Inventions in the Century Part 10

In a volume like this, room exists for mention only of those inventions which burn as beacon lights on the tallest hills--and so we must now pa.s.s on to others.

Just as Faraday was bringing his long series of experimental researches to a close in 1856-59, and introducing the fruits of his labours into the lighthouses of England, Cyrus W. Field of New York had commenced his trials in the great scheme of an ocean cable to "moor the new world alongside the old," as John Bright expressed it. After crossing the ocean from New York to England fifty times, and baffled often by the ocean, which broke his cables, and by the incredulous public of both hemispheres, who laughed at him, and by electricity, which refused to do his bidding, he at last overcame all obstacles, and in 1866 the cable two thousand miles in length had been successfully stretched and communication perfected. To employ currents of great power, the cable insulation would have been disintegrated and finally destroyed by heat.

Therefore only feeble currents could be used. But across that long distance these currents for many reasons grew still weaker. The inventor, Sir William Thomson, was at hand to provide the remedy. First, by his _mirror galvanometer_. A needle in the shape of a small magnet and connected to the current wires, is attached to the back of a small concave mirror having a hole in its centre; opposite the mirror is placed a graduated scale board, having slits through it, and a lighted lamp behind it. The light is thrown through the slits across to the hole at the center of the mirror and upon the needle. The feeblest imaginable current suffices to deflect the needle in one direction, which throws back the little beam of light upon it to the graduated front of the scale. When the current is reversed the needle and its shadow are deflected in the other direction, and so by a combination of right and left motions, and pauses, of the spots of light to represent letters, the message is spelled out. Second, a more expeditious instrument called the _syphon recorder_. In this the galvanometer needle is connected to a fine gla.s.s syphon tube conducting ink from a reservoir on to a strip of paper which is drawn under the point of the tube with a uniform motion.

The irregular movements given the galvanometer needle by the varying current are clearly delineated on the paper. Or in writing very long cables the point of the syphon may not touch the paper, but the ink by electrical attraction from the paper is ejected from the syphon upon the paper in a succession of fine dots. The irregular lines of dots and dashes were translated into words in accordance with the principles of the Morse telegraph.

An instrument was exhibited at the Centennial International Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, which was considered by the judges "the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph." Such was the language used both by Prof. Joseph Henry and Sir Wm. Thomson, and concurred in by the other eminent judges from America, Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. This instrument was the _Telephone_. It embodied, for the practical purpose of transmitting articulate speech to distances, the union of the two great forces,--sound and electricity. It consisted of a method and an apparatus. The apparatus or means consisted of an electric battery circuit, a transmitting cone placed at one end of the line into which speech and other vocal sounds were uttered, a diaphragm against which the sounds were projected, an armature secured to or forming a part of the diaphragm, an electro-magnet loosely connected to the armature, a wire connecting this magnet with another precisely similar arrangement of magnet, armature, diaphragm, and cone, at the receiving end. When speech was uttered in the transmitter the sound vibrations were received on the diaphragm, communicated to the electricised armature, from thence by induction to the magnet and the connecting wire current, which, undulating with precisely the same form of sound vibrations, carried them in exactly the same form to the receiving magnet. They were then carried through the receiving armature and reproduced on the receiving diaphragm, with all the same characteristics of pitch, loudness and quality.

The inventor was Alexander Graham Bell, by nativity a Scotchman, then a resident of Canada, and finally a citizen of the United States. His father was a teacher of vocal physiology at Edinburgh, and he himself became a teacher of deaf mutes. This occupation naturally led him to a thorough investigation of the laws of sound. He acknowledged the aid he received from the great work of Helmholtz on the _Theory of Tone_. His attention was called to sounds transmitted and reproduced by the electric current, especially by the ease with which telegraph operators read their messages by the duration of the "click" of their instruments.

He knew of the old device of a tightly-stretched string or wire between two little boxes. He had read the publication of Prof. C. G. Page, of America, in 1837, on the _Production of Galvanic Music_, in which was described how musical notes were transmitted and reproduced by an interrupted magnetic circuit. He became acquainted with the experimental musical telephonic and acoustic researches of Reis, and others of Germany, and those of celebrated scientists in France, especially the phonautograph of Scott, a delicate instrument having a cone membrane and pointer, and used to reproduce on smoked gla.s.s the waves of sound. He commenced his experiments with magneto instruments in 1874, continued them in 1875, when he succeeded in reproducing speech, but poorly, owing to his imperfect instruments, and then made out his application, and obtained a patent in the United States in July, 1876.

