Great Inventions and Discoveries Part 1

Great Inventions and Discoveries.

by Willis Duff Piercy.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the world was even then old, primitive man came into existence. The first men lived in the branches of trees or in their hollow trunks, and sometimes in caves. For food they chased horses or caught fish from the streams along whose sh.o.r.es they lived. If they had clothing, it was the skins of wild beasts. Life was simple, slow, and crude. There were no cities, books, railroads, clocks, newspapers, schools, churches, judges, teachers, automobiles, or elections. Man lived with other animals and was little superior to them. These primitive men are called cave-dwellers.

A resident of modern New York sits down to a breakfast gathered from distant parts of the earth. He spreads out before him his daily newspaper, which tells him what has happened during the last twenty-four hours all over the world. Telegraph wires and ocean cables have flashed these events across thousands of miles into the newspaper offices and there great printing presses have recorded them upon paper.

After breakfast he gets into an electric street car or automobile and is carried through miles of s.p.a.ce in a very short time to a great steel building hundreds of feet high. He steps into an electric elevator and is whirled rapidly up to his office on the twentieth floor. The postman brings a package of letters which fast-flying mail trains have brought him during the night from far-away places. He reads them and then speaks rapidly to a young woman who makes some crooked marks on paper.

After running her fingers rapidly over the keyboard of a little machine, she hands him type-written replies to the letters he has received. A boy brings him a little yellow envelope. In it he finds a message from Seattle or London or Hong Kong or Buenos Ayres sent only a few moments ago. He wishes to talk with a business a.s.sociate in Boston or St. Louis. Still sitting at his desk, he applies a small tube to his ear and speaks to the man as distinctly and as instantaneously as if he were in the next room. He finds it important to be in Chicago. After luncheon, he boards a train equipped with the conveniences of his own home, sleeps there comfortably, and flies through the thousand miles of distance in time to have breakfast in Chicago the next morning.

What is the difference between the life of the cave-dweller and the life of the modern New Yorker? We call it _civilization_. It is not at one bound or at one thousand that we pa.s.s from the primitive cave to New York City. Civilization is the acc.u.mulation of centuries of achievement. It is builded, in the language of Isaiah, "line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little."

Different nations have accomplished different things and have scattered the seeds of these accomplishments among other nations. Certain individuals have seen farther in certain directions than their fellows and have contributed to civilization the results of their vision.

Whoever has added to the safety, the happiness, the power, or the convenience of society; whoever discovers a star or a microbe; whoever paints a picture or plants a tree, builds a bridge or fights a righteous battle; whoever makes two ears of corn grow where there grew but one before; whoever lets the light s.h.i.+ne in upon a darkened street or a darkened spirit is an agent of civilization.

The history of civilization is largely a history of man's struggle against the forces of nature and of his victory over them. Nature is always saying to man, "Thou shalt not"; and man is always replying, "I will." If diseases lurk in air and water, cures are ready in the mind of man. Nature shoves men apart with lofty mountains; but man drives his iron horse over the mountains or through them. Vast oceans roll and mighty winds blow between continents; but steam laughs at stormy seas.

The moon's light is not sufficient for man's purposes and he makes a brighter one. When winter blows his icy breath, man warms himself with coal and fire. The South pours down upon him her scorching summer; but he has learned how to freeze water into ice. Time and s.p.a.ce conspire together for human isolation; man conjures with electricity and with it destroys both. The stars seek to hide their secrets behind immeasurable distances; but an Italian gives man a gla.s.s that brings the heavens closer before his vision. History tries to conceal itself in the rubbish of ages; but with ink man preserves the past. His asylums, hospitals, churches, schools, libraries, and universities are lights along the sh.o.r.e guiding the human race in its voyage down the ever widening stream of growth and possibility.

