Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery

Perforated Sails for Ships.

In craft built ages before steamers were designed, fishermen have observed that sails torn in the middle, if the rents were not too big, were more effective than when new and whole. What thus began in sheer wear, or accidental damage, is now imitated of set purpose. Under the equator one may often see small craft whose sails are matting woven with large openings, as the sailors say “to let out the wind.” The mariners of Carthegena, St. Thomas, and other islands of the West Indies, know that a ship goes better thus than if her sails were each one continuous breadth of canvas. Japanese junks of clipper builds have sails made of vertical breadths laced together so as to leave large apertures free to the air. Why is this breeziness of structure profitable? Because against the concave surface of an ordinary sail the wind rebounds so as to hinder its impulsive effect; through an aperture the air rushes in a continuous current and no rebound takes place. For a like reason, and with similar gain, Chinese rudders are made with separated boards or planks. The stream of water passing through such a rudder would exert an undesirable back pressure in a rudder of solid form.

It would be interesting, and might prove gainful, to experiment with perforated sails in sail-boats, ice-boats and wind-mills. In large kites, sent to the upper air by meteorologists, it has been found helpful to give the fabric a few small perforations.

Observations Must be Remembered and Compared: The Value of a New Eye.

It is not only necessary to observe if one would learn, one must remember and compare observations. In a cycle of 223 lunations all the motions of the moon are repeated; it is astonishing that astronomers in Chaldea detected this period, exceeding eighteen years as it does. On the other hand, one of the most striking phenomena of a solar eclipse, its revelation of the solar corona, does not seem to have been noticed until comparatively recent times. The first known record of it is by Lobatchevsky, July 8, 1842.

There is value in the teaching which teaches the eye what to observe; at times there is gain in a freshness of view unwarped by ideas as to what deserves to be inspected and what does not. Dr. Priestley, one of the founders of chemistry, says:—“I do not at all think it degrading to the business of experimental philosophy to compare it, as I often do, to the diversion of hunting, where it sometimes happens that those who beat the ground the most, and are consequently best acquainted with it, weary themselves without starting any game, when it may fall in the way of a mere passenger; so that there is but little room for boasting in the most successful termination of the chase.” True, yet this discerning eye will always be found beside a brain of uncommon force and sweep. Mr. Edwin Reynolds, of Milwaukee, as related in this book, never saw a mining stamp until the morning when he planned a bold and profitable simplification of it. Professor Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, came to his triumph not as a disciplined electrician, but as a student, under his father, of articulate speech and its transmission. He has told me that had he known the obstacles to be surmounted, he would never have begun his attack.

Professor Ernst Abbe, of Jena, who more than any other investigator is to be credited with the production of Jena glass, was at the outset of his labors quite ignorant of practical optics. But he had a thorough mastery of mathematical optics, and this in due season enabled him to revise the theory of the microscope, and to prescribe the conditions according to which the manufacture of totally new kinds of glass should proceed. Every one of these men, every peer they have ever had among the volunteer forces of research, is far removed in native ability, in plasticity of mind, from Priestley’s “mere passenger.” If ignorance by itself were the chief qualification for discovery, science would long ago have entered upon its golden age.

Any Observation May Have Value.

Michael Faraday, that consummate observer, held that at times the observations of comparatively untrained men are well worth attention. In one of his note-books he wrote:—“Whilst passing through manufactories and engaged in the observance of the various operations of civilized life, we are constantly hearing observations made by those who find employment in these places, and are accustomed to a minute observation of what passes before them which are new or frequently discordant with received opinions. These are frequently the result of facts, and though some are founded in error, some on prejudice, yet many are true and of high importance to the practical man. Such of them as come in my way I shall set down here, without waiting for the principle on which they depend; and though three fourths of them ultimately prove to be erroneous, yet if but one new fact is gathered in a multitude, it will be sufficient to justify this mode of occupying time.”

Folk Observation Foreruns Science.

