Great Inventions and Discoveries Part 8

Dr. Morton secured a patent on his discovery, but derived little pecuniary profit from it. Although he permitted the free use of his anaesthetic in charitable inst.i.tutions, his patent was frequently infringed. He vainly applied to Congress for compensation in 1846 and 1849. A bill to give him one hundred thousand dollars as a national testimonial of his contribution to the welfare of the race was introduced into Congress in 1852 and defeated. Measures in his behalf at sessions of Congress in 1853 and 1854 were likewise voted down. The only money that ever came to Dr. Morton for his discovery was a small prize from the French Academy of Sciences and the sum of one thousand dollars from the trustees of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital. The governments of Russia and of Norway and Sweden conferred upon him certain awards of honor in recognition of his great contribution to science.

He died in New York City, July 15, 1868, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, perhaps the most beautiful and ill.u.s.trious of American burial places.

The monument of Dr. Morton in Mount Auburn bears this inscription: "William T. G. Morton, inventor and revealer of anaesthetic inhalation, by whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, in all time, surgery was agony; since whom, science has control of pain." He is included among the fifty-three ill.u.s.trious sons of Ma.s.sachusetts whose names are inscribed upon the dome of the new Hall of Representatives in the State House at Boston; and is among the five hundred noted men whose names adorn the facade of the Boston Public Library.

The news of Morton's discovery reached England December 17, 1846.

Within five days ether was in use as an anaesthetic by the English dentists and surgeons. A year later Sir J. Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform, which has since that time been the preferred anaesthetic in Europe. Ether has continued in general use in America.

CHAPTER XI

STEEL AND RUBBER

It has been shown already in this volume that the materials from which man has made his tools, and those tools themselves, are the best means of determining his advance in civilization. Man pa.s.sed from the Stone Age with its few, crude implements into the Bronze Age, and from this into the Iron Age, with each succeeding step increasing the number and efficiency of his tools. The race has lately pa.s.sed into an age which might well be named the Age of Steel. The discovery or invention of this metal--for there is in it the nature of both invention and discovery--is sufficiently important to mark a distinct era in human progress.

Steel is not found native, but is a compound of iron and carbon and is produced artificially. The great value of steel lies in the fact that it can be made so hard that it can cut and shape almost every other substance known to man, and yet this very quality of hardness can be so modified as to make the metal capable of cutting and otherwise shaping itself. Steel can be made nearly as hard as the diamond, or so soft that it can be cut, bent, or hammered into this shape or that, rolled into sheets, or drawn out into the finest wire. Nearly the whole of the compound is iron, the carbon ranging from one-fourth of one per cent to two and one half per cent. Ordinary steel contains certain other chemicals, such as silicon, manganese, sulphur, and phosphorus, but these are mere natural impurities existing in the metal. The essential ingredients are iron and carbon. Steel is hardened by being heated to a high temperature and then suddenly cooled by contact with cold water, or in other like ways. Fixing the degree of hardness in a piece of steel is called tempering. The degree of hardness is dependent upon the suddenness of cooling.

The widespread use of steel and its importance in the life of to-day are due to Sir Henry Bessemer, an English inventor, who was born January 19, 1813, and died March 15, 1898. The substance was known, made, and used before the time of Bessemer, but its production was so costly that it was little used. By his process of production the cost was greatly reduced and steel consequently came into much wider usage.

By the Bessemer process molten iron is poured into a vessel with holes in the bottom. Air at a powerful pressure is forced through these openings, so that the pressure of the air prevents the melted metal from running out. The air removes the carbon from the molten iron.

Afterward the required amount of carbon is admitted to the iron, and the result of the union is a piece of steel. The process of Bessemer was patented in 1856.

