American Men of Mind Part 20

CHAPTER X

INVENTORS

It is a curious fact that the men to whom the world owes most generally get the least reward. The genius in art or letters is seldom recognized as such until long after he himself has pa.s.sed away--his life is usually embittered by derision or neglect. But, in the history of civilization, the lot of no man has been harder or more thankless than that of the inventor. Poverty and want have always been his portion, and even after he had won his triumph, had compelled public recognition of some great invention, it was usually some one else who won the reward.

America has been especially strong in the field of invention. Indeed, practically all the great labor-saving devices of the past century and more have originated here. "Yankee ingenuity" has pa.s.sed into a proverb, and a true one, for the country which has produced the steamboat, the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, the phonograph, the telephone, the typewriter, the reaper and binder, to mention only a few of the achievements of American inventors, may surely claim first place in this respect among the nations of the world. There are few stories more inspiring than that of American invention, and as benefactors to their race, the long line of American inventors may rightly rank before even the great philanthropists whose careers are outlined elsewhere in this volume. Indeed, if we judge greatness by the benefits which a man confers upon mankind, such men as Whitney and Howe and Morse and Bell and Edison far surpa.s.s most of the great characters of history.

First of the line is Benjamin Franklin, whose many-sided genius gives him a unique place in American history. His career has been considered in the chapter dealing with our statesmen, but let us pause for a moment here to speak of his inventions. One of them, the Franklin stove, is still in use in hundreds of old houses, and as an economizer of fuel has never been surpa.s.sed; another was the lightning-rod. He introduced the basket willow, the water-tight compartment for ships, the culture of silk, the use of white clothing in hot weather, and the use of oil to quiet a tempest-tossed sea. From none of his inventions did he seek to get any return. The Governor of Pennsylvania offered to give him a monopoly of the sale of the Franklin stove for a period of years, but he declined it, saying, "That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad to serve others by any invention of ours"--a principle characteristic of Franklin's whole philosophy of life.

After Franklin, came Robert Fulton, the first man successfully to apply the power of the steam-engine to the propulsion of boats. Everyone has heard the story of how, years before, the youthful James Watt first got his idea of the power of steam by noticing how it rattled the lid on his mother's boiling teakettle. From that came the stationary engine, and from that the engine as applied to the locomotive. It remained for Fulton to apply it to water navigation.

Born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of Irish parents, in poor circ.u.mstances, the boy received only the rudiments of an education, but developed a surprising talent for painting, so that, when he was seventeen, he removed to Philadelphia and set up there as an artist, painting portraits and landscapes. He remained there for some years, and finally, having made enough money to purchase a small farm for his mother, sailed for London, where he introduced himself to that amiable patron of all American painters, Benjamin West. West, who was at that time at the height of his fame, received Fulton with great kindness, and made a place in his house for him, where he remained for several years.

Those years were not devoted exclusively to painting, for Fulton had developed an interest in mechanics, secured a patent for an improvement in ca.n.a.l locks, invented a "plunging" boat, a kind of submarine, a machine for spinning flax, one for making ropes, one for sawing marble, and many others of minor importance. Finally abandoning art altogether, he went to Paris, where he spent seven years with the family of Joel Barlow, conducting with him a number of experiments; one series of which has developed into the modern submarine torpedo. He succeeded in interesting the French government in his submarine experiments and constructed a boat equipped with a small engine, with which, in the harbor of Brest, he seems actually to have made some progress under water, remaining under on one occasion for more than four hours. But the French government finally withdrew its support, and finding the British government also indifferent, Fulton sailed for New York in December, 1806.

Here, he succeeded in interesting the United States government, which granted him $5,000 to continue his submarine experiments, but interest in them soon waned, and Fulton turned his whole attention to the subject of steam navigation. He had been experimenting in this direction for a number of years, and, in conjunction with Chancellor Livingston, of New Jersey, had secured from the legislature of New York the exclusive right and privilege of navigating all kinds of boats which might be propelled by the force of fire or steam on all the waters within the territory of New York for a period of twenty years, provided he would, by the end of 1807, produce a boat that would attain a speed of four miles an hour.

Fulton went to work at once, the experiments being paid for by Livingston, and after various calculations, discarded the use of paddles or oars, of ducks' feet which open as they are pushed out and close as they are drawn in, and also the idea of forcing water out of the stern of the vessel. He finally decided on the paddle-wheel, and, in August, 1807, the first American steamboat appeared on the East River. A great concourse witnessed the first trial, incredulous at first, but converted into enthusiastic believers before the boat had gone a quarter of a mile.

