The Mentor, No. 29, Great American Inventors

The Mentor

“A Wise and Faithful Guide and Friend”

GREAT AMERICAN INVENTORS

By H. ADDINGTON BRUCE

Anyone who reads the history of the United States must be impressed with the supremely important part played by the inventor in the evolution of the nation. The explorer and pioneer, the statesman, diplomat, and soldier,—all these have contributed, and contributed notably, to the upbuilding of the mighty republic of today. But it is beyond dispute that in the long run their efforts would have counted for comparatively little had it not been for the genius of those who have bent their energies to the devising of means for the development of the country’s marvelously rich resources, and have still further added to the national wealth by the creation of unsuspected channels for the profitable employment of human enterprise and labor.

It was in the humble workshops of men like Whitney, Fitch, and Fulton that, almost as soon as the independence of the United States had been won by the sword, the foundations were laid for its rise to the standing of a world power. Every invention these men made meant a gain in the nation’s strength, and a wider opening of the door of opportunity to all native-born Americans, and to the constantly increasing host of newcomers from abroad. The American inventors have not simply astonished mankind; they have enhanced the prestige, power, and prosperity of their country.

THE COTTON GIN

Take, for example, the results that have flowed from a single invention, that of the Whitney cotton gin. When the young Yankee schoolmaster and law student, Eli Whitney, was graduated from Yale and settled in Georgia in 1792, the production of cotton in the Southern States was insignificant. At that time, indeed, cotton was grown by the Southerners chiefly for decorative effect in gardens, because of its handsome flowers. Its cultivation for commercial purposes was virtually out of the question, owing to the fact that no means were available for economically separating the lint from the seed. This had to be done by hand, and since it took ten hours for a quick worker to separate one pound of lint from its three pounds of seed no adequate returns could be had.

What was needed, as his southern friends pointed out to Whitney, was the invention of some apparatus for performing the work of separation cleanly and quickly. The problem was one that appealed to him with peculiar force. Even as a boy in Massachusetts he had been fond of tinkering with mechanical appliances. At the early age of twelve he had made a violin of fairly good tone; a year later he was making excellent knives; and before he was fifteen he was recognized as the best mechanic in his native town of Westborough. It was therefore with real enthusiasm that he set up a workshop in the basement of his Georgia home, and varied his law studies by experimenting in the manufacture of a cotton gin. Within a few months he had successfully completed his self-imposed task by the creation of a machine equipped with hundreds of tiny metal fingers, each of which did more work in quicker time than the human hand could possibly do.

That same year (1793) fully five million pounds of cotton were harvested in the United States, the product of a planting stimulated solely by faith in the Whitney gin. By the year of Whitney’s death (1825) cotton was indisputably king in the commercial life of the nation, the value of the cotton exports for that year being more than $36,000,000, as against a valuation of barely $30,000,000 for all other American exports. The eventual abolition of slavery served only to accentuate the stupendous importance of the cotton gin. Under free labor the production of cotton has steadily risen, until nowadays it annually runs into the billions of pounds, with a valuation of many hundreds of millions of dollars, and affords employment not only to an enormous army of cultivators, but to a still greater army of workers in factory, office, and store.

Even of much greater importance have been the results of the labors of another illustrious American inventor, Robert Fulton. Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in November, 1765, Fulton, by reason of the astonishing number and variety of his inventions, may well be called the Edison of his time.

ROBERT FULTON

Similar to all truly great inventors, he was a man of broad vision and keen imagination. What he was most interested in was not immediate consequences, but ultimate effects, and in working on the complicated mechanical problems with which his mind was incessantly occupied he kept steadily in view their significance to society as a whole. Thus, one of his most ingenious creations—the famous Fulton torpedo, crude forerunner of the deadly submarine missiles of today—was inspired by an ardent desire to produce something that would make war so terrible as to impel mankind to universal peace. And similarly it was with an eye to increasing the welfare and happiness of society that he went to work on the invention with which his name will always be linked,—the steamboat.

He was not the first to whom the idea had occurred of applying the steam engine to purposes of water transportation. Already the Pennsylvanian, William Henry, the Connecticut mechanic, John Fitch, the New Jersey inventor, John Stevens, and the Scotsman, William Symington, had demonstrated more or less successfully the possibility of using steam as a motive power on the water; but it was left to Fulton to establish definitely the value of the steamboat as a medium for passenger and freight traffic. This he did with his historic Clermont, built at New York in 1807, partly with funds provided by Chancellor Livingston and partly by loans from reluctant and skeptical friends.

The general impression was that Fulton had undertaken a hopeless and visionary task. “As I had occasion,” he himself has related, “daily to pass to and from the shipyard while my boat was in progress, I often loitered unknown near idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repetition of ‘Fulton’s Folly.’”

As everybody knows, the Clermont did not sink or otherwise come to grief when she started up the Hudson, August 11, 1807, for her maiden voyage to Albany. On the contrary, she made the journey, against the wind, at an average rate of nearly five miles an hour; and, with the wind again ahead, returned to New York at about the same speed. Compared with the steaming powers of the modern ocean leviathan, this was a sorry enough showing; but, with the continued success of the Clermont and her sister boats, the Raritan and the Car of Neptune,—which together constituted the world’s first regular line of steamboats,—it was sufficient to prove for all time that man had made another superb advance in the mastery of the forces of Nature.