Like all the other remarkable inventions recorded in these pages, this "marvel" did not spring forth as a sudden creation, but was a slow growth of a plant derived from old ideas, although it blossomed out suddenly one day when audible sounds were accidentally produced upon an apparatus with which he was experimenting.

It is impossible here to narrate the tremendous conflict that Bell now encountered to establish his t.i.tle as first inventor, or to enumerate the mult.i.tude of improvements and changes made which go to make up the successful telephone of to-day.

The messages of the voice are carried on the wings of electricity wherever any messages are carried, except under the widest seas, and this difficulty inventors are now seeking to overcome.

The story of the marvellous inventions of the century in electricity is a fascinating one, but in length and details it is also marvellous, and we must hasten unwillingly to a close. Numerous applications of it will be mentioned in chapters relating to other arts.

In the generation of this mighty force improvements have been made, but those of greatest power still involve the principles discovered by Faraday and Henry seventy years ago. The ideas of Faraday of the "lines of force"--the magnetic power streaming from the poles of the magnet somewhat as the rays of heat issue on all sides from a hot body, forming the magnetic field--and that a magnet behaves like an electric current, producing an electric wave by its approach to or recession from a coil of wire, joined with Henry's idea of increasing the magnetising effect by increasing the number of coils around the magnet, enter into all powerful dynamo electric machines of to-day. In them the lines of force must flow around the frame and across the path of the armature; and there must be a set of conductors to cut the lines of force twice in every revolution of the cylinder carrying the armature from which the current is taken.

When machines had been produced for generating with some economy powerful currents of electricity, their use for the world's business purposes rapidly increased. Among such applications, and following closely the electric lighting, came the _electric railway_. A subst.i.tute for the slow animal, horse, and for the dangerous, noisy steam horse and its lumbering locomotive and train, was hailed with delight. Inventors came forward with adaptations of all the old systems they could think of for the purpose, and with many new ones. One plan was to adapt the storage battery--that silent chemical monster which carries its own power and its own machine--and place one on each car to actuate a motor connected to the driving wheels. Another plan was to conduct the current from the dynamo machine at its station along the rails on one side of the track to the motor on the car and the return current on the opposite track; another was to carry the current to the car on a third rail between the track, using both the other rails for the return; another to use an overhead wire for the current from the dynamo, and connect it with the car by a rod, one end of which had a little wheel or trolley running on the overhead wire, to take up the current, the other end being connected by a wire to the car motor; another plan to have a trench made leading from the central station underneath the track the whole length of the line, and put into this trench conducting wires from the dynamo, to one of which the car motor should be connected by a trolley rod or "brush," extending down through a central slot between the rails of the track to carry the electric supply into the motor. In all these cases a lever was supplied to cut off communication between the conducting wire and the motor, and a brake lever to stop the car.

All of these plans have been tried, and some of them are still being tried with many improvements in detail, but not in principle.

The first electrical railway was constructed and operated at Berlin in 1879, by Messrs Siemens and Halske. It was two thousand seven hundred feet long and built on the third rail system. This was an experiment but a successful one. It was followed very soon by another line near Berlin for actual traffic; then still another in Saxony. At the Paris Exposition in 1881, Sir Wm. Siemens had in operation a road about one thousand six hundred feet in length, on which it is estimated ninety-five thousand pa.s.sengers were conveyed in seven weeks. Then in the next year in London; and then in the following year one in the United States near New York, constructed by Edison. And thus they spread, until every important town and city in the world seems to have its electric plant, and its electric car system, and of course its lighting, telephone and telegraph systems.

In 1882 Prof. Fleeming Jenkin of England invented and has put to use a system called _Telpherage_, by which cars are suspended on an overhead wire which is both the track and electrical conductor. It has been found to be advantageous in the transportation of freight from mines and other places to central stations.