She was christened the "Clermont," and soon afterwards made a trip up the Hudson to Albany, to the astonishment of the people living along the banks of that mighty river. The distance of 150 miles, against the current of the river, was covered in thirty-two hours, and there could no longer be any question of Fulton's success. A regular schedule between Albany and New York was established, and the "Clermont" began that great river traffic now carried on by the most palatial river steamers in the world.

After that, it was merely a question of development. More boats were built, improvements were made, and every year witnessed an increase of speed and efficiency. In 1814, in the midst of the second war with England, Fulton built the first steam ship-of-war the world had ever seen, designed for the defense of New York harbor. This ancestor of the modern "Dreadnought" was named "Fulton the First" in honor of her designer. She indirectly caused his death, for, exposing himself for several hours of a bitter winter day, in supervising some changes on her, he developed pneumonia and died a few days later. Could he re-visit the world to-day and see the wonderful and mighty ships which have grown out of his idea, he would no doubt be as astonished as were the people along the Hudson on that fall day in 1807 when they saw the "Clermont"

making her way up the stream against wind and tide.

The same year that Robert Fulton was born, another inventive genius first saw the light in the little town of Westborough, Ma.s.sachusetts.

His name was Eli Whitney, and the work he was to do revolutionized the industrial development of the South, paid off its debts, and trebled the value of its lands. It did something else, too, which was to fasten upon the South the system of negro slavery, resulting in the Civil War. But though he added hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealth of his country, his own reward was neglect, indifference, countless lawsuits and endless vexation of body and spirit.

Whitney's father ran a little wood-working shop where he made wheels and chairs, and there the boy spent every possible hour. At the age of twelve, he made himself a violin, and his progress was so steady, that by the time he was sixteen, he had greatly enlarged the business and had gained the reputation of being the best mechanic in all the country round. He soon discovered the value of education, and managed to prepare himself for Yale College, which he entered in 1789, at the age of twenty-four--an age at which most men had long since graduated and settled in life. But Whitney persevered, graduating in 1792, and almost immediately securing a position as private tutor in a Georgia family, which was to change the whole course of his life.

Until he reached the South, he had never seen raw cotton, only a little of which, indeed, had been raised in the United States. It had not been profitable because of the difficulty of picking out the green cottonseed. To separate one pound of the staple from the seed was a day's work, so that cotton was considered rather as a curiosity than as a profitable crop. Whitney was impressed by the possibilities of cotton culture, could this obstacle be overcome, and devoted his spare time to the construction of the machine upon which his fame rests. At last it was done, and did its work so perfectly that there could be no question of its success. Experiments showed that with it, one man, with the aid of two-horse power, could clean five thousand pounds of cotton a day!

A patent was at once applied for and every effort made to keep the invention a secret until a patent had been secured. But knowledge of it swept through the state, and great crowds of people came to see the machine. Whitney refused to show it, and after much excitement, a mob one night broke into the building where it was, and carried it away.

Others were at once made, using it as a model, and by the time Whitney had secured his patent, they were in successful operation in many parts of the state.

That was the beginning of Whitney's trials. He had not enough money to produce machines rapidly enough to meet the tremendous demand for them, and various rivals sprang up, some of them even claiming the honor of the invention. Other gins were put on the market, differing from Whitney's only in some unimportant detail, and plainly an infringement of his patent; but he had not the means to prosecute their manufacturers. The result was, that after two years of disheartening struggle, Whitney was reduced to bankruptcy.

The att.i.tude of the South toward him caused him especial distress. "I have invented a machine," he wrote, "from which the citizens of the South have already realized immense profits, which is worth to them millions, and from which they must continue to derive the most important profits, and in return to be treated as a felon, a swindler, and a villain, has stung me to the very soul. And when I consider that this cruel persecution is inflicted by the very persons who are enjoying these great benefits, and expressly for the purpose of preventing my ever deriving the least advantage from my labors, the acuteness of my feelings is altogether inexpressible."

Finally, the states of North and South Carolina voted him a royalty upon all the machines in use, and this enabled him to pay his debts; but Whitney at last abandoned hope of ever receiving from his invention the returns he had hoped for, and, turning his attention to other business, received, in 1798, a contract from the United States government for 10,000 stand of arms. Eight years were consumed in filling this contract. A contract for 30,000 stand followed, and so many improvements in design and process of manufacture were made by Whitney that no other manufacturer could compete with him.

