Newton, Watt, Ericsson, Rowland, as boys were constructive ... The passion for making new things ... Aid from imagination and trained dexterity ... Edison tells how he invented the phonograph ... Telephonic messages record themselves on a steel wire ... Handwriting transmitted by electricity ... How machines imitate hands ... Originality in attack.

Early Talent in Construction.

An inventor is a man of unusual powers. To begin with he is cast in a larger mold than ordinary men; he has keener eyes, more skilful hands, a better knitting quality of brain. In his heart he believes every engine, machine, and process to be improvable without limit. He is thoroughly dissatisfied with things as they are and alert to detect where an old method can be bettered, or a gift wholly new be conferred on mankind, as in the telephone or the phonograph. His uncommon faculty of observation we have had occasion to remark. Another talent as much in evidence, and quite irrepressible even in early life, impels him to make, weave, and build. Invariably the man who has added to the resources of architecture, engineering, machine design, has begun as a boy in repeating the rabbit-hutches, windmills, and whittled sailing craft of bigger boys. This means that he soon acquires a mastery of chisel, plane, and drill, that the lathe becomes as obedient to him as his own hand. Watt, Maudslay, Stephenson, and every peer they ever had, could go to the bench and make a valve, a mitre-wheel, a link-motion just as imaged in their mind’s eye. Lacking this dexterity other men, occasionally fertile in good ideas, never bring them to the birth.

While inventors owe their talents to nature, these talents need sound training, if at a master’s hands, so much the better. Just as the best place to learn how to paint, is the studio of a great artist, so the best school for ingenuity is the workshop of a great inventor. Maudslay, who devised the slide-rest for lathes, and Clement, who designed the first rotary planer, were trained by Bramah, who invented the famous hydraulic press, and locks of radically new and excellent pattern. Whitworth, who created lathes of new refinement, who established new and exact standards of measurement in manufacturing, was trained by Maudslay; so was Nasmyth, who devised the steam hammer. Mr. Edison in his laboratory and workshop has called forth the ingenuity of many an assistant who has since won fame and fortune by independent work.

But as a rule inventors, like the vast brotherhood of other men, must toil by themselves, and get what good they can out of unaided diligence. Cobbett used to say that he thought with the point of his pen; the very act of writing lifted into consciousness many an idea which otherwise had died stillborn. Beethoven, like all other great tone-poets, would play a few bars as they came to his imagination, and while he touched the keys the music, as if with pinions of its own, took such heavenly flights as those of the Fifth Symphony. In just this mode while an inventor is shaping a new model he feels how he can better its lines, give it a simpler design than he first intended. His hands and eyes think as well as his brain; while lever, link, and cam unite together they suggest how they may be more compactly built, more effectively joined. His partner, the discoverer, is under the same spell with regard to some long-standing puzzle of rock, or plant, or star. Because in his soul he believes nature to be intelligible to her very core, he is sure that this particular puzzle can be fathomed, and he keeps thinking day by day of possible solutions. At other times, and even during sleep, his brain is subconsciously at work upon his problem, bringing to view promising points for attack. With new light he is bold enough to say, this problem can be solved by me. At last dawns the happy morning when he verifies a shrewd guess, or when a crucial experiment stamps a theory as proven truth, indispensable aid having arisen as one attempt, through baffling failure, suggested the next. All boys and girls are the better, happier, more useful when they are early and thoroughly trained to use their eyes, ears, and hands; to the inventor and discoverer this training opens a career which otherwise is denied.

Among the greatest of the sons of men who have united the faculties of invention and discovery stands Sir Isaac Newton. As with his compeers we find that his art as an inventor was but the flower of his handicraft as a mechanic.

Sir Isaac Newton almost from the cradle was a builder. His biographer, Sir David Brewster, says:—

Newton as a Boy—A Tireless Constructor.

“He had not been long at school before he exhibited a taste for mechanical inventions. With the aid of little saws, hammers, hatchets, and tools of all sorts, he was constantly occupied during his play hours in the construction of models of known machines, and amusing contrivances. The most important pieces of mechanism which he thus constructed, were a windmill, a water-clock, and a carriage to be moved by the person who sat in it. When a windmill was in course of being erected near Grantham, Sir Isaac frequently watched the operations of the workmen, and acquired such a thorough knowledge of its mechanism, that he completed a working model of it, which Dr. Stukely says was as clean and curious a piece of workmanship as the original. This model was frequently placed on the top of the house in which he lived at Grantham, and was put in motion by the action of the wind upon its sails. In calm weather, however, another mechanical agent was required, and for this purpose a mouse was put in requisition, which went by the name of miller.

“The water-clock constructed by Sir Isaac was a more useful piece of mechanism than his windmill. It was made out of a box which he begged from Mrs. Clark’s brother, and, according to Dr. Stukely, to whom it was described by those who had seen it, it resembled pretty much our common clocks and clock-cases, but was less in size, being about four feet in height, and of a proportional breadth. There was a dial-plate at top with figures of the hours. The index was turned by a piece of wood, which either fell or rose by water dropping.

“The mechanical carriage which Sir Isaac is said to have invented, was a four-wheeled vehicle, and was moved with a handle or winch wrought by the person who sat in it. We can find no distinct information respecting its construction or use, but it must have resembled a Merlin’s chair, which is fitted to move only on the smooth surface of a floor, and not overcome the inequalities of a common road.

“He introduced the flying of paper kites, and is said to have investigated their best forms and proportions, as well as the number and position of the points to which the string should be attached. He constructed also lanterns of crimpled paper, in which he placed a candle to light him to school in the dark winter mornings; and in the dark nights he tied them to the tails of his kites, in order to terrify the country people, who took them for comets.