With the coming of the electric railway, the slow, much-abused horse, the puffing steam engine blowing off smoke and cinders through the streets, the great heavy cars, rails and roadbeds, the dangerous collisions and accidents, have disappeared.

The great problems to solve have related to generation, form, distribution and division of the electric current at the dynamos at the central stations for the purposes of running the distant motors and for furnishing independent supplies of light, heat, sound and power. These problems have received the attention of the keenest inventors and electrical engineers and have been solved.

The description of the inventions made by such electrical magicians as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla would fill volumes.

The original plan of sending but one message over a wire at a time has also been improved; and duplex, quadruplex and multiplex systems have been invented (by Stearns, Farmer, Edison and others) and applied, which have multiplied the capacity of the telegraphs, and by which even the alleged all-talk-at-the-same-time habit of certain members of the great human family can be carried on in opposite directions on the same wire at the same time between their gatherings in different cities and without a break.

To understand the manner of multiplying messages or signals on the same line, and using apparently the same electric current to perform different operations, the mind must revert to the theory already referred to, that a current of electricity does not consist of a stream of matter flowing like water through a conductor in one direction, but of particles of subtle ether, vibrating or oscillating in waves from and around the conductor which excites them; that the vibration of this line of waves proceeds at the rate of many thousand miles per second, almost with the velocity of waves of light, with which they are so closely related; that this wave current is susceptible of being varied in direction and in strength, according to the impulse given by the initial pressure of the transmitting and exciting instrument; and that some wave currents have power by reason of their form or strength to penetrate or pa.s.s others coming from an opposite direction. So that in the multiplex process, for instance, each transmission having a certain direction or strength and its own set of transmitting and receiving instruments, will have power to give its own peculiar and independent signal or message.

Apparently there is but one continuous current, but in reality each transmission is separated from the others by an almost inconceivably short interval of time.

Among the inventions in the cla.s.s of Telegraphy should also be mentioned the dial and the printing systems. Ever since the electric telegraph was invented, attempts have been made to use the electric influence to operate either a pointer to point out the letters of the message sent on a dial, or to print them on a moving strip of paper; and also to automatically reproduce on paper the handwriting of the sender or writer of the message. The earliest efforts were by Cooke and Prof. Wheatstone of London, in 1836-37; but it was not until 1839, after Prof. Henry had succeeded in perfecting the electromagnet, that dial and printing telegraphs were successfully produced. Dial telegraphs consist of the combination with magnets, armatures and printed dial plate of a clock-work and a pointer, means to set the pointer at the communicating end (which in some instances has been a piano keyboard) to any letter, the current operating automatically to indicate the same letters at the receiving end. These instruments have been modified and improved by Brequet and Froment of France, Dr. Siemens and Kramer, and Siemens and Halske of Germany, Prof. Wheatstone of England, Chester and Hamblet of America, and others. They have been used extensively upon private and munic.i.p.al lines both in Europe and the United States.

The type-printing telegraph was coeval with the dial, and originated with Morse and Vail as early as 1837. The printing of the characters is effected in various ways; sometimes by clockwork mechanism and sometimes by the direct action of an electromagnet. Wheatstone exhibited one in 1841. House of Vermont invented in 1845-1846 the first printing telegraph that was brought into any extensive use in the United States.

Then followed that of David E. Hughes of Kentucky in 1855, aided by his co-inventor George M. Phelps of Troy, New York, and which was subsequently adopted by the French government, by the United Kingdom Telegraph Co. of Great Britain, and by the American Telegraph Co in the United States. The system was subsequently greatly improved by Hughes and others. Alexander Bain of Edinburgh in 1845-46 originated the modern automatic chemical telegraph. In this system a kind of punch was used to perforate two rows of holes grouped to represent letters on a strip of paper conducted over a metal cylinder and arranged so as to permit spring levers to drop through the perforations and touch the cylinder, thus forming an electrical contact; and a recording apparatus consisting of a strip of paper carried through a chemical solution of an acid and potash and over a metal roller, and underneath one or two styles, or pens, which pens were connected by live wires with the poles of two batteries at the sending station. The operation is such that colored marks upon the paper were made by the pens corresponding precisely to the perforations in the strip at the sending station. Siemens, Wheatstone and others also improved this system; but none of these systems have as yet replaced or equalled in extensive use the Morse key and sounder system, and its great acoustic advantage of reading the messages by the click of the instrument. The type-printing system, however, has been recently greatly improved by the inventions of Howe, C. L. Buckingham, Fiske and others in the United States. Special contrivances and adaptations of the telegraph for printing stock reports and for transmitting fire alarm, police, and emergency calls, have been invented.

