*Project Gutenberg's The Age of Invention, by Holland Thompson*

Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.

Please do not remove this.

This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
Do not change or edit it without written permission.  The words
are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
need about what they can legally do with the texts.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.

Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota,
Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states
are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will
begin in the additional states. These donations should be made to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655


Title: The Age of Invention, A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest

Author: Holland Thompson

Release Date:  November, 2001  [Etext #2900]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]

Edition:  10

*Project Gutenberg's The Age of Invention, by Holland Thompson*
******This file should be named nvent10.txt or nvent10.zip*****

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, nvent11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, nvent10a.txt

THIS BOOK, 37 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, WAS DONATED TO
PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES J. KELLY
LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.

Scanned by Dianne Bean.

Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
the official publication date.

Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our sites at:
http://gutenberg.net
http://promo.net/pg


Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext01
or
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext01

Or /etext00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
manage to get some real funding.

Something is needed to create a future for Project Gutenberg for
the next 100 years.

We need your donations more than ever!

Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in:
Texas, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota,
Iowa, Indiana, and Vermont. As the requirements for other states
are met, additions to this list will be made and fund raising will
begin in the additional states.

All donations should be made to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and will be tax deductible to the extent
permitted by law.

Mail to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Avenue
Oxford, MS 38655  [USA]

We are working with the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation to build more stable support and ensure the
future of Project Gutenberg.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

You can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .

We would prefer to send you this information by email.


Example command-line FTP session:

ftp metalab.unc.edu
login: anonymous
password: your@login
cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext01, etc.
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain etexts, and royalty free copyright licenses.
If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.07.00*END*





THIS BOOK, 37 IN THE CHRONICLES OF AMERICA SERIES, WAS DONATED TO
PROJECT GUTENBERG BY THE JAMES J. KELLY
LIBRARY OF ST. GREGORY'S UNIVERSITY; THANKS TO ALEV AKMAN.





Scanned by Dianne Bean.





THE AGE OF INVENTION, A CHRONICLE OF MECHANICAL CONQUEST

BY HOLLAND THOMPSON




PREFATORY NOTE

This volume is not intended to be a complete record of inventive
genius and mechanical progress in the United States. A bare
catalogue of notable American inventions in the nineteenth
century alone could not be compressed into these pages. Nor is it
any part of the purpose of this book to trespass on the ground of
the many mechanical works and encyclopedias which give technical
descriptions and explain in detail the principle of every
invention. All this book seeks to do is to outline the
personalities of some of the outstanding American inventors and
indicate the significance of their achievements.

Acknowledgments are due the Editor of the Series and to members
of the staff of the Yale University Press particularly, Miss
Constance Lindsay Skinner, Mr. Arthur Edwin Krows, and Miss
Frances Hart--without whose intelligent assistance the book could
not have been completed in time to take its place in the Series.

H. T.

COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
May 10, 1921.

CONTENTS

I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES

II. ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN

III. STEAM IN CAPTIVITY

IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND

V. THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

VI. AGENTS OF COMMUNICATION

VII. THE STORY OF RUBBER

VIII. PIONEERS OF THE MACHINE SHOP

IX. THE FATHERS OF ELECTRICITY

X. THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



THE AGE OF INVENTION

CHAPTER I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS TIMES

On Milk Street, in Boston, opposite the Old South Church, lived
Josiah Franklin, a maker of soap and candles. He had come to
Boston with his wife about the year 1682 from the parish of
Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, where his family had lived on a
small freehold for about three hundred years. His English wife
had died, leaving him seven children, and he had married a
colonial girl, Abiah Folger, whose father, Peter Folger, was a
man of some note in early Massachusetts.

Josiah Franklin was fifty-one and his wife Abiah thirty-nine,
when the first illustrious American inventor was born in their
house on Milk Street, January 17, 1706. He was their eighth child
and Josiah's tenth son and was baptized Benjamin. What little we
know of Benjamin's childhood is contained in his "Autobiography",
which the world has accepted as one of its best books and which
was the first American book to be so accepted. In the crowded
household, where thirteen children grew to manhood and womanhood,
there were no luxuries. Benjamin's period of formal schooling was
less than two years, though he could never remember the time when
he could not read, and at the age of ten he was put to work in
his father's shop.

Benjamin was restless and unhappy in the shop. He appeared to
have no aptitude at all for the business of soap making. His
parents debated whether they might not educate him for the
ministry, and his father took him into various shops in Boston,
where he might see artisans at work, in the hope that he would be
attracted to some trade. But Benjamin saw nothing there that he
wished to engage in. He was inclined to follow the sea, as one of
his older brothers had done.

His fondness for books finally determined his career. His older
brother James was a printer, and in those days a printer was a
literary man as well as a mechanic. The editor of a newspaper was
always a printer and often composed his articles as he set them
in type; so "composing" came to mean typesetting, and one who
sets type is a compositor. Now James needed an apprentice. It
happened then that young Benjamin, at the age of thirteen, was
bound over by law to serve his brother.

James Franklin printed the "New England Courant", the fourth
newspaper to be established in the colonies. Benjamin soon began
to write articles for this newspaper. Then when his brother was
put in jail, because he had printed matter considered libelous,
and forbidden to continue as the publisher, the newspaper
appeared in Benjamin's name.

The young apprentice felt that his brother was unduly severe and,
after serving for about two years, made up his mind to run away.
Secretly he took passage on a sloop and in three days reached New
York, there to find that the one printer in the town, William
Bradford, could give him no work. Benjamin then set out for
Philadelphia. By boat to Perth Amboy, on foot to Burlington, and
then by boat to Philadelphia was the course of his journey, which
consumed five days. On a Sunday morning in October, 1723, the
tired, hungry boy landed upon the Market Street wharf, and at
once set out to find food and explore America's metropolis.

Benjamin found employment with Samuel Keimer, an eccentric
printer just beginning business, and lodgings at the house of
Read, whose daughter Deborah was later to become his wife. The
intelligent young printer soon attracted the notice of Sir
William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania, who promised to set him
up in business. First, however, he must go to London to buy a
printing outfit. On the Governor's promise to send a letter of
credit for his needs in London, Franklin set sail; but the
Governor broke his word, and Franklin was obliged to remain in
London nearly two years working at his trade. It was in London
that he printed the first of his many pamphlets, an attack on
revealed religion, called "A Dissertation on Liberty and
Necessity, Pleasure and Pain." Though he met some interesting
persons, from each of whom he extracted, according to his custom,
every particle of information possible, no future opened for him
in London, and he accepted an offer to return to Philadelphia
with employment as a clerk. But early in 1727 his employer died,
and Benjamin went back to his trade, as printers always do. He
found work again in Keimer's printing office. Here his mechanical
ingenuity and general ability presently began to appear; he
invented a method of casting type, made ink, and became, in fact,
the real manager of the business.

The ability to make friends was one of Franklin's traits, and the
number of his acquaintances grew rapidly, both in Pennsylvania
and New Jersey. "I grew convinced," he naively says, "that TRUTH,
SINCERITY, and INTEGRITY in dealings between man and man were of
the utmost importance to the felicity of life." Not long after
his return from England he founded in Philadelphia the Junto, a
society which at its regular meetings argued various questions
and criticized the writings of the members. Through this society
he enlarged his reputation as well as his education.

The father of an apprentice at Keimer's furnished the money to
buy a printing outfit for his son and Franklin, but the son soon
sold his share, and Benjamin Franklin, Printer, was fairly
established in business at the age of twenty-four. The writing of
an anonymous pamphlet on "The Nature and Necessity of a Paper
Currency" called attention to the need of a further issue of
paper money in Pennsylvania, and the author of the tract was
rewarded with the contract to print the money, "a very profitable
job, and a great help to me." Small favors were thankfully
received. And, "I took care not only to be in REALITY industrious
and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I drest
plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion." And, "to
show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home
the paper I purchased at the stores thru the streets on a
wheelbarrow."

"The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences and
Pennsylvania Gazette": this was the high-sounding name of a
newspaper which Franklin's old employer, Keimer, had started in
Philadelphia. But bankruptcy shortly overtook Keimer, and
Franklin took the newspaper with its ninety subscribers. The
"Universal Instructor" feature of the paper consisted of a page
or two weekly of "Chambers's Encyclopedia". Franklin eliminated
this feature and dropped the first part of the long name. "The
Pennsylvania Gazette" in Franklin's hands soon became profitable.
And it lives today in the fullness of abounding life, though
under another name. "Founded A.D. 1728 by Benj. Franklin" is the
proud legend of "The Saturday Evening Post", which carries on, in
our own times, the Franklin tradition.

The "Gazette" printed bits of local news, extracts from the
London "Spectator", jokes, verses, humorous attacks on Bradford's
"Mercury", a rival paper, moral essays by the editor, elaborate
hoaxes, and pungent political or social criticism. Often the
editor wrote and printed letters to himself, either to emphasize
some truth or to give him the opportunity to ridicule some folly
in a reply to "Alice Addertongue," "Anthony Afterwit," or other
mythical but none the less typical person.

If the countryman did not read a newspaper, or buy books, he was,
at any rate, sure to own an almanac. So in 1732 Franklin brought
out "Poor Richard's Almanac". Three editions were sold within a
few months. Year after year the sayings of Richard Saunders, the
alleged publisher, and Bridget, his wife, creations of Franklin's
fancy, were printed in the almanac. Years later the most striking
of these sayings were collected and published. This work has been
translated into as many as twenty languages and is still in
circulation today.

Franklin kept a shop in connection with his printing office,
where he sold a strange variety of goods: legal blanks, ink,
pens, paper, books, maps, pictures, chocolate, coffee, cheese,
codfish, soap, linseed oil, broadcloth, Godfrey's cordial, tea,
spectacles, rattlesnake root, lottery tickets, and stoves--to
mention only a few of the many articles he advertised. Deborah
Read, who became his wife in 1730, looked after his house, tended
shop, folded and stitched pamphlets, bought rags, and helped him
to live economically. "We kept no idle servants, " says Franklin,
"our table was plain and simple, our furniture of the cheapest.
For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and milk (no
tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer with a
pewter spoon."

With all this frugality, Franklin was not a miser; he abhorred
the waste of money, not the proper use. His wealth increased
rapidly. "I experienced too," he says, "the truth of the
observation, 'THAT AFTER GETTING THE FIRST HUNDRED POUND, IT IS
MORE EASY TO GET THE SECOND, money itself being of a prolific
nature." He gave much unpaid public service and subscribed
generously to public purposes; yet he was able, at the early age
of forty-two, to turn over his printing office to one of his
journeymen, and to retire from active business, intending to
devote himself thereafter to such public employment as should
come his way, to philosophical or scientific studies, and to
amusements.

From boyhood Franklin had been interested in natural phenomena.
His "Journal of a Voyage from London to Philadelphia", written at
sea as he returned from his first stay in London, shows unusual
powers of exact observation for a youth of twenty. Many of the
questions he propounded to the Junto had a scientific bearing. He
made an original and important invention in 1749, the
"Pennsylvania fireplace," which, under the name of the Franklin
stove, is in common use to this day, and which brought to the
ill-made houses of the time increased comfort and a great saving
of fuel. But it brought Franklin no pecuniary reward, for he
never deigned to patent any of his inventions.

His active, inquiring mind played upon hundreds of questions in a
dozen different branches of science. He studied smoky chimneys;
he invented bifocal spectacles; he studied the effect of oil upon
ruffled water; he identified the "dry bellyache" as lead
poisoning; he preached ventilation in the days when windows were
closed tight at night, and upon the sick at all times; he
investigated fertilizers in agriculture. Many of his suggestions
have since borne fruit, and his observations show that he foresaw
some of the great developments of the nineteenth century.

His fame in science rests chiefly upon his discoveries in
electricity. On a visit to Boston in 1746 he saw some electrical
experiments and at once became deeply interested. Peter Collinson
of London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who had made several
gifts to the Philadelphia Library, sent over some of the crude
electrical apparatus of the day, which Franklin used, as well as
some contrivances he had purchased in Boston. He says in a letter
to Collinson: "For my own part, I never was before engaged in any
study that so engrossed my attention and my time as this has
lately done."

Franklin's letters to Collinson tell of his first experiments and
speculations as to the nature of electricity. Experiments made by
a little group of friends showed the effect of pointed bodies in
drawing off electricity. He decided that electricity was not the
result of friction, but that the mysterious force was diffused
through most substances, and that nature is always alert to
restore its equilibrium. He developed the theory of positive and
negative electricity, or plus and minus electrification. The same
letter tells of some of the tricks which the little group of
experimenters were accustomed to play upon their wondering
neighbors. They set alcohol on fire, relighted candles just blown
out, produced mimic flashes of lightning, gave shocks on touching
or kissing, and caused an artificial spider to move mysteriously.

Franklin carried on experiments with the Leyden jar, made an
electrical battery, killed a fowl and roasted it upon a spit
turned by electricity, sent a current through water and found it
still able to ignite alcohol, ignited gunpowder, and charged
glasses of wine so that the drinkers received shocks. More
important, perhaps, he began to develop the theory of the
identity of lightning and electricity, and the possibility of
protecting buildings by iron rods. By means of an iron rod he
brought down electricity into his house, where he studied its
effect upon bells and concluded that clouds were generally
negatively electrified. In June, 1752, he performed the famous
experiment with the kite, drawing down electricity from the
clouds and charging a Leyden jar from the key at the end of the
string.

Franklin's letters to Collinson were read before the Royal
Society but were unnoticed. Collinson gathered them together, and
they were published in a pamphlet which attracted wide attention.
Translated into French, they created great excitement, and
Franklin's conclusions were generally accepted by the scientific
men of Europe. The Royal Society, tardily awakened, elected
Franklin a member and in 1753 awarded him the Copley medal with a
complimentary address.*

* It may be useful to mention some of the scientific facts and
mechanical principles which were known to Europeans at this time.
More than one learned essay has been written to prove the
mechanical indebtedness of the modern world to the ancient,
particularly to the works of those mechanically minded Greeks:
Archimedes, Aristotle, Ctesibius, and Hero of Alexandria. The
Greeks employed the lever, the tackle, and the crane, the
force-pump, and the suction-pump. They had discovered that steam
could be mechanically applied, though they never made any
practical use of steam. In common with other ancients they knew
the principle of the mariner's compass. The Egyptians had the
water-wheel and the rudimentary blast-furnace. The pendulum clock
appears to have been an invention of the Middle Ages. The art of
printing from movable type, beginning with Gutenberg about 1450,
helped to further the Renaissance. The improved mariner's compass
enabled Columbus to find the New world; gunpowder made possible
its conquest. The compound microscope and the first practical
telescope came from the spectacle makers of Middelburg, Holland,
the former about 1590 and the latter about 1608. Harvey, an
English physician, had discovered the circulation of the blood in
1628, and Newton, an English mathematician, the law of
gravitation in 1685.


If Franklin's desire to continue his scientific researches had
been gratified, it is possible that he might have discovered some
of the secrets for which the world waited until Edison and his
contemporaries revealed them more than a century later.
Franklin's scientific reputation has grown with the years, and
some of his views seem in perfect accord with the latest
developments in electricity. But he was not to be permitted to
continue his experiments. He had shown his ability to manage men
and was to be called to a wider field.

Franklin's influence among his fellow citizens in Philadelphia
was very great. Always ostensibly keeping himself in the
background and working through others, never contradicting, but
carrying his point by shrewd questions which showed the folly of
the contrary position, he continued to set on foot and carry out
movements for the public good. He established the first
circulating library in Philadelphia, and one of the first in the
country, and an academy which grew into the University of
Pennsylvania. He was instrumental in the foundation of a
hospital. "I am often ask'd by those to whom I propose
subscribing," said one of the doctors who had made fruitless
attempts to raise money for the hospital, "Have you consulted
Franklin upon this business?" Other public matters in which the
busy printer was engaged were the paving and cleaning of the
streets, better street lighting, the organization of a police
force and of a fire company. A pamphlet which he published,
"Plain Truth", showing the helplessness of the colony against the
French and Indians, led to the organization of a volunteer
militia, and funds were raised for arms by a lottery. Franklin
himself was elected colonel of the Philadelphia regiment, "but
considering myself unfit, I declined the station and recommended
Mr. Lawrence, a fine person and man of influence, who was
accordingly appointed." In spite of his militarism, Franklin
retained the position which he held as Clerk of the Assembly,
though the majority of the members were Quakers opposed to war on
principle.

The American Philosophical Society owes its origin to Franklin.
It was formally organized on his motion in 1743, but the society
has accepted the organization of the Junto in 1727 as the actual
date of its birth. From the beginning the society has had among
its members many leading men of scientific attainments or tastes,
not only of Philadelphia, but of the world. In 1769 the original
society was consolidated with another of similar aims, and
Franklin, who was the first secretary of the society, was elected
president and served until his death. The first important
undertaking was the successful observation of the transit of
Venus in 1769, and many important scientific discoveries have
since been made by its members and first given to the world at
its meetings.

Franklin's appointment as one of the two Deputy Postmasters
General of the colonies in 1753 enlarged his experience and his
reputation. He visited nearly all the post offices in the
colonies and introduced many improvements into the service. In
none of his positions did his transcendent business ability show
to better advantage. He established new postal routes and
shortened others. There were no good roads in the colonies, but
his post riders made what then seemed wonderful speed. The bags
were opened to newspapers, the carrying of which had previously
been a private and unlawful perquisite of the riders. Previously
there had been one mail a week in summer between New York and
Philadelphia and one a month in winter. The service was increased
to three a week in summer and one in winter.

The main post road ran from northern New England to Savannah,
closely hugging the seacoast for the greater part of the way.
Some of the milestones set by Franklin to enable the postmasters
to compute the postage, which was fixed according to distance,
are still standing. Crossroads connected some of the larger
communities away from the seacoast with the main road, but when
Franklin died, after serving also as Postmaster General of the
United States, there were only seventy-five post offices in the
entire country.

Franklin took a hand in the final struggle between France and
England in America. On the eve of the conflict, in 1754,
commissioners from the several colonies were ordered to convene
at Albany for a conference with the Six Nations of the Iroquois,
and Franklin was one of the deputies from Pennsylvania. On his
way to Albany he "projected and drew a plan for the union of all
the colonies under one government so far as might be necessary
for defense and other important general purposes." This
statesmanlike "Albany Plan of Union," however, came to nothing.
"Its fate was singular," says Franklin; "the assemblies did not
adopt it, as they all thought there was too much PREROGATIVE in
it and in England it was judg'd to have too much of the
DEMOCRATIC."

How to raise funds for defense was always a grave problem in the
colonies, for the assemblies controlled the purse-strings and
released them with a grudging hand. In face of the French menace,
this was Governor Shirley's problem in Massachusetts, Governor
Dinwiddie's in Virginia, and Franklin's in the Quaker and
proprietary province of Pennsylvania. Franklin opposed Shirley's
suggestion of a general tax to be levied on the colonies by
Parliament, on the ground of no taxation without representation,
but used all his arts to bring the Quaker Assembly to vote money
for defense, and succeeded. When General Braddock arrived in
Virginia Franklin was sent by the Assembly to confer with him in
the hope of allaying any prejudice against Quakers that the
general might have conceived. If that blustering and dull-witted
soldier had any such prejudice, it melted away when the envoy of
the Quakers promised to procure wagons for the army. The story of
Braddock's disaster does not belong here, but Franklin formed a
shrewd estimate of the man which proved accurate. His account of
Braddock's opinion of the colonial militia is given in a
sentence: "He smil'd at my ignorance, and reply'd, 'These savages
may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia,
but upon the King's regular and disciplin'd troops, sir, it is
impossible they should make any impression.'" After Braddock's
defeat the Pennsylvania Assembly voted more money for defense,
and the unmilitary Franklin was placed in command of the frontier
with full power. He built forts, as he had planned, and
incidentally learned much of the beliefs of a group of settlers
in the back country, the "Unitas Fratrum," better known as the
Moravians.

The death struggle between English and French in America served
only to intensify a lesser conflict that was being waged between
the Assembly and the proprietors of Pennsylvania; and the
Assembly determined to send Franklin to London to seek judgment
against the proprietors and to request the King to take away from
them the government of Pennsylvania. Franklin, accompanied by his
son William, reached London in July, 1757, and from this time on
his life was to be closely linked with Europe. He returned to
America six years later and made a trip of sixteen hundred miles
inspecting postal affairs, but in 1764 he was again sent to
England to renew the petition for a royal government for
Pennsylvania, which had not yet been granted. Presently that
petition was made obsolete by the Stamp Act, and Franklin became
the representative of the American colonies against King and
Parliament.

Franklin did his best to avert the Revolution. He made many
friends in England, wrote pamphlets and articles, told comical
stories and fables where they might do some good, and constantly
strove to enlighten the ruling class of England upon conditions
and sentiment in the colonies. His examination before the House
of Commons in February, 1766, marks perhaps the zenith of his
intellectual powers. His wide knowledge, his wonderful poise, his
ready wit, his marvelous gift for clear and epigrammatic
statement, were never exhibited to better advantage and no doubt
hastened the repeal of the Stamp Act. Franklin remained in
England nine years longer, but his efforts to reconcile the
conflicting claims of Parliament and the colonies were of no
avail, and early in 1775 he sailed for home.

Franklin's stay in America lasted only eighteen months, yet
during that time he sat in the Continental Congress and as a
member of the most important committees; submitted a plan for a
union of the colonies; served as Postmaster General and as
chairman of the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety; visited
Washington at Cambridge; went to Montreal to do what he could for
the cause of independence in Canada; presided over the convention
which framed a constitution for Pennsylvania; was a member of the
committee appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence and
of the committee sent on the futile mission to New York to
discuss terms of peace with Lord Howe.

In September, 1776, Franklin was appointed envoy to France and
sailed soon afterwards. The envoys appointed to act with him
proved a handicap rather than a help, and the great burden of a
difficult and momentous mission was thus laid upon an old man of
seventy. But no other American could have taken his place. His
reputation in France was already made, through his books and
inventions and discoveries. To the corrupt and licentious court
he was the personification of the age of simplicity, which it was
the fashion to admire; to the learned, he was a sage; to the
common man he was the apotheosis of all the virtues; to the
rabble he was little less than a god. Great ladies sought his
smiles; nobles treasured a kindly word; the shopkeeper hung his
portrait on the wall; and the people drew aside in the streets
that he might pass without annoyance. Through all this adulation
Franklin passed serenely, if not unconsciously.