“In the yard of the house where he lived, he was frequently observed to watch the motion of the sun. He drove wooden pegs into the walls and roofs of the buildings, as gnomons to mark by their shadows the hours and half-hours of the day. It does not appear that he knew how to adjust these lines to the latitude of Grantham; but he is said to have succeeded, after some years’ observation, in making them so exact that anybody could tell what o’clock it was by Isaac’s dial, as it was called.

“Sir Isaac himself told Mr. Conduit that one of the earliest scientific experiments which he made was in 1658, on the day of the great storm when Cromwell died, and when he himself had just entered into his sixteenth year. In order to determine the force of the gale he jumped first in the direction in which the wind blew, and then in opposition to the wind; and after measuring the length of the leap in both directions, and comparing it with the length to which he could jump on a perfectly calm day, he was enabled to compute the force of the storm. Sir Isaac added, that when his companions seemed surprised at his saying that any particular wind was a foot stronger than any he had known before, he carried them to the place where he had made the experiment, and showed them the measure and marks of his several leaps.

“When a young man he made a telescope with his own hands.”

James Watt, who became the chief improver of the steam engine, when a boy received from his father a set of small carpentry tools. The little fellow would take his toys to pieces, rebuild them and invent playthings wholly new. A cousin of his, Mrs. Campbell, has recorded that Watt as a lad was often blamed for idleness; she adds:—

Watt as an Inquiring Boy.

“His active mind was employed in investigating the properties of steam; he was then fifteen, and once in conversation he informed me that he had read twice, with great attention, S’Gravesande’s ‘Elements of Natural Philosophy,’ adding that it was the first book upon that subject put into his hands, and that he still thought it one of the best. While under his father’s roof, he went on with various chemical experiments, repeating them again and again until satisfied of their accuracy from his own observations. He had made for himself a small electrical machine, and sometimes startled his young friends by giving them sudden shocks from it.”

Astonishing Precocity of Ericsson.

John Ericsson as a child was the wonder of the neighborhood, says his biographer, Mr. William C. Conant. From the first he exhibited the qualities distinguishing him in later life. His industry was ceaseless; he was busy from morning to night drawing, planning and constructing. The machinery at the mines near his home was to him an endless source of wonder and delight. In the early morning he hastened to the works, carrying with him a drawing pencil, bits of paper, pieces of wood, and a few rude tools. There he would remain the day through, seeking to discover the principles of motion in the machines, and striving to copy their forms. In his tenth year this boy undertook to design a pump for draining the mines of water. The motor was to be a windmill. Such a contrivance the young inventor had never seen, yet he succeeded in drawing designs for his mill after the most approved fashion of skilled engineers by following a verbal description given by his father of a mill he had just visited.

Rowland’s Early Experiments.

Henry A. Rowland became at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore one of the great physical investigators and inventors of the nineteenth century. As a boy he delighted in chemical experiments, glass-blowing, and similar occupations. The family were often summoned by the young enthusiast to listen to lectures which were fully illustrated by experiments, not always free from prospective danger. His first five-dollar bill bought him, to his delight, a galvanic battery. The sheets of the New York “Observer” he converted into a hot-air balloon, which made a brilliant ascent and flight, setting fire, at last, to the roof of a neighboring house. One day he saw a pump at work in the hold of a steamer, sending out a stream which fell from a height of five or six feet to the river. “Why,” he exclaimed, “don’t you put that pipe down into the river and save power?” As a student at the Troy Polytechnical Institute he invented a method of winding naked strips of wire on cloth so as virtually to effect its insulation. This was afterward profitably patented by some one else.

In “The Senses and the Intellect” Professor Alexander Bain considers the inventing and discovering mind:—

The Passion for Experiment.

“Not one of the leading mental peculiarities applicable to scientific constructiveness can be dispensed with in the constructions of practice:—the intellectual store of ideas applicable to the special department; the powerful action of the associating forces; a very clear perception of the end, in other words, sound judgment; and, lastly, that patient thought, which is properly an entranced devotion of the energies to the subject in hand, rendering application to it spontaneous and easy.

“With reference to originality in all departments, whether science, practice, or fine art, there is a point of character that deserves notice, as being more obviously of value in practical inventions and in the conduct of business and affairs—I mean an active turn, or a profuseness of energy, put forth in trials of all kinds on the chance of making lucky hits. In science, meditation and speculation can do much, but in practice, a disposition to try experiments is of the utmost service. Nothing less than a fanaticism of experimentation could have given birth to some of our grandest practical combinations. The great discovery of Daguerre, for example, could not have been regularly worked out by any systematic and orderly research; there was no way but to stumble upon it, so unlikely and remote were the actions brought together in one consecutive process. The discovery is unaccountable, until we learn that the author had been devoting himself to experiments for improving the diorama, and thereby got deeply involved in trials and operations far removed from the beaten paths of inquiry. The energy that prompts to endless attempts was found in a surprising degree in Kepler. A similar untiring energy—the union of an active temperament with intense fascination for his subject—appears in the character of Sir William Herschel. When these two attributes are conjoined; when profuse active vigor operates on a field that has an unceasing charm for the mind, we then see human nature surpassing itself.

“The invention of photography by Daguerre illustrates the probable method whereby some of the most ancient inventions were arrived at. The inventions of the scarlet dye, of glass, of soap, of gunpowder, could have come only by accident; but the accident, in most of them, would probably fall into the hands of men engaged in numerous trials upon the materials involved. Intense application—‘days of watching, nights of waking’—went with ancient discoveries, as well as with modern. In the historical instances, we know as much. The mental absorption of Archimedes is a proverb.

“The wonderful part of Daguerre’s discovery consists in the succession of processes that had to concur in one operation before any effect could arise. Having taken a silver plate, iodine is first used to coat the surface; the surface is then exposed to the light, but the effect produced is not apparent till the plate has been immersed in the vapor of mercury. To fall upon such a combination, without any clue derived from previous knowledge, an innumerable series of fruitless trials must have been gone through.