The result of all this was that Whitney was enabled to end his life in comparative independence. His last days were his happiest, and he found in the care and affection of a loving family some consolation for the injustice and ingrat.i.tude which he had suffered.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MORSE]

Sixteen years after the battle of Bunker Hill, a boy was born in a great frame house at the foot of Breed's Hill, upon which that famous and misnamed battle was really fought. The boy's father was a preacher named Jedediah Morse, and the boy was named Samuel Finley, after his maternal great grandfather, the renowned president of Princeton College, and Breese, after his mother's maiden name, so that he comes down through history as S. F. B. Morse. He received a thorough schooling, graduating from Yale in 1807, and at once turned his attention to art. We have already spoken of his achievements in that respect, which were really of the first importance. He was an artist, heart and soul, but the whole course of his life was to be changed in a remarkable fashion.

In the autumn of 1832, Morse, being at that time forty-one years of age, sailed from Havre for New York in the ship Sully. It happened that there were on board some scientists who had been interested in electrical development, and the talk one evening turned on electricity. Morse knew little about it, except what he had learned in a few lectures heard at Yale; but when somebody asked how long it took a current of electricity to pa.s.s through a wire, and when the answer was that the pa.s.sage was instantaneous, his interest was aroused.

"If that is the case," he said, "and if the pa.s.sage of the current can be made visible or audible, there is no reason why intelligence cannot be transmitted instantaneously by electricity."

The company broke up, after a while, but Morse, filled with his great idea, went on deck, and at the end of an hour had jotted down in his notebook the first skeleton of the "Morse alphabet." Before he reached New York, he had made drawings and specifications of his invention, which he seems to have grasped clearly and completely from the first, although its details were worked out only by laborious thought. It was necessary for him to earn a living, and not until three years later was the first rude instrument completed. Two years more, and he had a short line in operation, but it was looked upon as a scientific toy constructed by an unfortunate dreamer. Finally, in 1838, Morse appeared before Congress, exhibited his invention and asked aid to construct an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. He was laughed at, and for twelve years an extraordinary struggle ensued, Morse laboring to convince the world of the value of his invention, and the world scoffing at him. His own situation was forlorn in the extreme; for his painting was his only means of livelihood, and, absorbed as he was by his great invention, he found painting utterly impossible. His home was a single room in the fifth story of a building at the corner of Na.s.sau and Beekman streets in New York City--a room which served as studio, workshop, parlor, kitchen and bedroom. There he labored and slept, using such money as he could earn for his experiments, and almost starving himself in consequence.

But at last the tide turned. He was appointed to a position in the University of the City of New York, which provided him with better means for experiment, and in 1843, again appeared before Congress. This time, he found some backers, and by a close vote, at the last hour of the session, an appropriation of $30,000 was made to enable him to construct a line between Washington and Baltimore. Wild with delight and enthusiasm, the inventor went to work, and on the twenty-fourth day of May, 1844, the first message flashed over the wire, "What hath G.o.d wrought!"

The wonder and amazement of the public can be better imagined than described. Morse offered to sell his invention to the government for the sum of $100,000, but the Postmaster General, a thickheaded individual named Cave Johnson, refused the offer, stating that in his opinion, no line would ever pay for the cost of operation!

It was inevitable that rival claimants for the honor of the invention should crop up on every side, but, after years of bitter litigation, Morse succeeded in defending his t.i.tle, and honors began to pour in upon him. It is worth remarking that the Sultan of Turkey, supposedly the most benighted of all rulers, was the first monarch to acknowledge Morse as a public benefactor. That was in 1848; but the monarchs of Europe soon followed, and in 1858, a special congress was called by the Emperor of the French to devise some suitable testimonial to the great inventor. But perhaps the most fitting testimonial of all were the ceremonies at the unveiling of the Morse monument in New York City in 1871. Delegates were present from every state in the Union, and at the close of the reception, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, announced that the telegraph instrument before the audience was in connection with every other one of the ten thousand instruments in America, and that, beside every instrument an operator was waiting to receive a message. Then a young operator sent this message from the key: "Greeting and thanks to the telegraph fraternity throughout the world. Glory to G.o.d in the highest; on earth, peace, good-will to men." Then the venerable inventor, the personification of dignity, simplicity and kindliness, bent above the key, and sent out, "S. F. B. Morse." A storm of enthusiasm swept over the audience, and the scene will never be forgotten by any who took part in it. The proudest boast of many an old operator is that he received that message. Death came to the inventor a year later, and on the day of his funeral, every telegraph office throughout the land was draped in mourning.