The erection of tall office and other buildings, some to the height of more than twenty stories, made practicable by the invention of the elevator system, has in turn brought out most ingenious devices for operating and controlling the elevators to insure safety and at the same time produce economy in the motive power.

The utility of the telephone has been greatly increased by the inventions of Hughes and Edison of the _microphone_. This consists, in one form, of pieces of carbon in loose contact placed in the circuit of a telephone. The very slightest vibrations communicated to the wood are heard distinctly in the telephone. By these inventions and certain improvements not only every sound and note of an opera or concert has been carried to distant places, but the slightest whispers, the minute movements of a watch, even the tread of a fly, and the pressure of a finger, have been rendered audible.

By the aid of the electric current certain rays of light directed upon the mineral selenium, and some other substances, have been discovered to emit musical sounds.

So wonderful and mysterious appear these communications along the electric wire that each and every force in the universe seems to have a voice awaiting utterance to man. The hope is indulged that by some such means we may indeed yet receive the "touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."

In 1879 that eminent English scientist, Prof. Wm. Crookes, published his extensive researches in electrical discharges as manifested in gla.s.s tubes from which the air had been exhausted. These same tubes have already been referred to as Geissler tubes, from the name of a young artist of Bonn who invented them. In these tubes are inclosed various gases through which the sparks from an induction coil can be pa.s.sed by means of platinum electrodes fused into the gla.s.s, and on the pa.s.sage of the current a soft and delicately-tinted light is produced which streams through the tube from pole to pole.

In 1895, Wm. Konrad Roentgen, professor of Physics in the Royal University of Wurzburg, while experimenting with these Crookes and Geissler tubes, discovered with one of them, which he had covered with a sort of black cardboard, that the rays emanating from the same and impinging on certain objects would render them self-luminous, or fluorescent; and on further investigation that such rays, unlike the rays of sunlight, were not deflected, refracted or condensed; but that they proceeded in straight lines from the point at which they were produced, and penetrated various articles, such as flesh, blood, and muscle, and thicknesses of paper, cloth and leather, and other substances which are opaque to ordinary light; and that thus while penetrating such objects and rendering them luminous, if a portion of the same were of a character too dense to admit of the penetration, the dark shadow of such obstacle would appear in the otherwise luminous ma.s.s.

Unable to explain the nature or cause of this wonderful revelation, Roentgen gave to the light an algebraic name for the unknown--the X rays.

This wonderful discovery, at first regarded as a figment of scientific magic, soon attracted profound attention. At first the experiments were confined to the gratification of curiosity--the interior of the hand was explored, and on one occasion the little mummified hand of an Egyptian princess folded in death three or four thousand years ago, was held up to this light, and the bones, dried blood, and muscle of the ancient Pharaohs exhibited to the startled eyes of the present generation. But soon surgery and medicine took advantage of the unknown rays for practical purposes. The location of previously unreachable bullets, and the condition of internal injuries, were determined; the cause of concealed disease was traced, the living brain explored, and the pulsations of the living heart were witnessed.

r.e.t.a.r.dation of the strength of the electric current by the inductive influence of neighboring wires and earth currents, together with the theory that the electric energy pervades all s.p.a.ce and matter, gave rise to the idea that if the energy once established could be set in motion at such point above the ordinary surface of the earth as would free this upper current from all inductive disturbance, impulses of such power might be conveyed from one high point and communicated to another as to produce signals without the use of a conducting wire, retaining only the usual batteries and the earth connection. On July 30th, 1872, Mahlen Loomis of Washington, D. C., took out a patent for "the utilization of natural electricity from elevated points" for telegraphic purposes, based on the principle mentioned, and made successful experiments on the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia near Washington, accounts of which were published in Washington papers at the time; but being poor and receiving no aid or encouragement he was compelled to give it up. Marconi of Italy has been more successful in this direction, and has sent electric messages and signals from high stations over the English Channel from the sh.o.r.es of France to England. So that now wireless telegraphy is an established fact.