The French ministers were not at first willing to make a treaty
of alliance, but under Franklin's influence they lent money to
the struggling colonies. Congress sought to finance the war by
the issue of paper currency and by borrowing rather than by
taxation, and sent bill after bill to Franklin, who somehow
managed to meet them by putting his pride in his pocket, and
applying again and again to the French Government. He fitted out
privateers and negotiated with the British concerning prisoners.
At length he won from France recognition of the United States and
then the Treaty of Alliance.

Not until two years after the Peace of 1783 would Congress permit
the veteran to come home. And when he did return in 1785 his
people would not allow him to rest. At once he was elected
President of the Council of Pennsylvania and twice reelected in
spite of his protests. He was sent to the Convention of 1787
which framed the Constitution of the United States. There he
spoke seldom but always to the point, and the Constitution is the
better for his suggestions. With pride he axed his signature to
that great instrument, as he had previously signed the Albany
Plan of Union, the Declaration of Independence, and the Treaty of
Paris.

Benjamin Franklin's work was done. He was now an old man of
eighty-two summers and his feeble body was racked by a painful
malady. Yet he kept his face towards the morning. About a hundred
of his letters, written after this time, have been preserved.
These letters show no retrospection, no looking backward. They
never mention "the good old times." As long as he lived, Franklin
looked forward. His interest in the mechanical arts and in
scientific progress seems never to have abated. He writes in
October, 1787, to a friend in France, describing his experience
with lightning conductors and referring to the work of David
Rittenhouse, the celebrated astronomer of Philadelphia. On the
31st of May in the following year he is writing to the Reverend
John Lathrop of Boston:

"I have long been impressed with the same sentiments you so well
express, of the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvement
in philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of
common living, and the invention of new and useful utensils and
instruments; so that I have sometimes wished it had been my
destiny to be born two or three centuries hence. For invention
and improvement are prolific, and beget more of their kind. The
present progress is rapid. Many of great importance, now
unthought of, will, before that period, be produced."

Thus the old philosopher felt the thrill of dawn and knew that
the day of great mechanical inventions was at hand. He had read
the meaning of the puffing of the young steam engine of James
Watt and he had heard of a marvelous series of British inventions
for spinning and weaving. He saw that his own countrymen were
astir, trying to substitute the power of steam for the strength
of muscles and the fitful wind. John Fitch on the Delaware and
James Rumsey on the Potomac were already moving vessels by steam.
John Stevens of New York and Hoboken had set up a machine shop
that was to mean much to mechanical progress in America. Oliver
Evans, a mechanical genius of Delaware, was dreaming of the
application of high-pressure steam to both road and water
carriages. Such manifestations, though still very faint, were to
Franklin the signs of a new era.

And so, with vision undimmed, America's most famous citizen lived
on until near the end of the first year of George Washington's
administration. On April 17, 1790, his unconquerable spirit took
its flight.


In that year, 1790, was taken the First Census of the United
States. The new nation had a population of about four million
people. It then included practically the present territory east
of the Mississippi, except the Floridas, which belonged to Spain.
But only a small part of this territory was occupied. Much of New
York and Pennsylvania was savage wilderness. Only the seacoast of
Maine was inhabited, and the eighty-two thousand inhabitants of
Georgia hugged the Savannah River. Hardy pioneers had climbed the
Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, but the Northwest
Territory--comprising Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and
Wisconsin--was not enumerated at all, so scanty were its people,
perhaps not more than four thousand.

Though the First Census did not classify the population by
occupation it is certain that nine-tenths of the breadwinners
worked more or less upon the soil. The remaining tenth were
engaged in trade, transportation, manufacturing, fishing and
included also the professional men, doctors, lawyers, clergymen,
teachers, and the like. In other words, nine out of ten of the
population were engaged primarily in the production of food, an
occupation which today engages less than three out of ten. This
comparison, however, requires some qualification. The farmer and
the farmer's wife and children performed many tasks which are now
done in factories. The successful farmer on the frontier had to
be a jack of many trades. Often he tanned leather and made shoes
for his family and harness for his horses. He was carpenter,
blacksmith, cobbler, and often boat-builder and fisherman as
well. His wife made soap and candles, spun yarn and dyed it, wove
cloth and made the clothes the family wore, to mention only a few
of the tasks of the women of the eighteenth century.

The organization of industry, however, was beginning. Here and
there were small paper mills, glass factories-though many houses
in the back country were without glass windows--potteries, and
iron foundries and forges. Capitalists, in some places, had
brought together a few handloom weavers to make cloth for sale,
and the famous shoemakers of Massachusetts commonly worked in
groups.

The mineral resources of the United States were practically
unknown. The country seems to have produced iron enough for its
simple needs, some coal, copper, lead, gold, silver, and sulphur.
But we may say that mining was hardly practiced at all.

The fisheries and the shipyards were great sources of wealth,
especially for New England. The cod fishers numbered several
hundred vessels and the whalers about forty. Thousands of
citizens living along the seashore and the rivers fished more or
less to add to the local food supply. The deep-sea fishermen
exported a part of their catch, dried and salted. Yankee vessels
sailed to all ports of the world and carried the greater part of
the foreign commerce of the United States. Flour, tobacco, rice,
wheat, corn, dried fish, potash, indigo, and staves were the
principal exports. Great Britain was the best customer, with the
French West Indies next, and then the British West Indies. The
principal imports came from the same countries. Imports and
exports practically balanced each other, at about twenty million
dollars annually, or about five dollars a head. The great
merchants owned ships and many of them, such as John Hancock of
Boston, and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, had grown very rich.

Inland transportation depended on horses and oxen or boats. There
were few good roads, sometimes none at all save bridle paths and
trails. The settlers along the river valleys used boats almost
entirely. Stage-coaches made the journey from New York to Boston
in four days in summer and in six in winter. Two days were
required to go between New York and Philadelphia. Forty to fifty
miles a day was the speed of the best coaches, provided always
that they did not tumble into the ditch. In many parts of the
country one must needs travel on horseback or on foot.

Even the wealthiest Americans of those days had few or none of
the articles which we regard today as necessities of life. The
houses were provided with open--which, however cheerful, did not
keep them warm--or else with Franklin's stoves. To strike a fire
one must have the flint and tinderbox, for matches were unknown
until about 1830. Candles made the darkness visible. There was
neither plumbing nor running water. Food was cooked in the ashes
or over an open fire.

The farmer's tools were no less crude than his wife's. His plough
had been little improved since the days of Rameses. He sowed his
wheat by hand, cut it with a sickle, flailed it out upon the
floor, and laboriously winnowed away the chaff.


In that same year, 1790, came a great boon and encouragement to
inventors, the first Federal Patent Act, passed by Congress on
the 10th of April. Every State had its own separate patent laws
or regulations, as an inheritance from colonial days, but the
Fathers of the Constitution had wisely provided that this
function of government should be exercised by the nation.* The
Patent Act, however, was for a time unpopular, and some States
granted monopolies, particularly of transportation, until they
were forbidden to do so by judicial decision.

* The Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) empowers
Congress: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."


The first Patent Act provided that an examining board, consisting
of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the
Attorney-General, or any two of them, might grant a patent for
fourteen years, if they deemed the invention useful and
important. The patent itself was to be engrossed and signed by
the President, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney-General.
And the cost was to be three dollars and seventy cents, plus the
cost of copying the specifications at ten cents a sheet.

The first inventor to avail himself of the advantages of the new
Patent Act was Samuel Hopkins of Vermont, who received a patent
on the 31st of July for an improved method of "Making Pot and
Pearl Ashes." The world knows nothing of this Samuel Hopkins, but
the potash industry, which was evidently on his mind, was quite
important in his day. Potash, that is, crude potassium carbonate,
useful in making soap and in the manufacture of glass, was made
by leaching wood ashes and boiling down the lye. To produce a ton
of potash, the trees on an acre of ground would be cut down and
burned, the ashes leached, and the lye evaporated in great iron
kettles. A ton of potash was worth about twenty-five dollars.
Nothing could show more plainly the relative value of money and
human labor in those early times.

Two more patents were issued during the year 1790. The second
went to Joseph S. Sampson of Boston for a method of making
candles, and the third to Oliver Evans, of whom we shall learn
more presently, for an improvement in manufacturing flour and
meal. The fourth patent was granted in 1791 to Francis Baily of
Philadelphia for making punches for types. Next Aaron Putnam of
Medford, Massachusetts, thought that he could improve methods of
distilling, and John Stone of Concord, Massachusetts, offered a
new method of driving piles for bridges. And a versatile
inventor, Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, received four patents
in one day for threshing grain, cutting and polishing marble,
raising a nap on cloth, and breaking hemp.

Then came improvements in making nails, in making bedsteads, in
the manufacture of boats, and for propelling boats by cattle. On
August 26, 1791, James Rumsey, John Stevens, and John Fitch (all
three will appear again in this narrative) took out patents on
means of propelling boats. On the same day Nathan Read received
one on a process for distilling alcohol.

More than fifty patents were granted under the Patent Act of
1790, and mechanical devices were coming in so thick and fast
that the department heads apparently found it inconvenient to
hear applications. So the Act of 1790 was repealed. The second
Patent Act (1793) provided that a patent should be granted as a
matter of routine to any one who swore to the originality of his
device and paid the sum of thirty dollars as a fee. No one except
a citizen, however, could receive a patent. This act, with some
amendments, remained in force until 1836, when the present Patent
Office was organized with a rigorous and intricate system for
examination of all claims in order to prevent interference.
Protection of the property rights of inventors has been from the
beginning of the nation a definite American policy, and to this
policy may be ascribed innumerable inventions which have
contributed to the greatness of American industry and multiplied
the world's comforts and conveniences.

Under the second Patent Act came the most important invention yet
offered, an invention which was to affect generations then
unborn. This was a machine for cleaning cotton and it was offered
by a young Yankee schoolmaster, temporarily sojourning in the
South.



CHAPTER II. ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN

The cotton industry is one of the most ancient. One or more of
the many species of the cotton plant is indigenous to four
continents, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the manufacture
of the fiber into yarn and cloth seems to have developed
independently in each of them. We find mention of cotton in India
fifteen hundred years before Christ. The East Indians, with only
the crudest machinery, spun yarn and wove cloth as diaphanous as
the best appliances of the present day have been able to produce.

Alexander the Great introduced the "vegetable wool" into Europe.
The fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost
down to modern times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an
extensive scale, but after their expulsion the industry
languished. The East India Company imported cotton fabrics into
England early in the seventeenth century, and these fabrics made
their way in spite of the bitter opposition of the woolen
interests, which were at times strong enough to have the use of
cotton cloth prohibited by law. But when the Manchester spinners
took up the manufacture of cotton, the fight was won. The
Manchester spinners, however, used linen for their warp threads,
for without machinery they could not spin threads sufficiently
strong from the short-fibered Indian cotton.

In the New World the Spanish explorers found cotton and cotton
fabrics in use everywhere. Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Magellan,
and others speak of the various uses to which the fiber was put,
and admired the striped awnings and the colored mantles made by
the natives. It seems probable that cotton was in use in the New
World quite as early as in India.

The first English settlers in America found little or no cotton
among the natives. But they soon began to import the fiber from
the West Indies, whence came also the plant itself into the
congenial soil and climate of the Southern colonies. During the
colonial period, however, cotton never became the leading crop,
hardly an important crop. Cotton could be grown profitably only
where there was an abundant supply of exceedingly cheap labor,
and labor in America, white or black, was never and could never
be as cheap as in India. American slaves could be much more
profitably employed in the cultivation of rice and indigo.

Three varieties of the cotton plant were grown in the South. Two
kinds of the black-seed or long-staple variety thrived in the
sea-islands and along the coast from Delaware to Georgia, but
only the hardier and more prolific green-seed or short-staple
cotton could. be raised inland. The labor of cultivating and
harvesting cotton of any kind was very great. The fiber, growing
in bolls resembling a walnut in size and shape, had to be taken
by hand from every boll, as it has to be today, for no
satisfactory cotton harvester has yet been invented. But in the
case of the green-seed or upland cotton, the only kind which
could ever be cultivated extensively in the South, there was
another and more serious obstacle in the way, namely, the
difficulty of separating the fiber from the seeds. No machine yet
devised could perform this tedious and unprofitable task. For the
black-seed or sea-island cotton, the churka, or roller gin, used
in India from time immemorial, drawing the fiber slowly between a
pair of rollers to push out the seeds, did the work imperfectly,
but this churka was entirely useless for the green-seed variety,
the fiber of which clung closely to the seed and would yield only
to human hands. The quickest and most skillful pair of hands
could separate only a pound or two of lint from its three pounds
of seeds in an ordinary working day. Usually the task was taken
up at the end of the day, when the other work was done. The
slaves sat round an overseer who shook the dozing and nudged the
slow. It was also the regular task for a rainy day. It is not
surprising, then, that cotton was scarce, that flax and wool in
that day were the usual textiles, that in 1783 wool furnished
about seventy-seven per cent, flax about eighteen per cent, and
cotton only about five per cent of the clothing of the people of
Europe and the United States.

That series of inventions designed for the manufacture of cloth,
and destined to transform Great Britain, the whole world, in
fact, was already completed in Franklin's time. Beginning with
the flying shuttle of John Kay in 1738, followed by the spinning
jenny of James Hargreaves in 1764, the water-frame of Richard
Arkwright in 1769, and the mule of Samuel Crompton ten years
later, machines were provided which could spin any quantity of
fiber likely to be offered. And when, in 1787, Edmund Cartwright,
clergyman and poet, invented the self-acting loom to which power
might be applied, the series was complete. These inventions,
supplementing the steam engine of James Watt, made the Industrial
Revolution. They destroyed the system of cottage manufactures in
England and gave birth to the great textile establishments of
today.

The mechanism for the production of cloth on a great scale was
provided, if only the raw material could be found.

The romance of cotton begins on a New England farm. It was on a
farm in the town (township) of Westboro, in Worcester County,
Massachusetts, in the year 1765, that Eli Whitney, inventor of
the cotton gin, was born. Eli's father was a man of substance and
standing in the community, a mechanic as well as a farmer, who
occupied his leisure in making articles for his neighbors. We are
told that young Eli displayed a passion for tools almost as soon
as he could walk, that he made a violin at the age of twelve and
about the same time took his father's watch to pieces
surreptitiously and succeeded in putting it together again so
successfully as to escape detection. He was able to make a table
knife to match the others of a broken set. As a boy of fifteen or
sixteen, during the War of Independence, he was supplying the
neighborhood with hand-made nails and various other articles.
Though he had not been a particularly apt pupil in the schools,
he conceived the ambition of attending college; and so, after
teaching several winters in rural schools, he went to Yale. He
appears to have paid his own way through college by the exercise
of his mechanical talents. He is said to have mended for the
college some imported apparatus which otherwise would have had to
go to the old country for repairs. "There was a good mechanic
spoiled when you came to college," he was told by a carpenter in
the town. There was no "Sheff" at Yale in those days to give
young men like Whitney scientific instruction; so, defying the
bent of his abilities, Eli went on with his academic studies,
graduated in 1792, at the age of twenty-seven, and decided to be
a teacher or perhaps a lawyer.

Like so many young New Englanders of the time, Whitney sought
employment in the South. Having received the promise of a
position in South Carolina, he embarked at New York, soon after
his graduation, on a sailing vessel bound for Savannah. On board
he met the widow of General Nathanael Greene of Revolutionary
fame, and this lady invited him to visit her plantation at
Mulberry Grove, near Savannah. What happened then is best told by
Eli Whitney himself, in a letter to his father, written at New
Haven, after his return from the South some months later, though
the spelling master will probably send Whitney to the foot of the
class:

"New Haven, Sept. 11th, 1793.

". . . I went from N. York with the family of the late Major
General Greene to Georgia. I went immediately with the family to
their Plantation about twelve miles from Savannah with an
expectation of spending four or five days and then proceed into
Carolina to take the school as I have mentioned in former
letters. During this time I heard much said of the extreme
difficulty of ginning Cotton, that is, seperating it from its
seeds. There were a number of very respectable Gentlemen at Mrs.
Greene's who all agreed that if a machine could be invented which
would clean the cotton with expedition, it would be a great thing
both to the Country and to the inventor. I involuntarily happened
to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a Machine
in my mind, which I communicated to Miller (who is agent to the
Executors of Genl. Greene and resides in the family, a man of
respectibility and property), he was pleased with the Plan and
said if I would pursue it and try an experiment to see if it
would answer, he would be at the whole expense, I should loose
nothing but my time, and if I succeeded we would share the
profits. Previous to this I found I was like to be disappointed
in my school, that is, instead of a hundred, I found I could get
only fifty Guineas a year. I however held the refusal of the
school untill I tried some experiments. In about ten Days I made
a little model, for which I was offered, if I would give up all
right and title to it, a Hundred Guineas. I concluded to
relinquish my school and turn my attention to perfecting the
Machine. I made one before I came away which required the labor
of one man to turn it and with which one man will clean ten times
as much cotton as he can in any other way before known and also
cleanse it much better than in the usual mode. This machine may
be turned by water or with a horse, with the greatest ease, and
one man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old
machines. It makes the labor fifty times less, without throwing
any class of People out of business.

"I returned to the Northward for the purpose of having a machine
made on a large scale and obtaining a Patent for the invintion. I
went to Philadelphia* soon after I arrived, made myself
acquainted with the steps necessary to obtain a Patent, took
several of the steps and the Secretary of State Mr. Jefferson
agreed to send the Pattent to me as soon it could be made out--so
that I apprehended no difficulty in obtaining the Patent--Since I
have been here I have employed several workmen in making machines
and as soon as my business is such that I can leave it a few
days, I shall come to Westboro'**. I think it is probable I shall
go to Philadelphia again before I come to Westboro', and when I
do come I shall be able to stay but few days. I am certain I can
obtain a patent in England. As soon as I have got a Patent in
America I shall go with the machine which I am now making, to
Georgia, where I shall stay a few weeks to see it at work. From
thence I expect to go to England, where I shall probably continue
two or three years. How advantageous this business will
eventually prove to me, I cannot say. It is generally said by
those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by
it. I have no expectation that I shall make an independent
fortune by it, but think I had better pursue it than any other
business into which I can enter. Something which cannot be
foreseen may frustrate my expectations and defeat my Plan; but I
am now so sure of success that ten thousand dollars, if I saw the
money counted out to me, would not tempt me to give up my right
and relinquish the object. I wish you, sir, not to show this
letter nor communicate anything of its contents to any body
except My Brothers and Sister, ENJOINING it on them to keep the
whole A PROFOUND SECRET."

* Then the national capital.

** Hammond, "Correspondence of Eli Whitney," American Historical
Review, vol. III, p. 99. The other citations in this chapter are
from the same source, unless otherwise stated.


The invention, however, could not be kept "a profound secret,"
for knowledge of it was already out in the cotton country.
Whitney's hostess, Mrs. Greene, had shown the wonderful machine
to some friends, who soon spread the glad tidings, and planters,
near and far, had come to Mulberry Grove to see it. The machine
was of very simple construction; any blacksmith or wheelwright,
knowing the principle of the design, could make one. Even before
Whitney could obtain his patent, cotton gins based on his were
being manufactured and used.

Whitney received his patent in March, 1794, and entered on his
new work with enthusiasm. His partner, Phineas Miller, was a
cultivated New England gentleman, a graduate of Yale College,
who, like Whitney, had sought his fortune as a teacher in the
South. He had been a tutor in the Greene household and on General
Greene's death had taken over the management of his estates. He
afterwards married Mrs. Greene. The partners decided to
manufacture the machines in New Haven, Whitney to give his time
to the production, Miller to furnish the capital and attend to
the firm's interests in the South.

At the outset the partners blundered seriously in their plan for
commercializing the invention. They planned to buy seed cotton
and clean it themselves; also to clean cotton for the planters on
the familiar toll system, as in grinding grain, taking a toll of
one pound of cotton out of every three. "Whitney's plan in
Georgia," says a recent writer, "as shown by his letters and
other evidence, was to own all the gins and gin all the cotton
made in the country. It is but human nature that this sort of
monopoly should be odious to any community."* Miller appears to
have calculated that the planters could afford to pay for the use
of the new invention about one-half of all the profits they
derived from its use. An equal division, between the owners of
the invention on the one hand and the cotton growers on the
other, of all the super-added wealth arising from the invention,
seemed to him fair. Apparently the full meaning of such an
arrangement did not enter his mind. Perhaps Miller and Whitney
did not see at first that the new invention would cause a
veritable industrial revolution, or that the system they planned,
if it could be made effective, would make them absolute masters
of the cotton country, with the most stupendous monopoly in the
world. Nor do they appear to have realized that, considering the
simple construction of their machine and the loose operation of
the patent law at that time, the planters of the South would
never submit to so great a tribute as they proposed to exact.
Their attempt in the first instance to set up an unfair monopoly
brought them presently into a sea of troubles, which they never
passed out of, even when they afterwards changed their tack and
offered to sell the machines with a license, or a license alone,
at a reasonable price.

* Tompkins, "Cotton and Cotton Oil", p. 86.


Misfortune pursued the partners from the beginning. Whitney
writes to his father from New Haven in May, 1794, that his
machines in Georgia are working well, but that he apprehends
great difficulty in manufacturing them as fast as they are
needed. In March of the following year he writes again, saying
that his factory in New Haven has been destroyed by fire: "When I
returned home from N. York I found my property all in ashes! My
shop, all my tools, material and work equal to twenty finished
cotton machines all gone. The manner in which it took fire is
altogether unaccountable." Besides, the partners found themselves
in distress for lack of capital. Then word came from England that
the Manchester spinners had found the ginned cotton to contain
knots, and this was sufficient to start the rumor throughout the
South that Whitney's gin injured the cotton fiber and that cotton
cleaned by them was worthless. It was two years before this ghost
was laid. Meanwhile Whitney's patent was being infringed on every
hand. "They continue to clean great quantities of cotton with
Lyon's Gin and sell it advantageously while the Patent ginned
cotton is run down as good for nothing," writes Miller to Whitney
in September, 1797. Miller and Whitney brought suits against the
infringers but they could obtain no redress in the courts.