“A remark may be made here, applicable alike to science and to practice. Originality in either takes two form—observation or experiment on the one hand, and the identifying processes of abstraction, induction, and deduction on the other. In the first, the bodily activities and the senses are requisite; the last are the purely intellectual forces. It is not by high intellectual force that a man discovers new countries, new plants, new properties of objects; it is by putting forth an unusual force of activity, adventure, inquisitorial and persevering search. All this is necessary in order to obtain the observations and facts in the first instance; when these are collected in sufficient number, a different aptitude is brought to bear. By identifying and assimilating the scattered materials, general properties and general truths are obtained, and these may be pushed deductively into new applications; in all which a powerful reach of similarity is the first requisite; and this may be owned by men totally destitute of the active qualities necessary for observation and experiment.”

The Chief Impulse in Discovery.

In “The Hazard of New Fortunes” Mr. W. D. Howells depicts a man of force who, without education, becomes rich. He has little patience with poor men, who, he says, “don’t get what they want because they don’t want it bad enough.” The rough old Westerner, Dryfoos, was sound in his view. Success in discovery as in money-making is as much a matter of passion as of intelligence, says Mr. O. F. Cook:—

“The first and most essential preliminary for a successful investigation is an interest in the question, and any method which tends to diminish or relax interest is false and futile. Diligence in learning the facts of a science is a distinctly unfavorable symptom in a would-be investigator when unaccompanied by a vital constructive interest. That a student hoards facts does not mean that he will build anything with them. Intellectual misers are common, and are quite as unprofitable as the monetary variety. A scientific specialist may have vast knowledge and life-long experience, and yet may never entertain an original idea or make a new rift in the wall of the unknown which baffled his predecessors. Indeed, such men commonly resent a readjustment of the bounds of knowledge as an interference with their vested capital of erudition.

“Investigation is a sentiment, an instinct, a habit of mind; it is man’s effort at knowing and enjoying the universe. The productive investigator desires knowledge for a purpose; he may not be eager for knowledge in general, nor for new knowledge in particular. He values details for their bearing on the problem he hopes to solve. He can gather and sift them to advantage only in the light of a radiant interest, and his ability to utilize them for correct information depends on the delicacy of his perception and the strength of his mental grasp. The investigator, like the athlete, must first be born; he can not be made to order, but his training determines the degree of excellence to which he can attain. No amount of training can remove organic defects, but bad training may be worse than none in lessening the attainment of the most capable. That education is false and injurious which puts the matter first and retards or prevents the development of constructive mental ability, a power not peculiar to the investigator, but in him reaching the greatest scope and freedom of action.”

Aid from Picturing Power.

A picturing faculty such as comes to the flower in an inventor may often be observed in a skilful workman. In a shoe factory a veteran will lift a hide, utterly irregular in form, and cut soles and heels from it, so that the remaining scraps are a mere trifle, while flaws have been avoided.

Hugh Miller, in “My Schools and Schoolmasters,” thus speaks of a fellow stone-mason:—“John Fraser’s strength had never been above the average of that of Scotchmen, and it was now considerably reduced; nor did his mallet deal more or heavier blows than that of the common workman. He had, however, an extraordinary power of conceiving of the finished piece of work, as lying within the rude stone from which it was his business to disinter it; and while ordinary stone-cutters had to repeat and re-repeat their lines and draughts, and had in this way virtually to give their work several surfaces in detail ere they reached the true one, old John cut upon the true figure at once, and made one surface serve for all. In building, too, he exercised a similar power; he hammer-dressed his stones with fewer strokes than other workmen, and in fitting the interspaces between the stones already laid, always picked from out the heap at his feet the stone that exactly filled the place; while other operatives busied themselves in picking up stones that were too small or too large; or, if they set themselves to reduce the too large ones, reduced them too little or too much, and had to fit and fit again. Whether building or hewing, John never seemed in a hurry. He has been seen, when far advanced in life, working very leisurely, as became his years, on one side of a wall, and two stout young fellows building against him on the other side—toiling, apparently, twice harder than he, but the old man always contriving to keep a little ahead of them both.”

Henry Maudslay, famous as an inventor, had the same exquisite sense of form. When he executed a piece of work he was greatly indebted to the dexterity he had acquired as a blacksmith in early life. He used to say that to be a good smith you must be able to see in an iron bar the object you mean to get out of it with hammer and chisel, just as the sculptor sees the statue he intends to carve from a block of marble.

Inventors and artists have in common a keen perception of form, an ability to confer form with skill and accuracy. Often the same man is at once inventor and artist. Of this class Leonardo da Vinci is the most illustrious example. Alexander Nasmyth, of Edinburgh, who invented the bow-string bridge, was an eminent painter of portraits and landscapes. His son, James Nasmyth, who devised the steam hammer and the steam pile-driver, tells us in his autobiography:—

“My father taught me to sketch with exactness every object, whether natural or artificial, so as to enable the hand accurately to reproduce what the eye had seen. In order to acquire this almost invaluable art, he was careful to educate my eye, so that I might perceive the relative proportions of objects placed before me. He would throw down at random a number of bricks, or pieces of wood representing them, and set me to copy their forms, proportions, lights and shadows. I have often heard him say that any one who could make a correct drawing in regard to outline, and also indicate by a few effective touches the variation of lights and shadows of such a group of model objects, might not despair of making a good and correct sketch of York Minster. My father was an enthusiast in praise of this graphic language, and I have followed his example. In fact it formed a principal part of my own education. It gave me the power of recording observations with a few graphic strokes of the pencil, and far surpassing in expression any number of mere words. This graphic eloquence is one of the highest gifts in conveying clear and correct ideas as to the forms of objects—whether they be those of a simple and familiar kind, or of some form of mechanical construction, or of the details of a fine building, or the characteristic features of a wide-stretching landscape. This accomplishment of accurate drawing, which I achieved for the most part in my father’s workroom, served me many a good turn in future years with reference to the engineering work which became the business of my life.”