Steel is used in the construction of great modern buildings, bridges, and battleships; and in making cannon, railroad cars and rails, pipe, wire, bolts and nails, swords, knives, saws, watch-springs, needles, and innumerable tools and articles of every-day usage. Manifestly a material that is used in the manufacture of articles ranging from a needle to a great city sky-sc.r.a.per or a battleship must be of prime importance to the human race.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STEEL FRAMEWORK OF THE FLATIRON BUILDING, NEW YORK CITY]

The United States Steel Corporation is the largest combination of capital in the world. It was organized in March, 1901, under the laws of New Jersey, for the manufacture and sale of steel products. This giant corporation was formed by the union of ten large corporations, each of which was, in turn, made up of smaller companies. Its total capitalization is $1,404,000,000, or one half of all the money in the United States. Its property consists of 149 steel works, with an annual capacity of 9,000,000 tons; 18,000 c.o.ke furnaces; over 100,000 acres of land; and 125 lake vessels and several small railroads. The Corporation employs over 150,000 men, to whom it pays in Wages annually over $120,000,000.

When on a wet morning one puts on rubbers and a rain coat, one scarcely wonders about the history of the articles that give so much protection and comfort. The story of rubber is an interesting one. The substance at first was called "elastic gum." About 1770 it was discovered that the gum would rub out lead pencil marks. It was imported into Great Britain and sold for this purpose, and because of this property its name was changed to rubber. The correct name of the material now is caoutchouc, though its common name is India-rubber or simply rubber. It is obtained from the sap of certain tropical trees and shrubs. The best quality of rubber comes from Brazil, though supplies are procured from other parts of South America, from Central America, the West Indies, Africa, and parts of tropical Asia.

The details of collecting the sap and preparing it for market vary somewhat according to locality and the nature of the trees or shrubs from which it comes. In the region of the Amazon, when the sap is to be obtained from a tree, cuts are made each morning in the bark. The milky sap that exudes is collected in little tin or clay cups fastened to the trunk. At the end of about ten hours these cups are emptied into larger ones, and on the morning of the following day new incisions are made in each tree, about eight inches below the old ones. This process is continued until incisions have been made in the bark from a height of about six feet down to the ground; the lower down on the trunk of the tree, the better is the quality of the sap. For the evaporation of the sap, a fire is built of material yielding dense volumes of smoke.

Workmen dip wooden paddles into the liquid and hold them in the smoke until the sap solidifies and acquires a slightly yellow tinge. They repeat the process of dipping the paddle into the sap and holding it in the smoke, until the paddle is covered with a layer of the dried gum about an inch and a half in thickness. This layer is then removed from the paddle and hung up to dry; and the process of evaporation is commenced anew. The raw material, which is an elastic, yellowish, gum-like substance, is sent away to be vulcanized. From the vulcanized product are made the rubber goods of commerce.

As far back as 1615 A.D. the Spaniards used rubber for waxing canvas cloaks so as to make them water-proof. But it was not until two centuries later that caoutchouc began to attract general attention.

Charles Goodyear, an American inventor, found a way for making it commonly useful, and brought about its practical and widespread utility.

The story of Goodyear's life is pathetically interesting. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, December 29, 1800. His father was Amasa Goodyear, a pioneer hardware manufacturer, from whom the son inherited much of his inventive ability. Charles Goodyear was educated in the schools of New Haven, and spent much of his time on his father's farm and in the factory, where the father manufactured steel implements and pearl b.u.t.tons, the first ever made in America. The son intended to become a preacher, but obstacles arose and he abandoned his purpose.

Though he was not to minister to man's spiritual needs, yet he was to bring to the race a material blessing of great value.

Goodyear entered into the hardware business with his father in Connecticut and at Philadelphia, but their business failed. During the ten years extending from 1830 to 1840 he was frequently imprisoned for debt. All this time he was working to perfect unfinished inventions in order that his creditors might be paid.

While a boy on his father's farm, he one day picked up a scale of rubber peeled from a bottle, and conceived the notion that this substance could be turned into a most useful material if it were made uniformly thin and prepared in such way as to prevent its melting and sticking together in a solid ma.s.s. When he was first imprisoned for debt, the use of rubber was attracting general attention. He became strongly interested in finding a way for making the article more useful. The chief difficulty in treating rubber lay in its susceptibility to extremes of temperature; it melted in summer and became stiffened in winter. Strenuous effort had been expended in attempting to overcome this difficulty, but without success. Goodyear dedicated his energies to a solution of the problem. His experiments were conducted in Philadelphia, in New York, and in Ma.s.sachusetts towns.