Whitney's attitude of mind during these troubles is shown in his
letters. He says the statement that his machines injure the
cotton is false, that the source of the trouble is bad cotton,
which he ventures to think is improved fifty per cent by the use
of his gin, and that it is absurd to say that the cotton could be
injured in any way in the process of cleaning. "I think," he
says, writing to Miller, "you will be able to convince the CANDID
that this is quite a mistaken notion and them that WILL NOT
BELIEVE may be damn'd." Again, writing later to his friend Josiah
Stebbins in New England: "I have a set of the most Depraved
villains to combat and I might almost as well go to HELL in
search of HAPPINESS as apply to a Georgia Court for Justice." And
again: "You know I always believed in the 'DEPRAVITY OF HUMAN
NATURE.' I thought I was long ago sufficiently 'grounded and
stablished' in this Doctrine. But God Almighty is continually
pouring down cataracts of testimony upon me to convince me of
this fact. 'Lord I believe, help thou,' not 'mine unbelief,' but
me to overcome the rascality of mankind." His partner Miller, on
the other hand, is inclined to be more philosophical and suggests
to Whitney that "we take the affairs of this world patiently and
that the little dust which we may stir up about cotton may after
all not make much difference with our successors one hundred,
much less one thousand years hence." Miller, however, finally
concluded that, "the prospect of making anything by ginning in
this State [Georgia] is at an end. Surreptitious gins are being
erected in every part of the country; and the jurymen at Augusta
have come to an understanding among themselves, that they will
never give a verdict in our favor, let the merits of the case be
as they may."*

* Cited in Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 153.


Miller and Whitney were somewhat more fortunate in other States
than in Georgia though they nowhere received from the cotton gin
enough to compensate them for their time and trouble nor more
than a pitiable fraction of the great value of their invention.
South Carolina, in 1801, voted them fifty thousand dollars for
their patent rights, twenty thousand dollars to be paid down and
the remainder in three annual payments of ten thousand dollars
each. "We get but a song for it," wrote Whitney, "in comparison
with the worth of the thing, but it is securing something." Why
the partners were willing to take so small a sum was later
explained by Miller. They valued the rights for South Carolina at
two hundred thousand dollars, but, since the patent law was being
infringed with impunity, they were willing to take half that
amount; "and had flattered themselves," wrote Miller, "that a
sense of dignity and justice on the part of that honorable body
[the Legislature] would not have countenanced an offer of a less
sum than one hundred thousand dollars. Finding themselves,
however, to be mistaken in this opinion, and entertaining a
belief that the failure of such negotiation, after it commenced,
would have a tendency to diminish the prospect, already doubtful,
of enforcing the Patent Law, it was concluded to be best under
existing circumstances to accept the very inadequate sum of fifty
thousand dollars offered by the Legislature and thereby
relinquish and entirely abandon three-fourths of the actual value
of the property."

But even the fifty thousand dollars was not collected without
difficulty. South Carolina suspended the contract, after paying
twenty thousand dollars, and sued Miller and Whitney for recovery
of the sum paid, on the ground that the partners had not complied
with the conditions. Whitney succeeded, in 1805, in getting the
Legislature to reinstate the contract and pay him the remainder
of the money. Miller, discouraged and broken by the long
struggle, had died in the meantime.

The following passage from a letter written by Whitney in
February, 1805, to Josiah Stebbins, gives Whitney's views as to
the treatment he had received at the hands of the authorities. He
is writing from the residence of a friend near Orangeburg, South
Carolina.

"The principal object of my present excursion to this Country was
to get this business set right; which I have so far effected as
to induce the Legislature of this State to recind all their
former SUSPENDING LAWS and RESOLUTIONS, to agree once more to pay
the sum of 30,000 Dollars which was due and make the necessary
appropriations for that purpose. I have as yet however obtained
but a small part of this payment. The residue is promised me in
July next. Thus you see my RECOMPENSE OF REWARD is as the land of
Canaan was to the Jews, resting a long while in promise. If the
Nations with whom I have to contend are not as numerous as those
opposed to the Israelites, they are certainly much greater
HEATHENS, having their hearts hardened and their understanding
blinded, to make, propagate and believe all manner of lies.
Verily, Stebbins, I have had much vexation of spirit in this
business. I shall spend forty thousand dollars to obtain thirty,
and it will all end in vanity at last. A contract had been made
with the State of Tennessee which now hangs SUSPENDED. Two
attempts have been made to induce the State of No. Carolina to
RECIND their CONTRACT, neither of which have succeeded. Thus you
see Brother Steb. Sovreign and Independent States warped by
INTEREST will be ROGUES and misled by Demagogues will be FOOLS.
They have spent much time, MONEY and CREDIT, to avoid giving me a
small compensation, for that which to them is worth millions."


Meanwhile North Carolina had agreed to buy the rights for the
State on terms that yielded Whitney about thirty thousand
dollars, and it is estimated that he received about ten thousand
dollars from Tennessee, making his receipts in all about ninety
thousand dollars, before deducting costs of litigation and other
losses. The cotton gin was not profitable to its inventor. And
yet no invention in history ever so suddenly transformed an
industry and created enormous wealth. Eight years before
Whitney's invention, eight bales of cotton, landed at Liverpool,
were seized on the ground that so large a quantity of cotton
could not have been produced in the United States. The year
before that invention the United States exported less than one
hundred and forty thousand pounds of cotton; the year after it,
nearly half a million pounds; the next year over a million and a
half; a year later still, over six million; by 1800, nearly
eighteen million pounds a year. And by 1845 the United States was
producing producing seven-eighths of the world's cotton. Today
the United States produces six to eight billion pounds of cotton
annually, and ninety-nine per cent of this is the upland or
green-seed cotton, which is cleaned on the Whitney type of gin
and was first made commercially available by Whitney's
invention.*

* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", pp. 150-51.


More than half of this enormous crop is still exported in spite
of the great demand at home. Cotton became and has continued to
be the greatest single export of the United States. In ordinary
years its value is greater than the combined value of the three
next largest exports. It is on cotton that the United States has
depended for the payment of its trade balance to Europe.

Other momentous results followed on the invention of the cotton
gin. In 1793 slavery seemed a dying institution, North and South.
Conditions of soil and climate made slavery unprofitable in the
North. On many of the indigo, rice, and tobacco plantations in
the South there were more slaves than could be profitably
employed, and many planters were thinking of emancipating their
slaves, when along came this simple but wonderful machine and
with it the vision of great riches in cotton; for while slaves
could not earn their keep separating the cotton from its seeds by
hand, they could earn enormous profits in the fields, once the
difficulty of extracting the seeds was solved. Slaves were no
longer a liability but an asset. The price of "field hands" rose,
and continued to rise. If the worn-out lands of the seaboard no
longer afforded opportunity for profitable employment, the rich
new lands of the Southwest called for laborers, and yet more
laborers. Taking slaves with them, younger sons pushed out into
the wilderness, became possessed of great tracts of fertile land,
and built up larger plantations than those upon which they had
been born. Cotton became King of the South.

The supposed economic necessity of slave labor led great men to
defend slavery, and politics in the South became largely the
defense of slavery against the aggression, real or fancied, of
the free North. The rift between the sections became a chasm.
Then came the War of Secession.

Though Miller was dead, Whitney carried on the fight for his
rights in Georgia. His difficulties were increased by a patent
which the Government at Philadelphia issued in May, 1796, to
Hogden Holmes, a mechanic of Augusta, for an improvement in the
cotton gin. The Holmes machines were soon in common use, and it
was against the users of these that many of the suits for
infringement were brought. Suit after suit ran its course in the
Georgia courts, without a single decision in the inventor's
favor. At length, however, in December, 1806, the validity of
Whitney's patent was finally determined by decision of the United
States Circuit Court in Georgia. Whitney asked for a perpetual
injunction against the Holmes machine, and the court, finding
that his invention was basic, granted him all that he asked.

By this time, however, the life of the patent had nearly run its
course. Whitney applied to Congress for a renewal, but, in spite
of all his arguments and a favorable committee report, the
opposition from the cotton States proved too strong, and his
application was denied. Whitney now had other interests. He was a
great manufacturer of firearms, at New Haven, and as such we
shall meet him again in a later chapter.



CHAPTER III. STEAM IN CAPTIVITY

For the beginnings of the enslavement of steam, that mighty giant
whose work has changed the world we live in, we must return to
the times of Benjamin Franklin. James Watt, the accredited father
of the modern steam engine, was a contemporary of Franklin, and
his engine was twenty-one years old when Franklin died. The
discovery that steam could be harnessed and made to work is not,
of course, credited to James Watt. The precise origin of that
discovery is unknown. The ancient Greeks had steam engines of a
sort, and steam engines of another sort were pumping water out of
mines in England when James Watt was born. James Watt, however,
invented and applied the first effective means by which steam
came to serve mankind. And so the modern steam engine begins with
him.

The story is old, of how this Scottish boy, James Watt, sat on
the hearth in his mother's cottage, intently watching the steam
rising from the mouth of the tea kettle, and of the great role
which this boy afterwards assumed in the mechanical world. It was
in 1763, when he was twenty-eight and had the appointment of
mathematical-instrument maker to the University of Glasgow, that
a model of Newcomen's steam pumping engine was brought into his
shop for repairs. One can perhaps imagine the feelings with which
James Watt, interested from his youth in mechanical and
scientific instruments, particularly those which dealt with
steam, regarded this Newcomen engine. Now his interest was
vastly. quickened. He set up the model and operated it, noticed
how the alternate heating and cooling of its cylinder wasted
power, and concluded, after some weeks of experiment, that, in
order to make the engine practicable, the cylinder must be kept
hot, "always as hot as the steam which entered it." Yet in order
to condense the steam there must be a cooling of the vessel. The
problem was to reconcile these two conditions.

At length the pregnant idea occurred to him--the idea of the
separate condenser. It came to him on a Sunday afternoon in 1765,
as he walked across Glasgow Green. If the steam were condensed in
a vessel separate from the cylinder, it would be quite possible
to keep the condensing vessel cool and the cylinder hot at the
same time. Next morning Watt began to put his scheme to the test
and found it practicable. He developed other ideas and applied
them. So at last was born a steam engine that would work and
multiply man's energies a thousandfold.

After one or two disastrous business experiences, such as fall to
the lot of many great inventors, perhaps to test their
perseverance, Watt associated himself with Matthew Boulton, a man
of capital and of enterprise, owner of the Soho Engineering
Works, near Birmingham. The firm of Boulton and Watt became
famous, and James Watt lived till August 19, 1819--lived to see
his steam engine the greatest single factor in the new industrial
era that had dawned for English-speaking folk.

Boulton and Watt, however, though they were the pioneers, were by
no means alone in the development of the steam engine. Soon there
were rivals in the field with new types of engines. One of these
was Richard Trevithick in England; another was Oliver Evans of
Philadelphia. Both Trevithick and Evans invented the
high-pressure engine. Evans appears to have applied the high
pressure principle before Trevithick, and it has been said that
Trevithick borrowed it from Evans, but Evans himself never said
so, and it is more likely that each of these inventors worked it
out independently. Watt introduced his steam to the cylinder at
only slightly more than atmospheric pressure and clung
tenaciously to the low-pressure theory all his life. Boulton and
Watt, indeed, aroused by Trevithick's experiments in
high-pressure engines, sought to have Parliament pass an act
forbidding high pressure on the ground that the lives of the
public were endangered. Watt lived long enough, however, to see
the high-pressure steam engine come into general favor, not only
in America but even in his own conservative country.

Less sudden, less dramatic, than that of the cotton gin, was the
entrance of the steam engine on the American industrial stage,
but not less momentous. The actions and reactions of steam in
America provide the theme for an Iliad which some American Homer
may one day write. They include the epic of the coal in the
Pennsylvania hills, the epic of the ore, the epic of the
railroad, the epic of the great city; and, in general, the
subjugation of a continental wilderness to the service of a vast
civilization.

The vital need of better transportation was uppermost in the
thoughts of many Americans. It was seen that there could be no
national unity in a country so far flung without means of easy
intercourse between one group of Americans and another. The
highroads of the new country were, for the most part, difficult
even for the man on horseback, and worse for those who must
travel by coach or post-chaise. Inland from the coast and away
from the great rivers there were no roads of any sort; nothing
but trails. Highways were essential, not only for the permanent
unity of the United States, but to make available the wonderful
riches of the inland country, across the Appalachian barrier and
around the Great Lakes, into which American pioneers had already
made their way.

Those immemorial pathways, the great rivers, were the main
avenues of traffic with the interior. So, of course, when men
thought of improving transportation, they had in mind chiefly
transportation by water; and that is why the earliest efforts of
American inventors were applied to the means of improving traffic
and travel by water and not by land.

The first men to spend their time in trying to apply steam power
to the propulsion of a boat were contemporaries of Benjamin
Franklin. Those who worked without Watt's engine could hardly
succeed. One of the earliest of these was William Henry of
Pennsylvania. Henry, in 1763, had the idea of applying power to
paddle wheels, and constructed a boat, but his boat sank, and no
result followed, unless it may be that John Fitch and Robert
Fulton, both of whom were visitors at Henry's house, received
some suggestions from him. James Rumsey of Maryland began
experiments as early as 1774 and by 1786 had a boat that made
four miles an hour against the current of the Potomac.

The most interesting of these early and unsuccessful inventors is
John Fitch, who, was a Connecticut clockmaker living in
Philadelphia. He was eccentric and irregular in his habits and
quite ignorant of the steam engine. But he conceived the idea of
a steamboat and set to work to make one. The record of Fitch's
life is something of a tragedy. At the best he was an unhappy man
and was always close to poverty. As a young man he had left his
family because of unhappy domestic relations with his wife. One
may find in the record of his undertakings which he left in the
Philadelphia Library, to be opened thirty years after its
receipt, these words: "I know of nothing so perplexing and
vexatious to a man of feelings as a turbulent Wife and Steamboat
building." But in spite of all his difficulties Fitch produced a
steamboat, which plied regularly on the Delaware for several
years and carried passengers. "We reigned Lord High Admirals of
the Delaware; and no other boat in the River could hold its way
with us," he wrote. "Thus has been effected by little Johnny
Fitch and Harry Voight [one of his associates] one of the
greatest and most useful arts that has ever been introduced into
the world; and although the world and my country does not thank
me for it, yet it gives me heartfelt satisfaction." The "Lord
High Admirals of the Delaware," however, did not reign long. The
steamboat needed improvement to make it pay; its backers lost
patience and faith, and the inventor gave up the fight and
retired into the fastnesses of the Kentucky wilderness, where he
died.

The next inventor to struggle with the problem of the steamboat,
with any approach to success, was John Stevens of Hoboken. His
life was cast in a vastly different environment from that of John
Fitch. He was a rich man, a man of family and of influence. His
father's house--afterwards his own---at 7 Broadway, facing
Bowling Green--was one of the mansions of early New York, and his
own summer residence on Castle Point, Hoboken, just across the
Hudson, was one of the landmarks of the great river. For many
years John Stevens crossed that river; most often in an open boat
propelled by sail or by men at the oars. Being naturally of a
mechanical turn, he sought to make the crossing easier. To his
library were coming the prints that told of James Watt and the
steam engine in England, and John Fitch's boat had interested
him.

Robert Fulton's Clermont, of which we shall speak presently, was
undoubtedly the pioneer of practicable steamboats. But the
Phoenix, built by John Stevens, followed close on the Clermont.
And its engines were built in America, while those of the
Clermont had been imported from England. Moreover, in June, 1808,
the Phoenix stood to sea, and made the first ocean voyage in the
history of steam navigation. Because of a monopoly of the Hudson,
which the New York Legislature had granted to Livingston and
Fulton, Stevens was compelled to send his ship to the Delaware.
Hence the trip out into the waters of the Atlantic, a journey
that was not undertaken without trepidation. But, despite the
fact that a great storm arose, the Phoenix made the trip in
safety; and continued for many years thereafter to ply the
Delaware between Philadelphia and Trenton.

Robert Fulton, like many and many another great inventor, from
Leonardo da Vinci down to the present time, was also an artist.
He was born November 14, 1765, at Little Britain, Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania, of that stock which is so often miscalled
"Scotch-Irish." He was only a child when his father died, leaving
behind him a son who seems to have been much more interested in
his own ideas than in his schoolbooks. Even in his childhood
Robert showed his mechanical ability. There was a firm of noted
gunsmiths in Lancaster, in whose shops he made himself at home
and became expert in the use of tools. At the age of fourteen he
applied his ingenuity to a heavy fishing boat and equipped it
with paddle-wheels, which were turned by a crank, thus greatly
lightening the labor of moving it.

At the age of seventeen young Fulton moved to Philadelphia and
set up as a portrait painter. Some of the miniatures which he
painted at this time are said to be very good. He worked hard,
made many good friends, including Benjamin Franklin, and
succeeded financially. He determined to go to Europe to study--if
possible under his fellow Pennsylvanian, Benjamin West, then
rising into fame in London. The West and the Fulton families had
been intimate, and Fulton hoped that West would take him as a
pupil. First buying a farm for his mother with a part of his
savings, he sailed for England in 1786, with forty guineas in his
pocket. West received him not only as a pupil but as a guest in
his house and introduced him to many of his friends. Again Fulton
succeeded, and in 1791 two of his portraits were exhibited at the
Royal Academy, and the Royal Society of British Artists hung four
paintings by him.

Then came the commission which changed the course of Fulton's
life. His work had attracted the notice of Viscount Courtenay,
later Earl of Devon, and he was invited to Devonshire to paint
that nobleman's portrait. Here he met Francis, third Duke of
Bridgewater, the father of the English canal system, and his
hardly less famous engineer, James Brindley, and also Earl
Stanhope, a restless, inquiring spirit. Fulton the mechanic
presently began to dominate Fulton the artist. He studied canals,
invented a means of sawing marble in the quarries, improved the
wheel for spinning flax, invented a machine for making rope, and
a method of raising canal boats by inclined planes instead of
locks. What money he made from these inventions we do not know,
but somewhat later (1796) he speaks hopefully of an improvement
in tanning. This same year he published a pamphlet entitled "A
Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation", copies of which
were sent to Napoleon and President Washington.

Fulton went to France in 1797. To earn money he painted several
portraits and a panorama of the Burning of Moscow. This panorama,
covering the walls of a circular hall built especially for it,
became very popular, and Fulton painted another. In Paris he
formed a warm friendship with that singular American, Joel
Barlow, soldier, poet, speculator, and diplomatist, and his wife,
and for seven years lived in their house.

The long and complicated story of Fulton's sudden interest in
torpedoes and submarine boats, his dealings with the Directory
and Napoleon and with the British Admiralty does not belong here.
His experiments and his negotiations with the two Governments
occupied the greater part of his time for the years between 1797
and 1806. His expressed purpose was to make an engine of war so
terrible that war would automatically be abolished. The world,
however, was not ready for diving boats and torpedoes, nor yet
for the end of war, and his efforts had no tangible results.*

* The submarine was the invention of David Bushnell, a
Connecticut Yankee, whose "American Turtle" blew up at least one
British vessel in the War of Independence and created much
consternation among the King's ships in American waters.


During all the years after 1793, at least, and perhaps earlier,
the idea of the steamboat had seldom been out of his mind, but
lack of funds and the greater urgency, as he thought, of the
submarine prevented him from working seriously upon it. In 1801,
however, Robert R. Livingston came to France as American
Minister. Livingston had already made some unsuccessful
experiments with the steamboat in the United States, and, in
1798, had received the monopoly of steam navigation on the waters
of New York for twenty years, provided that he produced a vessel
within twelve months able to steam four miles an hour. This grant
had, of course, been forfeited, but might be renewed, Livingston
thought.

Fulton and Livingston met, probably at Barlow's house, and, in
1802, drew up an agreement to construct a steamboat to ply
between New York and Albany. Livingston agreed to advance five
hundred dollars for experimentation in Europe. In this same year
Fulton built a model and tested different means of propulsion,
giving "the preference to a wheel on each side of the model."*
The boat was built on the Seine, but proved too frail for the
borrowed engine. A second boat was tried in August, 1803, and
moved, though at a disappointingly slow rate of speed.

* Fulton to Barlow, quoted in Sutcliffe, "Robert Fulton and the
Clermont", p. 124.


Just at this time Fulton wrote ordering an engine from Boulton
and Watt to be transported to America. The order was at first
refused, as it was then the shortsighted policy of the British
Government to maintain a monopoly of mechanical contrivances.
Permission to export was given the next year, however, and the
engine was shipped in 1805. It lay for some time in the New York
Customs House. Meanwhile Fulton had studied the Watt engine on
Symington's steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, on the Forth and
Clyde Canal, and Livingston had been granted a renewal of his
monopoly of the waters of New York.

Fulton arrived at New York in 1806 and began the construction of
the Clermont, so named after Livingston's estate on the Hudson.
The building was done on the East River. The boat excited the
jeers of passersby, who called it "Fulton's Folly." On Monday,
August 17, 1807, the memorable first voyage was begun. Carrying a
party of invited guests, the Clermont steamed off at one o'clock.
Past the towns and villages along the Hudson, the boat moved
steadily, black smoke rolling from her stack. Pine wood was the
fuel. During the night, the sparks pouring from her funnel, the
clanking of her machinery, and the splashing of the paddles
frightened the animals in the woods and the occupants of the
scattered houses along the banks. At one o'clock Tuesday the boat
arrived at Clermont, 110 miles from New York. After spending the
night at Clermont, the voyage was resumed on Wednesday. Albany,
forty miles away, was reached in eight hours, making a record of
150 miles in thirty-two hours. Returning to New York, the
distance was covered in thirty hours. The steamboat was a
success.

The boat was then laid up for two weeks while the cabins were
boarded in, a roof built over the engine, and coverings placed
over the paddle-wheels to catch the spray--all under Fulton's
eye. Then the Clermont began regular trips to Albany, carrying
sometimes a hundred passengers, making the round trip every four
days, and continued until floating ice marked the end of
navigation for the winter.

Why had Fulton succeeded where others had failed? There was
nothing new in his boat. Every essential feature of the Clermont
had been anticipated by one or other of the numerous
experimenters before him. The answer seems to be that he was a
better engineer than any of them. He had calculated proportions,
and his hull and his engine were in relation. Then too, he had
one of Watt's engines, undoubtedly the best at the time, and the
unwavering support of Robert Livingston.

Fulton's restless mind was never still, but he did not turn
capriciously from one idea to another. Though never satisfied,
his new ideas were tested scientifically and the results
carefully written down. Some of his notebooks read almost like
geometrical demonstrations; and his drawings and plans were
beautifully executed. Before his death in 1815 he had constructed
or planned sixteen or seventeen boats, including boats for the
Hudson, Potomac, and Mississippi rivers, for the Neva in Russia,
and a steam vessel of war for the United States. He was a member
of the commission on the Erie Canal, though he did not live to
see that enterprise begun.