The centuries do not yield to man equal advancement. Some are very fertile; others are almost, if not quite, barren. The entire period of a thousand years stretching from the fall of Rome to the discovery of America was as sterile as a heath. On the other hand, the nineteenth century was the greatest in history in point of human progress, especially in the field of inventions. It alone gave to man far more of civilization than the whole ten centuries before the discovery of America or indeed any other period of a thousand years. One hundred years ago there was not a mile of railroad, ocean cable, or telegraph wire in the world; not a telephone, automobile, electric light, or typewriter. The people were then deriding the new-born idea of the steamboat, and wireless telegraphy had not been dreamed of.

Even up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War, less than one hundred fifty years ago, no man in America had ever seen an envelope, a match, a stove, a piece of coal, a daily newspaper, a sewing machine, a reaper, a drill, a mowing machine, ether, chloroform, galvanized iron, India-rubber, or steam-driven machinery. We who are alive to-day are fortunate more than any other generation thus far in the world's population.

"We are living, we are dwelling In a grand and awful time; In an age on ages telling-- To be living is sublime."

The horse and the dog of to-day are not very different from the horses and the dogs of a thousand years ago. From the beginning they have done about all they can ever do. Not so with man. He is a progressive animal. He is always reaching outward and upward for broader and higher things. Tennyson sings,

"For I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."

The difference between the lives of the primitive cave-dweller and the modern American is unspeakably vast. But looking far down the vista of future ages, who shall say that the fortieth century may not as far surpa.s.s the twentieth as the twentieth does the sleepy dawn of man's existence on the earth? We are packing more of life into a day than our ancestors could put into a month. And the hours of the centuries to come hold a fuller experience than our days.

Thomas Carlyle calls man a "tool-using animal." Throughout all time man has made and used tools. These tools are the best measure of his civilization. According to the material out of which they have been made, man's progress has been divided into epochs or ages.

Primitive man made a few implements of bone, horn, and stone. They were few and crude. This period is called the Stone Age. During it men dwelt in caves or huts, dressed themselves in skins, and lived by catching fish, chasing wild animals, and gathering wild fruits. By and by man learned how to make tools out of bronze, an alloy composed of copper and tin. These bronze implements were more numerous and more efficient than the stone tools and gave man a higher degree of power and workmans.h.i.+p. With them he cut down trees or carved stone for his dwellings and acquired generally a higher order of life. This era is named the Bronze Age. Finally the use of iron was discovered. This metal afforded many tools that could not be made of stone or bronze--tools that were much stronger and more efficient. Man became correspondingly more powerful and his life more complex. The period during which iron was used is called the Iron Age.

_Invention_ is the making of some new thing not previously existing.

_Discovery_ is the finding of something already in existence but not known before. There was no electric telegraph until Samuel Morse made or invented it; America has always existed, but was not known until Christopher Columbus found or discovered it.

Among all the builders of civilization, not the least are the inventors and discoverers. High up on the page of those who have made the world great will always stand the names of Gutenberg or Coster, Watt, Stephenson, Morse, Edison, Fulton, Galileo, Newton, Columbus, Morton, Bell, Marconi, and others who have invented new machines and discovered new processes for making life more happy, safe, and powerful.

Regarding the influence of inventions upon civilization, Lord Salisbury says: "The inventors and even the first users of the great discoveries in applied science had never realized what influence their work was to have upon industry, politics, society, and even religion. The discovery of gunpowder simply annihilated feudalism, thus effecting an entire change in the structure of government in Europe. As to the discovery of printing, it not only made religious revolutions possible, but was the basis on which modern democratic forms of government rested. The steam engine not only changed all forms of industry and the conditions under which industries were prosecuted, but it made practically contiguous the most distant parts of the world, reducing its vastness to a relatively contracted area. And now the introduction of electricity as a form of force seems destined, as its development proceeds, to bring about results quite as important in their way, though but yet dimly seen by the most far-sighted."

Secretary Seward pays this tribute to invention: "The exercise of the inventive faculty is the nearest akin to the Creator of any faculty possessed by the human mind; for while it does not create in the sense that the Creator did, yet it is the nearest approach to it of anything known to man."

And Lord Bacon tells us: "The introduction of new inventions seemeth to be the very chief of all human actions. The benefits of new inventions may extend to all mankind universally; while the good of political achievements can respect but some particular cantons of men; these latter do not endure above a few ages, the former forever.

