Great Inventions and Discoveries Part 10

THE SEWING MACHINE

Civilization owes the invention of the sewing machine to Elias Howe, an American. Howe was born at Spencer, Ma.s.sachusetts, July 9, 1819.

His father was a miller, and work in the mills gave the son's mind a bent toward machinery. One day in 1839 while Howe was working in a machine-shop in Boston, he overheard a conversation among some men regarding the invention of a knitting machine. "What are you bothering yourselves with a knitting machine for? Why don't you make a sewing machine?" asked one. "I wish I could," was the reply, "but it can't be done." "Oh, yes it can," said the first, "I can make a sewing machine myself." "Well, you do it," replied the second, "and I'll insure you an independent fortune."

This conversation impressed Howe with the idea of producing a sewing machine. The hope of relieving his extreme poverty set him to work on the invention in earnest in the year 1843. George Fisher, a coal and wood dealer of Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, who was a former schoolmate of Howe, formed a partners.h.i.+p with him for producing the invention. In December, 1844, Howe moved into Fisher's house, set up his shop in the garret, and went to work. In the following April he sewed the first seam with his new machine, and by the middle of May he had sewed all the seams of two suits of clothes, one for himself and one for his partner.

On September 10, 1846, a patent on the sewing machine was issued to Howe from the United States Patent Office at Was.h.i.+ngton.

The tailors of Boston, believing that a sewing machine would destroy their business, waged fierce warfare against it. In the spring of 1846, seeing no prospect of revenue from his invention, Howe took employment as a railroad engineer on one of the roads entering Boston, but this labor proved too hard for him and he soon gave it up. Howe's partner, Fisher, could see no profit in the machine and became wholly discouraged. Howe then determined to try to market his invention in England, and sent a machine to London. An English machinist examined it, approved it, and paid $250 for it, together with the right to use as many others in his own business as he might desire. Howe was afterward of the opinion that the investment of this $250 by the English machinist brought ultimately to that man a profit of one million dollars.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELIAS HOWE]

During all this time Howe was extremely poor. He and his wife and children had gone to England, but on account of poverty he was compelled to send his family back to America. His fourth machine, which he had constructed in England, he was obliged to sell for 5 pounds (about $25), although it was worth ten times as much, in order to procure money enough to pay his return pa.s.sage to America. He also p.a.w.ned his first-made machine and his patent on the invention. In April, 1849, he landed at New York with only an English half-crown in his pocket. Procuring employment in a machine-shop, the inventor took up his abode in one of the cheapest emigrant boarding-houses. At this time his wife lay dying in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, and his father had to send him ten dollars to enable him to go to her.

Finally the sewing machine began to succeed commercially. The inventor's long night of discouragement was breaking on a day of a.s.sured prosperity. In 1850 Howe was in New York superintending the manufacture of fourteen sewing machines. His office was equipped with a five-dollar desk and two fifty-cent chairs. A few years later he was rich. Isaac Merritt Singer became acquainted with his machine, and submitted to him the sketch of an improved one. It was Singer who first forced the sewing machine upon the attention of the United States. Howe charged that Singer was infringing his patent rights. Litigation ensued. Judge Sprague of Ma.s.sachusetts decided in favor of Howe. In his opinion he stated that "there is no evidence in this case that leaves a shadow of doubt that, for all the benefit conferred upon the public by the introduction of a sewing machine the public are indebted to Mr.

Howe." From this time Howe began to reap the financial reward of his labors. His revenues from the sewing machine amounted ultimately to more than $200,000 a year. He spent vast sums, however, in defending his patent rights, and many others of the "sewing machine kings" were wealthier than he. Howe died at Brooklyn, New York, October 3, 1867.

The sewing machine is used not only for sewing cloth into all kinds of garments, but for making leather into boots, shoes, harness, and other necessary articles of daily life. Great improvements have been made in the sewing machine since its invention, but its essential principles to-day are for the most part those that the inventor discovered and brought into successful operation in his first machine. It is agreed by disinterested and competent persons that "Howe carried the invention of the sewing machine further toward its complete and final utility than any other inventor before him had ever brought a first-rate invention at the first trial."

