Great Inventions and Discoveries Part 4

Mr. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847. His father was Alexander Melville Bell, a Scotch educator, inventor of a system of visible speech, and author of some text-books on elocution. His grandfather was Alexander Bell, noted for his efforts to remove impediments of speech. Alexander Graham Bell was therefore well fitted by heredity for the invention of an instrument to transmit speech. He was educated in the Edinburgh high school and in the University of Edinburgh, and in 1867 he entered the University of London. Hard study broke down his health and he moved to Canada. Thence he moved to the United States, becoming first a teacher of deaf mutes, and afterward professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. In 1874, at the suggestion of the Boston Board of Education, he began some experiments to show to the eye the vibrations of sound, for the use of the deaf and dumb. The results of these experiments convinced Bell that articulate speech could be transmitted through s.p.a.ce. Early in 1876 he completed the first telephone. The same year he exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, where it was p.r.o.nounced the "wonder of wonders."

He filed application for a patent on his invention at the Patent Office in Washington, February 14, 1876. It is a singular fact that another application for a patent on the telephone was received at the Patent Office a few hours later on the same day from Elisha Gray, an electrical inventor of Chicago. The patent was issued to Bell, not because his invention was superior in merit to Gray's, but on the ground that his application was received first. This is a case where "the early bird catches the worm," for the profits arising from the patent have made Mr. Bell very wealthy, and high honors have come to him as the inventor of one of the world's greatest and most marvelous inventions.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and in 1878 the first telephone exchanges were constructed. By the following year the telephone was firmly established as a social and commercial necessity.

It has grown with great rapidity. It is now found in every city of the world; hotels, large buildings, and ships have their private exchanges, and it has found its way recently into thousands of farmhouses.

Bell had to fight hard in the courts to sustain his patent. Suit after suit was brought by rival claimants, attacking his right to the patent.

The litigation was bitter and protracted. One of the most noteworthy of these suits was brought by a Pennsylvania mechanic named Drawbaugh. He claimed that about 1872 he had made a working telephone out of a cigar box, a gla.s.s tumbler, a tin can, and some other crude materials; and that with the apparatus thus constructed he had talked over a wire several hundred feet long. Many persons testified that they were acquainted with Drawbaugh's apparatus, some of them having used it.

Some instruments, said to be the original ones which Drawbaugh had constructed, were brought into court and exhibited. It was shown that speech could be transmitted with them in a crude way. Drawbaugh claimed that he was too poor at the time of making the apparatus to take out the necessary patent. The Court decided in favor of Bell. Elisha Gray, whose application for a patent had been received the same day that Bell's was, also brought suit against Bell. Before making his application, Gray had filed some preliminary papers looking forward to a patent on the telephone. In his suit against Bell he charged that the patent examiner had fraudulently and secretly conveyed to Bell the contents of those papers. But Bell won this suit, and he finally established over all rivals his legal t.i.tle as the inventor of the telephone.

Recently a wireless system of telephoning has been in process of development, and it will not be strange if, within a few years, we shall be talking through s.p.a.ce without wires, so boundless seem the possibilities of the age.

CHAPTER V

ELECTRICITY: LIGHTING, TRANSPORTATION, AND OTHER USES

Man must have discovered artificial light as soon as he discovered fire, for the two exist together. The first light was probably produced by burning sticks or pieces of wood. In his search for more light, man learned how to make the tallow candle. Lights made in one form or other from the fats of animals persisted almost to the threshold of the present. The next step forward was to the use of oil; and the next, to the use of gas.

The first practical use of gas for purposes of illumination was in 1792. In that year William Murdoch, an English engineer, produced gas artificially from coal, and with it lighted his house in Cornwall, a county of England. Nine years afterward a Frenchman named Lebon illuminated his house and garden in Paris with gas produced from wood.

Street lighting by gas was introduced in 1807 by an Englishman named F.