His mastery of the pencil had undoubtedly a great deal to do in cultivating his powers of inventive imagination. He says:—“It is one of the most delightful results of the possession of the constructive faculty, that one can build up in the mind mechanical structures and set them to work in imagination, and observe beforehand the various details performing their respective functions, as if they were in absolute form and action. Unless this happy faculty exists in the brain of the mechanical engineer, he will have a hard and disappointing life before him. It is the early cultivation of the imagination which gives the right flexibility to the thinking faculty.”

Manual Training.

Drawing is one of the courses in every manual training school in America. The first of these schools was organized in 1879 St. Louis, under the direction of Professor C. M. Woodward. Within the past thirty years, from the kindergarten to the university, American education has addressed itself as never before to bringing out all the talents of pupils and students. In earlier days there was little appeal to sense perception, to dexterity, to the faculties of eye and hand which all too soon pass out of plasticity, to leave the young man or woman for life destitute of powers which, had they been duly elicited, would have broadened their careers by widening their horizons. To-day, happily, our schools are more and more supplementing literary and mathematical courses with instruction in the use of tools, in modeling, design, and pattern-making. Every process is thoroughly explained. All the studies are linked into series; these unite practice and its reasons with a thoroughness impossible in the outworn schemes of apprenticeship.

All this is a distinct aid to inventiveness. As Professor Woodward says in “Manual Training in Education”:—“Manual training cultivates a capacity for executive work, a certain power of creation. Every manual exercise involves the execution of a clearly defined plan. Familiar steps and processes are to be combined with new ones in a rational order and for a definite purpose. As a rule these exercises are carefully chosen by the instructor. At proper times and in reasonable degree, pupils are set to forming and executing their own plans. Here is developed not a single faculty, but a combination of many faculties. Memory, comparison, imagination, and a train of reasoning, all are necessary in creating something new out of the old.”

How the Phonograph was Born.

Every inventor of mark is a man of native dexterity whose skill has been thoroughly cultivated. Let us observe such a man as he came to an extraordinary triumph. One of the great inventions of all time is the phonograph, giving us as it does accurate records of sound which may be repeated as often as we please. The ideas which issued in the perfected instrument were for years germinating in Mr. Edison’s mind; they took their rise in his recording telegraph. One afternoon Mr. Edison told the story to the late Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, who published it in Harpers’ Magazine for February, 1890:—“I worked a circuit in the daytime at Indianapolis, and got a small salary for doing it. But at night with another operator named Parmley, I used to receive newspaper reports just for the practice. The regular operator, who was given to copious libations, was glad enough to sleep off the effects while we did his work for him as well as we could. I would sit down for ten minutes, and take as much as I could from the instrument, carrying the rest in my memory. Then, while I wrote out, Parmley would serve his turn at taking; and so on. This worked well until they put a new man on at the Cincinnati end. He was one of the quickest despatchers in the business, and we soon found it was hopeless for us to try to keep up with him. Then it was that I worked out my first invention, and necessity was certainly the mother of it.

“I got two old Morse registers, and arranged them in such a way that by running a strip of paper through them, the dots and dashes were recorded on it by the first instrument as fast as they were delivered from the Cincinnati end, and were transmitted to us through the other instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness. They would come in on one instrument at the rate of forty words a minute, and we would grind them out of the other at the rate of twenty-five. Then weren’t we proud! Our copy used to be so clean and beautiful that we hung it up on exhibition; and our manager used to come and gaze at it silently, with a puzzled expression. Then he would depart, shaking his head in a troubled sort of way. He could not understand it; neither could any of the other operators; for we used to drag off my impromptu automatic recorder and hide it when our toil was over. But the crash came when there was a big night’s work—a presidential vote, I think it was—and copy kept pouring in at the top rate of speed, until we fell an hour and a half or two hours behind. The newspapers sent in frantic complaints, an investigation was made, and our little scheme was discovered. We couldn’t use it any more.

“It was that same rude automatic recorder,” Edison explained, “that indirectly—yet not by accident, but by logical deduction—led me long afterward to invent the phonograph. I’ll tell you how this came about. After thinking over the matter a great deal, I came to the point where, in 1877, I had worked out satisfactorily an instrument which would not only record telegrams by indenting a strip of paper with dots and dashes of the Morse code, but would also repeat a message any number of times at any rate of speed required. I was then experimenting with the telephone also, and my mind was filled with theories of sound vibrations and their transmission by diaphragms. Naturally enough, the idea occurred to me: If the indentations on paper could be made to give forth again the click of the instrument, why could not the vibrations of a diaphragm be recorded and similarly reproduced? I rigged up an instrument hastily, and pulled a strip of paper through it, at the same time shouting, ‘Hallo!’ Then the paper was pulled through again, my friend Batchelor and I listening breathlessly. We heard a distinct sound, which a strong imagination might have translated into the original ‘Hallo!’ That was enough to lead me to a further experiment. But Batchelor was sceptical, and bet me a barrel of apples that I couldn’t make the thing go. I made a drawing of a model, and took it to Mr. Kruesi, at that time engaged on piece-work for me. I marked it $4, and told him it was a talking machine. He grinned, thinking it a joke; but set to work, and soon had the model ready. I arranged some tin-foil on it, and spoke into the machine. Kruesi looked on, and was still grinning. But when I arranged the machine for transmission, and we both heard a distinct sound from it, he nearly fell down in his fright; I was a little scared myself, I must admit. I won that barrel of apples from Batchelor, though, and was mighty glad to get it.”