It is certainly thrilling to realize that there is a mysterious, silent, invisible and powerful mechanical agent on every side of us, waiting to do our bidding, and to lend a hand in every field of human labour, and yet unable to be so used without excitement to action and direction in its course by some master, intermediate between itself and man. The princ.i.p.al masters for this purpose are steam and water power. A small portion of the power of the resistless Niagara has been taken, diverted to turn the machinery which excites electricity to action, and this energy in turn employed to operate a mult.i.tude of the most powerful motors and machines of many descriptions.

So great is the might of this willing agent that at a single turn of the hand of man it rushes forth to do work for him far exceeding in wonder and extent any labour of the G.o.ds of mythological renown.

CHAPTER X.

HOISTING, CONVEYING AND STORING.

Allusion has been made to the stupendous buildings and works of the ancients and of the middle ages; the immense mult.i.tude of workers and great extent of time and labour employed in their construction; and how the awful drudgery involved in such undertakings was relieved by the invention of modern engineering devices--the cranes, the derricks, and the steam giants to operate them, so that vast loads which required large numbers of men and beasts to move, and long periods of time in which to move them, can now be lifted with ease and carried to great heights and distances in a few minutes by the hands of one or of a few men.

But outside of the line of such undertakings there is an immense field of labor-saving appliances adapted for use in transportation of smaller loads from place to place, within and without buildings, and for carrying people and freight from the lower to the upper stories of tall structures. In fact the tall buildings which we see now in almost every great city towering cloudward from the ground to the height of fifteen, twenty and twenty-five stories, would have been extravagant and useless had not the invention of the modern elevator rendered their highest parts as easy of access as their lowest, and at the same time given to the air s.p.a.ce above the city lot as great a commercial value in feet and inches as the stretch of earth itself.

Many of the "sky-sc.r.a.pers" so called, are splendid monuments of the latest inventions of the century.

It is by means of the modern elevator that the business of a whole town may be transacted under a single roof.

In the multiplicity of modern human contrivances by which the sweat and drudgery of life are saved, and time economised for worthier objects, we are apt to overlook the painful and laborious steps by which they were reached, and to regard with impatience, or at least with indifference, the story of their evolution; and yet no correct or profound knowledge of the growth of humanity to its higher planes can be obtained without noting to what extent the minor inventions, as well as the startling ones, have aided the upward progress.

For instance, consider how few and comparatively awkward were the mechanical means before this century. The innumerable army of men when men were slaves, and when blood and muscle and brain were cheap, who, labouring with the beast, toiled upward for years on inclined ways to lay the stones of the stupendous pyramids, still had their counterpart centuries later in the stream of men carrying on their shoulders the loads of grain and other freight and burdens from the sh.o.r.e to the holds of vessels, from vessels to the sh.o.r.e, from the ground to high buildings and from one part of great warehouses to another. Now look at a vessel moved to a wharf, capable of holding fifty thousand or one hundred thousand bushels of grain and having that amount poured into it in three hours from the spouts of an elevator, to which the grain has been carried in a myriad buckets on a chain by steam power in about the same time; or to those arrangements of carriers, travelling on ropes, cords, wires, or cables, by which materials are quickly conveyed from one part of some structure or place to another, as hay and grain in barns or mows, ores from mines to cars, merchandise of all kinds from one part of a great store to another; or shot through pipes underground from one section of a city or town to their destination by a current of air.

True, as it has before been stated, the ancients and later generations had the wedge, the pulley, the inclined plane, the screw and the windla.s.s, and by these powers, modified in form and increased in size as the occasion demanded, in the form of cranes, derricks, and operated by animal power, materials were lifted and transported; but down to the time of the practical and successful application of steam by Watt in the latter part of the 18th century, and until a much later period in most places in the world, these simple means actuated alone by men or animals were the best means employed for elevating and conveying loads, and even they were employed to a comparatively limited extent.