THE REAPER

In the Louvre at Paris is one of the n.o.blest and most famous paintings of modern art, purchased some years ago at a cost of three hundred thousand francs. It is "The Gleaners" from the brush of the French artist Jean Francois Millet. It pictures three peasant women who have gone out into the fields to glean at the end of the harvest. They are picking up the grain left by the reapers, seeking the little that is left on the ground. In the background are the field, the groups of reapers, the loaded wagons and the horses bringing the garnered sheaves to the rick, the farmer on horseback among his men, and the homestead among the trees. The transparent atmosphere of the summer day, the burning rays of the sun, and the short yellow stubble are all as if they were nature and not art. In the foreground are the three gleaners, "heroic types of labor fulfilling its task until 'the night cometh when no man can work.'"

One of the most beautiful stories of the Bible is the tale of Ruth, the Moabitess, who went out into the fields of Palestine to glean. "And she went, and came, and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimilech."

According to the old English law, gleaners had the right to go into the fields and glean. And those needy ones who went for the leavings of the reapers could not be sued for trespa.s.s.

But it is not with reaping in art, literature, or law that we are here concerned, but with the reaper as a machine, a concrete thing, a tool, an instrument of civilization.

From the earliest times until nearly the middle of the last century the cutting of grain was done by means of a hand sickle or curved reaping-hook. The sickles used by the ancient Jews, Egyptians, and Chinese differed very little from those of our own ancestors. This tool was only slightly improved as the centuries went by, and to this day the sickle may be seen in use. In many parts of the British Isles the reaping-hook gave place to the scythe in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. An attempt to trace the idea of a machine for reaping would carry us far back into the early stages of agriculture; Pliny, the Roman writer, born early in the first century of the Christian era, found a crude kind of reaper in the fields of Gaul. For the great modern invention of the reaping machine, civilization is indebted to Cyrus Hall McCormick, an American.

McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, February 15, 1809.

His father, Robert McCormick, a farmer of inventive mind, worked long to produce a reaper. In 1831 he put a reaping machine in the field for trial, but it failed to work and its inventor was completely discouraged. Against the counsel of his father, Cyrus McCormick began a study of the machine that had failed, to determine and to overcome the causes of failure. He produced another reaper, and in the late harvest of 1831 he tested it in the wheat fields of his father's farm and in some fields of oats belonging to a neighbor. The machine was a success.

McCormick's invention, soon destined to revolutionize agriculture, was combated for the alleged reason that it would destroy the occupation of farm laborers during the harvest season. It was some years before McCormick himself realized the importance of his invention, and he did not take out a patent on it until June 21, 1834. It was not until 1840 that he began manufacturing reapers for the market. In that year he constructed one and sold it to a neighbor. For the harvest of 1843 he made and sold twenty-nine machines. These had all been built upon the home farm by hand, the workmen being himself, his father, and his brothers. In 1844 he traveled with his reaper from Virginia to New York State, and from there through the wheat fields of Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri, showing the machine at work in the grain and enlisting the interest of agricultural men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MODERN REAPER This machine cuts, threshes, winnows, and sacks the wheat]

In 1847 and 1848 Chicago was but a trading village. McCormick, foreseeing its future growth, located his reaper factory there. In that factory he constructed about nine hundred reapers for the harvest of 1848.

In 1851 he exhibited his invention at the World's Fair in London. The London _Times_ facetiously called it "a cross between a wheel-barrow and a flying machine." Later the same paper said of the reaper that it was "the most valuable contribution to the Exposition, and worth to the farmers of England more than the entire cost of the Exposition."

In 1848 McCormick's patent on the reaper expired. Although his claim as the inventor was clearly established, and the commissioner of patents paid him the highest compliments in words for his invention, a renewal of the patent was denied. Other reapers had been made in the meantime, and others have been brought out subsequently. It is an historical fact, however, and one now seldom questioned, that every harvesting machine which has ever been constructed is in its essential parts the invention of Cyrus Hall McCormick.

Besides being a great inventor and successful business man, McCormick was a liberal philanthropist. He gave freely to educational and religious inst.i.tutions. He died at his home in Chicago, May 13, 1884.