A. Winzer or Windsor, in Pall Mall, one of the fine streets of London.

The first gas lights in America were installed in 1806 by David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, in his residence and in the streets adjacent. Baltimore was the first city in the United States to adopt gas lighting for its streets. This was in 1817.

When gas was first used, there was much opposition to it, as there usually has been to improvements in general. The citizens of Philadelphia protested for more than twenty years against the introduction of gas into that city for purposes of illumination. Some of the newspapers of the time called gas a "folly and a nuisance"; and one of the professors in the University of Pennsylvania declared that even if gas were the good thing its supporters were declaring it to be, tallow candles and oil lamps were good enough for him. But gas triumphed, and to-day the world could scarcely do without it, either for illumination or for fuel.

The electric light had its beginning about 1800 in the experiments of Sir Humphry Davy, a British investigator. He discovered that if two pieces of carbon are brought into contact, completing a circuit through which an electric current flows, and if the carbon points are separated by a short distance, the points will become intensely hot and emit a brilliant light. The word _arc_, used in connection with the arc lamp or light, refers to the gap or arc between the two carbon points, across which the electric current leaps in creating the light.

Following Sir Humphry Davy's experiments, several arc lights were invented, with greater or less degree of success, and about 1860 electricity was tried successfully for lighting in some lighthouses along the British coast. The widespread usage and the usefulness of the arc electric light, however, are due to Charles Francis Brush, an electrical inventor of Cleveland, Ohio, who in 1876 simplified the arc light so as to bring it into general use for lighting streets, large rooms, halls, and outdoor s.p.a.ces. Brush was also the inventor of an electric-dynamo machine that has added to his fame. After the invention of the arc light, he took out more than fifty other patents. The incandescent electric light, for lighting residences and small rooms, came a little later as the invention of Edison.

Thomas Alva Edison is one of the most remarkable men of all times and places. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon together did not benefit mankind as has this quiet American inventor. He was born at Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847. His father was of Dutch descent and his mother was Scotch. The mother, who had been a teacher, gave him all the schooling he received. Early in life he showed great mental vigor and ingenuity. When he was twelve years old, he is said to have read the histories of Hume and Gibbon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS A. EDISON]

When Thomas was seven years old, the Edison family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. He soon became a newsboy on the Grand Trunk railway running into Detroit. He also became proprietor of a news stand, a book store, and a vegetable market, each a separate enterprise in Port Huron, employing eleven boys in all. His spare hours in Detroit, between the arrival and departure of his train, he spent reading in the Free Library. Before long he had bought a small hand printing press, some old type, and plates for "patent insides" from the proprietor of a Detroit newspaper, and using the baggage car for an office, he started the _Grand Trunk Herald_, the first and only newspaper ever published on a railway train. His inquiring mind led him one day to make some chemical experiments in the car. He overturned a bottle of phosphorus, set the car on fire, and as a result was not permitted to use it longer for a newspaper office.

One day young Edison s.n.a.t.c.hed the child of the station agent at Mount Clemens, Michigan, from beneath the wheels of a locomotive. In grat.i.tude for this act, the station agent taught him telegraphy. In a few months his ingenuity, one of the chief characteristics of the great inventor, led him to string a private telegraph wire from the depot to the town. Over this wire he forwarded messages, charging ten cents for each message. Next he went to Stratford, Canada, as night operator for the Grand Trunk railway. One night he received an order to hold a train. He stopped to reply before signaling the train, and when he reached the platform the train had pa.s.sed. A collision resulted, though not a serious one, and Edison was ordered to report at the office of the general manager. Edison hastily climbed on a freight train, went to Port Huron, and probably has not yet called on the general manager.

Edison worked as telegraph operator at various places. Although he was a brilliant and rapid telegrapher, his fondness for playing pranks and making fun lost him several positions. After making his first experiments with a telegraph repeater, he left Indianapolis for Cincinnati, where he earned sixty dollars per month, besides something extra for night work. He Worked next in Louisville and Memphis. He was poor in purse, for all his money went to defray the expenses of his experiments. His fondness for Victor Hugo's great work, _Les Miserables_, gained for him the nicknames of "Victor" and "Hugo."