Often a conviction widely held by the plain people of a countryside is based on many and sound observations, long before a scientific theory accounts for the facts. For many generations there was a saying among German peasants that when a storm is approaching a fire should be made in the stove, with as much smoke as possible. Professor Schuster has shown that this saying and the custom founded upon it are rational, as the products of combustion and the smoke act as an effective conductor to discharge the atmosphere slowly but surely. He quotes statistics showing that out of each 1000 cases of lightning stroke, 6.3 churches and 8.5 mills were struck, and but 0.3 factory chimneys. Only the factories had fires burning.

A mighty work has been wrought by glaciers on the surface of our globe. Long before this fact was discovered by professional geologists it was clear to many of the plainer people. Jean de Charpentier, one of the first propounders of the theory of glacial action now fundamental in geological science, relates:—“When in the year 1815, I returned from the magnificent glaciers of the valley of the Rhone, I spent the night in the hamlet of Lourtier, in the cottage of Perraudin, a chamois-hunter. Our conversation turned on the peculiarities of the country, and especially of the glaciers which he had repeatedly explored and knew most intimately. ‘Our glaciers,’ said Perraudin, ‘had formerly a much larger extent than now. Our whole valley was occupied by a glacier extending as far as Martigny, as is proved by the boulders in the vicinity of this town, and which are far too large for the water to have carried them thither.’” Charpentier adds that he afterward met with similar explanations on the part of mountaineers in other sections of Switzerland.

Cowpox was long observed by English country folk to be a preventive of smallpox. It was in hearing a servant woman say so that Dr. Jenner was drawn to the study which ended in his successful vaccinations, in all the triumphs since won in this department of medical science. For two thousand years the peasants of Italy have suspected mosquitoes and other insects to be concerned in the spread of malarial and other fevers. It remained for Dr. Ronald Ross in our day to prove that the suspicion was founded in truth. In “The Naturalist in La Plata,” one of the best books on natural history ever written, Mr. W. H. Hudson says:—“The country people in South America believe that the milky secretion exuded by the toad possesses wonderful curative properties; it is their invariable specific for shingles—a painful, dangerous malady common amongst them, and to cure it living toads are applied to the inflamed part. I dare say learned physicians would laugh at this cure, but then, if I mistake not, the learned have in past times laughed at other specifics used by the vulgar, but which now have honorable places in the pharmacopœia—pepsine, for example. More than two centuries ago, very ancient times for South America, the gauchos were accustomed to take the lining of the rhea’s (a large ostrich’s) stomach, dried and powdered, for ailments caused by impaired digestion; and the remedy is popular still. Science has gone over to them, and the ostrich-hunter now makes a double profit, one from the feathers, and the other from the dried stomachs which he supplies to the chemists of Buenos Ayres. Yet he was formerly told that to take the stomach of the ostrich to improve his digestion was as wild an idea as it would be to swallow birds’ feathers in order to fly.”

Snake poison has long been used by the Hottentots as an antidote to snake poison. With aid from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi, of the University of Pennsylvania, has succeeded in producing antivenins, to use the medical term, for the venoms of the water-moccasin and Crotalus adamanteus snakes, using the venoms themselves in preparing his antidotes. He is continuing his researches in this remarkable field of the healing art.

Kelp, as it drifts and sways in the Atlantic, attracts from the sea both the iodine and the bromine dissolved in minute quantities in the sea-water. This trait of fastening upon a particular and rare element is displayed by plants on land as well as by sea-weeds. In the Horn silver mine of Utah, the zinc mingled with the silver is betokened by the abundance of a zinc violet, Viola calaminaria, a delicate cousin of the pansy. In Germany this little flower was believed to point to zinc deposits long before zinc was discovered in its juices. The late Mr. William Dorn, of South Carolina, had faith in a bush of unrecorded name, as declaring that gold veins stood beneath it: that his faith was not baseless is proved by the large fortune he won as a gold miner in the Blue Ridge country—his guide the bush aforesaid. Mr. Rossiter W. Raymond, a famous mining engineer of New York, has given some attention to “indicative plants” of this kind. He is of opinion that their unwritten lore among practical miners, prospectors, hunters, and Indians is well worth sifting.

