process of converting iron into steel cheaply and in quantities was invented by Henry Bessemer who patented it in 1855. It was the Bessemer process which made it possible to use steel for rails and structural purposes generally. The inventor grew rich beyond the dreams of the romancer and the steel industry has made multimillionaires of all its captains.

The Gas Engine.—Many inventions for using gas as the motive power for engines were made before 1861 but it was not until that year that N. A. Otto built a working model of a gas engine in which the explosive gases were mixed, compressed, and ignited in one cylinder when the waste gases were exhausted from it. The Otto gas engine became a commercial success in 1878 and netted the inventor many millions.

The Dynamo and Motor.—The principle on which the dynamo electric machine works was discovered by Faraday in 1831. In 1866 both Wilde and Siemens built dynamos, but it was Gramme who made the dynamo a commercial machine by inventing the ring armature, which he did in 1870. Then some genius, or bonehead, no one seems to know which, found that when a current was passed through a dynamo it became a motor. From 1880 inventions for electric light, heat and power advanced by leaps and bounds and everybody that invented anything at all worth while in the electrical line got rich quick.

The Air Brake.—The air brake to stop and control the speed of trains was invented by Westinghouse in 1869. He had hard work getting any railroad to give it a trial but once that this was done it very quickly came into general use. Next to the safety valve it was the first important safety device applied to railroads. It has in the past and is still piling up millions for its inventor.

The Telephone.—The first use of the word telephone was made by Charles Wheatstone in 1834, who applied it to a musical instrument otherwise known as the magic lyre. In 1854 Charles Bourseul suggested a way to make a speaking telephone, and in 1860 Johanne Phillip Reis constructed a telephone apparatus along the line of Bourseul’s idea; while this instrument reproduced musical tones it would not reproduce the human voice.

Alexander Graham Bell began working on the problem in 1874 and invented the first electric speaking telephone which he patented, showed in operation at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876 and shortly after a company was formed to float it. Edison made a big improvement in the telephone in 1878 when he invented the carbon transmitter. Other rivals appeared in the field and after long years of costly law suits the rights of Bell were sustained by the courts and the Bell Telephone Company has had a practical monopoly of the business in this country ever since. The invention made Bell and its owners enormously wealthy.

The Typewriter.—This useful machine was invented by Charles Thurber in 1843, but it was not until about 1875 that a practical machine was put on the market. Millions of dollars have been made out of the typewriter industry, subsequent inventors coming in for their big shares, but it is doubtful if the original inventor received anything more than honorable mention in the encyclopÆdias and a monument in some cemetery for the great benefit he conferred on mankind.

The Phonograph.—This wonderful instrument for recording and reproducing speech and other sounds was invented by Edison in 1877 and improved by him in 1888. In 1887 Emile Berliner invented and patented the graphophone in which the vibrations are recorded on a disk instead of on a cylinder as it is in the Edison phonograph.

The phonograph was placed on the market in 1888 and the manufacture of graphophones began in 1897 when both the machines and the records became popular and rapidly grew into a great industry. The phonograph is only one of Edison’s 700 inventions and from some or all of them he has amassed a fortune of $10,000,000, and Berliner, who is also an inventor of renown, is very wealthy.

The Storage Battery.—Like many other great inventions the storage battery has made millions, but from the time it was invented by Gaston PlantÉ in 1860 until it became a commercial product in 1880 was too long a stretch for the originator to have received his just reward. But those who followed with their little and big improvements made small and large fortunes out of them when the Electric Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia was organized to take over all the smaller concerns.

The Snap-Shot Camera.—The snap-shot camera, or kodak, is not an invention of magnitude but Eastman who invented it about 1880 has through his business ability made it a money-maker second only to inventions of great utility. So rich is his company that it paid $300,000 for the simple invention of enabling a kodak user to write a record on each film when it was exposed.

The Steam Turbine.—The steam turbine dates back to the time of Hero, that is 120 years B. C., and the place of its birth was Alexandria, Egypt. It consisted of a copper ball pivoted on trunnions. Projecting from opposite sides of its equator were two bent pipes and when the ball was partly filled with water and heated the steam would spout out of the bent pipes and on striking the air it reacted on the ball and this caused it to revolve at a high-speed. For this reason Hero’s engine was called a reaction turbine.

In 1705 Branca, an Italian, invented a steam turbine in which a jet of steam was forced through a nozzle and impinged on the vanes of a paddle-wheel, the impact of the steam causing it to revolve. Hence this kind of a turbine is called an impact turbine.

The first steam turbine to be built and operated as a competitor of the reciprocating engine was made by De Laval in 1883. It was a reaction turbine and it revolved at a tremendously high speed. Parsons of England brought out in 1884 the first multiple expansion turbine which combined the reaction and the impulse types. It made 18,000 revolutions per minute and was directly connected to an electric lighting dynamo. In a little over thirty years the steam turbine reached a degree of perfection and economy not attained in the two hundred odd years of development of the reciprocating engine and it is now used for driving the largest steamships.

The Automobile.—The so-called daddy of the automobile is George B. Selden; he built his first self-moving wagon in 1878 and applied for a patent on it. He did not let this patent issue, however, but kept it alive in the Patent Office until 1895 when in that year automobiles began to be made and used and he then had the patent granted to him.

His next step was to sell licenses to the various gasoline engine automobile manufacturers who paid him a royalty on each machine sold and in this very easy and genteel manner he accumulated much money. But there were some manufacturers who refused to recognize his patent rights and hence refused to pay him royalty. Henry Ford of Detroit was the leader of these rebellious souls and a bitter patent suit resulted in which the courts first decided for Selden and then against him and this ended his monopoly.