At Memphis he perfected his telegraph repeater and was the first to bring New Orleans into direct communication with New York. However, the manager at Memphis was jealous of him and dismissed him. Shabby and dest.i.tute, he made his way back to Louisville, walking a hundred miles of the way, and resumed his old position. After he had worked in the Louisville office for two years, his experimenting again got him into trouble. He upset some sulphuric acid, part of which trickled through the floor and spoiled the carpet in the manager's room below. For this he was discharged. He next went to New Orleans, intending to sail for Brazil; but the ship had gone and an old Spanish sailor advised him to stay in America. He went back to Cincinnati, where he made some of his first experiments in duplex telegraphy, a system whereby two messages may be sent over the same wire at the same time.

A little while afterward, as poor as ever and as unattractive in dress, he walked into the telegraph office in Boston, where he had procured work. His co-workers there, thinking they would have some fun at his expense, set him to receiving messages from the most rapid operators in New York. Instead of throwing up his hands in defeat, as his companions expected, he received the messages easily, with a good margin to spare, and asked the operator sending at the other end of the line to "please send with the other foot." He was at once placed regularly on the New York wire. While in Boston, Edison opened a small workshop, put many of his ideas into definite shape, and took out his first patent. It was upon a chemical apparatus to record votes. He tried to introduce this into Congress, but failed, although he proved that it "would work."

He left Boston not only without money, but in debt, and went to New York. This was in 1871 when he was twenty-four years old. At that time an apparatus called a "gold indicator" was in use in the offices of about six hundred brokers, to show fluctuations in the prices of gold.

The system was operated from a central office near Wall street. One day this central office was filled with six hundred messenger boys, each bringing the complaint that the machinery had broken. No one knew how to repair it. A stranger walked up, looked at the apparatus, and said to the manager, "Mr. Law, I think I can show you where the trouble is."

The machinery was repaired, the office was cleared, and order was restored. "What is your name, sir?" asked the delighted manager.

"Edison," was the reply. He was engaged as superintendent at a salary of $200 per month, and from that hour his fortunes were a.s.sured.

Edison at once busied himself with inventing. He improved and invented various machines used in the stock markets, and in 1872 perfected his system of duplex telegraphy. Two years later he brought out the wonderful quadruplex system, by which four messages may be sent over the same wire at the same time. This system saved millions of dollars and dispensed with thousands of miles of poles and wires.

He started a large factory at Newark, New Jersey, employing some three hundred men. Sometimes he was working on as many as forty-five improvements and original inventions at once. In 1876 he stopped manufacturing and turned all his attention to inventing. In that year he established a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, twenty-five miles from New York City. When this laboratory was outgrown, he founded a new one at Orange, New Jersey, the largest laboratory ever established by one man for scientific research and invention. It comprises one building 250 feet long and three stories high, and four smaller buildings, each one hundred feet long and one story high. The princ.i.p.al building contains a library of thirty thousand reference books, a lecture room, and an exhibition room, where a remarkable collection of instruments of almost every kind is to be seen.

When Edison began working to produce an incandescent electric light for illuminating residences and small rooms, most of the scientists of England said that such a light could not be produced. For nine years he worked on this invention. The chief problem was to find, for the horseshoe thread or filament used to give off the light, a material that should glow with sufficient intensity and yet not be consumed by the great heat necessary to produce the light. In his search for this material he tried all kinds of rags and textiles steeped in various chemicals, different kinds of paper, wood, inner and outer bark, cornstalks, etc. Finally he sent one of his a.s.sistants to the East, and in j.a.pan a kind of bamboo was found answering the requirements.