Inventions make all men happy, without injury to any one single person. Furthermore, they are, as it were, new creations, and imitations of G.o.d's own works."

CHAPTER II

THE PRINTING PRESS

"Blessings be on the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it is, that first invented books."

_Thomas Carlyle._

"Except a living man," says Charles Kingsley, "there is nothing more wonderful than a book--a message to us from the dead--from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, vivify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. We ought to reverence books, to look at them as useful and mighty things."

Milton calls a good book "the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." Cicero likens a room without books to a body without a soul. Ruskin says, "Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book." And Thomas Carlyle exclaims: "Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue of a true book! O thou who art able to write a book, which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name city-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name conqueror or city-burner!"

Is it not wonderful that a record of all the world has thought and said and felt and done can be deposited in a corner of my room, and that there I may sit and commune with the master spirits of all the centuries? Socrates, Plato, Homer, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Paul, David, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Hugo, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Emerson, all in one room at the same time!

Great as books are, however, the world has not long had them. For many generations after man's advent, he had no language. He communicated with his fellows by means of gestures or gave vent to his feelings in rude grunts or cries, much as the lower animals do now. But G.o.d gave to man something He did not bestow upon the other animals--the power of articulate speech. Certain sounds came to represent certain ideas and a kind of oral language grew up. This became more and more highly developed as time went by. For centuries the traditions, stories, and songs of men were handed down orally from father to son and were preserved only in the memory. The poems of Homer, the great Greek bard, were recited by readers to large audiences, some of them numbering probably twenty thousand.

By and by men felt the need of preserving their thoughts in some more permanent way than by memory, and there grew up a rude system of writing. At first pictures or rude imitations of objects were used; a circle or a disc might represent the sun, and a crescent the moon. The idea of a tree was denoted by the picture of a tree. The early Indians of North America were among the peoples who used a system of picture writing. In process of time, as men grew in knowledge and culture, certain fixed signs began to denote certain sounds, and a phonetic system of writing was developed.

For the first phonetic alphabet it is generally supposed that we are indebted to the Phoenicians, an active, commercial people, who lived along the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Mediterranean Sea. They were a maritime nation and scattered their alphabet wherever they sailed, so that some kind of phonetic alphabet finally existed throughout the civilized world.

Books among the ancients were very different from the books of the present. Paper has not been known long, nor, indeed, has the art of printing. When man began to preserve his thoughts and deeds in more permanent form than in the memory, various substances were used to write upon. Josephus, an historian of the Jews, mentions two columns, one of stone and the other of brick, upon which the children of Seth wrote accounts of their inventions and astronomical discoveries.

Tablets of lead containing the works of Hesiod, a Greek writer, were deposited in the temple of the Muses in Boeotia. According to the Bible, the ten commandments which the Lord gave to Moses on Mount Sinai for the children of Israel were engraved on two tablets of stone; and the laws of Solon, the great Grecian law-giver, were carved on planks of wood.

Sixty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile in northern Africa flourished the civilization of the Egyptians. There grew abundantly in Egypt a marsh reed called the papyrus. From the name of this plant is derived our word _paper_. The Egyptians made their books from the papyrus plant. With a sharp instrument they cut lengthwise strips through the stalk, put these strips together edge to edge, and on them at right angles, placed another layer of shorter strips. The two layers were then moistened with Nile water, pressed together, and left to dry.

A leaf of writing material was thus produced. Any roughness on the surface of the sheet was polished away with some smooth instrument. A number of leaves were then glued together so as to form a long piece of the material. The Egyptians took reeds, dipped them in gum water colored with charcoal or with a kind of resinous soot, and wrote on the long papyrus strip. Sometimes ink was made of the cuttle fish or from lees of wine. After the papyrus had been written upon, it was rolled up and became an Egyptian book. Papyrus was used for writing material not only by the Egyptians but by the Greeks and the Romans also, and for a long time it was the chief substance used for writing throughout the civilized world. It continued in use to a greater or less extent till about the seventh century after Christ.