Although to Morse belongs all the credit for the invention of the telegraph, it should, in justice to one man, be pointed out that it would have been impossible but for a discovery which preceded it--that of the electro-magnet. To Joseph Henry, the great physicist, first of Princeton, then of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, this invention is chiefly due. We have already spoken of Professor Henry's work in science, but none of it was more important than his invention, in 1828, of the modern form of electro-magnet--a coil of silk-covered wire wound in a series of crossed layers around a soft iron core, and in 1831, he had used it to produce the ringing of a bell at a distance. It is this magnet which forms the basis of every telegraph instrument--is essential to it, and is the foundation of the entire electrical art. Let it be added to this great scientist's credit that he never sought to patent any of his inventions, giving them, as Franklin had done, free to all the world.

The struggle which Morse made to perfect and secure public recognition of his telegraph and the injustice shown Eli Whitney by the people of the South, were as nothing when compared with the trials of that most unfortunate of all inventors, Charles Goodyear, whose story is one of the most tragic in American annals. No one can read of his struggles without experiencing the deepest admiration for a man who, at the time, was regarded as a hopeless lunatic.

Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800. While he was still a child, his father moved to Philadelphia and engaged in the hardware business, in which his son joined him, as soon as he was old enough to do so. But the panic of 1836 wiped the business out of existence, and Goodyear was forced to look around for some other means of livelihood. He had been interested for some time in the wonderful success of some newly-established India-rubber companies, and, out of curiosity, bought an India-rubber life-preserver. Upon examining it, he found a defect in the valve, and inventing an improvement in it, he went to New York with the intention of selling his improvement to the manufacturer. The manufacturer was impressed with the new device, but told Goodyear frankly that the whole India-rubber business of the country was on the verge of collapse, and indeed, the collapse came a few months later.

The trouble was that the goods which the rubber companies had been turning out were not durable. The use of rubber had begun about fifteen years before, first in France in the manufacture of garters and suspenders, and then in England where a manufacturer named Mackintosh made water-proof coats by spreading a layer of rubber between two layers of cloth. Then, in 1833, the Roxbury India-Rubber Company was organized in the United States, and manufactured an India-rubber cloth from which wagon-covers, caps, coats, and other articles were made. Its success was so great that other companies were organized and seemed on the highroad to fortune, when a sudden reverse came. For the heat of summer melted wagon-covers, caps and coats to sticky ma.s.ses with an odor so offensive that they had to be buried. So the business collapsed, the various companies went into bankruptcy, and the very name of India-rubber came to be detested by producers and consumers alike.

It was at this time that Charles Goodyear appeared upon the scene--unfortunately enough for himself, but fortunately for humanity--and determined to discover some method by which rubber could be made to withstand the extremes of heat and cold. From that time until the close of his life, he devoted himself wholly to this work, in the face of such hardships and discouragements as few other men have ever experienced. He began his experiments at once, and finally hit upon magnesia as a substance which, mixed with rubber, seemed to give it lasting properties; but a month later, the mixture began to ferment and became as hard and brittle as gla.s.s.

His stock of money was soon exhausted, his own valuables, and even the trinkets of his wife were p.a.w.ned, but Goodyear never for an instant thought of giving up the problem which he had set himself to solve.

Again he believed he had discovered the secret by boiling the solution of rubber and magnesia in quicklime and water, when he found to his dismay that a drop of the weakest acid, such as the juice of an apple, would reduce an apparently fine sheet of rubber to a sticky ma.s.s. The first real step in the right direction was made by accident, for, in removing some bronzing from a piece of rubber with aqua fortis, he found that the chemical worked a remarkable change in the rubber, which would now stand a degree of heat that would have melted it before. He called this "curing" India-rubber, and after careful tests, patented the process, secured a partner with capital, rented an old India-rubber works on Staten Island, and set to work, full of hope. But commercial disaster swept away his partner's fortune, and Goodyear could find no one else who would risk his money in so doubtful an enterprise.

Indeed, in all America he seemed to be the only man who had the slightest hope of accomplishing anything with India-rubber. His friends regarded him as a lunatic, and especially when he made himself a suit of clothes out of his India-rubber cloth, and wore it on all occasions. One day a man looking for Goodyear asked one of the latter's friends how he would recognize him if he met him.

"If you see a man with an India-rubber coat on," was the reply, "India-rubber shoes, India-rubber hat, and in his pocket an India-rubber purse with not a cent in it, that's Goodyear."