Perseverance won, and the incandescent electric light became a reality about 1880.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INCANDESCENT LIGHT]

Thomas Edison is one of the most systematic of workers, and nearly all his inventions have been the result of intelligent and methodical labor directed toward a definite aim. He reads carefully what other investigators have found out, so as not to waste time in going over fruitless ground. He also keeps copious note books of his own operations, so that there may be no loss of time and energy. His invention of the phonograph, however, was accidental. While he was working to improve the telephone, the idea of the phonograph suddenly came into his mind. A little while afterward the first phonograph, crude but successful, was finished. At first this instrument was regarded as a toy, but later the invention was sold for a million dollars.

Edison is a man of remarkable personality. Once when someone referred to him as a genius and said that he supposed a genius worked only when the spirit moved him, the inventor replied, "Genius is two per cent inspiration and ninety-eight per cent perspiration." He certainly possesses great native talent for inventing. This was apparent in his early boyhood. But much of his marvelous success is due to the intelligent direction of effort, to tireless perseverance, and to long hours of work. In 1897 he devoted his attention exclusively to the invention of a new storage battery, upon which he had been working for five years. For more than a year he worked harder than a day laborer.

He was in his laboratory by half past seven in the morning; his luncheon was sent to him there; he went home to dinner, but he returned by eight o'clock. At half past eleven his carriage called for him, but often the coachman was compelled to wait three or four hours before the inventor was willing to suspend his work. While the first incandescent electric lighting plant was being prepared in New York City, Edison himself worked part of the time in the trenches, to be sure that the work would be properly done.

There is scarcely an electrical apparatus or an electrical process in existence to-day that does not bear the mark of some great change for the better coming from this most ingenious of American inventors. He has taken out more than four hundred patents on original inventions and improvements. Mr. Edison is still living in his beautiful home at West Orange, New Jersey, near his laboratory. He is frequently called the "Wizard of Menlo Park."

The idea of using electricity as motive power on railroads is nearly as old as the railroads themselves. In 1837, when the utility of steam for purposes of transportation was doubted, Robert Davidson propelled a car with an electric engine on the Edinburgh and Glasgow road. In the fifties Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, constructed an electric engine containing all the essential elements of the modern electric motor. Little progress, however, was made in the use of electricity for motive power, because the cost of producing the electric current was so great. In 1887 Lieut. Sprague, overcoming most of the difficulties then existing, installed at Richmond, Virginia, the first successful electric railway in the world. Managers of street railways in other cities visited Richmond, and after an inspection of what Sprague had done there, decided to subst.i.tute electricity for animal power. No other construction has had a more rapid growth since the time of its invention than the electric railway. In 1890 there were only thirteen unimportant electric roads. Now there is hardly a city of the civilized world where the hum of the electric street car is not heard at all hours of day and night. Modern urban life could scarcely exist without it. It is rapidly pushing its way into the country and giving the farmer the privilege of rapid and cheap transit.

The uses of electricity are by no means exhausted in the four major inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, and the electric street car. It has been put to many minor uses. Among the most interesting and important of these are the Roentgen or X-rays, discovered by Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen, a German physicist, in 1895.

They were named X-rays by their discoverer, because the ultimate nature of their radiation was unknown, the letter X being commonly used in algebra to represent an unknown quant.i.ty. The X-rays are peculiar electric rays having the power to penetrate wood, flesh, and other opaque substances. They are of much value to surgery in disclosing the location of bullets, foreign substances of various kinds, and other objective points in the interior of the human body.

The United States government has demonstrated through its Department of Agriculture that electricity applied to the soil will quicken and help the growth of certain vegetables. It has also shown that certain crops are forwarded by the application of electric light.

The New York legislature in 1888 pa.s.sed a law providing that criminals should be executed in that state thereafter by electrocution, that is, by sending through the body of the condemned person, a current of electricity strong enough to produce death. Execution in this way makes death quicker and apparently less painful than by hanging, the method used previously, and subsequently several other states have pa.s.sed laws for electrical execution, following the example of New York.