The Latest Phonograph.

In October, 1905, I paid Mr. Edison a visit at his laboratory, when he showed me the phonograph as now perfected. Chief among his improvements is a composition for records which is much harder than the wax formerly employed, and may therefore revolve more swiftly with no fear of blurring. His reproducer is to-day a built-up diaphragm of mica, highly sensitive. In the reproducer arm is placed the highly polished, button-shaped sapphire which tracks with fidelity the grooves which sound has recorded on the cylinder. These features, combined in a mechanism of the utmost accuracy in make and adjustment, have opened for the phonograph a vast field in the business world. Some of the great firms and companies of New York and other cities now use phonographs instead of stenographers; a letter or a contract is dictated to a revolving cylinder with all the swiftness of ordinary speech. Afterward a secretary listens to the reproducer and writes the letter or contract at any speed desired. On occasion a cylinder bearing a message may be sent to a correspondent who listens to its words as sent forth from his own phonograph, no intermediate writing being required. Such instruments are extensively used in teaching foreign languages, learners being free to have a difficult pronunciation repeated until it is mastered. Mr. Edison has much improved the musical records familiar throughout the world; these are now produced in molds of gold with a delicacy that refines away the scratchiness of tone so unpleasant in earlier cylinders.

Telephone Messages Recorded for Repetition at Will: The Telegraphone.

As the fruit of rare experimental ability Mr. Valdemar Poulsen, an electrical engineer of Copenhagen, has invented the telegraphone. This instrument proceeds upon the fact that the electrical pulses of the telephone, minute and delicate though they are, can register themselves magnetically upon a moving steel wire but one-hundredth of an inch in diameter. The message is repeated as often as the wire is borne between the poles of an electro-magnet in circuit with a telephonic receiver. The accompanying figure shows the transmitter, the traveling wire, and the receiver as it repeats a message. The instrument in its latest form is illustrated opposite page 314. In supplementing the telephone most usefully, this apparatus brings a fresh competition to bear upon the telegraph. In many cases a man of business has preferred to telegraph rather than to telephone a message, because a telegram as a written record affords proof in case of error or dispute. Now suppose that through a telegraphone a broker offers six per cent. interest for a loan; his voice impressed on the wire, duly preserved for reference, identifies him as securely as would his signature on a written offer. Take a different case: a patient rings up a physician only to find him not at home; a message committed to a few yards of wire is listened to by the physician the moment he returns to his office. Take an example of yet another service: a letter may be dictated at Newark and recorded on a wire in Brooklyn, and there, at leisure, be put upon paper by an amanuensis. Or, better still, the message may be spoken upon a small, revolving disc of steel, and mailed to a correspondent who listens to its words as they roll out of his own graphophone. Young children and others unable to write may impress discs that tell their story to correspondents unable to read. So compact withal are the records of this instrument that they may soon give us not only music from the concert-room, and news from the telegraph office, but also the latest popular book.

A wire or a disc can repeat its record, vocal or musical, hundreds of times without loss of distinctness. To obliterate this record it only is necessary to pass the steel between the poles of a strong magnet.

The Gray Telautograph.

A telephone transmits a familiar voice so that its tones are at once recognized. By electrical means a telautograph reproduces writing at a distance so precisely that it may be as readily identified. To understand how this feat is accomplished let us begin with the transmission of vertical marks varying in length.

This task, as above illustrated, we perform by sending to a receiving pencil a current varying in strength between limits which correspond to the variations in length of our transmitted lines. The strength of this current, say 0.429 volt, decides where a mark will begin; the strength of that current in rising to say 27.5 volts, decides where that mark will end. To vary the strength of the current as desired we employ a square rod of aluminium, tightly covered with a thin copper wire insulated by silk wrapping. We place this rod beside our tablet, and scrape from its innermost surface the silk covering so as to leave the wire bare, while between its strands the silk remains intact as an effective insulation. Our rod is now a rheostat, whose use we shall presently discover. We are wont to think of copper as a good conductor, and so it is. Used in stout bars or thick wires it exerts but little resistance to an electric current, but when we employ a wire of but ¹/₂₀₀ of an inch in diameter, about the thickness of the paper on which this is printed, the narrowness of path reduces the pressure of a current so much that in the course of 375 feet it falls to one eighth. In like manner a glass tube of minute diameter might receive at one end water under extreme pressure, and at a yard distance send out a mere dribble. The copper wire of our square rod, or rheostat, is so thin that when connected at K with a source of 110-volt electricity, at V this voltage, or pressure, has sunk to but one twentieth of a volt.

Let us suppose our rheostat at V connected with a circuit extended to the receiving station. A wire, kept in this circuit, and moving up and down with our pencil, in a line always parallel with the side of our tablet, sends to the receiving station a current constantly varying in its pressure. As the wire passes from S to M the transmitted current rises from 0.429 to 27.5 volts.

At the receiving station we provide means whereby the current arriving at a voltage of 0.429 and rising to 27.5 will mark a vertical line the length of S M. A simple device for this purpose consists in a hollow coil of copper wire, or a solenoid, as electricians call it, through which circulates the arriving current, the coil being free to be drawn as a shell over a cylindrical electro-magnet. The degree to which such a coil, duly attached to a retractile spring, is drawn over a suitable electro-magnet, depends upon the strength of the current circulating in the coil. In the simple instrument we are using let us assume that when a current of 110 volts comes in, the coil moves to K, the end of its path; that when a current of 6.875 volts arrives, the coil moves to O; the receiving coil and the sending rheostat being marked with the same divisions. Our receiving coil actuates a pencil which accordingly marks a line of the same length and direction as that set down on the tablet of the sending instrument.