The mighty influence of the steamboat in the development of
inland America is told elsewhere in this Series.* The steamboat
has long since grown to greatness, but it is well to remember
that the true ancestor of the magnificent leviathan of our own
day is the Clermont of Robert Fulton.

* Archer B. Hulbert, "The Paths of Inland Commerce".


The world today is on the eve of another great development in
transportation, quite as revolutionary as any that have preceded.
How soon will it take place? How long before Kipling's vision in
"The Night Mail" becomes a full reality? How long before the air
craft comes to play a great role in the world's transportation?
We cannot tell. But, after looking at the nearest parallel in the
facts of history, each of us may make his own guess. The airship
appears now to be much farther advanced than the steamboat was
for many years after Robert Fulton died. Already we have seen men
ride the wind above the sea from the New World to the Old.
Already United States mails are regularly carried through the air
from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate. It was twelve years after
the birth of Fulton's Clermont, and four years after the
inventor's death, before any vessel tried to cross the Atlantic
under steam. This was in 1819, when the sailing packet Savannah,
equipped with a ninety horsepower horizontal engine and paddle-
wheels, crossed from Savannah to Liverpool in twenty-five days,
during eighteen of which she used steam power. The following
year, however, the engine was taken out of the craft. And it was
not until 1833 that a real steamship crossed the Atlantic. This
time it was the Royal William, which made a successful passage
from Quebec to London. Four years more passed before the Great
Western was launched at Bristol, the first steamship to be
especially designed for transatlantic service, and the era of
great steam liners began.


If steam could be made to drive a boat on the water, why not a
wagon on the land?

History, seeking origins, often has difficulty when it attempts
to discover the precise origin of an idea. "It frequently
happens," said Oliver Evans, "that two persons, reasoning right
on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing
without any communication with each other."* It is certain,
however, that one of the first, if not the first, protagonist of
the locomotive in America was the same Oliver Evans, a truly
great inventor for whom the world was not quite ready. The world
has forgotten him. But he was the first engine builder in
America, and one of the best of his day. He gave to his
countrymen the high-pressure steam engine and new machinery for
manufacturing flour that was not superseded for a hundred years. 

* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," "Journal of
the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol. CXXII, p. 16.


"Evans was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a wheelwright.
He was a thoughtful, studious boy, who devoured eagerly the few
books to which he had access, even by the light of a fire of
shavings, when denied a candle by his parsimonious master. He
says that in 1779, when only seventeen years old, he began to
contrive some method of propelling land carriages by other means
than animal power; and that he thought of a variety of devices,
such as using the force of the wind and treadles worked by men;
but as they were evidently inadequate, was about to give up the
problem as unsolvable for want of a suitable source of power,
when he heard that some neighboring blacksmith's boys had stopped
up the touch-hole of a gun barrel, put in some water, rammed down
a tight wad, and, putting the breech into the smith's fire, the
gun had discharged itself with a report like that of gunpowder.
This immediately suggested to his fertile mind a new source of
power, and he labored long to apply it, but without success,
until there fell into his hands a book describing the old
atmospheric steam engine of Newcomen, and he was at once struck
with the fact that steam was only used to produce a vacuum while
to him it seemed clear that the elastic power of the steam if
applied directly to moving the piston, would be far more
efficient. He soon satisfied himself that he could make steam
wagons, but could convince no one else of this possibility."*

* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," "Journal of
the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol. CXXII, p. 3.


Evans was then living in Delaware, where he was born, and where
he later worked out his inventions in flour-milling machinery and
invented and put into service the high-pressure steam engine. He
appears to have moved to Philadelphia about 1790, the year of
Franklin's death and of the Federal Patent Act; and, as we have
seen, the third patent issued by the Government at Philadelphia
was granted to him. About this time he became absorbed in the
hard work of writing a book, the "Millwright and Miller's Guide",
which he published in 1795, but at a heavy sacrifice to himself
in time and money. A few years later he had an established engine
works in Philadelphia and was making steam engines of his own
type that performed their work satisfactorily.

The Oruktor Amphibolos, or Amphibious Digger, which came out of
his shop in 1804, was a steamdriven machine made to the order of
the Philadelphia Board of Health for dredging and cleaning the
docks of the city. It was designed, as its name suggests, for
service either in water or on shore. It propelled itself across
the city to the river front, puffing and throwing off clouds of
steam and making quite a sensation on the streets.

Evans had never forgotten his dream of the "steam wagon." His
Oruktor had no sooner begun puffing than he offered to make for
the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Company steamdriven
carriages to take the place of their six-horse Conestoga wagons,
promising to treble their profits. But the directors of the road
were conservative men and his arguments fell on deaf ears.

In the same year Evans petitioned Congress for an extension of
the patent on his flour-milling machinery, which was about to
expire. He had derived little profit from this important
invention, as the new machinery made its way very slowly, but
every year more and more millers were using it and Evans received
royalties from them. He felt sure that Congress would renew his
patent, and, with great expectations for the future, he announced
a new book in preparation by himself to be called "The Young
Engineer's Guide". It was to give the most thorough treatment to
the subject of the steam engine, with a profusion of drawings to
illustrate the text. But Evans reckoned without the millers who
were opposing his petition. Though they were profiting by his
invention, they were unwilling to pay him anything, and they
succeeded in having his bill in Congress defeated. It was a hard
blow for the struggling author and inventor. His income cut off,
he was obliged to reduce the scale of his book "and to omit many
of the illustrations he had promised." He wrote the sad story
into the name of the book. It came out under the title of "The
Abortion of the Young Engineer's Guide".

Four years later, when Congress restored and extended his patent,
Evans felt that better days were ahead, but, as said already, he
was too far ahead of his time to be understood and appreciated.
Incredulity, prejudice, and opposition were his portion as long
as he lived. Nevertheless, he went on building good engines and
had the satisfaction of seeing them in extensive use. His life
came to an end as the result of what to him was the greatest
possible tragedy. He was visiting New York City in 1819, when
news came to him of the destruction by an incendiary of his
beloved shops in Philadelphia. The shock was greater than he
could bear. A stroke of apoplexy followed, from which he died.

The following prophecy, written by Oliver Evans and published in
1812, seventeen years before the practical use of the locomotive
began, tells us something of the vision of this early American
inventor:

"The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by
steam engines from one city to another almost as fast as birds
fly--fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Passing through the air
with such velocity--changing the scenes in such rapid
succession--will be the most exhilarating, delightful exercise. A
carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, and the
passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine in Philadelphia, and
sup at New York the same day.

"To accomplish this, two sets of railways will be laid so nearly
level as not in any place to deviate more than two degrees from a
horizontal line, made of wood or iron, on smooth paths of broken
stone or gravel, with a rail to guide the carriages so that they
may pass each other in different directions and travel by night
as well as by day; and the passengers will sleep in these stages
as comfortably as they do now in steam stage-boats."*

*Cited by Coleman Sellers, Ibid., p. 13.


Another early advocate of steam carriages and railways was John
Stevens, the rich inventor of Hoboken, who figures in the story
of the steamboat. In February, 1812, Stevens addressed to the
commissioners appointed by the State of New York to explore a
route for the Erie Canal an elaborate memoir calculated to prove
that railways would be much more in the public interest than the
proposed canal. He wrote at the same time to Robert R. Livingston
(who, as well as Robert Fulton, his partner in the steamboat, was
one of the commissioners) requesting his influence in favor of
railways. Livingston, having committed himself to the steamboat
and holding a monopoly of navigation on the waters of New York
State, could hardly be expected to give a willing ear to a rival
scheme, and no one then seems to have dreamed that both canal and
railway would ultimately be needed. Livingston, however, was an
enlightened statesman, one of the ablest men of his day. He had
played a prominent part in the affairs of the Revolution and in
the ratification of the Constitution; had known Franklin and
Washington and had negotiated with Napoleon the Louisiana
Purchase. His reply to Stevens is a good statement of the
objections to the railway, as seen at the time, and of the public
attitude towards it.

Robert R. Livingston to John Stevens

"Albany, 11th March, 1812.

"I did not, till yesterday, receive yours of the 5th of February;
where it has loitered on the road I am at a loss to say. I had
before read your very ingenious propositions as to the rail-way
communication. I fear, however, on mature reflection, that they
will be liable to serious objections, and ultimately more
expensive than a canal. They must be double, so as to prevent the
danger of two such heavy bodies meeting. The walls on which they
are placed must at least be four feet below the surface, and
three above, and must be clamped with iron, and even then, would
hardly sustain so heavy a weight as you propose moving at the
rate of four miles an hour on wheels. As to wood, it would not
last a week; they must be covered with iron, and that too very
thick and strong. The means of stopping these heavy carriages
without a great shock, and of preventing them from running upon
each other (for there would be many on the road at once) would be
very difficult. In case of accidental stops, or the necessary
stops to take wood and water &c many accidents would happen. The
carriage of condensed water would be very troublesome. Upon the
whole, I fear the expense would be much greater than that of
canals, without being so convenient."*

* John Stevens, "Documents Tending to Prove the Superior
Advantages of Rail-Ways and Steam-Carriages over Canal
Navigation" (1819). Reprinted in "The Magazine of History with
Notes and Queries", Extra Number 54 (1917).


Stevens, of course, could not convince the commissioners. "The
Communication from John Stevens, Esq.," was referred to a
committee, who reported in March: "That they have considered the
said communication with the attention due to a gentleman whose
scientific researches and knowledge of mechanical powers entitle
his opinions to great respect, and are sorry not to concur in
them."

Stevens, however, kept up the fight. He published all the
correspondence, hoping to get aid from Congress for his design,
and spread his propaganda far and wide. But the War of 1812 soon
absorbed the attention of the country. Then came the Erie Canal,
completed in 1825, and the extension into the Northwest of the
great Cumberland Road. From St. Louis steamboats churned their
way up the Missouri, connecting with the Santa Fe Trail to the
Southwest and the Oregon Trail to the far Northwest. Horses,
mules, and oxen carried the overland travelers, and none yet
dreamed of being carried on the land by steam.

Back East, however, and across the sea in England, there were a
few dreamers. Railways of wooden rails, sometimes covered with
iron, on which wagons were drawn by horses, were common in Great
Britain; some were in use very early in America. And on these
railways, or tramways, men were now experimenting with steam,
trying to harness it to do the work of horses. In England,
Trevithick, Blenkinsop, Ericsson, Stephenson, and others; in
America, John Stevens, now an old man but persistent in his plans
as ever and with able sons to help him, had erected a circular
railway at Hoboken as early as 1826, on which he ran a locomotive
at the rate of twelve miles an hour. Then in 1828 Horatio Allen,
of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, went over to England
and brought back with him the Stourbridge Lion. This locomotive,
though it was not a success in practice, appears to have been the
first to turn a wheel on a regular railway within the United
States. It was a seven days' wonder in New York when it arrived
in May, 1829. Then Allen shipped it to Honesdale, Pennsylvania,
where the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company had a tramway to
bring down coal from the mountains to the terminal of the canal.
On the crude wooden rails of this tramway Allen placed the
Stourbridge Lion and ran it successfully at the rate of ten miles
an hour. But in actual service the Stourbridge Lion failed and
was soon dismantled.

Pass now to Rainhill, England, and witness the birth of the
modern locomotive, after all these years of labor. In the same
year of 1829, on the morning of the 6th of October, a great crowd
had assembled to see an extraordinary race--a race, in fact,
without any parallel or precedent whatsoever. There were four
entries but one dropped out, leaving three: The Novelty, John
Braithwaite and John Ericsson; The Sanspareil, Timothy Hackworth;
The Rocket, George and Robert Stephenson. These were not horses;
they were locomotives. The directors of the London and Manchester
Railway had offered a prize of five hundred pounds for the best
locomotive, and here they were to try the issue.

The contest resulted in the triumph of Stephenson's Rocket. The
others fell early out of the race. The Rocket alone met all the
requirements and won the prize. So it happened that George
Stephenson came into fame and has ever since lived in popular
memory as the father of the locomotive. There was nothing new in
his Rocket, except his own workmanship. Like Robert Fulton, he
appears to have succeeded where others failed because he was a
sounder engineer, or a better combiner of sound principles into a
working, whole, than any of his rivals.

Across the Atlantic came the news of Stephenson's remarkable
success. And by this time railroads were beginning in various
parts of the United States: the Mohawk and Hudson, from Albany to
Schenectady; the Baltimore and Ohio; the Charleston and Hamburg
in South Carolina; the Camden and Amboy, across New Jersey.
Horses, mules, and even sails, furnished the power for these
early railroads. It can be imagined with what interest the owners
of these roads heard that at last a practicable locomotive was
running in England.

This news stimulated the directors of the Baltimore and Ohio to
try the locomotive. They had not far to go for an experiment, for
Peter Cooper, proprietor of the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore,
had already designed a small locomotive, the Tom Thumb. This was
placed on trial in August, 1830, and is supposed to have been the
first American-built locomotive to do work on rails, though
nearly coincident with it was the Best Friend of Charleston,
built by the West Point Foundry, New York, for the Charleston and
Hamburg Railroad. It is often difficult, as we have seen, to say
which of two or several things was first. It appears as though
the little Tom Thumb was the first engine built in America, which
actually pulled weight on a regular railway, while the much
larger Best Friend was the first to haul cars in regular daily
service.

The West Point Foundry followed its first success with the West
Point, which also went into service on the Charleston and Hamburg
Railroad, and then built for the newly finished Mohawk and Hudson
(the first link in the New York Central Lines) the historic De
Witt Clinton. This primitive locomotive and the cars it drew may
be seen today in the Grand Central Station in New York.

Meanwhile, the Stevens brothers, sons of John Stevens, were
engaged in the construction of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. The
first locomotive to operate on this road was built in England by
George Stephenson. This was the John Bull, which arrived in the
summer of 1831 and at once went to work. The John Bull was a
complete success and had a distinguished career. Sixty-two years
old, in 1893, it went to Chicago, to the Columbian Exposition,
under its own steam. The John Bull occupies a place today in the
National Museum at Washington.

With the locomotive definitely accepted, men began to turn their
minds towards its improvement and development, and locomotive
building soon became a leading industry in America. At first the
British types and patterns were followed, but it was not long
before American designers began to depart from the British models
and to evolve a distinctively American type. In the development
of this type great names have been written into the industrial
history of America, among which the name of Matthias Baldwin of
Philadelphia probably ranks first. But there have been hundreds
of great workers in this field. From Stephenson's Rocket and the
little Tom Thumb of Peter Cooper, to the powerful "Mallets" of
today, is a long distance--not spanned in ninety years save by
the genius and restless toil of countless brains and hands.


If the locomotive could not remain as it was left by Stephenson
and Cooper, neither could the stationary steam engine remain as
it was left by James Watt and Oliver Evans. Demands increasing
and again increasing, year after year, forced the steam engine to
grow in order to meet its responsibilities. There were men living
in Philadelphia in 1876, who had known Oliver Evans personally;
at least one old man at the Centennial Exhibition had himself
seen the Oruktor Amphibolos and recalled the consternation it had
caused on the streets of the city in 1804. It seemed a far cry
back to the Oruktor from the great and beautiful engine, designed
by George Henry Corliss, which was then moving all the vast
machinery of the Centennial Exhibition. But since then
achievements in steam have dwarfed even the great work of
Corliss. And to do a kind of herculean task that was hardly
dreamed of in 1876 another type of engine has made its entrance:
the steam turbine, which sends its awful energy, transformed into
electric current, to light a million lamps or to turn ten
thousand wheels on distant streets and highways.



CHAPTER IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND

The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four: first to
harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin
it into threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and,
finally to fashion and sew the cloth into clothes. We have
already seen the influence of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the
first process, and the series of inventions for spinning and
weaving, which so profoundly changed the textile industry in
Great Britain, has been mentioned. It will be the business of
this chapter to tell how spinning and weaving machinery was
introduced into the United States and how a Yankee inventor laid
the keystone of the arch of clothing machinery by his invention
of the sewing machine.

Great Britain was determined to keep to herself the industrial
secrets she had gained. According to the economic beliefs of the
eighteenth century, which gave place but slowly to the doctrines
of Adam Smith, monopoly rather than cheap production was the road
to success. The laws therefore forbade the export of English
machinery or drawings and specifications by which machines might
be constructed in other countries. Some men saw a vast prosperity
for Great Britain, if only the mystery might be preserved.

Meanwhile the stories of what these machines could do excited
envy in other countries, where men desired to share in the
industrial gains. And, even before Eli Whitney's cotton gin came
to provide an abundant supply of raw material, some Americans
were struggling to improve the old hand loom, found in every
house, and to make some sort of a spinning machine to replace the
spinning wheel by which one thread at a time was laboriously
spun.

East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was the scene of one of the
earliest of these experiments. There in 1786 two Scotchmen, who
claimed to understand Arkwright's mechanism, were employed to
make spinning machines, and about the same time another attempt
was made at Beverly. In both instances the experiments were
encouraged by the State and assisted with grants of money. The
machines, operated by horse power, were crude, and the product
was irregular and unsatisfactory. Then three men at Providence,
Rhode Island, using drawings of the Beverly machinery, made
machines having thirty-two spindles which worked indifferently.
The attempt to run them by water power failed, and they were sold
to Moses Brown of Pawtucket, who with his partner, William Almy,
had mustered an army of hand-loom weavers in 1790, large enough
to produce nearly eight thousand yards of cloth in that year.
Brown's need of spinning machinery, to provide his weavers with
yarn, was very great; but these machines he had bought would not
run, and in 1790 there was not a single successful power-spinner
in the United States.

Meanwhile Benjamin Franklin had come home, and the Pennsylvania
Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts was
offering prizes for inventions to improve the textile industry.
And in Milford, England, was a young man named Samuel Slater,
who, on hearing that inventive genius was munificently rewarded
in America, decided to migrate to that country. Slater at the age
of fourteen had been apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, a partner of
Arkwright. He had served both in the counting-house and the mill
and had had every opportunity to learn the whole business.

Soon after attaining his majority, he landed in New York,
November, 1789, and found employment. From New York he wrote to
Moses Brown of Pawtucket, offering his services, and that old
Quaker, though not giving him much encouragement, invited him to
Pawtucket to see whether he could run the spindles which Brown
had bought from the men of Providence. "If thou canst do what
thou sayest," wrote Brown, "I invite thee to come to Rhode
Island."

Arriving in Pawtucket in January, 1790, Slater pronounced the
machines worthless, but convinced Almy and Brown that he knew his
business, and they took him into partnership. He had no drawings
or models of the English machinery, except such as were in his
head, but he proceeded to build machines, doing much of the work
himself. On December 20, 1790, he had ready carding, drawing, and
roving machines and seventy-two spindles in two frames. The
water-wheel of an old fulling mill furnished the power--and the
machinery ran.

Here then was the birth of the spinning industry in the United
States. The "Old Factory," as it was to be called for nearly a
hundred years, was built at Pawtucket in 1793. Five years later
Slater and others built a second mill, and in 1806, after Slater
had brought out his brother to share his prosperity, he built
another. Workmen came to work for him solely to learn his
machines, and then left him to set up for themselves. The
knowledge he had brought soon became widespread. Mills were built
not only in New England but in other States. In 1809 there were
sixty-two spinning mills in operation in the country, with
thirty-one thousand spindles; twenty-five more mills were
building or projected, and the industry was firmly established in
the United States. The yarn was sold to housewives for domestic
use or else to professional weavers who made cloth for sale. This
practice was continued for years, not only in New England, but
also in those other parts of the country where spinning machinery
had been introduced.

By 1810, however, commerce and the fisheries had produced
considerable fluid capital in New England which was seeking
profitable employment, especially as the Napoleonic Wars
interfered with American shipping; and since Whitney's gins in
the South were now piling up mountains of raw cotton, and
Slater's machines in New England were making this cotton into
yarn, it was inevitable that the next step should be the power
loom, to convert the yarn into cloth. So Francis Cabot Lowell,
scion of the New England family of that name, an importing
merchant of Boston, conceived the idea of establishing weaving
mills in Massachusetts. On a visit to Great Britain in 1811,
Lowell met at Edinburgh Nathan Appleton, a fellow merchant of
Boston, to whom he disclosed his plans and announced his
intention of going to Manchester to gain all possible information
concerning the new industry. Two years afterwards, according to
Appleton's account, Lowell and his brother-in-law, Patrick T.
Jackson, conferred with Appleton at the Stock Exchange in Boston.
They had decided, they said, to set up a cotton factory at
Waltham and invited Appleton to join them in the adventure, to
which he readily consented. Lowell had not been able to obtain
either drawings or model in Great Britain, but he had
nevertheless designed a loom and had completed a model which
seemed to work.

The partners took in with them Paul Moody of Amesbury, an expert
machinist, and by the autumn of 1814 looms were built and set up
at Waltham. Carding, drawing, and roving machines were also built
and installed in the mill, these machines gaining greatly, at
Moody's expert hands, over their American rivals. This was the
first mill in the United States, and one of the first in the
world, to combine under one roof all the operations necessary to
convert raw fiber into cloth, and it proved a success. Lowell,
says his partner Appleton, "is entitled to the credit for having
introduced the new system in the cotton manufacture." Jackson and
Moody "were men of unsurpassed talent," but Lowell "was the
informing soul, which gave direction and form to the whole
proceeding."

The new enterprise was needed, for the War of 1812 had cut off
imports. The beginnings of the protective principle in the United
States tariff are now to be observed. When the peace came and
Great Britain began to dump goods in the United States, Congress,
in 1816, laid a minimum duty of six and a quarter cents a yard on
imported cottons; the rate was raised in 1824 and again in 1828.
It is said that Lowell was influential in winning the support of
John C. Calhoun for the impost of 1816.

Lowell died in 1817, at the early age of forty-two, but his work
did not die with him. The mills he had founded at Waltham grew
exceedingly prosperous under the management of Jackson; and it
was not long before Jackson and his partners Appleton and Moody
were seeking wider opportunities. By 1820 they were looking for a
suitable site on which to build new mills, and their attention
was directed to the Pawtucket Falls, on the Merrimac River. The
land about this great water power was owned by the Pawtucket
Canal Company, whose canal, built to improve the navigation of
the Merrimac, was not paying satisfactory profits. The partners
proceeded to acquire the stock of this company and with it the
land necessary for their purpose, and in December, 1821, they
executed Articles of Association for the Merrimac Manufacturing
Company, admitting some additional partners, among them Kirk
Boott who was to act as resident agent and manager of the new
enterprise, since Jackson could not leave his duties at Waltham.