An improved type of the ordinary reaper of McCormick is the self-binder, now in common use, a machine which not only reaps the stalks of grain but binds them together in sheaves.

The most primitive method of thres.h.i.+ng grain from the straw was doubtless by beating it with a stick. The ancient Egyptians and Israelites spread out their loosened sheaves upon a circular plot of earth and threshed out the grain by driving oxen back and forth over it. Later a thres.h.i.+ng-sledge was dragged over the sheaves. The Greeks and the Romans beat out grain with a stick, trod it out with men or horses, or used the thres.h.i.+ng-sledge. The primitive implement for thres.h.i.+ng in northern Europe was the stick. A modification of this was the flail, made of two sticks loosely fastened together at one end by means of stout thongs. This implement was used by our ancestors in America and has not yet entirely disappeared from all parts of the world. The thres.h.i.+ng machine was invented in 1787 by Andrew Meikle, a Scotchman. Only a few years ago thres.h.i.+ng machines were drawn by horses, but of late years they have been moved with self-propelling steam engines, commonly called traction engines.

A remarkable combination machine has come into use recently, particularly in the vast wheat fields of California, eastern Was.h.i.+ngton, and the West. This machine is drawn by as many as thirty-two horses. At one operation it cuts the grain, threshes it, winnows it, and puts it into bags ready for the market.

SPINNING AND WEAVING MACHINES

The low, monotonous hum of the spinning-wheel in the old farmhouse on winter evenings, as the housewife spun the yarn which she was afterward to knit into warm stockings for the family, has not entirely pa.s.sed away from the memory of the older generation of to-day. Thomas Buchanan Read has a pathetic allusion to the old spinning-wheel in one of his best poems, "The Closing Scene." And who has not felt the charm of the spinning-wheel scene in Longfellow's "The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish,"

which pictures John Alden as he sits clumsily holding on his hands the skein which Priscilla winds for knitting.

There are two essential principles in the art of spinning: first, the drawing out of uniform quant.i.ties of fiber in a continuous manner; and second, the twisting of the fiber so as to give it coherency and strength. The earliest spinning apparatus, and for ages the only one, was the distaff and spindle. The former was a staff upon which was loosely bound a bundle of the fiber to be spun. It was held in the left hand or was fastened in the belt. The spindle, a tapering rod smaller than the distaff, was held in the right hand. The rotation of the spindle gave the necessary twist to the thread, and around the spindle the thread was wound as it was twisted. The next development in spinning machinery was the spinning-wheel, which has continued in use in some rural parts of the world practically to the present day.

The series of inventions that overthrew hand spinning, and made this industry possible on a large scale, really began in 1738 when Lewis Paul, an English inventor, discovered a process for drawing out and attenuating threads of wool or cotton by pa.s.sing the fiber through successive pairs of rollers. To-day this principle forms a fundamental feature of all spinning machinery. In 1764 James Hargreaves, an illiterate weaver and carpenter of Lancas.h.i.+re, England, invented the spinning-jenny, a device by which eight threads could be spun at once.

With a little improvement in this invention, eighty threads were produced as easily as eight. The idea of the spinning-jenny is said to have been accidentally suggested to its inventor by watching the motions of a common spinning-wheel which one of his children had unintentionally upset.

Hargreaves is another in the long list of those who have suffered persecution because of having done something to make the world better.

His fellow-spinners, filled with prejudice toward his invention because they feared it might rob them of employment, broke into his house and destroyed his machine. He then moved to Nottingham, where he erected a spinning mill. In 1770 Hargreaves took out a patent on his invention, but the patent was subsequently annulled on the ground that he had sold a few machines before patenting the invention.

Valuable as was the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, it was adapted only to producing the transverse threads, or the woof. It could not produce sufficient firmness and hardness for the longitudinal threads, or the warp. In 1767 Richard Arkwright, another native of Lancas.h.i.+re, invented the spinning-frame, which was able to yield a thread fine enough and firm enough to make the warp. At the time of his invention Arkwright was so poor that he had to be furnished with a suit of clothes before he looked respectable enough to appear at an election. Like Hargreaves, he also was persecuted. Both were driven out of Lancas.h.i.+re to Nottingham to escape popular rage. Arkwright's patent was annulled, and at one time his factory was destroyed by the populace in the presence of a powerful military and police force, who did nothing to restrain it. And why were Hargreaves and Arkwright driven out of Lancas.h.i.+re?