On the plains of Asia lived the Chaldeans, whose civilization was about as old as that of the Egyptians. But their books were very different. Men use for their purposes the things that are close at hand. In Egypt the papyrus plant was utilized for making books. In Chaldea, instead of this marsh reed, there were great stores of clay and of this material the ancient Chaldeans, and the Babylonians and the a.s.syrians who followed them, made their books. The Chaldeans took bricks or ma.s.ses of smooth clay and, while they were yet soft, made impressions on them with a metal stiletto shaped at the end like the side of a wedge. In Latin the word for _wedge_ is _cuneus_. Hence this old writing of the Chaldeans is called cuneiform or wedge-shaped.

Some of these wedge-shaped impressions stood for whole words, others for syllables. After the clay tablets had been written upon, they were burned or dried hard in the sun. A Chaldean book was thus made very durable and lasted for ages. During recent years many of them have been dug up in ancient Babylonia and deciphered. They consist of grammars, dictionaries, religious books and hymns, laws, public doc.u.ments, and records of private business transactions.

The early Greeks and Romans used for their books tablets of ivory or metal or, more commonly, tablets of wood taken from the beech or fir tree. The inner sides of these tablets were coated with wax. On this wax coating the letters were traced with a pointed metallic pen or stiletto called the stylus. Our English word _style_, as used in rhetoric, comes from the name of this instrument. The other end of the stylus was used for erasing. Two of these waxed tablets, joined at the edges by wire hinges, were the earliest specimens of bookbinding. Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in Europe through the Middle Ages. Later the leaves of the palm tree were used; then the inner bark of the lime, ash, maple, or elm.

The next material that came into general use for writing purposes was parchment. This was made from the skins of animals, particularly sheep or lambs. Next came vellum, the prepared skin of the calf. Parchment and vellum were written upon with a metallic pen. As these substances were very costly, sometimes one book was written over another on the same piece of parchment or vellum. Of course this made the reading of the ma.n.u.script very difficult.

About the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, after Christ, parchment and vellum as material for books gave way to paper.

At first paper was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from linen. It is not known who invented linen paper, but its introduction gave the first great impulse to book making.

In the early Greek books the lines ran in opposite directions alternately. That is, there would be a line from left to right across the page, and then the next lower line would begin at the right and run towards the left. Among some of the Orientals the lines ran from right to left. In the old Chinese books the lines were vertical down the page, as they are still. Among Western and Northern peoples the lines ran from left to right as in our modern books.

The old civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, in which the art of book-making originated, sprang up, flourished, and decayed, burying from the sight of men precious secrets in the arts and sciences. The beautiful flower of Greek culture budded, bloomed, and withered.

Pa.s.sing on from east to west, civilization knocked at the door of Rome and awakened there such military and legal genius as the world had not yet seen. Then a horde of wild barbarians poured over the mountains of northern Italy and overthrew the mighty city on the Tiber. The sun of civilization was setting, at least for a time. Night was coming on, the night of the Dark Ages, a night without a star of human thought or achievement, a night full of the noxious vapors of ignorance and superst.i.tion.

About the beginning of the fifteenth century after Christ there came over the world a great intellectual awakening. The human intellect began to awake, to stretch itself, to go forth and conquer. One of the first signs and causes of this intellectual awakening was an event that happened at Mainz in Germany or at Haarlem in Holland, or possibly in both places at the same time. Of all the events that have made for civilization and have influenced the progress of the human race, this event at Haarlem or Mainz is the most important. It is the invention of printing. Before this time, ever since man began to record his thoughts, whether on plank, stone, or papyrus, on bark of tree, skin of animal, or tablet of wax or paper, every letter was made by hand. The process was necessarily slow, books were rare and costly, and only the few could have them. But with the advent of a process that would multiply books and make them cheap, learning was made accessible to the mult.i.tude. The clang of the first printing press was the death knell of ignorance and tyranny.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN ADVERTIs.e.m.e.nT OF CAXTON, THE FIRST PRINTER IN ENGLAND]