He says:—“Judging from the general laws of the distribution of plants, and from the analogy furnished by Viola calaminaria, we may expect that an indicative plant will be, not a distinct species, but a variety of some widely distributed species, the range of the species as a whole being determined by general conditions of climate, altitude and soil, while the characteristics of the variety are affected by causes peculiar to the mineral deposit. Temperature and moisture, as Agricola long ago pointed out, are among these causes, and color is one of the most sensitive of their effects. It is quite reasonable to believe the soil may affect the color of the plant absorbing it. On the other hand, it is not certain, even if a plant is proved to indicate by color or other peculiarities the presence of silver, that silver is the substance actually entering into and altering the plant. The effect may be due to some other mineral substances associated with the silver-ores; and our silver-plant may be indicative of silver in a silver region only.”

Mr. Raymond remarks that a general relation between the flora and the geological formation of any given district is a fact familiar to field-geologists. Many plants, too, indicate the neighborhood of water. A botanist knowing the root-length, water-requirements and habits of different species can often determine from the surface vegetation, he tells us, the nature, amount and distance of the underground water-supply.[33]

How observation may lead to a bold and successful experiment is told by Mr. L. E. Chittenden, Register of the Treasury under President Lincoln, in his Personal Reminiscences:—

A Lesson from a Bank-Swallow.

Between the Winooski Valley and Lake Champlain, north of the city of Burlington, lies a broad sand plain high above the lake level, through which the Central Vermont Railroad was to be carried in a tunnel. But the sand was destitute of moisture or cohesiveness, and the engineers, after expending a large sum of money, decided that the tunnel could not be constructed because there were no means of sustaining the material during the building of the masonry. The removal of so large a quantity of material from a cut of such dimensions also involved an expense that was prohibitory. The route was consequently given up and the road built in a crooked ravine through the centre of the city, involving ascending and descending grades of more than 130 feet to the mile. When the railroad was opened these grades were found to involve a cost which practically drove the through freights to a competing railroad.

There was at the time a young man in the engineers’ office of the railroad who said that he could tunnel the sand bank at a very small cost. He was summoned before the managers and questioned. “Yes,” he said, “I can build the tunnel for so many dollars per running foot, but I cannot expect you to act upon my opinion when so many American and European engineers have declared the project impracticable.” The managers knew that the first fifty feet of the tunnel involved all the difficulties. They offered him, and he accepted, a contract to build fifty feet of the structure.

His plan was simplicity itself. On a vertical face of the bank he marked the line of an arch larger than the tunnel. On this line he drove into the bank sharpened timbers, twelve feet long, three by four inches square. Then he removed six feet of the material and drove in another arch, just inside the first one, of twelve-foot timbers, took out six feet more of sand, and repeated this process until he had space enough to commence the masonry. As fast as this was completed the space above it was filled, leaving the timbers in place.

Thus he progressed, keeping the masonry well up to the excavation, until he had pierced the bank with the cheapest tunnel ever constructed, which has carried the traffic of a great railroad for thirty years, and now stands as firm as on its completion.

The engineer was asked if there was any suggestion of the structure adopted by him in the books on engineering. “No,” he said, “it came to me in this way. I was driving by the place where the first attempts were made, of which a colony of bank-swallows had taken possession. It occurred to me that these little engineers had disproved the assertion that this material had no cohesion. They have their homes in it, where they raise two families every summer. Every home is a tunnel, self-sustaining without masonry. A larger tunnel can be constructed by simply extending the principle, and adopting masonry. This is the whole story. The bank-swallow is the inventor of this form of tunnel construction. I am simply a copyist—his imitator.”

CHAPTER XXI
EXPERIMENT

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.

Eyes and Hands Inform the Brain.

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.”