The story of the enterprise thus begun forms one of the brightest
pages in the industrial history of America; for these partners
had the wisdom and foresight to make provision at the outset for
the comfort and well-being of their operatives. Their mill hands
were to be chiefly girls drawn from the rural population of New
England, strong and intelligent young women, of whom there were
at that time great numbers seeking employment, since household
manufactures had come to be largely superseded by factory goods.
And one of the first questions which the partners considered was
whether the change from farm to factory life would effect for the
worse the character of these girls. This, says Appleton, "was a
matter of deep interest. The operatives in the manufacturing
cities of Europe were notoriously of the lowest character for
intelligence and morals. The question therefore arose, and was
deeply considered, whether this degradation was the result of the
peculiar occupation or of other and distinct causes. We could not
perceive why this peculiar description of labor should vary in
its effects upon character from all other occupations." And so we
find the partners voting money, not only for factory buildings
and machinery, but for comfortable boardinghouses for the girls,
and planning that these boardinghouses should have "the most
efficient guards," that they should be in "charge of respectable
women, with every provision for religious worship." They voted
nine thousand dollars for a church building and further sums
later for a library and a hospital.

The wheels of the first mill were started in September, 1823.
Next year the partners petitioned the Legislature to have their
part of the township set off to form a new town. One year later
still they erected three new mills; and in another year (1826)
the town of Lowell was incorporated.

The year 1829 found the Lowell mills in straits for lack of
capital, from which, however, they were promptly relieved by two
great merchants of Boston, Amos and Abbott Lawrence, who now
became partners in the business and who afterwards founded the
city named for them farther down on the Merrimac River.

The story of the Lowell cotton factories, for twenty years, more
or less, until the American girls operating the machines came to
be supplanted by French Canadians and Irish, is appropriately
summed up in the title of a book which describes the factory life
in Lowell during those years. The title of this book is "An Idyl
of Work" and it was written by Lucy Larcom, who was herself one
of the operatives and whose mother kept one of the corporation
boarding-houses. And Lucy Larcom was not the only one of the
Lowell "factory girls" who took to writing and lecturing. There
were many others, notably, Harriet Hanson (later Mrs. W. S.
Robinson), Harriot Curtis ("Mina Myrtle"), and Harriet Farley;
and many of the "factory girls" married men who became prominent
in the world. There was no thought among them that there was
anything degrading in factory work. Most of the girls came from
the surrounding farms, to earn money for a trousseau, to send a
brother through college, to raise a mortgage, or to enjoy the
society of their fellow workers, and have a good time in a quiet,
serious way, discussing the sermons and lectures they heard and
the books they read in their leisure hours. They had numerous
"improvement circles" at which contributions of the members in
both prose and verse were read and discussed. And for several
years they printed a magazine, "The Lowell Offering", which was
entirely written and edited by girls in the mills.

Charles Dickens visited Lowell in the winter of 1842 and recorded
his impressions of what he saw there in the fourth chapter of his
"American Notes". He says that he went over several of the
factories, "examined them in every part; and saw them in their
ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or
departure from their ordinary every-day proceedings"; that the
girls "were all well dressed: and that phrase necessarily
includes extreme cleanliness. They had serviceable bonnets, good
warm cloaks, and shawls. . . . Moreover, there were places in the
mill in which they could deposit these things without injury; and
there were conveniences for washing. They were healthy in
appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and
deportment of young women; not of degraded brutes of burden."
Dickens continues: "The rooms in which they worked were as well
ordered as themselves. In the windows of some there were green
plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was
as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort as the nature of the
occupation would possibly admit of." Again: "They reside in
various boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the mills are
particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the
possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone
the most searching and thorough enquiry." Finally, the author
announces that he will state three facts which he thinks will
startle his English readers: "Firstly, there is a joint-stock
piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly
all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries.
Thirdly, they have got up among themselves a periodical called
'The Lowell Offering' . . . whereof I brought away from Lowell
four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from beginning
to end." And: "Of the merits of the 'Lowell Offering' as a
literary production, I will only observe, putting entirely out of
sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls
after the arduous labors of the day, that it will compare
advantageously with a great many English Annuals."

The efficiency of the New England mills was extraordinary. James
Montgomery, an English cotton manufacturer, visited the Lowell
mills two years before Dickens and wrote after his inspection of
them that they produced "a greater quantity of yarn and cloth
from each spindle and loom (in a given time) than was produced by
any other factories, without exception in the world." Long before
that time, of course, the basic type of loom had changed from
that originally introduced, and many New England inventors had
been busy devising improved machinery of all kinds.


Such were the beginnings of the great textile mills of New
England. The scene today is vastly changed. Productivity has been
multiplied by invention after invention, by the erection of mill
after mill, and by the employment of thousands of hands in place
of hundreds. Lowell as a textile center has long been surpassed
by other cities. The scene in Lowell itself is vastly changed. If
Charles Dickens could visit Lowell today, he would hardly
recognize in that city of modern factories, of more than a
hundred thousand people, nearly half of them foreigners, the
Utopia of 1842 which he saw and described.


The cotton plantations in the South were flourishing, and
Whitney's gins were cleaning more and more cotton; the sheep of a
thousand hills were giving wool; Arkwright's machines in England,
introduced by Slater into New England, were spinning the cotton
and wool into yarn; Cartwright's looms in England and Lowell's
improvements in New England were weaving the yarn into cloth; but
as yet no practical machine had been invented to sew the cloth
into clothes.

There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a
few tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously
sewed garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until
the invention of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and
daughters of farmers and sailors in the villages around Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia. In these cities the garments were cut
and sent out to the dwellings of the poor to be sewn. The wages
of the laborers were notoriously inadequate, though probably
better than in England. Thomas Hood's ballad The Song of the
Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the English
woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the
needle:

With fingers weary and worn,
  With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
  Plying her needle and thread.

Meanwhile, as Hood wrote and as the whole English people learned
by heart his vivid lines, as great ladies wept over them and
street singers sang them in the darkest slums of London, a man,
hungry and ill-clad, in an attic in faraway Cambridge,
Massachusetts, was struggling to put into metal an idea to
lighten the toil of those who lived by the needle. His name was
Elias Howe and he hailed from Eli Whitney's old home, Worcester
County, Massachusetts. There Howe was born in 1819. His father
was an unsuccessful farmer, who also had some small mills, but
seems to have succeeded in nothing he undertook.

Young Howe led the ordinary life of a New England country boy,
going to school in winter and working about the farm until the
age of sixteen, handling tools every day, like any farmer's boy
of the time. Hearing of high wages and interesting work in
Lowell, that growing town on the Merrimac, he went there in 1835
and found employment; but two years later, when the panic of 1837
came on, he left Lowell and went to work in a machine shop in
Cambridge. It is said that, for a time, he occupied a room with
his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, who rose from bobbin boy in a
cotton mill to Speaker of the United States House of
Representatives and Major-General in the Civil War.

Next we hear of Howe in Boston, working in the shop of Ari Davis,
an eccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young
mechanic heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began
to puzzle over the problem. Many an inventor before him had
attempted to make sewing machines and some had just fallen short
of success. Thomas Saint, an Englishman, had patented one fifty
years earlier; and about this very time a Frenchman named
Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines making army
uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the bread
was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed
the machines. Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came
into general use. Several patents had been issued on sewing
machines in the United States, but without any practical result.
An inventor named Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the
lock-stitch and had built a machine but had wearied of his work
and abandoned his invention, just as success was in sight. But
Howe knew nothing of any of these inventors. There is no evidence
that he had ever seen the work of another.

The idea obsessed him to such an extent that he could do no other
work, and yet he must live. By this time he was married and had
children, and his wages were only nine dollars a week. Just then
an old schoolmate, George Fisher, agreed to support his family
and furnish him with five hundred dollars for materials and
tools. The attic in Fisher's house in Cambridge was Howe's
workroom. His first efforts were failures, but all at once the
idea of the lock-stitch came to him. Previously all machines
(except Hunt's, which was unknown, not having even been patented)
had used the chainstitch, wasteful of thread and easily
unraveled. The two threads of the lockstitch cross in the
materials joined together, and the lines of stitches

show the same on both sides. In short, the chainstitch is a
crochet or knitting stitch, while the lockstitch is a weaving
stitch. Howe had been working at night and was on his way home,
gloomy and despondent, when this idea dawned on his mind,
probably rising out of his experience in the cotton mill. The
shuttle would be driven back and forth as in a loom, as he had
seen it thousands of times, and passed through a loop of thread
which the curved needle would throw out on the other side of the
cloth; and the cloth would be fastened to the machine vertically
by pins. A curved arm would ply the needle with the motion of a
pick-axe. A handle attached to the fly-wheel would furnish the
power.

On that design Howe made a machine which, crude as it was, sewed
more rapidly than five of the swiftest needle workers. But
apparently to no purpose. His machine was too expensive, it could
sew only a straight seam, and it might easily get out of order.
The needle workers were opposed, as they have generally been, to
any sort of laborsaving machinery, and there was no manufacturer
willing to buy even one machine at the price Howe asked, three
hundred dollars.

Howe's second model was an improvement on the first. It was more
compact and it ran more smoothly. He had no money even to pay the
fees necessary to get it patented. Again Fisher came to the
rescue and took Howe and his machine to Washington, paying all
the expenses, and the patent was issued in September, 1846. But,
as the machine still failed to find buyers, Fisher gave up hope.
He had invested about two thousand dollars which seemed gone
forever, and he could not, or would not, invest more. Howe
returned temporarily to his father's farm, hoping for better
times.

Meanwhile Howe had sent one of his brothers to London with a
machine to see if a foothold could be found there, and in due
time an encouraging report came to the destitute inventor. A
corsetmaker named Thomas had paid two hundred and fifty pounds
for the English rights and had promised to pay a royalty of three
pounds on each machine sold. Moreover, Thomas invited the
inventor to London to construct a machine especially for making
corsets. Howe went to London and later sent for his family. But
after working eight months on small wages, he was as badly off as
ever, for, though he had produced the desired machine, he
quarrelled with Thomas and their relations came to an end.

An acquaintance, Charles Inglis, advanced Howe a little money
while he worked on another model. This enabled Howe to send his
family home to America, and then, by selling his last model and
pawning his patent rights, he raised enough money to take passage
himself in the steerage in 1848, accompanied by Inglis, who came
to try his fortune in the United States.

Howe landed in New York with a few cents in his pocket and
immediately found work. But his wife was dying from the hardships
she had suffered, due to stark poverty. At her funeral, Howe wore
borrowed clothes, for his only suit was the one he wore in the
shop.

Then, soon after his wife had died, Howe's invention came into
its own. It transpired presently that sewing machines were being
made and sold and that these machines were using the principles
covered by Howe's patent. Howe found an ally in George W. Bliss,
a man of means, who had faith in the machine and who bought out
Fisher's interest and proceeded to prosecute infringers.
Meanwhile Howe went on making machines--he produced fourteen in
New York during 1850--and never lost an opportunity to show the
merits of the invention which was being advertised and brought to
notice by the activities of some of the infringers, particularly
by Isaac M. Singer, the best business man of them all. Singer had
joined hands with Walter Hunt and Hunt had tried to patent the
machine which he had abandoned nearly twenty years before.

The suits dragged on until 1854, when the case was decisively
settled in Howe's favor. His patent was declared basic, and all
the makers of sewing machines must pay him a royalty of
twenty-five dollars on every machine. So Howe woke one morning to
find himself enjoying a large income, which in time rose as high
as four thousand dollars a week, and he died in 1867 a rich man.

Though the basic nature of Howe's patent was recognized, his
machine was only a rough beginning. Improvements followed, one
after another, until the sewing machine bore little resemblance
to Howe's original. John Bachelder introduced the horizontal
table upon which to lay the work. Through an opening in the
table, tiny spikes in an endless belt projected and pushed the
work for ward continuously. Allan B. Wilson devised a rotary hook
carrying a bobbin to do the work of the shuttle, and also the
small serrated bar which pops up through the table near the
needle, moves forward a tiny space, carrying the cloth with it,
drops down just below the upper surface of the table, and returns
to its starting point, to repeat over and over again this series
of motions. This simple device brought its owner a fortune. Isaac
M. Singer, destined to be the dominant figure of the industry,
patented in 1851 a machine stronger than any of the others and
with several valuable features, notably the vertical presser foot
held down by a spring; and Singer was the first to adopt the
treadle, leaving both hands of the operator free to manage the
work. His machine was good, but, rather than its surpassing
merits, it was his wonderful business ability that made the name
of Singer a household word.

By 1856 there were several manufacturers in the field,
threatening war on each other. All men were paying tribute to
Howe, for his patent was basic, and all could join in fighting
him, but there were several other devices almost equally
fundamental, and even if Howe's patents had been declared void it
is probable that his competitors would have fought quite as
fiercely among themselves. At the suggestion of George Gifford, a
New York attorney, the leading inventors and manufacturers agreed
to pool their inventions and to establish a fixed license fee for
the use of each. This "combination" was composed of Elias Howe,
Wheeler and Wilson, Grover and Baker, and I. M. Singer, and
dominated the field until after 1877, when the majority of the
basic patents expired. The members manufactured sewing machines
and sold them in America and Europe. Singer introduced the
installment plan of sale, to bring the machine within reach of
the poor, and the sewing machine agent, with a machine or two on
his wagon, drove through every small town and country district,
demonstrating and selling. Meanwhile the price of the machines
steadily fell, until it seemed that Singer's slogan, "A machine
in every home!" was in a fair way to be realized, had not another
development of the sewing machine intervened.

This was the development of the ready-made clothing industry. In
the earlier days of the nation, though nearly all the clothing
was of domestic manufacture, there were tailors and seamstresses
in all the towns and many of the villages, who made clothing to
order. Sailors coming ashore sometimes needed clothes at once,
and apparently a merchant of New Bedford was the first to keep a
stock on hand. About 1831, George Opdyke, later Mayor of New
York, began the manufacture of clothing on Hudson Street, which
he sold largely through a store in New Orleans. Other firms began
to reach out for this Southern trade, and it became important.
Southern planters bought clothes not only for their slaves but
for their families. The development of California furnished
another large market. A shirt factory was established, in 1832,
on Cherry and Market Streets, New York. But not until the coming
of the power-driven sewing machine could there be any factory
production of clothes on a large scale. Since then the clothing
industry has become one of the most important in the country. The
factories have steadily improved their models and materials, and
at the present day only a negligible fraction of the people of
the United States wear clothes made to their order.

The sewing machine today does many things besides sewing a seam.
There are attachments which make buttonholes, darn, embroider,
make ruffles or hems, and dozens of other things. There are
special machines for every trade, some of which deal successfully
with refractory materials.

The Singer machine of 1851 was strong enough to sew leather and
was almost at once adopted by the shoemakers. These craftsmen
flourished chiefly in Massachusetts, and they had traditions
reaching back at least to Philip Kertland, who came to Lynn in
1636 and taught many apprentices. Even in the early days before
machinery, division of labor was the rule in the shops of
Massachusetts. One workman cut the leather, often tanned on the
premises; another sewed the uppers together, while another sewed
on the soles. Wooden pegs were invented in 1811 and came into
common use about 1815 for the cheaper grades of shoes: Soon the
practice of sending out the uppers to be done by women in their
own homes became common. These women were wretchedly paid, and
when the sewing machine came to do the work better than it could
be done by hand, the practice of "putting out" work gradually
declined.

That variation of the sewing machine which was to do the more
difficult work of sewing the sole to the upper was the invention
of a mere boy, Lyman R. Blake. The first model, completed in
1858, was imperfect, but Blake was able to interest Gordon McKay,
of Boston, and three years of patient experimentation and large
expenditure followed. The McKay sole-sewing machine, which they
produced, came into use, and for twenty-one years was used almost
universally both in the United States and Great Britain. But
this, like all the other useful inventions, was in time enlarged
and greatly improved, and hundreds of other inventions have been
made in the shoe industry. There are machines to split leather,
to make the thickness absolutely uniform, to sew the uppers, to
insert eyelets, to cut out heel tops, and many more. In fact,
division of labor has been carried farther in the making of shoes
than in most industries, for there are said to be about three
hundred separate operations in making a pair of shoes.

From small beginnings great industries have grown. It is a far
cry from the slow, clumsy machine of Elias Howe, less than
three-quarters of a century ago, to the great factories of today,
filled with special models, run at terrific speed by electric
current, and performing tasks which would seem to require more
than human intelligence and skill.



CHAPTER V. THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

The Census of 1920 shows that hardly thirty per cent of the
people are today engaged in agriculture, the basic industry of
the United States, as compared with perhaps ninety per cent when
the nation began. Yet American farmers, though constantly
diminishing in proportion to the whole population, have always
been, and still are, able to feed themselves and all their fellow
Americans and a large part of the outside world as well. They
bring forth also not merely foodstuffs, but vast quantities of
raw material for manufacture, such as cotton, wool, and hides.
This immense productivity is due to the use of farm machinery on
a scale seen nowhere else in the world. There is still, and
always will be, a good deal of hard labor on the farm. But
invention has reduced the labor and has made possible the
carrying on of this vast industry by a relatively small number of
hands.

The farmers of Washington's day had no better tools than had the
farmers of Julius Caesar's day; in fact, the Roman ploughs were
probably superior to those in general use in America eighteen
centuries later. "The machinery of production," says Henry Adams,
"showed no radical difference from that familiar in ages long
past. The Saxon farmer of the eighth century enjoyed most of the
comforts known to Saxon farmers of the eighteenth."* One type of
plough in the United States was little more than a crooked stick
with an iron point attached, sometimes with rawhide, which simply
scratched the ground. Ploughs of this sort were in use in
Illinois as late as 1812. There were a few ploughs designed to
turn a furrow, often simply heavy chunks of tough wood, rudely
hewn into shape, with a wrought-iron point clumsily attached. The
moldboard was rough and the curves of no two were alike. Country
blacksmiths made ploughs only on order and few had patterns. Such
ploughs could turn a furrow in soft ground if the oxen were
strong enough--but the friction was so great that three men and
four or six oxen were required to turn a furrow where the sod was
tough.

* "History of the United States", vol. I, p. 16.


Thomas Jefferson had worked out very elaborately the proper
curves of the moldboard, and several models had been constructed
for him. He was, however, interested in too many things ever to
follow any one to the end, and his work seems to have had little
publicity. The first real inventor of a practicable plough was
Charles Newbold, of Burlington County, New Jersey, to whom a
patent for a cast-iron plough was issued in June, 1797. But the
farmers would have none of it. They said it "poisoned the soil"
and fostered the growth of weeds. One David Peacock received a
patent in 1807, and two others later. Newbold sued Peacock for
infringement and recovered damages. Pieces of Newbold's original
plough are in the museum of the New York Agricultural Society at
Albany.

Another inventor of ploughs was Jethro Wood, a blacksmith of
Scipio, New York, who received two patents, one in 1814 and the
other in 1819. His plough was of cast iron, but in three parts,
so that a broken part might be renewed without purchasing an
entire plough. This principle of standardization marked a great
advance. The farmers by this time were forgetting their former
prejudices, and many ploughs were sold. Though Wood's original
patent was extended, infringements were frequent, and he is said
to have spent his entire property in prosecuting them.

In clay soils these ploughs did not work well, as the more
tenacious soil stuck to the iron moldboard instead of curling
gracefully away. In 1833, John Lane, a Chicago blacksmith, faced
a wooden moldboard with an old steel saw. It worked like magic,
and other blacksmiths followed suit to such an extent that the
demand for old saws became brisk. Then came John Deere, a native
of Vermont, who settled first in Grand Detour, and then in
Moline, Illinois. Deere made wooden ploughs faced with steel,
like other blacksmiths, but was not satisfied with them and
studied and experimented to find the best curves and angles for a
plough to be used in the soils around him. His ploughs were much
in demand, and his need for steel led him to have larger and
larger quantities produced for him, and the establishment which
still bears his name grew to large proportions.

Another skilled blacksmith, William Parlin, at Canton, Illinois,
began making ploughs about 1842, which he loaded upon a wagon and
peddled through the country. Later his establishment grew large.
Another John Lane, a son of the first, patented in 1868 a
"soft-center" steel plough. The hard but brittle surface was
backed by softer and more tenacious metal, to reduce the
breakage. The same year James Oliver, a Scotch immigrant who had
settled at South Bend, Indiana, received a patent for the
"chilled plough." By an ingenious method the wearing surfaces of
the casting were cooled more quickly than the back. The surfaces
which came in contact with the soil had a hard, glassy surface,
while the body of the plough was of tough iron. From small
beginnings Oliver's establishment grew great, and the Oliver
Chilled Plow Works at South Bend is today one of the largest and
most favorably known privately owned industries in the United
States.

From the single plough it was only a step to two or more ploughs
fastened together, doing more work with approximately the same
man power. The sulky plough, on which the ploughman rode, made
his work easier, and gave him great control. Such ploughs were
certainly in use as early as 1844, perhaps earlier. The next step
forward was to substitute for horses a traction engine. Today one
may see on thousands of farms a tractor pulling six, eight, ten,
or more ploughs, doing the work better than it could be done by
an individual ploughman. On the "Bonanza" farms of the West a
fifty horsepower engine draws sixteen ploughs, followed by
harrows and a grain drill, and performs the three operations of
ploughing, harrowing, and planting at the same time and covers
fifty acres or more in a day.

The basic ideas in drills for small grains were successfully
developed in Great Britain, and many British drills were sold in
the United States before one was manufactured here. American
manufacture of these drills began about 1840. Planters for corn
came somewhat later. Machines to plant wheat successfully were
unsuited to corn, which must be planted less profusely than
wheat.

The American pioneers had only a sickle or a scythe with which to
cut their grain. The addition to the scythe of wooden fingers,
against which the grain might lie until the end of the swing, was
a natural step, and seems to have been taken quite independently
in several places, perhaps as early as 1803. Grain cradles are
still used in hilly regions and in those parts of the country
where little grain is grown.

The first attempts to build a machine to cut grain were made in
England and Scotland, several of them in the eighteenth century;
and in 1822 Henry Ogle, a schoolmaster in Rennington, made a
mechanical reaper, but the opposition of the laborers of the
vicinity, who feared loss of employment, prevented further
development. In 1826, Patrick Bell, a young Scotch student,
afterward a Presbyterian minister, who had been moved by the
fatigue of the harvesters upon his father's farm in Argyllshire,
made an attempt to lighten their labor. His reaper was pushed by
horses; a reel brought the grain against blades which opened and
closed like scissors, and a traveling canvas apron deposited the
grain at one side. The inventor received a prize from the
Highland and Agricultural Society of Edinburgh, and pictures and
full descriptions of his invention were published. Several models
of this reaper were built in Great Britain, and it is said that
four came to the United States; however this may be, Bell's
machine was never generally adopted.