During this period he and his family lived literally from hand to mouth, and more than once subsisted upon what was virtually the charity of friends. Sometimes it was necessary to sell the children's books and articles of household furniture to drive the wolf of hunger from the door. Much of his experimentation was carried on in prison, with no encouragement from any source to cheer him on. At times his hopes arose as victory seemed near; they soon fell, as what he had mistaken for triumph proved to be defeat. He became the b.u.t.t of those who did not share his own constant faith in the ultimate success of his labors. He was calm in defeat, patient in ridicule, and always bore himself with magnificent fort.i.tude.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES GOODYEAR]

In the early months of 1839 Goodyear could shout with the old Syracusan mathematician, "Eureka!"--"I have found it!" He had discovered that rubber coated with sulphur and then heated to a high degree of heat is rendered uniformly elastic in all temperatures. He had solved the problem, but it was two long years before he could convince any one of the fact. William Rider, of New York, finally furnished capital for carrying on the business of manufacturing rubber goods according to the new process. The firm was successful and Goodyear had soon paid off thirty-five thousand dollars of indebtedness owed to creditors of his old business that had failed ten or fifteen years before.

The new process was called vulcanizing. Vulcan was the old Roman G.o.d of fire and metal working, and was patron of handicrafts generally.

The word _volcano_ is derived from _vulcan_, and melted sulphur is a.s.sociated with volcanoes. The term _vulcanize_, therefore, is traceable either directly or indirectly, through the fire or the sulphur employed in the process, to the name of the Roman G.o.d.

According to the relative amount of sulphur used and the temperature to which the compound is raised, either soft or hard rubber may be produced. Hard rubber contains a greater quant.i.ty of sulphur and is heated to a higher temperature. The heat used in vulcanization reaches as much as three hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Goodyear's first patent was taken out in 1844, the year in which Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph. About this time he was imprisoned for debt for the last time in the United States, though he suffered a jail sentence for debt in France later. His patents were repeatedly infringed in this country, and he could not secure any patents in Great Britain or France. The United States Commissioner of Patents said of Goodyear, "No inventor, probably, has ever been so hara.s.sed, so trampled upon, so plundered by pirates as he, their spoliations upon him having unquestionably amounted to millions of dollars." Daniel Webster was the lawyer employed in the trial in which Goodyear's legal right to the honor and profits of his invention was established. For his services in this case Webster received a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Goodyear himself made no very large sum of money from his invention, though he added to life not merely a new material but a new cla.s.s of materials, applicable to many cases. Before his death he had seen rubber put to more than five hundred different uses, and thousands of persons engaged in manufacturing the various articles fashioned from it. Goodyear died in New York City, July 1, 1860.

CHAPTER XII

STENOGRAPHY AND THE TYPEWRITER

It is difficult to see how man could now dispense with any of the great inventions and discoveries that give him power over time and s.p.a.ce. Not one of them could be sacrificed without corresponding loss of power.

Among the great devices that economize time are stenography and the typewriter. Stenography is the world's business alphabet; the typewriter, its commercial printing press.

The word _stenography_ is derived from the Greek adjective _stenos_ meaning "narrow" or "close," and the Greek verb _graphein_ signifying "to write." Stenography, therefore, is the art of close or narrow writing, so named, perhaps, from the great amount of meaning that by its use is packed into a narrow compa.s.s. It is a phonetic system in which brief signs are used to represent single sounds, groups of sounds, whole words, or groups of words.