Ford organized the Ford Motor Company and at this writing it is the largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world. It employs 16,000 men and turns out 1000 automobiles a day. Mr. Ford has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it, but his great wealth is based upon his business ability and not upon any patents he may have.

The Incandescent Light.—The first electric incandescent lamp that was made used a platinum wire for the filament. J. W. Starr substituted a carbon filament for the platinum wire, but the first successful incandescent lamp was produced by Edison in 1879 after he had made over 2000 experiments in order to find a suitable fiber for the filament. In order to be able to use the incandescent lamps, Edison designed a new system of distributing the current through several circuits and between any number of lamps.

The lamps of to-day have filaments of tungsten and these are sealed in bulbs filled with nitrogen and which together greatly increases the candle-power and at the same time uses less current. In 1882 the Pearl Street Edison station in New York was put into service and was the first of the great central stations. The Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago is the largest electric lighting system in the world. There are four stations and together they have an output of 320,000 kilowatts, or 430,000 horsepower.

The Electric Railway.—The first attempt to build a railway operated by electricity was made by Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith in 1835. Next, C. T. Page made a sixteen horsepower electric locomotive in 1850 and when it was tried out on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad it ran at a speed of nineteen miles an hour. Batteries were used in both cases to supply the current.

The Trolley Car.—The first practical overhead electric line was shown in Chicago in 1883 by C. J. Van Depoele and about the same time Leo Daft built a third-rail line from Saratoga Springs, N. Y., to Mount McGregor, while a conduit line was built by Bently and Knight in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1884 the first practical trolley line was built in Kansas City and from this time on horse- and mule-drawn cars were doomed, except on West Street in New York City where they are still used to hold down a franchise.

There were in 1912 about 41,000 miles of track operated by electricity in the United States; over 76,000 passenger cars were in service and 12,100,000 passengers were carried, all of which goes to show that there is money in electrical inventions for somebody.

The Electric Locomotive.—The 1913 type of electric locomotive used on the New York Central is fifty-seven feet long, weighs 110 tons, has eight motors of 325 horsepower each, which are mounted on four trucks and driving eight axles. This powerful locomotive is capable of hauling a train of 1200 tons at a speed of sixty miles an hour on a straight level track. The stockholders of the General Electric Company of Schenectady, N. Y., profited by their building.

The Linotype.—The linotype is a machine that is operated like a typewriter and makes a slug or a solid line of type from metal type-bars each of which has a letter on it. These type-bars are then properly spaced and melted type metal is run into the matrix they form. This wonderful machine is the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler who began working on it in 1876 and completed the machine in 1886. Thousands of linotype machines are in use at the present time and it goes without saying that the inventor was richly rewarded for his hard labors.

Moving Pictures.—The moving-picture industry, which is the third largest in the United States, came into being through the following inventions: In 1845 a toy called the zoetrope, or wheel-of-life, was invented; it was so made that when a series of drawings showing the different positions of, say, a horse in motion was viewed through a number of vertical slits in a rapidly revolving cylinder the horse would appear to be running. It was truly a moving picture.

The next step was taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1877, who was the first to make a series of instantaneous photographs of a horse in motion, and in this way he showed the true position of the animal at different instants of its gait, but since there was no exactness in timing the intervals between the exposures of the dry plates—the film had not yet been invented—they could not have been used for moving pictures.

The photographic gelatine film having come into use, Edison, in 1893, invented two machines, the kinetograph which was a camera for taking successive pictures of moving objects, and the kinetoscope which allowed the pictures made on the film by the kinetograph to be viewed. The kinetoscope showed each picture on the film to the eye for about ¹/40th of a minute, so that the figures seemed to move as in actual life. And this is the way the moving-picture industry was born. It was easy to combine a projecting lantern and a kinetoscope so that the little photographs on the film could be thrown on a screen and enlarged and this is the principle of all moving-picture machines as they are now constructed.

The moving-picture business has taken a tremendous hold on the public all over the world. This is shown by the fact that in 1914 the distributers for three of the largest film makers handled 75 per cent. of the films released and are said to have received $15,000,000 for them. In 1915 the daily average attendance of moving-picture shows in the United States was about 5,000,000 people.

The Wireless Telegraph.—The wireless telegraph was invented by William Marconi, who showed a set in operation, in 1896, between the General Postoffice and the Thames embankment in London, the distance being about 300 feet. Since that time he has been almost constantly engaged in patent suits with infringers.

Since then the signaling range has been increased until now a regular telegraph service without wires is carried on across the Atlantic. I do not know how well the inventor fared financially but whatever the amount he got, it was not nearly enough for his great work.

The Wireless Telephone.—The wireless telephone was invented by the author of this book in 1899 when he telephoned without wires between two stations in Narberth, Pa., a distance of about three blocks. During the past year the human voice has been transmitted without wires from Arlington, near Washington, D. C., eastward to Paris, France, and from Arlington as far westward as Honolulu, Hawaii. Patent litigation, patent hold-ups and government persecution have been my lot. I know about the amount I made out of my invention but I won’t tell.

The Aeroplane.—The aeroplane was invented by the Wright Brothers, Wilbur and Orville. They began their experiments in flying on the sand-dunes of Kitty Hawk, N. C., in 1900. Their first efforts were made with a glider fitted with elevation planes and after having developed the balancing instinct they installed a gasoline motor in the glider and this drove two propellers at the rear of the machine.

With this new born aeroplane they made the first motor-driven, man-carrying flight in 1903—a flight that lasted a small fraction of a minute. From this time on records and necks were broken by other fliers who tried to outdo their rivals and undo themselves.