Soon afterward three men patented reapers in the United States:
William Manning, Plainfield, New Jersey, 1831; Obed Hussey,
Cincinnati, Ohio, 1833; and Cyrus Hall McCormick, Staunton,
Virginia, 1834. Just how much they owed to Patrick Bell cannot be
known, but it is probable that all had heard of his design if
they had not seen his drawings or the machine itself. The first
of these inventors, Manning of New Jersey, drops out of the
story, for it is not known whether he ever made a machine other
than his model. More persistent was Obed Hussey of Cincinnati,
who soon moved to Baltimore to fight out the issue with
McCormick. Hussey was an excellent mechanic. He patented several
improvements to his machine and received high praise for the
efficiency of the work. But he was soon outstripped in the race
because he was weak in the essential qualities which made
McCormick the greatest figure in the world of agricultural
machinery. McCormick was more than a mechanic; he was a man of
vision; and he had the enthusiasm of a crusader and superb genius
for business organization and advertisement. His story has been
told in another volume of this series.*

* "The Age of Big Business", by Burton J. Hendrick.


Though McCormick offered reapers for sale in 1834, he seems to
have sold none in that year, nor any for six years afterwards. He
sold two in 1840, seven in 1842, fifty in 1844. The machine was
not really adapted to the hills of the Valley of Virginia, and
farmers hesitated to buy a contrivance which needed the attention
of a skilled mechanic. McCormick made a trip through the Middle
West. In the rolling prairies, mile after mile of rich soil
without a tree or a stone, he saw his future dominion. Hussey had
moved East. McCormick did the opposite; he moved West, to
Chicago, in 1847.

Chicago was then a town of hardly ten thousand, but McCormick
foresaw its future, built a factory there, and manufactured five
hundred machines for the harvest of 1848. From this time he went
on from triumph to triumph. He formulated an elaborate business
system. His machines were to be sold at a fixed price, payable in
installments if desired, with a guarantee of satisfaction. He set
up a system of agencies to give instruction or to supply spare
parts. Advertising, chiefly by exhibitions and contests at fairs
and other public gatherings, was another item of his programme.
All would have failed, of course, if he had not built good
machines, but he did build good machines, and was not daunted by
the Government's refusal in 1848 to renew his original patent. He
decided to make profits as a manufacturer rather than accept
royalties as an inventor.

McCormick had many competitors, and some of them were in the
field with improved devices ahead of him, but he always held his
own, either by buying up the patent for a real improvement, or
else by requiring his staff to invent something to do the same
work. Numerous new devices to improve the harvester were
patented, but the most important was an automatic attachment to
bind the sheaves with wire. This was patented in 1872, and
McCormick soon made it his own. The harvester seemed complete.
One man drove the team, and the machine cut the grain, bound it
in sheaves, and deposited them upon the ground.

Presently, however, complaints were heard of the wire tie. When
the wheat was threshed, bits of wire got into the straw, and were
swallowed by the cattle; or else the bits of metal got among the
wheat itself and gave out sparks in grinding, setting some mills
on fire. Two inventors, almost simultaneously, produced the
remedy. Marquis L. Gorham, working for McCormick, and John F.
Appleby, whose invention was purchased by William Deering, one of
McCormick's chief competitors, invented binders which used twine.
By 1880 the self-binding harvester was complete. No distinctive
improvement has been made since, except to add strength and
simplification. The machine now needed the services of only two
men, one to drive and the other to shock the bundles, and could
reap twenty acres or more a day, tie the grain into bundles of
uniform size, and dump them in piles of five ready to be shocked.

Grain must be separated from the straw and chaff. The Biblical
threshing floor, on which oxen or horses trampled out the grain,
was still common in Washington's time, though it had been largely
succeeded by the flail. In Great Britain several threshing
machines were devised in the eighteenth century, but none was
particularly successful. They were stationary, and it was
necessary to bring the sheaves to them. The seventh patent issued
by the United States, to Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, was for
a threshing machine. The portable horse-power treadmill, invented
in 1830 by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, was
presently coupled with a thresher, or "separator," and this
outfit, with its men and horses, moving from farm to farm, soon
became an autumn feature of every neighborhood. The treadmill was
later on succeeded--by the traction engine, and the apparatus now
in common use is an engine which draws the greatly improved
threshing machine from farm to farm, and when the destination is
reached, furnishes the power to drive the thresher. Many of these
engines are adapted to the use of straw as fuel.

Another development was the combination harvester and thresher
used on the larger farms of the West. This machine does not cut
the wheat close to the ground, but the cutter-bar, over
twenty-five feet in length, takes off the heads. The wheat is
separated from the chaff and automatically weighed into sacks,
which are dumped as fast as two expert sewers can work. The
motive power is a traction engine or else twenty to thirty
horses, and seventy-five acres a day can be reaped and threshed.
Often another tractor pulling a dozen wagons follows and the
sacks are picked up and hauled to the granary or elevator.

Haying was once the hardest work on the farm, and in no crop has
machinery been more efficient. The basic idea in the reaper, the
cutter-bar, is the whole of the mower, and the machine developed
with the reaper. Previously Jeremiah Bailey, of Chester County,
Pennsylvania, had patented in 1822 a machine drawn by horses
carrying a revolving wheel with six scythes, which was widely
used. The inventions of Manning, Hussey, and McCormick made the
mower practicable. Hazard Knowles, an employee of the Patent
Office, invented the hinged cutter-bar, which could be lifted
over an obstruction, but never patented the invention. William F.
Ketchum of Buffalo, New York, in 1844, patented the first machine
intended to cut hay only, and dozens of others followed. The
modern mowing machine was practically developed in the patent of
Lewis Miller of Canton, Ohio, in 1858. Several times as many
mowers as harvesters are sold, and for that matter, reapers
without binding attachments are still manufactured.

Hayrakes and tedders seem to have developed almost of themselves.
Diligent research has failed to discover any reliable information
on the invention of the hayrake, though a horserake was patented
as early as 1818. Joab Center of Hudson, New York, patented a
machine for turning and spreading hay in 1834. Mechanical
hayloaders have greatly reduced the amount of human labor. The
hay-press makes storage and transportation easier and cheaper.

There are binders which cut and bind corn. An addition shocks the
corn and deposits it upon the ground. The shredder and husker
removes the ears, husks them, and shreds shucks, stalks, and
fodder. Power shellers separate grain and cobs more than a
hundred times as rapidly as a pair of human hands could do. One
student of agriculture has estimated that it would require the
whole agricultural population of the United States one hundred
days to shell the average corn crop by hand, but this is an
exaggeration.

The list of labor-saving machinery in agriculture is by no means
exhausted. There are clover hullers, bean and pea threshers,
ensilage cutters, manure spreaders, and dozens of others. On the
dairy farm the cream separator both increases the quantity and
improves the quality of the butter and saves time. Power also
drives the churns. On many farms cows are milked and sheep are
sheared by machines and eggs are hatched without hens.

There are, of course, thousands of farms in the country where
machinery cannot be used to advantage and where the work is still
done entirely or in part in the old ways.


Historians once were fond of marking off the story of the earth
and of men upon the earth into distinct periods fixed by definite
dates. One who attempts to look beneath the surface cannot accept
this easy method of treatment. Beneath the surface new tendencies
develop long before they demand recognition; an institution may
be decaying long before its weakness is apparent. The American
Revolution began not with the Stamp Act but at least a century
earlier, as soon as the settlers realized that there were three
thousand miles of sea between England and the rude country in
which they found themselves; the Civil War began, if not in early
Virginia, with the "Dutch Man of Warre that sold us twenty
Negars," at least with Eli Whitney and his cotton gin.

Nevertheless, certain dates or short periods seem to be flowering
times. Apparently all at once a flood of invention, a change of
methods, a difference in organization, or a new psychology
manifests itself. And the decade of the Civil War does serve as a
landmark to mark the passing of one period in American life and
the beginning of another; especially in agriculture; and as
agriculture is the basic industry of the country it follows that
with its mutations the whole superstructure is also changed.

The United States which fought the Civil War was vastly different
from the United States which fronted the world at the close of
the Revolution. The scant four million people of 1790 had grown
to thirty-one and a half million. This growth had come chiefly by
natural increase, but also by immigration, conquest, and
annexation. Settlement had reached the Pacific Ocean, though
there were great stretches of almost uninhabited territory
between the settlements on the Pacific and those just beyond the
Mississippi.

The cotton gin had turned the whole South toward the cultivation
of cotton, though some States were better fitted for mixed
farming, and their devotion to cotton meant loss in the end as
subsequent events have proved. The South was not manufacturing
any considerable proportion of the cotton it grew, but the
textile industry was flourishing in New England. A whole series
of machines similar to those used in Great Britain, but not
identical, had been invented in America. American mills paid
higher wages than British and in quantity production were far
ahead of .the British mills, in proportion to hands employed,
which meant being ahead of the rest of the world.

Wages in America, measured by the world standard, were high,
though as expressed in money, they seem low now. They were
conditioned by the supply of free land, or land that was
practically free. The wages paid were necessarily high enough to
attract laborers from the soil which they might easily own if
they chose. There was no fixed laboring class. The boy or girl in
a textile mill often worked only a few years to save money, buy a
farm, or to enter some business or profession.

The steamboat now, wherever there was navigable water, and the
railroad, for a large part of the way, offered transportation to
the boundless West. Steamboats traversed all the larger rivers
and the lakes. The railroad was growing rapidly. Its lines had
extended to more than thirty thousand miles. Construction went on
during the war, and the transcontinental railway was in sight.
The locomotive had approached standardization, and the American
railway car was in form similar to that of the present day,
though not so large, so comfortable, or so strong. The Pullman
car, from which has developed the chair car, the dining car, and
the whole list of special cars, was in process of development,
and the automatic air brake of George Westinghouse was soon to
follow.

Thus far had the nation progressed in invention and industry
along the lines of peaceful development. But with the Civil War
came a sudden and tremendous advance. No result of the Civil War,
political or social, has more profoundly affected American life
than the application to the farm, as a war necessity, of
machinery on a great scale. So long as labor was plentiful and
cheap, only a comparatively few farmers could be interested in
expensive machinery, but when the war called the young men away
the worried farmers gladly turned to the new machines and found
that they were able not only to feed the Union, but also to
export immense quantities of wheat to Europe, even during the
war. Suddenly the West leaped into great prosperity. And long
centuries of economic and social development were spanned within
a few decades.



CHAPTER VI. AGENTS OF COMMUNICATION

Communication is one of man's primal needs. There was indeed a
time when no formula of language existed, when men communicated
with each other by means of gestures, grimaces, guttural sounds,
or rude images of things seen; but it is impossible to conceive
of a time when men had no means of communication at all. And at
last, after long ages, men evolved in sound the names of the
things they knew and the forms of speech; ages later, the
alphabet and the art of writing; ages later still, those
wonderful instruments of extension for the written and spoken
word: the telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press,
the phonograph, the typewriter, and the camera.

The word "telegraph" is derived from Greek and means "to write
far"; so it is a very exact word, for to write far is precisely
what we do when we send a telegram. The word today, used as a
noun, denotes the system of wires with stations and operators and
messengers, girdling the earth and reaching into every civilized
community, whereby news is carried swiftly by electricity. But
the word was coined long before it was discovered that
intelligence could be communicated by electricity. It denoted at
first a system of semaphores, or tall poles with movable arms,
and other signaling apparatus, set within sight of one another.
There was such a telegraph line between Dover and London at the
time of Waterloo; and this telegraph began relating the news of
the battle, which had come to Dover by ship, to anxious London,
when a fog set in and the Londoners had to wait until a courier
on horseback arrived. And, in the very years when the real
telegraph was coming into being, the United States Government,
without a thought of electricity, was considering the
advisability of setting up such a system of telegraphs in the
United States.

The telegraph is one of America's gifts to the world. The honor
for this invention falls to Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a New
Englander of old Puritan stock. Nor is the glory that belongs to
Morse in any way dimmed by the fact that he made use of the
discoveries of other men who had been trying to unlock the
secrets of electricity ever since Franklin's experiments. If
Morse discovered no new principle, he is nevertheless the man of
all the workers in electricity between his own day and Franklin's
whom the world most delights to honor; and rightly so, for it is
to such as Morse that the world is most indebted. Others knew;
Morse saw and acted. Others had found out the facts, but Morse
was the first to perceive the practical significance of those
facts; the first to take steps to make them of service to his
fellows; the first man of them all with the pluck and persistence
to remain steadfast to his great design, through twelve long
years of toil and privation, until his countrymen accepted his
work and found it well done.

Morse was happy in his birth and early training. He was born in
1791, at Charlestown, Massachusetts. His father was a
Congregational minister and a scholar of high standing, who, by
careful management, was able to send his three sons to Yale
College. Thither went young Samuel (or Finley, as he was called
by his family) at the age of fourteen and came under the
influence of Benjamin Silliman, Professor of Chemistry, and of
Jeremiah Day, Professor of Natural Philosophy, afterwards
President of Yale College, whose teaching gave him impulses which
in later years led to the invention of the telegraph. "Mr. Day's
lectures are very interesting," the young student wrote home in
1809; "they are upon electricity; he has given us some very fine
experiments, the whole class taking hold of hands form the
circuit of communication and we all receive the shock apparently
at the same moment." Electricity, however, was only an alluring
study. It afforded no means of livelihood, and Morse had gifts as
an artist; in fact, he earned a part of his college expenses
painting miniatures at five dollars apiece. He decided,
therefore, that art should be his vocation.

A letter written years afterwards by Joseph M. Dulles of
Philadelphia, who was at New Haven preparing for Yale when Morse
was in his senior year, is worth reading here:

"I first became acquainted with him at New Haven, when about to
graduate with the class of 1810, and had such an association as a
boy preparing for college might have with a senior who was just
finishing his course. Having come to New Haven under the care of
Rev. Jedidiah Morse, the venerable father of the three Morses,
all distinguished men, I was commended to the protection of
Finley, as he was then commonly designated, and therefore saw him
frequently during the brief period we were together. The father I
regard as the gravest man I ever knew. He was a fine exemplar of
the gentler type of the Puritan, courteous in manner, but stern
in conduct and in aspect. He was a man of conflict, and a leader
in the theological contests in New England in the early part of
this century. Finley, on the contrary, bore the expression of
gentleness entirely. In person rather above the ordinary height,
well formed, graceful in demeanor, with a complexion, if I
remember right, slightly ruddy, features duly proportioned, and
often lightened with a genial and expressive smile. He was,
altogether, a handsome young man, with manners unusually bland.
It is needless to add that with intelligence, high culture, and
general information, and with a strong bent to the fine arts, Mr.
Morse was in 1810 an attractive young man. During the last year
of his college life he occupied his leisure hours, with a view to
his self-support, in taking the likenesses of his fellow-students
on ivory, and no doubt with success, as he obtained afterward a
very respectable rank as a portrait-painter. Many pieces of his
skill were afterward executed in Charleston, South Carolina."*

* Prime, "The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, LL.D.", p. 26.


That Morse was destined to be a painter seemed certain, and when,
soon after graduating from Yale, he made the acquaintance of
Washington Allston, an American artist of high standing, any
doubts that may have existed in his mind as to his vocation were
set at rest. Allston was then living in Boston, but was planning
to return to England, where his name was well known, and it was
arranged that young Morse should accompany him as his pupil. So
in 1811 Morse went to England with Allston and returned to
America four years later an accredited portrait painter, having
studied not only under Allston but under the famous master,
Benjamin West, and having met on intimate terms some of the great
Englishmen of the time. He opened a studio in Boston, but as
sitters were few, he made a trip through New England, taking
commissions for portraits, and also visited Charleston, South
Carolina, where some of his paintings may be seen today.

At Concord, New Hampshire, Morse met Miss Lucretia Walker, a
beautiful and cultivated young woman, and they were married in
1818. Morse then settled in New York. His reputation as a painter
increased steadily, though he gained little money, and in 1825 he
was in Washington painting a portrait of the Marquis La Fayette,
for the city of New York, when he heard from his father the
bitter news of his wife's death in New Haven, then a journey of
seven days from Washington. Leaving the portrait of La Fayette
unfinished, the heartbroken artist made his way home.

Two years afterwards Morse was again obsessed with the marvels of
electricity, as he had been in college. The occasion this time
was a series of lectures on that subject given by James Freeman
Dana before the New York Athenaeum in the chapel of Columbia
College. Morse attended these lectures and formed with Dana an
intimate acquaintance. Dana was in the habit of going to Morse's
studio, where the two men would talk earnestly for long hours.
But Morse was still devoted to his art; besides, he had himself
and three children to support, and painting was his only source
of income.

Back to Europe went Morse in 1829 to pursue his profession and
perfect himself in it by three years' further study. Then came
the crisis. Homeward bound on the ship Sully in the autumn of
1832, Morse fell into conversation with some scientific men who
were on board. One of the passengers asked this question: "Is the
velocity of electricity reduced by the length of its conducting
wire?" To which his neighbor replied that electricity passes
instantly over any known length of wire and referred to
Franklin's experiments with several miles of wire, in which no
appreciable time elapsed between a touch at one end and a spark
at the other.

Here was a fact already well known. Morse must have known it
himself. But the tremendous significance of that fact had never
before occurred to him nor, so far as he knew, to any man. A
recording telegraph! Why not? Intelligence delivered at one end
of a wire instantly recorded at the other end, no matter how long
the wire! It might reach across the continent or even round the
earth. The idea set his mind on fire.

Home again in November, 1832, Morse found himself on the horns of
a dilemma. To give up his profession meant that he would have no
income; on the other hand, how could he continue wholeheartedly
painting pictures while consumed with the idea of the telegraph?
The idea would not down; yet he must live; and there were his
three motherless children in New Haven. He would have to go on
painting as well as he could and develop his telegraph in what
time he could spare. His brothers, Richard and Sidney, were both
living in New York and they did what they could for him, giving
him a room in a building they had erected at Nassau and Beekman
Streets. Morse's lot at this time was made all the harder by
hopes raised and dashed to earth again. Congress had voted money
for mural paintings for the rotunda of the Capitol. The artists
were to be selected by a committee of which John Quincy Adams was
chairman. Morse expected a commission for a part of the work, for
his standing at that time was second to that of no American
artist, save Allston, and Allston he knew had declined to paint
any of the pictures and had spoken in his favor. Adams, however,
as chairman of the committee was of the opinion that the pictures
should be done by foreign artists, there being no Americans
available, he thought, of sufficiently high standing to execute
the work with fitting distinction. This opinion, publicly
expressed, infuriated James Fenimore Cooper, Morse's friend, and
Cooper wrote an attack on Adams in the New York Evening Post, but
without signing it. Supposing Morse to be the author of this
article, Adams summarily struck his name from the list of artists
who were to be employed.

How very poor Morse was about this time is indicated by a story
afterwards told by General Strother of Virginia, who was one of
his pupils:

I engaged to become Morse's pupil and subsequently went to New
York and found him in a room in University Place. He had three or
four other pupils and I soon found that our professor had very
little patronage.

I paid my fifty dollars for one-quarter's instruction. Morse was
a faithful teacher and took as much interest in our progress as--
more indeed than--we did ourselves. But he was very poor. I
remember that, when my second quarter's pay was due, my
remittance did not come as expected, and one day the professor
came in and said, courteously: "Well Strother, my boy, how are we
off for money?"

"Why professor," I answered, "I am sorry to say that I have been
disappointed, but I expect a remittance next week."

"Next week," he repeated sadly, "I shall be dead by that time."

"Dead, sir?"

"Yes, dead by starvation."

I was distressed and astonished. I said hurriedly:

"Would ten dollars be of any service?"

"Ten dollars would save my life. That is all it would do."

I paid the money, all that I had, and we dined together. It was a
modest meal, but good, and after he had finished, he said:

"This is my first meal for twenty-four hours. Strother, don't be
an artist. It means beggary. Your life depends upon people who
know nothing of your art and care nothing for you. A house dog
lives better, and the very sensitiveness that stimulates an
artist to work keeps him alive to suffering."*

* Prime, p. 424.


In 1835 Morse received an appointment to the teaching staff of
New York University and moved his workshop to a room in the
University building in Washington Square. "There," says his
biographer*, "he wrought through the year 1836, probably the
darkest and longest year of his life, giving lessons to pupils in
the art of painting while his mind was in the throes of the great
invention." In that year he took into his confidence one of his
colleagues in the University, Leonard D. Gale, who assisted him
greatly, in improving the apparatus, while the inventor himself
formulated the rudiments of the telegraphic alphabet, or Morse
Code, as it is known today. At length all was ready for a test
and the message flashed from transmitter to receiver. The
telegraph was born, though only an infant as yet. "Yes, that room
of the University was the birthplace of the Recording Telegraph,"
said Morse years later. On September 2, 1837, a successful
experiment was made with seventeen hundred feet of copper wire
coiled around the room, in the presence of Alfred Vail, a
student, whose family owned the Speedwell Iron Works, at
Morristown, New Jersey, and who at once took an interest in the
invention and persuaded his father, Judge Stephen Vail, to
advance money for experiments. Morse filed a petition for a
patent in October and admitted his colleague Gale; as well as
Alfred Vail, to partnership. Experiments followed at the Vail
shops, all the partners working day and night in their
enthusiasm. The apparatus was then brought to New York and
gentlemen of the city were invited to the University to see it
work before it left for Washington. The visitors were requested
to write dispatches, and the words were sent round a three-mile
coil of wire and read at the other end of the room by one who had
no prior knowledge of the message.

* Prime, p. 311.


In February, 1838, Morse set out for Washington with his
apparatus, and stopped at Philadelphia on the invitation of the
Franklin Institute to give a demonstration to a committee of that
body. Arrived at Washington, he presented to Congress a petition,
asking for an appropriation to enable him to build an
experimental line. The question of the appropriation was referred
to the Committee on Commerce, who reported favorably, and Morse
then returned to New York to prepare to go abroad, as it was
necessary for his rights that his invention should be patented in
European countries before publication in the United States.

Morse sailed in May, 1838, and returned to New York by the
steamship Great Western in April, 1839. His journey had not been
very successful. He had found London in the excitement of the
ceremonies of the coronation of Queen Victoria, and the British
Attorney-General had refused him a patent on the ground that
American newspapers had published his invention, making it public
property. In France he had done better. But the most interesting
result of the journey was something not related to the telegraph
at all. In Paris he had met Daguerre, the celebrated Frenchman
who had discovered a process of making pictures by sunlight, and
Daguerre had given Morse the secret. This led to the first
pictures taken by sunlight in the United States and to the first
photographs of the human face taken anywhere. Daguerre had never
attempted to photograph living objects and did not think it could
be done, as rigidity of position was required for a long
exposure. Morse, however, and his associate, John W. Draper, were
very soon taking portraits successfully.