INVENTOR OF THE SEWING MACHINE

Very different, but also of great value, was the service rendered by Elias Howe of sewing machine fame. There are two stories as to the genesis of this wonderful labor-saving device. One is that it was suggested to Howe by the chance remark of a visitor to the Boston machine shop in which he was employed. The other and more romantic story is that the idea of a machine for sewing garments originated from a desire on Howe’s part to lighten the labor of his wife, who, when he was ill and out of work, was obliged to take in sewing and toil far into the night.

Whichever version is correct, it is certain that in 1843 (Howe was then only twenty-four years old) he set to work in the garret of his father’s home in Cambridge, and about a year later gave to the world a sewing machine that embodied the principal features of the most up-to-date models of the present day. For long, however, the world was reluctant to accept this splendid invention. The tailors of Boston, to whom he first offered it, refused to adopt it, on the ground that it would ruin their business; and later, in New York, there were anti-sewing machine demonstrations, fomented by labor leaders, who failed to realize that in the end labor-saving devices of any real merit were always certain to increase, not decrease, the demand and opportunities for the workingman and workingwoman.

In the case of the sewing machine the truth of this has long since been demonstrated. Not only has it become a familiar household adjunct, freeing millions of women from the slavery of the needle, and thus most effectively answering the piteous plea of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” but it has also brought about a marvelous expansion of the clothing industry. It has in fact created an entirely new and most important branch of that industry,—the ready-made clothing business,—giving employment to hundreds of thousands of people, and providing well patterned and well finished garments at prices undreamed of in other days. Surely Howe, no less than Fulton and Whitney, deserves to be regarded as a benefactor of humanity.

So, too, with Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, the one the father of the electric telegraph, the other the inventor of the telephone. If anybody had told Samuel Morse in 1811, when as a youth of twenty he sailed from New York to Liverpool to study painting under Benjamin West, that he would be known to posterity as an inventor rather than as an artist, he would have laughed the prophecy to scorn. But, as has happened to other gifted men, circumstances conspired to turn and fix the thoughts of this brilliant son of New England on problems unconnected with the routine of his daily life, yet appealing to him with such force as to change the whole course of his career.

TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE

With Morse the turning point was reached in 1827 when, some years after his return from England, he attended a course of lectures in New York on the subject of electromagnetism. What he then heard fired his imagination, and led him, during a second visit abroad, to study more closely the nature of electricity. He specially became interested in the possibility of utilizing this great natural force as a medium for long-distance communication, and when homeward bound, in the autumn of 1832, applied himself to this one problem to such good purpose that before landing in New York he was able to show to his fellow passengers plans of the instrument that was to immortalize his name.

It was not until five years afterward, however, that Morse made the first working demonstration of his invention, which by most people was regarded as a scientific toy rather than a creation of the highest practical utility. And a scientific toy it remained until, after a heartbreaking struggle to secure the necessary financial aid, Morse persuaded Congress in 1843 to appropriate $30,000 for the construction of a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. The first message to be flashed over this line, May 1, 1844, was the news of the nomination of Henry Clay for the presidency; and with the sending of that message one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind definitely gained recognition as an accomplished fact.

Alexander Graham Bell, experimenting in the same field of long-distance communication by the aid of electricity, was more fortunate in securing early acknowledgment of the merits of his telephone, a public demonstration of which was given at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Connected with this invention a most interesting story is told. Bell, it is said, was experimenting with a device for multiplex telegraphy, when the accidental snapping of a wire sent a sound vibrating through another wire which had attached to it at each end a thin sheet-iron disk a few inches in circumference. At once Bell asked himself if the sound could be repeated. Experiment showed that it could, and the query then suggested itself to him, Could vocal sounds be thus transmitted? Forthwith he set himself to the task that resulted, after many failures, in the creation of the telephone.

But even in the case of this marvelous instrument it was for a long time impossible to obtain the necessary financial support. When, in 1877, Bell took the telephone to England, he could find no purchaser for half the European rights at $10,000, and in this country a personal friend declined to advance $2,500 for a half interest. Today, so it is stated, there are in use in the United States alone approximately seven and a half million telephones.

EDISON, THE MASTER INVENTOR

Never has there been an American inventor who has contributed more abundantly than Thomas Alva Edison to the republic’s industrial expansion, nor one who has achieved greatness under a heavier handicap of early disadvantages. Born (1847) of a poor family in an obscure Ohio canal village, Edison began his career at the age of twelve in the occupation of a railway newsboy.

It was as a telegrapher, which he became at eighteen, that his inventive genius first displayed itself. One after another various devices for improving telegraphic service flowed from his fertile mind, until, after his astonishing success in inventing a duplex and quadruplex telegraph, he was able to command the support of a group of New York capitalists in carrying through a long series of experiments that finally resulted in the invention of the now familiar Edison electric light.

Had it been for only this one invention Edison’s name would be gratefully remembered for all time. But to strengthen his claims on the gratitude of his countrymen and of posterity there has since come from his New Jersey laboratory a succession of inventions,—to name only a few, the phonograph, the kinetoscope, the mimeograph, the storage battery, and the “talking moving pictures,”—which have meant new openings for capital, new opportunities for labor, and an incalculable enlargement of the resources of the human race. Whitney, Fulton, Howe, Morse, Bell, Edison,—clearly it is only simple historic justice to rate these great inventors with the great statesmen, warriors, and pioneers who in days gone by have won undying fame as makers of the American republic.