Let us next transmit between these two stations a series of horizontal lines. To do this we duplicate our first apparatus. We place a second rheostat along the foot of our sending tablet, not along its side, and slide a second wire along its bared surface with motions always parallel to those of the marking pencil. Thus a second current, going by a wire of its own to the receiving station there repeats through a second coil, or solenoid, the horizontal marks of our sending pencil.

We have now two sets of apparatus, alike in all respects, one sending rheostat at right angles to the other; one receiving solenoid at right angles to its mate. In the actual telautograph the rheostats are curved, as shown in the picture facing page 318, and they are so joined by levers that the up-and-down and sidewise motions of writing are accurately represented, from moment to moment, in the two varying currents sent afar. As these currents arrive they actuate a pencil, similarly furnished with levers, so that it moves in a path which exactly corresponds with that of the sending pencil. The apparatus has an ingenious ink supply, and a device to shift the paper as filled line after line. In its basic features the telautograph was invented by the late Professor Elisha Gray of Chicago. Its present form is largely due to the modifications and additions of Mr. George S. Tiffany of New York. The instrument is giving satisfactory service in thousands of banks, factories, hotels, business offices, and households. Its records at both ends of a line make it of inestimable value in many cases, as aboard a warship where orders of the utmost importance may be committed to its tablets. Exterior and interior views of the instrument are given facing page 318.

Machines Cannot Directly Imitate Hands: A Task Must be “Coded.”

Only a few machines deal with writing or its duplication, most machines perform quite other tasks at first wrought by the hands. Inventors have always gone astray when they have sought to imitate a hand process with anything like precision. On this point Sir John Fletcher Moulton, of London, says:—“Doubtless you have often had to send a message by telegraph to some distant country to which the rate charged per word is high. You write your message as tersely as may be, but even thus its length is formidable. You resort to your telegraphic code. It tells you that if you will change the phraseology of your message you can by a single code-word represent a whole phrase. You thereupon set to work to recast your message so as to make it capable of being expressed in code-words. When you have done so, you have not improved it as a message. It is less terse and less naturally expressed. If you were writing and not telegraphing, you would prefer to use it in its original form. But as now expressed, each of the phrases of which it is composed can be sent over the wires in the form and at the price of a single word, and the cost of the whole is but a fraction of what would have been the cost of the message as originally framed. It has been cast in a form suitable for cheap telegraphing. Just so with the inventor. He has to find a series of operations which, in their totality, are equivalent to the series of the hand worker. But each of these operations in itself need not be such as would in hand labor be suitable or even practicable.

“It is necessary and sufficient for him that they are suited to the new conditions, so that they can be well and easily done by mechanism, and that, taken as a whole, they produce the same result as the series which he is paralleling. He is re-writing the series in terms suited to mechanism just as the message was rewritten in terms suited for telegraphing. The meaning of the message must remain the same, but the terms used to express it are no longer those most naturally used in writing or speaking, but are those which can be telegraphed at least cost.

Sewing Coded in a Machine.

“To make my meaning clear, let me revert to the familiar operation of sewing. The hand process is plainly unsuited for mechanical reproduction. How is it to be translated into an equivalent cycle suitable for mechanism? In other words, how is it to be ‘coded’? This case is interesting, inasmuch as we have two independent solutions worked out at different dates and widely different in nature. The earlier invention imitated the hand cycle very closely. The thumb and finger of the right hand in the human being were replaced by pairs of pincers capable of taking hold of the needle and letting it free again, but to avoid having to follow the intricate movements of the human fingers in the operation two pairs of pincers were used, one on each side of the work, which passed the needle backwards and forwards through the fabric one to the other. Following out this idea the needle was pointed at both ends with an eye in the middle, and, as in hand sewing, it carried a moderate length of thread. The pair of pincers which held the threaded needle advanced to the fabric and passed through it to the other pair which took it and retreated so as to draw the thread tight and form the completed stitch. To form the next stitch the work was moved through the proper distance and the same process was gone through, the line of movement of the needle always remaining the same.

“There is not much ‘coding’ here. The new cycle imitates the hand-worker so faithfully that it benefits little by the advantages of mechanical action. As in hand work it can only sew with moderate lengths of thread, and must therefore have the needles re-threaded at intervals. Its superiority over hand labor is therefore so slight that it is doubtful whether such a sewing machine could ever have competed with, much less replaced, hand work. But it has one great merit. The needle mechanism is capable of being re-duplicated almost without limit, and the movement of the work which is necessary to direct the stitches for one needle will serve equally well for any number of needles working parallel to it. Hence the machine that would have failed as a sewing machine has survived and proved useful as an embroidery machine. The work is stretched between two rows of pincers and moved by the workman according to the stitches of the pattern. Each stitch is repeated by each of the parallel needles which work side by side at convenient distances, and thus as many copies of the pattern are simultaneously produced as there are needles. Each is a perfect facsimile of all the others, and as each copies faithfully the errors of the workman, this machine is entitled to the proud boast that its productions possess all the defects of hand work—an essential we are told of artistic beauty.

“What is the cause of the comparative failure of this attempt at a sewing-machine? It is evident that it is due to the retention of the feature of the hand operation by which the needle is passed from one holding mechanism to the other. The inventors of the modern sewing-machine on the one hand decided to work with a needle fixed in its holder and never leaving it throughout the operation. It at once followed that the needle and thread must, on the back stroke, return through the same hole through which they had entered the fabric, so that no stitch could be formed unless some obstacle were interposed to the return of the thread. Here the two famous and successful forms of the machine parted company. Both placed the eye at the point of the needle that the stroke might not be needlessly long, but while the lock stitch machine used a second thread to provide the necessary obstacle, the chain stitch machine availed itself of a loop of the original thread for that purpose. Thus in the lock stitch machine the substituted cycle became as follows:—

(1) The work is moved under the needle for the new stroke.