Meanwhile the affairs of the telegraph at Washington had not
prospered. Congress had done nothing towards the grant which
Morse had requested, notwithstanding the favorable report of its
committee, and Morse was in desperate straits for money even to
live on. He appealed to the Vails to assist him further, but they
could not, since the panic of 1837 had impaired their resources.
He earned small sums from his daguerreotypes and his teaching.

By December, 1842, Morse was in funds again; sufficiently, at
least, to enable him to go to Washington for another appeal to
Congress. And at last, on February 23, 1843, a bill appropriating
thirty thousand dollars to lay the wires between Washington and
Baltimore passed the House by a majority of six. Trembling with
anxiety, Morse sat in the gallery of the House while the vote was
taken and listened to the irreverent badinage of Congressmen as
they discussed his bill. One member proposed an amendment to set
aside half the amount for experiments in mesmerism, another
suggested that the Millerites should have a part of the money,
and so on; however, they passed the bill. And that night Morse
wrote: "The long agony is over."

But the agony was not over. The bill had yet to pass the Senate.
The last day of the expiring session of Congress arrived, March
3, 1843, and the Senate had not reached the bill. Says Morse's
biographer:

In the gallery of the Senate Professor Morse had sat all the last
day and evening of the session. At midnight the session would
close. Assured by his friends that there was no possibility of
the bill being reached, he left the Capitol and retired to his
room at the hotel, dispirited, and well-nigh broken-hearted. As
he came down to breakfast the next morning, a young lady entered,
and, coming toward him with a smile, exclaimed:

"I have come to congratulate you!"

"For what, my dear friend?" asked the professor, of the young
lady, who was Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, daughter of his friend the
Commissioner of Patents.

"On the passage of your bill."

The professor assured her it was not possible, as he remained in
the Senate-Chamber until nearly midnight, and it was not reached.
She then informed him that her father was present until the
close, and, in the last moments of the session, the bill was
passed without debate or revision. Professor Morse was overcome
by the intelligence, so joyful and unexpected, and gave at the
moment to his young friend, the bearer of these good tidings, the
promise that she should send the first message over the first
line of telegraph that was opened.*

*Prime, p. 465.


Morse and his partners* then proceeded to the construction of the
forty-mile line of wire between Baltimore and Washington. At this
point Ezra Cornell, afterwards a famous builder of telegraphs and
founder of Cornell University, first appears in history as a
young man of thirty-six. Cornell invented a machine to lay pipe
underground to contain the wires and he was employed to carry out
the work of construction. The work was commenced at Baltimore and
was continued until experiment proved that the underground method
would not do, and it was decided to string the wires on poles.
Much time had been lost, but once the system of poles was adopted
the work progressed rapidly, and by May, 1844, the line was
completed. On the twenty-fourth of that month Morse sat before
his instrument in the room of the Supreme Court at Washington.
His friend Miss Ellsworth handed him the message which she had
chosen: "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!" Morse flashed it to Vail forty
miles away in Baltimore, and Vail instantly flashed back the same
momentous words, "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!"

* The property in the invention was divided into sixteen shares
(the partnership having been formed in 1838) of which Morse held
9, Francis O. J. Smith 4, Alfred Vail 2, Leonard D. Gale 2. In
patents to be obtained in foreign countries, Morse was to hold 8
shares, Smith 5, Vail 2, Gale 1. Smith had been a member of
Congress and Chairman of the Committee on Commerce. He was
admitted to the partnership in consideration of his assisting
Morse to arouse the interest of European Governments.


Two days later the Democratic National Convention met in
Baltimore to nominate a President and Vice-President. The leaders
of the Convention desired to nominate Senator Silas Wright of New
York, who was then in Washington, as running mate to James K.
Polk, but they must know first whether Wright would consent to
run as Vice-President. So they posted a messenger off to
Washington but were persuaded at the same time to allow the new
telegraph to try what it could do. The telegraph carried the
offer to Wright and carried back to the Convention Wright's
refusal of the honor. The delegates, however, would not believe
the telegraph, until their own messenger, returning the next day,
confirmed its message.

For a time the telegraph attracted little attention. But Cornell
stretched the lines across the country, connecting city with
city, and Morse and Vail improved the details of the mechanism
and perfected the code. Others came after them and added further
improvements. And it is gratifying to know that both Morse and
Vail, as well as Cornell, lived to reap some return for their
labor. Morse lived to see his telegraph span the continent, and
link the New World with the Old, and died in 1872 full of honors.


Prompt communication of the written or spoken message is a demand
even more insistent than prompt transportation of men and goods.
By 1859 both the railroad and the telegraph had reached the old
town of St. Joseph on the Missouri. Two thousand miles beyond, on
the other side of plains and mountains and great rivers, lay
prosperous California. The only transportation to California was
by stage-coach, a sixty days' journey, or else across Panama, or
else round the Horn, a choice of three evils. But to establish
quicker communication, even though transportation might lag, the
men of St. Joseph organized the Pony Express, to cover the great
wild distance by riders on horseback, in ten or twelve days.
Relay stations for the horses and men were set up at appropriate
points all along the way, and a postboy dashed off from St.
Joseph every twenty-four hours, on arrival of the train from the
East. And for a time the Pony Express did its work and did it
well. President Lincoln's First Inaugural was carried to
California by the Pony Express; so was the news of the firing on
Fort Sumter. But by 1869. the Pony Express was quietly superseded
by the telegraph, which in that year had completed its circuits
all the way to San Francisco, seven years ahead of the first
transcontinental railroad. And in four more years Cyrus W. Field
and Peter Cooper had carried to complete success the Atlantic
Cable; and the Morse telegraph was sending intelligence across
the sea, as well as from New York to the Golden Gate.

And today ships at sea and stations on land, separated by the
sea, speak to one another in the language of the Morse Code,
without the use of wires. Wireless, or radio, telegraphy was the
invention of a nineteen-year-old boy, Guglielmo Marconi, an
Italian; but it has been greatly extended and developed at the
hands of four Americans: Fessenden, Alexanderson, Langmuir, and
Lee De Forest. It was De Forest's invention that made possible
transcontinental and transatlantic telephone service, both with
and without wires.

The story of the telegraph's younger brother, and great ally in
communication, the telephone of Alexander Graham Bell, is another
pregnant romance of American invention. But that is a story by
itself, and it begins in a later period and so falls within the
scope of another volume of these Chronicles.*

* "The Age of Big Business", by Burton J. Hendrick, "The
Chronicle of America", vol. XXXIX.


Wise newspapermen stiffened to attention when the telegraph began
ticking. The New York Herald, the Sun, and the Tribune had been
founded only recently and they represented a new type of
journalism, swift, fearless, and energetic. The proprietors of
these newspapers saw that this new instrument was bound to affect
all newspaperdom profoundly. How was the newspaper to cope with
the situation and make use of the news that was coming in and
would be coming in more and more over the wires?

For one thing, the newspapers needed better printing machinery.
The application of steam, or any mechanical power, to printing in
America was only begun. It had been introduced by Robert Hoe in
the very years when Morse was struggling to perfect the
telegraph. Before that time newspapers were printed in the United
States, on presses operated as Franklin's press had been
operated, by hand. The New York Sun, the pioneer of cheap modern
newspapers, was printed by hand in 1833, and four hundred
impressions an hour was the highest speed of one press. There had
been, it is true, some improvements over Franklin's printing
press. The Columbian press of George Clymer of Philadelphia,
invented in 1816, was a step forward. The Washington press,
patented in 1829 by Samuel Rust of New York, was another step
forward. Then had come Robert Hoe's double-cylinder, steamdriven
printing press. But a swifter machine was wanted. And so in 1845
Richard March Hoe, a son of Robert Hoe, invented the revolving or
rotary press, on the principle of which larger and larger
machines have been built--machines so complex and wonderful that
they baffle description; which take in reels of white paper and
turn out great newspapers complete, folded and counted, at the
rate of a hundred thousand copies an hour. American printing
machines are in use today the world over. The London Times is
printed on American machines.

Hundreds of new inventions and improvements on old inventions
followed hard on the growth of the newspaper, until it seemed
that the last word had been spoken. The newspapers had the
wonderful Hoe presses; they had cheap paper; they had excellent
type, cast by machinery; they had a satisfactory process of
multiplying forms of type by stereotyping; and at length came a
new process of making pictures by photo-engraving, supplanting
the old-fashioned process of engraving on wood. Meanwhile,
however, in one important department of the work, the newspapers
had made no advance whatever. The newspapers of New York in the
year 1885, and later, set up their type by the same method that
Benjamin Franklin used to set up the type for The Pennsylvania
Gazette. The compositor stood or sat at his "case," with his
"copy" before him, and picked the type up letter by letter until
he had filled and correctly spaced a line. Then he would set
another line, and so on, all with his hands. After the job was
completed, the type had to be distributed again, letter by
letter. Typesetting was slow and expensive.

This labor of typesetting was at last generally done away with by
the invention of two intricate and ingenious machines. The
linotype, the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore, came
first; then the monotype of Tolbert Lanston, a native of Ohio.
The linotype is the favorite composing machine for newspapers and
is also widely used in typesetting for books, though the monotype
is preferred by book printers. One or other of these machines has
today replaced, for the most part, the old hand compositors in
every large printing establishment in the United States.


While the machinery of the great newspapers was being developed,
another instrument of communication, more humble but hardly less
important in modern life, was coming into existence. The
typewriter is today in every business office and is another of
America's gifts to the commercial world. One might attempt to
trace the typewriter back to the early seals, or to the name
plates of the Middle Ages, or to the records of the British
Patent Office, for 1714, which mention a machine for embossing.
But it would be difficult to establish the identity of these
contrivances with the modern typewriter.

Two American devices, one of William Burt in 1829, for a
"typographer," and another of Charles Thurber, of Worcester,
Massachusetts, in 1843, may also be passed over. Alfred Ely Beach
made a model for a typewriter as early as 1847, but neglected it
for other things, and his next effort in printing machines was a
device for embossing letters for the blind. His typewriter had
many of the features of the modern typewriter, but lacked a
satisfactory method of inking the types. This was furnished by S.
W. Francis of New York, whose machine, in 1857, bore a ribbon
saturated with ink. None of these machines, however, was a
commercial success. They were regarded merely as the toys of
ingenious men.

The accredited father of the typewriter was a Wisconsin
newspaperman, Christopher Latham Sholes, editor, politician, and
anti-slavery agitator. A strike of his printers led him to
unsuccessful attempts to invent a typesetting machine. He did
succeed, however, in making, in collaboration with another
printer, Samuel W. Soule, a numbering machine, and a friend,
Carlos Glidden, to whom this ingenious contrivance was shown,
suggested a machine to print letters.

The three friends decided to try. None had studied the efforts of
previous experimenters, and they made many errors which might
have been avoided. Gradually, however, the invention took form.
Patents were obtained in June, 1868, and again in July of the
same year, but the machine was neither strong nor trustworthy.
Now appeared James Densmore and bought a share in the machine,
while Soule and Glidden retired. Densmore furnished the funds to
build about thirty models in succession, each a little better
than the preceding. The improved machine was patented in 1871,
and the partners felt that they were ready to begin
manufacturing.

Wisely they determined, in 1873, to offer their machine to
Eliphalet Remington and Sons, then manufacturing firearms, sewing
machines, and the like, at Ilion, New York. Here, in
well-equipped machine shops it was tested, strengthened, and
improved. The Remingtons believed they saw a demand for the
machine and offered to buy the patents, paying either a lump sum,
or a royalty. It is said that Sholes preferred the ready cash and
received twelve thousand dollars, while Densmore chose the
royalty and received a million and a half.


The telegraph, the press, and the typewriter are agents of
communication for the written word. The telephone is an agent for
the spoken word. And there is another instrument for recording
sound and reproducing it, which should not be forgotten. It was
in 1877 that Thomas Alva Edison completed the first phonograph.
The air vibrations set up by the human voice were utilized to
make minute indentations on a sheet of tinfoil placed over a
metallic cylinder, and the machine would then reproduce the
sounds which had caused the indentations. The record wore out
after a few reproductions, however, and Edison was too busy to
develop his idea further for a time, though later he returned to
it.

The phonograph today appears under various names, but by whatever
name they are called, the best machines reproduce with wonderful
fidelity the human voice, in speech or song, and the tones of
either a single instrument or a whole orchestra. The most
distinguished musicians are glad to do their best for the
preservation and reproduction of their art, and through these
machines, good music is brought to thousands to whom it could
come in no other way.


The camera bears a large part in the diffusion of intelligence,
and the last half century in the United States has seen a great
development in photography and photoengraving. The earliest
experiments in photography belong almost exclusively to Europe.
Morse, as we have seen, introduced the secret to America and
interested his friend John W. Draper, who had a part in the
perfection of the dry plate and who was one of the first, if not
the first, to take a portrait by photography.

The world's greatest inventor in photography is, however, George
Eastman, of Rochester. It was in 1888 that Eastman introduced a
new camera, which he called by the distinctive name Kodak, and
with it the slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest." This
first kodak was loaded with a roll of sensitized paper long
enough for a hundred exposures. Sent to the makers, the roll
could itself be developed and pictures could be printed from it.
Eastman had been an amateur photographer when the fancy was both
expensive and tedious. Inventing a method of making dry plates,
he began to manufacture them in a small way as early as 1880.
After the first kodak, there came others filled with rolls of
sensitized nitro-cellulose film. Priority in the invention of the
cellulose film, instead of glass, which has revolutionized
photography, has been decided by the courts to belong to the
Reverend Hannibal Goodwin, but the honor none the less belongs to
Eastman, who independently worked out his process and gave
photography to the millions. The introduction by the Eastman
Kodak Company of a film cartridge which could be inserted or
removed without retiring to a dark room removed the chief
difficulty in the way of amateurs, and a camera of some sort,
varying in price from a dollar or two to as many hundreds, is
today an indispensable part of a vacation equipment.

In the development of the animated pictures Thomas Alva Edison
has played a large part. Many were the efforts to give the
appearance of movement to pictures before the first real
entertainment was staged by Henry Heyl of Philadelphia. Heyl's
pictures were on glass plates fixed in the circumference of a
wheel, and each was brought and held for a part of a second
before the lens. This method was obviously too slow and too
expensive. Edison with his keen mind approached the difficulty
and after a prolonged series of experiments arrived at the
decision that a continuous tape-like film would be necessary. He
invented the first practical "taking" camera and evoked the
enthusiastic cooperation of George Eastman in the production of
this tape-like film, and the modern motion picture was born. The
projecting machine was substantially like the "taking" camera and
was so used. Other inventors, such as Paul in England and Lumiere
in France, produced other types of projecting machines, which
differed only in mechanical details.

When the motion picture was taken up in earnest in the United
States, the world stared in astonishment at the apparent
recklessness of the early managers. The public responded,
however, and there is hardly a hamlet in the nation where there
is not at least one moving-picture house. The most popular actors
have been drawn from the speaking stage into the "movies," and
many new actors have been developed. In the small town, the
picture theater is often a converted storeroom, but in the
cities, some of the largest and most attractive theaters have
been given over to the pictures, and others even more luxurious
have been specially built. The Eastman Company alone manufactures
about ten thousand miles of film every month.

Besides affording amusement to millions, the moving picture has
been turned to instruction. Important news events are shown on
the screen, and historical events are preserved for posterity by
depositing the films in a vault. What would the historical
student not give for a film faithfully portraying the
inauguration of George Washington! The motion picture has become
an important factor in instruction in history and science in the
schools and this development is still in its infancy.



CHAPTER VII. THE STORY OF RUBBER

One day in 1852, at Trenton, New Jersey, there appeared in the
Circuit Court of the United States two men, the legal giants of
their day, to argue the case of Goodyear vs. Day for infringement
of patent. Rufus Choate represented the defendant and Daniel
Webster the plaintiff. Webster, in the course of his plea, one of
the most brilliant and moving ever uttered by him, paused for a
moment, drew from himself the attention of those who were hanging
upon his words, and pointed to his client. He would have them
look at the man whose cause he pleaded: a man of fifty-two, who
looked fifteen years older, sallow, emaciated from disease, due
to long privations, bitter disappointments, and wrongs. This was
Charles Goodyear, inventor of the process which put rubber into
the service of the world. Said Webster:

"And now is Charles Goodyear the discoverer of this invention of
vulcanized rubber? Is he the first man upon whose mind the idea
ever flashed, or to whose intelligence the fact ever was
disclosed, that by carrying heat to a certain height it would
cease to render plastic the India Rubber and begin to harden and
metallize it? Is there a man in the world who found out that fact
before Charles Goodyear? Who is he? Where is he? On what
continent does he live? Who has heard of him? What books treat of
him? What man among all the men on earth has seen him, known him,
or named him? Yet it is certain that this discovery has been
made. It is certain that it exists. It is certain that it is now
a matter of common knowledge all over the civilized world. It is
certain that ten or twelve years ago it was not knowledge. It is
certain that this curious result has grown into knowledge by
somebody's discovery and invention. And who is that somebody? The
question was put to my learned opponent by my learned associate.
If Charles Goodyear did not make this discovery, who did make it?
Who did make it? Why, if our learned opponent had said he should
endeavor to prove that some one other than Mr. Goodyear had made
this discovery, that would have been very fair. I think the
learned gentleman was very wise in not doing so. For I have
thought often, in the course of my practice in law, that it was
not very advisable to raise a spirit that one could not
conveniently lay again. Now who made this discovery? And would it
not be proper? I am sure it would. And would it not be manly? I
am sure it would. Would not my learned friend and his coadjutor
have acted a more noble part, if they had stood up and said that
this invention was not Goodyear's, but it was an invention of
such and such a man, in this or that country? On the contrary
they do not meet Goodyear's claim by setting up a distinct claim
of anybody else. They attempt to prove that he was not the
inventor by little shreds and patches of testimony. Here a little
bit of sulphur, and there a little parcel of lead; here a little
degree of heat, a little hotter than would warm a man's hands,
and in which a man could live for ten minutes or a quarter of an
hour; and yet they never seem to come to the point. I think it is
because their materials did not allow them to come to the manly
assertion that somebody else did make this invention, giving to
that somebody a local habitation and a name. We want to know the
name, and the habitation, and the location of the man upon the
face of this globe, who invented vulcanized rubber, if it be not
he, who now sits before us.

"Well there are birds which fly in the air, seldom lighting, but
often hovering. Now I think this is a question not to be hovered
over, not to be brooded over, and not to be dealt with as an
infinitesimal quantity of small things. It is a case calling for
a manly admission and a manly defense. I ask again, if there is
anybody else than Goodyear who made this invention, who is he? Is
the discovery so plain that it might have come about by accident?
It is likely to work important changes in the arts everywhere. IT
INTRODUCES QUITE A NEW MATERIAL INTO THE MANUFACTURE OF THE ARTS,
THAT MATERIAL BEING NOTHING LESS THAN ELASTIC METAL. It is hard
like metal and as elastic as pure original gum elastic. Why, that
is as great and momentous a phenomenon occurring to men in the
progress of their knowledge, as it would be for a man to show
that iron and gold could remain iron and gold and yet become
elastic like India Rubber. It would be just such another result.
Now, this fact cannot be denied; it cannot be secreted; it cannot
be kept out of sight; somebody has made this invention. That is
certain. Who is he? Mr. Hancock has been referred to. But he
expressly acknowledges Goodyear to be the first inventor. I say
that there is not in the world a human being that can stand up
and say that it is his invention, except the man who is sitting
at that table."


The court found for the plaintiff, and this decision established
for all time the claim of the American, Charles Goodyear, to be
the sole inventor of vulcanized rubber.

This trial may be said to be the dramatic climax in the story of
rubber. It celebrated the hour when the science of invention
turned a raw product--which had tantalized by its promise and
wrought ruin by its treachery--into a manufacture adaptable to a
thousand uses, adding to man's ease and health and to the
locomotion, construction, and communication of modern life.

When Columbus revisited Hayti on his second voyage, he observed
some natives playing with a ball. Now, ball games are the oldest
sport known. From the beginning of his history man, like the
kitten and the puppy, has delighted to play with the round thing
that rolls. The men who came with Columbus to conquer the Indies
had brought their Castilian wind-balls to play with in idle
hours. But at once they found that the balls of Hayti were
incomparably superior toys; they bounced better. These high
bouncing balls were made, so they learned, from a milky fluid of
the consistency of honey which the natives procured by tapping
certain trees and then cured over the smoke of palm nuts. A
discovery which improved the delights of ball games was
noteworthy.

The old Spanish historian, Herrera, gravely transcribed in his
pages all that the governors of Hayti reported about the bouncing
balls. Some fifty years later another Spanish historian related
that the natives of the Amazon valley made shoes of this gum; and
that Spanish soldiers spread their cloaks with it to keep out the
rain. Many years later still, in 1736, a French astronomer, who
was sent by his government to Peru to measure an arc of the
meridian, brought home samples of the gum and reported that the
natives make lights of it, "which burn without a wick and are
very bright," and "shoes of it which are waterproof, and when
smoked they have the appearance of leather. They also make
pear-shaped bottles on the necks of which they fasten wooden
tubes. Pressure on the bottle sends the liquid squirting out of
the tube, so they resemble syringes." Their name for the fluid,
he added, was "cachuchu"--caoutchouc, we now write it. Evidently
the samples filled no important need at the time, for we hear no
more of the gum until thirty-four years afterward. Then, so an
English writer tells us, a use was found for the gum--and a name.
A stationer accidentally discovered that it would erase pencil
marks, And, as it came from the Indies and rubbed, of course it
was "India rubber."

About the year 1820 American merchantmen, plying between Brazil
and New England, sometimes carried rubber as ballast on the home
voyage and dumped it on the wharves at Boston. One of the
shipmasters exhibited to his friends a pair of native shoes
fancifully gilded. Another, with more foresight, brought home
five hundred pairs, ungilded, and offered them for sale. They
were thick, clumsily shaped, and heavy, but they sold. There was
a demand for more. In a few years half a million pairs were being
imported annually. New England manufacturers bid against one
another along the wharves for the gum which had been used as
ballast and began to make rubber shoes.