They had invented machines that would produce more and cheaper clothing; that would give powerful impetus to the cotton and the woolen industries; that would lift the race higher in the path-way of civilization. What was the reason? Misunderstanding, prejudice, and selfishness. The interests of the few were shutting out the interests of the world. And these interests of the few were imaginary.

In spite of all opposition, however, Arkwright succeeded, and may be regarded as the founder of the modern factory system.

In 1779 Samuel Crompton, another Lancas.h.i.+re inventor, produced an improved spinning machine called the spinning-mule. This invention combined the good qualities of the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves and the spinning-frame of Arkwright. Its chief point of excellence lay in the fineness of the threads which it spun; from this kind of thread could be made finer fabrics than were possible with the machines of Hargreaves and of Arkwright.

Crompton was very poor. By day he worked at the loom or on the farm to earn bread for himself, his mother, and his two sisters, and at night he toiled away on his invention. No sooner had he perfected his machine than he was beset by persons seeking to rob him of its benefits. All kinds of devices were employed for learning the secret. Ladders were placed against his windows in order that unscrupulous spectators might get a view of the machine. He did not dare to leave the house, lest his secret be stolen from him. He had spent his last farthing upon the invention and had no funds for securing a patent. A manufacturer persuaded him to disclose to the trade the nature of his invention under promise of a liberal subscription; but Crompton received only a paltry sum amounting to less than $350. He finally saved up enough money to begin manufacturing on a small scale, but his rivals had already out-distanced him. He died in June, 1827, disspirited at the ill treatment he had received, but not until he had seen his invention a powerful agency in British cloth manufacturing.

An interesting glimpse of the days when weaving was done by hand in England may be found in the first chapter of George Eliot's _Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe_. The hand-loom in weaving was superseded by the power-loom early in the nineteenth century. The loom was the invention of the Rev. Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman, poet, and inventor. The date of the invention was 1785. Cartwright's first loom was very crude, but he subsequently improved it. The idea for the invention of his power-loom came to Cartwright after a visit to the spinning mills of Arkwright. He too was subjected to opposition from the weavers on account of his invention. At one time he was a.s.sociated with Robert Fulton in his experiments in applying steam to navigation.

CHAPTER XVII

AERONAUTICS

To fly in the air has been the dream of all peoples in all ages. "Oh that I had wings like a dove! Then would I fly away and be at rest!"

sang the Psalmist. It would seem from the recent inventions in the science of aeronautics that this dream is to become in the near future a practical experience of our every-day lives.

A balloon is an apparatus with an envelope filled with gas, the specific gravity of which is less than that of the atmosphere near the surface of the earth. It is practically at the mercy of air-currents.

The science of balloon aeronautics dates definitely from 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers at Angonay in France constructed their first balloons. These Frenchmen and their successors developed the spherical balloons to a state of efficiency which has scarcely been improved upon to this day. The balloon in time came to be adopted throughout Europe for military uses, mainly for the purpose of spying out the enemy's position and defenses.

A dirigible balloon usually has an elongated envelope and is equipped with a motor and a rudder by which it can be steered at will against a moderate wind. Balloon aeronautics became popular in 1898, when Santos-Dumont, a wealthy young Brazilian, performed a series of spectacular feats with his dirigible balloon. Immediately ballooning became the sporting fad in France and the craze spread rapidly over the Continent and to England. Numerous airs.h.i.+ps of the dirigible type made their appearance and many balloon factories were established.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WRIGHT BIPLANE By Courtesy of Brooks Brothers]

In Germany every community has its aero club. In the United States there are about 300,000 club members scattered throughout the land who individually or collectively own over 200 balloons. All of the great nations own one or more aerial wars.h.i.+ps of the dirigible type, as well as numerous spherical balloons.