(2) The needle (which has an eye at its point through which the thread passes) pierces the fabric carrying with it the thread.

(3) A second thread is passed between the thread and the needle (by means of a shuttle or its equivalent) when the needle is at its lowest position.

(4) The needle returns while a take-up retracts the thread so as to tighten the stitch.

“This cycle would, for hand work, be immeasurably more complicated and difficult than ordinary sewing, but it consists of operations mechanically easy of performance in swift and accurately timed sequence, and as the whole of the thread in use has no longer to be passed from one side of the fabric to the other as each stitch is made, it has brought with it the all-important advantage of our being able to work with a continuous thread. Here, then, is a magnificent example of ‘coding.’ It is not to be wondered at that the machines which it has given to the world are in well-nigh universal use, and have profoundly modified both our social and industrial economy.”

Obed Hussey and His Mower.

One of the supreme inventions of all time is the mower of Obed Hussey, of Maryland, devised in 1833, and afterward adapted to reaping. In the primitive reaping of tall grain one hand keeps the stalks upright, while the other hand cuts these stalks with a scythe. Hussey, in a masterpiece of “coding,” arrayed metal fingers which keep the grain from bending, while vibrating knives sever the stalks. To this day his invention remains the core of millions of mowers as well as reapers; it has economized labor to an extent beyond estimate, and by shortening the time required in harvesting has saved many million bushels of grain which otherwise would have been destroyed by bad weather.

Not a few inventors of the first mark are found among the men of great ability who unite training in two distinct fields of science, whose alliances they thoughtfully cultivate.

New Modes of Attack.

Thus Helmholtz, at once a physician and a physicist, devised the ophthalmoscope, that simple instrument for observing the interior of the eye. On a plane less lofty an inventor’s success may turn on his width of outlook, his intimacy with fields remote from the home acre, so that he may gainfully ally two arts or processes that, to a casual glance, seem utterly unrelated or unrelatable. When a pneumatic tube between a post-office and a railroad station is obstructed, there would seem to be no promise of aid in a fire-arm. But snapping off its blank cartridge at the open end of the tube gives back an echo through the air within the tube; in measuring the interval between touching the trigger and hearing the echo, there is news as to where the tube is choked, the velocity of sound in air being known. From the labors of a postmaster let us turn to those of an apothecary, who pounds and grinds his drugs in a mortar which has descended from the day when it reduced grain to flour. The grindstones which succeeded the mortar were only in recent years ousted by Hungarian rollers of steel which separate the constituents of grain with a new perfection. Their excellence consists in imitating the crushing of the mortar, not in attempting the grinding of the familiar burrs.

The miller’s practice in one particular has given the postmaster a hint of value. In a flour-mill a cheap and sufficient motor is simple gravity as the products pass from one machine to the next. At the very outset the wheat is taken by conveyors to the top floor, whence its products descend, stage by stage, impelled by gravity alone, until the finished and barreled flour rolls into shipping rooms beside the railroad tracks. This principle has been adopted at the Chicago Post-office, where the mails as received are borne to the top floor, thence, by gravity, they take their way as sorted and re-sorted, to the ground floor where they are finally disposed of.

In a field somewhat parallel is the modern art of designing the layout of a great manufacturing plant so that the material shall travel as little as possible between its entrance and its exit. In a well planned ship-yard the machines are so placed that the steel plates, bars and girders, the planks and boards, move continuously from one machine to its neighbor, ending at last by reaching the building berth.

Shears for metal, cutting scissors-fashion, have long been familiar; the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad employs the Murphy machine, on the same principle, to cut up old ties and bridge timbers intended for fuel. The upper moving blade is set about an inch out of line from the lower fixed blade, so as to allow spikes or bolts to pass through without injuring the machine. In dividing cord wood for stoves and furnaces a machine of this kind might be used instead of a saw.

It is by perfect means of subdivision that new and cheap materials for writing and printing are now produced. The leaves offered by the papyrus to scribes were used for centuries, so that the plant has given its name to paper now made from fibres of cotton, linen, or wood, finely divided, thoroughly mixed, and squeezed between rollers much as if paste. Paper from its smoothness, its absence of grain and its low price, is far preferable to papyrus leaves or vellum. Its manufacture has been copied in diverse new industries. Wood ground to powder, worked into pulp, molded into pails, tubs and the like, is saturated with oil to produce wares of indurated fibre. A pail thus manufactured will not split apart in dry weather when empty, or absorb liquids, and it is as easily kept clean as glass.

While wood has thus found a rival in pulp, stone has a new competitor much more formidable. Pavements and piers are often needed in long stretches, without joints for the admission of rain or frost. The demand is met by cements and concretes easily laid in unjointed miles. These materials when strengthened with skeletons of steel find many uses; a brief survey of them is given in this book. A sister product, terra cotta, baked at high temperatures, is now molded in beautiful designs not only for tiles, but as walls, cornices, finials, vases, hearths, and statuary.

Linotype and Its Use of Wedges.

Clay as tablets was one of the first mediums of the printer’s art, an art of late years exposed to many a surprise from unexpected invaders. Composition is now performed by machines of various models, one of them being Mergenthaler’s linotype, as employed for this book. In effect this machine is a caster rather than a compositor, and recalls the chief tasks of the type-foundry. As an operator touches its keys he releases a succession of matrices, from which is cast a line as a unit. In its latest form this machine enables the operator to change instantly from one font to another, introducing roman, italic, and black face type in the same line at will. Intricate book, tabular and pamphlet matter, with chapter headings, titles, or marginal notes may in this new model be set up at a speed four to six times quicker than hand composition.