The century was well started before it was common to employ cups on elevator bands in mills, invented by Oliver Evans in 1780, to carry grain to the top of the mill, from whence it was to fall by gravity to the grinding and flouring apparatus below. It was not until 1795 that that powerful modern apparatus--the hydraulic, or hydrostatic, press was patented by Bramah in England. The model he then made is now in the museum of the Commissioner of Patents, London. In this a reservoir for water is provided, on which is placed a pump having a piston rod worked by a hand lever. The water is conveyed from the reservoir to a cylinder by a pipe, and this cylinder is provided with a piston carrying at its top a table, which rises between guides. The load to be carried is placed on this table, and as the machine was at first designed to compress materials the load is pressed by the rising table against an upper stationary plate. The elevation of the table is proportionate to the quant.i.ty of water injected, and the power proportionate to the receptive areas of the pump and the cylinder. The first great application of machines built on this principle was by Robert Stephenson in the elevation of the gigantic tubes for the tubular bridge across the Menai straits, already described in the chapter on Civil Engineering.

The century was half through with before it was proposed to use water and steam for pa.s.senger elevators.

In 1852 J. T. Slade in England patented a device consisting of a drum to be actuated by steam, water, or compressed air, around which drum ropes were wound, and to which ropes were attached separate cages in separate wells, to counterbalance each other, the cages moving in guides, and provided with brakes and levers to stop and control the cages and the movement of the drum. Louis T. Van Elvean, also of England, in 1858 invented counterbalance weights for such lifts. Otis, an American, invented and patented in America and England in 1859 the first approach to the modern pa.s.senger elevator for hotels, warehouses, and other structures. The motive power was preferably a steam engine; and the elevating means was a large screw placed vertically and made to revolve by suitable gearing, and a cylinder to which the car was attached, having projections to work in the threads of the screw. Means were provided to start and to stop the car, and to r.e.t.a.r.d its otherwise sudden fall and stoppage.

Elevators, which are now so largely used to raise pa.s.sengers and freight from the lower to the upper stories of high edifices, have for their motive power steam, water, compressed air, and electricity. With steam a drum is rotated over which a hoisting wire-rope is wound, to which the elevator car is attached. The car for pa.s.sengers may be a small but elegantly furnished room, which is carried on guide blocks, and the stationary guides are provided with ratchet teeth with which pawls on the car are adapted to engage should the hoisting rope give way. To the hoisting rope is attached a counterbalance weight to partly meet the weight of the car in order to prevent the car from sticking fast on its pa.s.sage, and also to prevent a sudden dropping of the car should the rope become slack. A hand rope for the operator is provided, which at its lower end is connected with a starting lever controlling the valves of the cylinders into which steam is admitted to start the piston shaft, which in turn actuates the gear wheels, by which movement the ropes are wound around the drums.

In another form of steam elevator the drums are turned in opposite directions, by right and left worms driven by a belt.

In the hydraulic form of elevator, a motor worked by water is employed to lift the car, although steam power is also employed to raise the water. The car is connected to wire cables pa.s.sing over large sheaves at the top of the well room to a counterbalancing bucket. This bucket fits closely in a water-tight upright tube, or stand-pipe, about two feet in diameter, extending from the bas.e.m.e.nt to the upper story. Near this stand-pipe in the upper story is placed a water supply tank. A pipe discharges the water from the tank into the bucket, which moves up and down in the stand pipe. There is a valve in the tank which is opened by stepping on a treadle in the car, and this action admits to the bucket just enough weight of water to overbalance the load on the car. As soon as the bucket is heavier than the car it descends, and of course draws the car upward, thus using the minimum power required to raise each load, rather than, when steam is employed, the full power of the engine each and every time. The speed is controlled by means of brakes or clamps that firmly clasp wrought-iron slides secured to posts on each side of the well room, the operator having control of these brakes by a lever on the car. When the car has ascended as far as desired, the operator steps upon another treadle in the car connected with a valve in the bottom of the bucket and thus discharges the water into the receiving tank below until the car is heavier than the bucket, when it then of course descends. The water is thus taken from the upper tank into the bucket, discharged through the stand-pipe into the receiving tank under the floor of the bas.e.m.e.nt and then pumped back again to the upper tank, so that it is used over and over again without loss.