The idea of stenography or shorthand writing originated in ancient times. Antiquarians have tried to show, with more or less plausibility, that it was practised more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ by the Persians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. Abbreviated writing, for taking down lectures and preserving poems recited at the Olympic and other games, was used by the Greeks. The first known pract.i.tioner of the art of shorthand writing was Tiro, who lived in Rome 63 B.C., and who was the stenographer of the great orator Cicero. He took down in shorthand the speeches of his master, by whom they were afterward revised. Plutarch says that when the Roman Senate was voting on the charge which Cicero had preferred against Catiline, Cicero distributed shorthand reporters throughout the Senate House for the purpose of taking down the speeches of some of the leading Senators. At the close of St. Paul's letter to the Colossians there is a note to the effect that the Epistle was written from Rome by Tychicus and Onesimus. It has been supposed that Tychicus acted as shorthand writer and Onesimus as transcriber. Certain it is that the early Christian fathers employed a system of shorthand writing. Saint Augustine refers to a church meeting held at Carthage in the fourth century of the Christian era, at which eight shorthand writers were employed, two working at a time.

Charlemagne, the great king of the Franks, who died in 814 A.D., delved deep into the art of shorthand writing as practised by Tiro, Cicero's stenographer.

In Chapter x.x.xviii of _David Copperfield_, Charles d.i.c.kens describes his own experience with shorthand thus: "I bought an approved scheme of the n.o.ble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence), and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place--not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly, through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant _expectation_, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for _disadvantageous_. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system; in short, it was almost heart-breaking."

Till near the middle of the last century all systems of shorthand writing were more or less crude and illogical. About 1837 Isaac Pitman, an Englishman, put stenography upon a phonetic basis and therefore a scientific basis. As there are in the English language forty-three different sounds represented by twenty-six letters, Pitman adopted a shorthand alphabet in which consonants were represented by simple straight or curved strokes, the light sounds denoted by light strokes and the heavy sounds by heavy strokes. "The leading heavy vowels are represented by six heavy dots and a like number of heavy dashes, placed at the beginning, middle, or end of the strokes, and before or after as they precede or follow the consonants. The same course is followed with the light vowels. Diphthongs are provided for by a combination of dash forms, and by a small semicircle, differently formed and placed in different positions. Circles, hooks, and loops are employed in distinct offices."

Pitman's invention of a phonographic alphabet for shorthand was the beginning of verbatim reporting that has spread to every land which Anglo-Saxon civilization has touched. There is scarcely a legislative body, a court of importance, or a great convention of any kind, whose proceedings are not taken down on the spot in shorthand, accurately and at once, to say nothing of the very wide use of stenography in private business. In this bewildering commercial whirl of the twentieth century time is money, and stenography is time.

The typewriter, invented about forty years ago, is parallel to stenography in importance. The daily volume of the world's business could not be accomplished without it. And, as in the case of all the great inventions, men do not see how they got on before it came. The world owes the typewriter to two Americans, John Pratt and Christopher L. Sholes. Pratt was born in Unionville, South Carolina, April 14, 1831. In 1867, while in England, he produced the first working typewriter that ever secured a sale. A description of his machine in one of the English periodicals attracted the attention of Sholes, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1819, but who at that time was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He began working at the idea of the typewriter borrowed from Pratt, and in the same year that Pratt's machine was first made, Sholes produced a typewriter that was practically successful and started the manufacture of a machine that was to become increasingly useful, and finally indispensable.

No business in recent years has grown more rapidly than the typewriter industry. From nothing forty years ago, it has grown into an industry producing nearly a quarter of a million machines a year and employing thousands of workmen. American manufacturers not only supply the home trade with their output, but export machines to every part of the civilized world, making this country the home and center of the world's typewriter industry.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FRICTION MATCH

The biggest things are not always the most important. A little article, used many times in the course of every day and familiar to every person, is one of the world's great inventions. It is the friction match.

Fire is one of man's absolute necessities. Without it civilization would have been impossible, and life could scarcely continue. The story of man's power to produce and use fire is practically the story of civilization itself. So far as history can reveal there has never been in any time a people who were without the knowledge and use of fire; which, on its beneficent side, is man's indispensable friend; and in its wrath, a terrible destroyer.