Elisha Gray, who contested with Bell the invention of the telephone, was the inventor of a peculiar machine called the telautograph. _Tele_ and _graph_ have been previously explained. _Auto_ is from a Greek word meaning "itself." The meaning of _telautograph_, therefore, is "to write afar by itself." By means of the telautograph, which is operated with electric currents, if a person writes with an ordinary lead pencil on paper, say in Washington or any other place, at the same time the writing will be reproduced with pen and paper at the other end of the line, in New York or wherever the message may be sent.

One of the important uses of electricity is in connection with the electric block signal. This is a device for preventing railroad collisions. The signals are operated with electricity, and show engineers whether or not a certain section of the track ahead of them is clear.

Electricity is used also in the production of certain chemical substances; in covering base metals with a coating of a precious metal, as gold or silver, called electroplating; in producing a solid metal page from rows of type, called an electrotype, which is used in printing; in the navigation of small boats and the propulsion of automobiles; in playing organs and pianos; in driving electric fans; in drawing elevators in high buildings; in call-bells and door-bells; in police-alarms and fire-alarms; in the treatment of certain diseases; and in many other useful ways. What electricity may do for the future cannot even be guessed.

CHAPTER VI

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

The birthplace of mankind is supposed to have been somewhere in Asia, untold thousands of years ago. The race is thought to have spread thence to the northern coast of Africa and to the peninsulas that jut down from the south of Europe. The travelers of ancient times were the Phoenicians. They occupied a narrow strip of land along the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Mediterranean Sea. Their country was small and with difficulty supported an increasing population. To the east of them were barbaric hordes, who poured over the mountains and pushed the Phoenicians to the sea, making of them traders and colonizers. As early as twelve centuries before Christ they were founding colonies, exploring strange lands, trading all over the known world, and leaving their alphabet wherever they went. Arriving at a favorable place, they would pull their ships ash.o.r.e, plant a crop, wait till it had matured, reap it, and go on. They founded many colonies on such sites.

Herodotus, a Greek, born in Asia Minor nearly five hundred years before Christ, is called the father of history and geography. He tells us that in his time the earth was thought to consist of the coast regions of the Mediterranean Sea, extending rather vaguely north and south, and bounded on the west by the Atlantic Ocean and on the east by the great Persian Empire. The word _Mediterranean_ is made up of two Latin words meaning "the middle of the earth." Eratosthenes, a Greek geographer who was born on the northern coast of Africa about three centuries before Christ, wrote a geographical treatise in which he announced his belief that the earth was in the form of a sphere revolving on its own axis. He succeeded in convincing only a few, however, that his theory was right. The next great geographer was Strabo, born in the northeast part of Asia Minor in the year 64 B.C.

He was a great traveler and observer, and wrote a work on geography that has come down to us. The parts dealing with his own observations are especially valuable.

The great traveler of mediaeval times was Marco Polo, an Italian, born in Venice in 1254 A.D. He traveled widely, had many adventures, and published an account of his travels. His experiences were a great stimulus to geographical inquiry and discovery. About this time also the mariners' compa.s.s was introduced into Europe. Civilization seems to be indebted to the Chinese for the compa.s.s, for it is mentioned by them as an instrument of navigation as early as the third or fourth century after Christ. With the advent of the compa.s.s, seamen were no longer compelled to hug the sh.o.r.e; they acquired more daring to sail the open sea, and geographical exploration was correspondingly widened.

Geographical knowledge grew very slowly. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, explorers had become familiar with the range of the ocean, the outline of the continents, and with many islands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, four fifths of the land area of the entire globe was unknown. Africa, except a narrow rim of coast, was almost as little known as the planet Mars is to-day. At the opening of the last century men knew little more about Asia than did Marco Polo, three or four centuries earlier. In America the whole vast area west of the Mississippi River was unknown in 1800. The coast of Australia had not yet been traced, and nothing was known of its interior. At that time South America was better known than any other of the continental land ma.s.ses, except Europe; now it is the least explored of all. The nineteenth century, wonderful for advancement in many fields of human endeavor, was a marvelous one for the growth of geographical knowledge.