An illustration shows the two-letter matrices of a special Mergenthaler machine. The upper is usually a body character and the lower an italic, a small capital or a black face. These lower matrices are lifted a little by a key so as to come in line with upper matrices. In this way the compositor has at command two distinct fonts. Groove E receives the ears of the matrices. In a normal position D receives the ears of the matrices elevated to produce the secondary characters. In this way the matrices are held in position as casting proceeds. Five double-wedge justifiers will be observed between the matrices. These devices, invented by J. W. Schuckers, form an essential part of the machine. Justification, let the reader be reminded, is so spacing the contents of a line that it shall neatly end with a word or syllable. In typewritten manuscript the lack of justification leaves the ends of lines jagged and unsightly. Mr. Schuckers at the end of every word places a pair of wedges. When the operator is close to the end of a line he pushes in the whole row of wedges in that line; the outer sides of each pair remain always parallel, and as pushed in these outer sides are just sufficiently forced apart to space out the line with exactitude. To lift a table or a desk, and at the same time keep it always level, we may use pairs of wedges in the same manner; they must, of course, be much larger and thicker than those used in linotypy. See next page for an illustration.

To-day a book may be reproduced without any recourse whatever to the type long indispensable. A photographer takes the volume, and repeats it in pages of any size we wish, dispensing not only with the type-setter or the type-caster, but even with the proofreader, since a camera furnishes an exact fac-simile of the original work. If the book is illustrated, a further economy is enjoyed; its pictures are copied as faithfully and cheaply as the letterpress.

Ingenuity in Copying and Decorating.

A feat which is a mere trifle as compared with reproducing a book by photography, turns upon a loan from an old resource. Confectioners from time immemorial have squeezed paste out of bags through apertures into ornaments for wedding cakes and the like. With similar bags decorators force a thin stream of plaster into a semblance of flowers, fruits, and arabesques on their ceilings and cornices. On the same plan, with pressure more severe, soap is forced, from a tank through a square opening to form bars for the laundress. Increasing the pressure once again, clay for bricks is urged forth, to be divided into lengths suitable for the kiln. Lead pipe is manufactured on the same principle, recalling the production of macaroni. A further step was taken by Alexander Dick, the inventor of Delta metal; by employing hydraulic pressure on metals at red heat he poured out wires and bars of varied cross-sections, superseding the method of drawing through dies.

Frost as a Servant.

Cold as well as heat may be employed in a novel manner. The flesh of birds, beasts, and insects is now frozen hard, so as to be sliced into extremely thin sections clearly showing the details of structure. How a freezing process may aid the miner was shown first in Germany in 1880, when Hermann Poetsch, a mining engineer, had to sink a shaft near Aschersleben, to a vein of coal, where, after excavating 100 feet, a stratum of sand eighteen feet thick, overlying the coal, was encountered. It occurred to Poetsch that the great difficulty occasioned by the influx of water through the sand could be overcome by solidifying the entire mass by freezing. To do this, he penetrated the sand to be excavated with large pipes eight inches in diameter, sunk entirely through it and a foot or two into the underlying coal. These were placed in a circle at intervals of a metre, and close to the periphery of the shaft. They were closed at the lower end. Inside each of these and open at its lower end was a pipe an inch in diameter. This system of pipes was so connected that a closed circulation could be produced down through the small pipes and up through the large ones. An ice-machine, such as brewers use, was set up near by and kept at a temperature below zero Fahrenheit. A tank filled with a solution of chloride of magnesium, which freezes at -40° Fahr., had its contents circulated through the ground pipes described. Thermometers placed in pipes sunk in the mass of sand showed 51.8° Fahr. at the beginning of the process. The circulation was kept up and on the third day the whole mass was frozen. Within the continuous frozen wall the material was excavated without damage from caving in or inflow of water. The freezing entered the coal three feet, and to a distance six feet outside the pipes. The circulation was kept up until the excavation and walling were complete. On a somewhat similar plan tunnels have been bored through difficult ground. Of late years at Detroit, and elsewhere, serious breaks in water-mains have been repaired after a freezing process has solidified the stream.

Polarized Light and X-Rays.

Light, as well as heat and cold, is to-day bidden to perform new duties. It was long ago observed that polarized light as it takes its way through transparent crystal or glass clearly reveals in areas of variegation, any strains to which the crystal or glass may be subjected. Of late this fact has been applied with new skill to investigating strains in engineering structures. A model in glass, carefully annealed, is placed in the path of a beam of polarized light. By shifting the points of application and of support, by loading the structure more or less, and here or there, the distribution of stresses and strains is directly shown to the eye. In this way curved shapes of various kinds have been investigated, as well as bodies in which Hooke’s law of the strict proportionality of strain to stress does not apply. Photographs taken by this method show the distribution of stresses in rings subjected to external compression, crank shafts, and car-coupler hooks. It would be interesting thus to compare standard types of girders, trusses, and bridges, as well as arches of various forms, both regular and skew.

Polarized light, which when first discovered seemed nothing more than a singular and quite sterile phenomenon, has other uses of great importance. It tells the chemist how much sugar a given solution contains; it displays the inner architecture of rocks when these are sawn into thin sections.

Even more valuable than polarized light are the X-rays discovered by Professor RÖntgen. One of their latest uses is to reveal impurities and air bubbles in electric cables, affording a procedure much simpler and easier than to employ electrical instruments. In the production of X-rays and similar rays a tube as nearly vacuous as possible is employed. As an aid in removing air Professor James Dewar, of Cambridge University, has recently adopted cocoanut charcoal with remarkable success. He subjects it to the intense cold of liquid air, then establishing communication between a receptacle filled with this charcoal and a bulb exhausted to one fourth of the ordinary atmospheric pressure, he has air so tenuous that an electric spark passes through it with difficulty. So much for developing the long known affinity of charcoal for gases, a property which increases in degree as temperatures fall.

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