The description was a good one, for that purse had been without a cent in it for a long time. It was to stay empty for some weary years longer.

For he had not yet discovered the secret of making India-rubber permanent, as he found when he tried to fill a contract for a hundred and fifty mail bags ordered by the government. The bags were apparently perfect, but in less than a month began to soften and ferment and were thrown back on his hands. All his property was seized and sold for debt; his family was reduced to the point of starvation, and friends, relatives and even his wife joined in demanding that he abandon this useless quest.

Goodyear was in despair, for he had just made another discovery that seemed to promise success--the discovery that sulphur was the active "curing" agent for India-rubber, and that it was the sulphuric acid in aqua fortis which had wrought the changes in rubber which he had noticed in his experiments. One day, while explaining the properties of a sulphur-cured piece of rubber to an incredulous crowd in a country-store, he happened to let it fall on the red-hot stove. To his amazement it did not melt; it had shrivelled some, but had not softened.

And, at last, he had the key, which was that rubber mixed with sulphur and subjected to a certain degree of heat, would be rendered impervious to any extremes of temperature!

But what degree of heat? He experimented in the oven of his wife's cooking-stove, and in every other kind of oven to which he could gain access; he induced a brick-layer to make him an oven, paying him in rubber ap.r.o.ns; he grew yellow and shrivelled, for he and his family were living upon the charity of neighbors; more than once, there was not a morsel of food in the house; his friends thought seriously of shutting him up in an asylum; he tried to get to New York, but was arrested for debt, and thrown into prison. Even in prison, he tried to interest men with capital in his discovery, for he needed delicate and expensive apparatus, and at last two brothers, William and Emory Rider agreed to advance him a certain sum. The laboratory was built, and in 1844, Goodyear astonished the world by producing perfect vulcanized India-rubber with economy and certainty. The long and desperate battle had been won!

Did he reap a fortune? By no means! In one way or another, he was defrauded of his patent rights. In England, for instance, another man who received a copy of the American patent, actually applied for and obtained the English rights in his own name. In 1858, the United States Commissioner of Patents said, "No inventor, probably, has ever been so hara.s.sed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious cla.s.s of infringers known in the parlance of the world as 'pirates.'"

Worn out with work and disappointment, Goodyear died two years later, a bankrupt. But his story should be remembered, and his memory honored, by every American.

Near a little mountain hamlet of central Sweden stands a great pyramid of iron cast from ore dug from the neighboring mountains. It is set up on a base of granite also quarried from those mountains, and bears upon it two names, Nils Ericsson and John Ericsson. The monument marks the place where these two men were born. The life of the former was pa.s.sed in Sweden and does not concern us, but John Ericsson's name is closely connected with the history of the United States.

He was the son of a poor miner, and one of his earliest recollections was of the sheriff coming to take away all their household goods in payment of a debt. He was put to work in the iron mines as soon as he was able to earn a few pennies daily, and he soon developed a remarkable apt.i.tude for mechanics. At the age of eleven, he planned a pumping engine to keep the mines free from water, and at the age of twelve, was made a member of the surveying party in charge of the construction of the Gotha ship ca.n.a.l, and was soon himself in charge of a section of the work, with six hundred men under him, one of whom was detailed to follow him with a stool, upon which he stood to use the surveying instruments. It reminds one of Farragut commanding a war ship, at the age of eleven.

In 1826, at the age of twenty-three, he went to England to introduce a flame or gas-engine which he had invented. He remained there for eleven years, and then a fortunate chance won him for the United States. He had been experimenting with a screw or propeller for steamboats, instead of the paddle-wheels as used by Fulton, and finally, equipping a small boat with two propellers, offered the invention to the British admiralty. But the admiralty was skeptical. The United States consul in Liverpool happened to be Francis B. Ogden, a pioneer in steam navigation on the Ohio river. He was impressed with Ericsson's invention, introduced him to Robert F. Stockton, of the United States navy, and on their a.s.surance that the invention would be taken up in the United States, closed up his affairs in England and sailed for this country.

His first experiment was disastrous--though through no fault of his. A ship-of-war called the Princeton was ordered by the government and completed. She embodied, besides screw propellers, many other features which made her a nine days' wonder. A distinguished company boarded her for her trial trip, and it was decided also to test her big guns. But at the first discharge, the gun burst, killing the secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, the captain of the ship, and a number of other well known men. As a consequence, the experiment was stopped and Ericsson was twelve years in securing from the government the $15,000 he had spent in equipping the Princeton.