European vessels had also carried rubber home; and experiments
were being made with it in France and Britain. A Frenchman
manufactured suspenders by cutting a native bottle into fine
threads and running them through a narrow cloth web. And
Macintosh, a chemist of Glasgow, inserted rubber treated with
naphtha between thin pieces of cloth and evolved the garment that
still bears his name.

At first the new business in rubber yielded profits. The cost of
the raw material was infinitesimal; and there was a demand for
the finished articles. In Roxbury, Massachusetts, a firm
manufacturing patent leather treated raw rubber with turpentine
and lampblack and spread it on cloth, in an effort to produce a
waterproof leather. The process appeared to be a complete
success, and a large capital was employed to make handsome shoes
and clothing out of the new product and in opening shops in the
large cities for their sale. Merchants throughout the country
placed orders for these goods, which, as it happened, were made
and shipped in winter.

But, when summer came, the huge profits of the manufacturers
literally melted away, for the beautiful garments decomposed in
the heat; and loads of them, melting and running together, were
being returned to the factory. And they filled Roxbury with such
noisome odors that they had to be taken out at dead of night and
buried deep in the earth.

And not only did these rubber garments melt in the heat. It
presently transpired that severe frost stiffened them to the
rigidity of granite. Daniel Webster had had some experience in
this matter himself. "A friend in New York," he said, "sent me a
very fine cloak of India Rubber, and a hat of the same material.
I did not succeed very well with them. I took the cloak one day
and set it out in the cold. It stood very well by itself. I
surmounted it with the hat, and many persons passing by supposed
they saw, standing by the porch, the Farmer of Marshfield."

It was in the year 1834, shortly after the Roxbury manufacturers
had come to realize that their process was worthless and that
their great fortune was only a mirage, and just before these
facts became generally known, that Charles Goodyear made his
entrance on the scene. He appeared first as a customer in the
company's store in New York and bought a rubber life-preserver.
When he returned some weeks later with a plan for improving the
tube, the manager confided to him the sad tragedy of rubber,
pointing out that no improvement in the manufactured articles
would meet the difficulty, but that fame and fortune awaited the
inventor of a process that would keep rubber dry and firm and
flexible in all weathers.

Goodyear felt that he had a call from God. "He who directs the
operations of the mind," he wrote at a later date, "can turn it
to the development of the properties of Nature in his own way,
and at the time when they are specially needed. The creature
imagines he is executing some plan of his own, while he is simply
an instrument in the hands of his Maker for executing the divine
purposes of beneficence to the race." It was in the spirit of a
crusader, consecrated to a particular service, that this man took
up the problem of rubber. The words quoted are a fitting preface
for the story of the years that followed, which is a tale of
endurance and persistent activity under sufferings and
disappointments such as are scarcely paralleled even in the pages
of invention, darkened as they often are by poverty and defeat.

Charles Goodyear was born at New Haven, December 29, 1800, the
son of Amasa Goodyear and descendant of Stephen Goodyear who was
associated with Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of the
Puritan colony of New Haven. It was natural that Charles should
turn his mind to invention, as he did even when a boy; for his
father, a pioneer in the manufacture of American hardware, was
the inventor of a steel hayfork which replaced the heavy iron
fork of prior days and lightened and expedited the labor of the
fields. When Charles was seven his father moved to Naugatuck and
manufactured the first pearl buttons made in America; during the
War of 1812 the Goodyear factory supplied metal buttons to the
Government. Charles, a studious, serious boy, was the close
companion of his father. His deeply religious nature manifested
itself early, and he joined the Congregational Church when he was
sixteen. It was at first his intention to enter the ministry,
which seemed to him to offer the most useful career of service,
but, changing his mind, he went to Philadelphia to learn the
hardware business and on coming of age was admitted to
partnership in a firm established there by his father. The firm
prospered for a time, but an injudicious extension of credit led
to its suspension. So it happened that Goodyear in 1834, when he
became interested in rubber, was an insolvent debtor, liable,
under the laws of the time, to imprisonment. Soon afterward,
indeed, he was lodged in the Debtor's Prison in Philadelphia.

 It would seem an inauspicious hour to begin a search which might
lead him on in poverty for years and end nowhere. But, having
seen the need for perfect rubber, the thought had come to him,
with the force of a religious conviction, that "an object so
desirable and so important, and so necessary to man's comfort, as
the making of gum-elastic available to his use, was most
certainly placed within his reach." Thereafter he never doubted
that God had called him to this task and that his efforts would
be crowned with success. Concerning his prison experiences, of
which the first was not to be the last, he says that
"notwithstanding the mortification attending such a trial," if
the prisoner has a real aim "for which to live and hope over he
may add firmness to hope, and derive lasting advantage by having
proved to himself that, with a clear conscience and a high
purpose, a man may be as happy within prison walls as in any
other (even the most fortunate) circumstances in life." With this
spirit he met every reverse throughout the ten hard years that
followed.

Luckily, as he says, his first experiments required no expensive
equipment. Fingers were the best tools for working the gum. The
prison officials allowed him a bench and a marble slab, a friend
procured him a few dollars' worth of gum, which sold then at five
cents a pound, and his wife contributed her rolling pin. That was
the beginning.

For a time he believed that, by mixing the raw gum with magnesia
and boiling it in lime, he had overcome the stickiness which was
the inherent difficulty. He made some sheets of white rubber
which were exhibited, and also some articles for sale. His hopes
were dashed when he found that weak acid, such as apple juice or
vinegar, destroyed his new product. Then in 1836 he found that
the application of aqua fortis, or nitric acid, produced a
"curing" effect on the rubber and thought that he had discovered
the secret. Finding a partner with capital, he leased an
abandoned rubber factory on Staten Island. But his partner's
fortune was swept away in the panic of 1837, leaving Goodyear
again an insolvent debtor. Later he found another partner and
went to manufacturing in the deserted plant at Roxbury, with an
order from the Government for a large number of mail bags. This
order was given wide publicity and it aroused the interest of
manufacturers throughout the country. But by the time the goods
were ready for delivery the first bags made had rotted from their
handles. Only the surface of the rubber had been "cured."

This failure was the last straw, as far as Goodyear's friends
were concerned. Only his patient and devoted wife stood by him;
she had labored, known want, seen her children go hungry to
school, but she seems never to have reproached her husband nor to
have doubted his ultimate success. The gentleness and tenderness
of his deportment in the home made his family cling to him with
deep affection and bear willingly any sacrifice for his sake;
though his successive failures generally meant a return of the
inventor to the debtor's prison and the casting of his family
upon charity.

The nitric acid process had not solved the problem but it had
been a real step forward. It was in the year 1839, by an
accident, that he discovered the true process of vulcanization
which cured not the surface alone but the whole mass. He was
trying to harden the gum by boiling it with sulphur on his wife's
cookstove when he let fall a lump of it on the red hot iron top.
It vulcanized instantly. This was an accident which only Goodyear
could have interpreted. And it was the last. The strange
substance from the jungles of the tropics had been mastered. It
remained, however, to perfect the process, to ascertain the
accurate formula and the exact degree of heat. The Goodyears were
so poor during these years that they received at any time a
barrel of flour from a neighbor thankfully. There is a tradition
that on one occasion, when Goodyear desired to cross between
Staten Island and New York, he had to give his umbrella to the
ferry master as security for his fare, and that the name of the
ferry master was Cornelius Vanderbilt, "a man who made much money
because he took few chances." The incident may easily have
occurred, though the ferry master could hardly have been
Vanderbilt himself, unless it had been at an earlier date.
Another tradition says that one of Goodyear's neighbors described
him to an inquisitive stranger thus: "You will know him when you
see him; he has on an India rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and
shoes, and an India rubber purse WITHOUT A CENT IN IT!"

Goodyear's trials were only beginning. He had the secret at last,
but nobody would believe him. He had worn out even the most
sanguine of his friends. "That such indifference to this
discovery, and many incidents attending it, could have existed in
an intelligent and benevolent community," wrote Goodyear later,
"can only be accounted for by existing circumstances in that
community The great losses that had been sustained in the
manufacture of gum-elastic: the length of time the inventor had
spent in what appeared to them to be entirely fruitless efforts
to accomplish anything with it; added to his recent misfortunes
and disappointments, all conspired, with his utter destitution,
to produce a state of things as unfavorable to the promulgation
of the discovery as can well be imagined. He, however, felt in
duty bound to beg in earnest, if need be, sooner than that the
discovery should be lost to the world and to himself. . . . How
he subsisted at this period charity alone can tell, for it is as
well to call things by their right names; and it is little else
than charity when the lender looks upon what he parts with as a
gift. The pawning or selling some relic of better days or some
article of necessity was a frequent expedient. His library had
long since disappeared, but shortly after the discovery of this
process, he collected and sold at auction the schoolbooks of his
children, which brought him the trifling sum of five dollars;
small as the amount was, it enabled him to proceed. At this step
he did not hesitate. The occasion, and the certainty of success,
warranted the measure which, in other circumstances, would have
been sacrilege."

His itinerary during those years is eloquent. Wherever there was
a man, who had either a grain of faith in rubber or a little
charity for a frail and penniless monomaniac, thither Goodyear
made his way. The goal might be an attic room or shed to live in
rent free, or a few dollars for a barrel of flour for the family
and a barrel of rubber for himself, or permission to use a
factory's ovens after hours and to hang his rubber over the steam
valves while work went on. From Woburn in 1839, the year of his
great discovery, he went to Lynn, from Lynn back to the deserted
factory at Roxbury. Again to Woburn, to Boston, to Northampton,
to Springfield, to Naugatuck; in five years as many removes. When
he lacked boat or railway fare, and he generally did, he walked
through winds and rains and drifting snow, begging shelter at
some cottage or farm where a window lamp gleamed kindly.

Goodyear took out his patent in 1844. The process he invented has
been changed little, if at all, from that day to this. He also
invented the perfect India rubber cloth by mixing fiber with the
gum a discovery he considered rightly as secondary in importance
only to vulcanization. When he died in 1860 he had taken out
sixty patents on rubber manufactures. He had seen his invention
applied to several hundred uses, giving employment to sixty
thousand persons, producing annually eight million dollars' worth
of merchandise--numbers which would form but a fraction of the
rubber statistics of today.

Everybody, the whole civilized world round, uses rubber in one
form or another. And rubber makes a belt around the world in its
natural as well as in its manufactured form. The rubber-bearing
zone winds north and south of the equator through both
hemispheres. In South America rubber is the latex of certain
trees, in Africa of trees and vines. The best "wild" rubber still
comes from Para in Brazil. It is gathered and prepared for
shipment there today by the same methods the natives used four
hundred years ago. The natives in their canoes follow the
watercourses into the jungles. They cut V-shaped or spiral
incisions in the trunks of the trees that grow sheer to sixty
feet before spreading their shade. At the base of the incisions
they affix small clay cups, like swallows' nests. Over the route
they return later with large gourds in which they collect the
fluid from the clay cups. The filled gourds they carry to their
village of grass huts and there they build their smoky fires of
oily palm nuts. Dipping paddles into the fluid gum they turn and
harden it, a coating at a time, in the smoke. The rubber
"biscuit" is cut from the paddle with a wet knife when the
desired thickness has been attained.

Goodyear lived for sixteen years after his discovery of the
vulcanization process. During the last six he was unable to walk
without crutches. He was indifferent to money. To make his
discoveries of still greater service to mankind was his whole
aim. It was others who made fortunes out of his inventions.
Goodyear died a poor man.

In his book, a copy of which was printed on gumelastic sheets and
bound in hard rubber carved, he summed up his philosophy in this
statement: "The writer is not disposed to repine and say that he
has planted and others have gathered the fruits. The advantages
of a career in life should not be estimated exclusively by the
standard of dollars and cents, as it is too often done. Man has
just cause for regret when he sows and no one reaps."



CHAPTER VIII. PIONEERS OF THE MACHINE SHOP

There is a tinge of melancholy about the life of such a pioneer
as Oliver Evans, that early American mechanic of great genius,
whose story is briefly outlined in a preceding chapter. Here was
a man of imagination and sensibility, as well as practical power;
conferring great benefits on his countrymen, yet in chronic
poverty; derided by his neighbors, robbed by his beneficiaries;
his property, the fruit of his brain and toil, in the end
malevolently destroyed. The lot of the man who sees far ahead of
his time, and endeavors to lead his fellows in ways for which
they are not prepared, has always been hard.

John Stevens, too, as we have seen, met defeat when he tried to
thrust a steam railroad on a country that was not yet ready for
it. His mechanical conceptions were not marked by genius equal to
that of Evans, but they were still too far advanced to be
popular. The career of Stevens, however, presents a remarkable
contrast to that of Evans in other respects. Evans was born poor
(in Delaware, 1755) and remained poor all his life. Stevens was
born rich (in New York City, 1749) and remained rich all his
life. Of the family of Evans nothing is known either before or
after him. Stevens, on the contrary, belonged to one of the best
known and most powerful families in America. His grandfather,
John Stevens I, came from England in 1699 and made himself a
lawyer and a great landowner. His father, John Stevens II, was a
member from New Jersey of the Continental Congress and presided
at the New Jersey Convention which ratified the Constitution.

John Stevens III was graduated at King's College (Columbia) in
1768. He held public offices during the Revolution. To him,
perhaps more than to any other man, is due the Patent Act of
1790, for the protection of American inventors, for that law was
the result of a petition which he made to Congress and which,
being referred to a committee, was favorably reported. Thus we
may regard John Stevens as the father of the American patent law.

John Stevens owned the old Dutch farm on the Hudson on which the
city of Hoboken now stands. The place had been in possession of
the Bayard family, but William Bayard, who lived there at the
time of the Revolution, was a Loyalist, and his house on Castle
Point was burned down and his estate confiscated. After the
Revolution Stevens acquired the property. He laid it out as a
town in 1804, made it his summer residence, and established there
the machine shops in which he and his sons carried on their
mechanical experiments.

These shops were easily the largest and bestequipped in the Union
when in 1838 John Stevens died at the age of ninety. The four
brothers, John Cox, Robert Livingston, James Alexander, and Edwin
Augustus, worked harmoniously together. "No one ever heard of any
quarrel or dissension in the Stevens family. They were workmen
themselves, and they were superior to their subordinates because
they were better engineers and better men of business than any
other folk who up to that time had undertaken the business of
transportation in the United States."*

* Abram S. Hewitt. Quoted in Iles, "Leading American Inventors",
p. 37.


The youngest of these brothers, Edwin Augustus Stevens, dying in
1868, left a large part of his fortune to found the Stevens
Institute of Technology, afterwards erected at Hoboken not far
from the old family homestead on Castle Point. The mechanical
star of the family, however, was the second brother, Robert
Livingston Stevens, whose many inventions made for the great
improvement of transportation both by land and water. For a
quarter of a century, from 1815 to 1840, he was the foremost
builder of steamboats in America, and under his hand the
steamboat increased amazingly in speed and efficiency. He made
great contributions to the railway. The first locomotives ran
upon wooden stringers plated with strap iron. A loose end--"a
snakehead" it was called--sometimes curled up and pierced through
the floor of a car, causing a wreck. The solid metal T-rail, now
in universal use, was designed by Stevens and was first used on
the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which he was president and his
brother Edwin treasurer and manager. The swivel truck and the
cow-catcher, the modern method of attaching rails to ties, the
vestibule car, and many improvements in the locomotive were also
first introduced on the Stevens road.

The Stevens brothers exerted their influence also on naval
construction. A double invention of Robert and Edwin, the forced
draft, to augment steam power and save coal, and the air-tight
fireroom, which they applied to their own vessels, was afterwards
adopted by all navies. Robert designed and projected an ironclad
battleship, the first one in the world. This vessel, called the
Stevens Battery, was begun by authority of the Government in
1842; but, owing to changes in the design and inadequate
appropriations by Congress, it was never launched. It lay for
many years in the basin at Hoboken an unfinished hulk. Robert
died in 1856. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Edwin tried to
revive the interest of the Government, but by that time the
design of the Stevens Battery was obsolete, and Edwin Stevens was
an old man. So the honors for the construction of the first
ironclad man-of-war to fight and win a battle went to John
Ericsson, that other great inventor, who built the famous Monitor
for the Union Government.

Carlyle's oft-quoted term, "Captains of Industry," may fittingly
be applied to the Stevens family. Strong, masterful, and
farseeing, they used ideas, their own and those of others, in a
large way, and were able to succeed where more timorous inventors
failed. Without the stimulus of poverty they achieved success,
making in their shops that combination of men and material which
not only added to their own fortunes but also served the world.


We left Eli Whitney defeated in his efforts to divert to himself
some adequate share of the untold riches arising from his great
invention of the cotton gin. Whitney, however, had other sources
of profit in his own character and mechanical ability. As early
as 1798 he had turned his talents to the manufacture of firearms.
He had established his shops at Whitneyville, near New Haven; and
it was there that he worked out another achievement quite as
important economically as the cotton gin, even though the
immediate consequences were less spectacular: namely, the
principle of standardization or interchangeability in
manufacture.

This principle is the very foundation today of all American
large-scale production. The manufacturer produces separately
thousands of copies of every part of a complicated machine,
confident that an equal number of the complete machine will be
assembled and set in motion. The owner of a motor car, a reaper,
a tractor, or a sewing machine, orders, perhaps by telegraph or
telephone, a broken or lost part, taking it for granted that the
new part can be fitted easily and precisely into the place of the
old.

Though it is probable that this idea of standardization, or
interchangeability, originated independently in Whitney's mind,
and though it is certain that he and one of his neighbors, who
will be mentioned presently, were the first manufacturers in the
world to carry it out successfully in practice, yet it must be
noted that the idea was not entirely new. We are told that the
system was already in operation in England in the manufacture of
ship's blocks. From no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson we
learn that a French mechanic had previously conceived the same
idea.* But, as no general result whatever came from the idea in
either France or England, the honors go to Whitney and North,
since they carried it to such complete success that it spread to
other branches of manufacturing. And in the face of opposition.
When Whitney wrote that his leading object was "to substitute
correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of
the artist which is acquired only by long practice and
experience," in order to make the same parts of different guns
"as much like each other as the successive impressions of a
copper-plate engraving," he was laughed to scorn by the ordnance
officers of France and England. "Even the Washington officials,"
says Roe, "were sceptical and became uneasy at advancing so much
money without a single gun having been completed, and Whitney
went to Washington, taking with him ten pieces of each part of a
musket. He exhibited these to the Secretary of War and the army
officers interested, as a succession of piles of different parts.
Selecting indiscriminately from each of the piles, he put
together ten muskets, an achievement which was looked on with
amazement."**

* See the letter from Jefferson to John Jay, of April 30, 1785,
cited in Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 129.

** Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 133.


While Whitney worked out his plans at Whitneyville, Simeon North,
another Connecticut mechanic and a gunmaker by trade, adopted the
same system. North's first shop was at Berlin. He afterwards
moved to Middletown. Like Whitney, he used methods far in advance
of the time. Both Whitney and North helped to establish the
United States Arsenals at Springfield, Massachusetts, and at
Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which their methods were adopted.
Both the Whitney and North plants survived their founders. Just
before the Mexican War the Whitney plant began to use steel for
gun barrels, and Jefferson Davis, Colonel of the Mississippi
Rifles, declared that the new guns were "the best rifles which
had ever been issued to any regiment in the world." Later, when
Davis became Secretary of War, he issued to the regular army the
same weapon.

The perfection of Whitney's tools and machines made it possible
to employ workmen of little skill or experience. "Indeed so easy
did Mr. Whitney find it to instruct new and inexperienced
workmen, that he uniformly preferred to do so, rather than to
combat the prejudices of those who had learned the business under
a different system."* This reliance upon the machine for
precision and speed has been a distinguishing mark of American
manufacture. A man or a woman of little actual mechanical skill
may make an excellent machine tender, learning to perform a few
simple motions with great rapidity.

* Denison Olmstead, "Memoir", cited by Roe, p. 159.


Whitney married in 1817 Miss Henrietta Edwards, daughter of Judge
Pierpont Edwards, of New Haven, and granddaughter of Jonathan
Edwards. His business prospered, and his high character,
agreeable manners, and sound judgment won. for him the highest
regard of all who knew him; and he had a wide circle of friends.
It is said that he was on intimate terms with every President of
the United States from George Washington to John Quincy Adams.
But his health had been impaired by hardships endured in the
South, in the long struggle over the cotton gin, and he died in
1825, at the age of fifty-nine. The business which he founded
remained in his family for ninety years. It was carried on after
his death by two of his nephews and then by his son, until 1888,
when it was sold to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New
Haven.

Here then, in these early New England gunshops, was born the
American system of interchangeable manufacture. Its growth
depended upon the machine tool, that is, the machine for making
machines. Machine tools, of course, did not originate in America.
English mechanics were making machines for cutting metal at least
a generation before Whitney. One of the earliest of these English
pioneers was John Wilkinson, inventor and maker of the boring
machine which enabled Boulton and Watt in 1776 to bring their
steam engine to the point of practicability. Without this machine
Watt found it impossible to bore his cylinders with the necessary
degree of accuracy.* From this one fact, that the success of the
steam engine depended upon the invention of a new tool, we may
judge of what a great part the inventors of machine tools, of
whom thousands are unnamed and unknown, have played in the
industrial world.

* Roe, "English and American Tool Builders", p. 1 et seq.


So it was in the shops of the New England gunmakers that machine
tools were first made of such variety and adaptability that they
could be applied generally to other branches of manufacturing;
and so it was that the system of interchangeable manufacture
arose as a distinctively American development. We have already
seen how England's policy of keeping at home the secrets of her
machinery led to the independent development of the spindles and
looms of New England. The same policy affected the tool industry
in America in the same way and bred in the new country a race of
original and resourceful mechanics.

One of these pioneers was Thomas Blanchard, born in 1788 on a
farm in Worcester County, Massachusetts, the home also of Eli
Whitney and Elias Howe. Tom began his mechanical career at the
age of thirteen by inventing a device to pare apples. At the age
of eighteen he went to work in his brother's shop, where tacks
were made by hand, and one day took to his brother a mechanical
device for counting the tacks to go into a single packet. The
invention was adopted and was found to save the labor of one
workman. Tom's next achievement was a machine to make tacks, on
which he spent six years and the rights of which he sold for five
thousand dollars. It was worth far more, for it revolutionized
the tack industry, but such a sum was to young Blanchard a great
fortune.

The tack-making machine gave Blanchard a reputation, and he was
presently sought out by a gun manufacturer, to see whether he
could improve the lathe for turning the barrels of the guns.
Blanchard could; and did. His next problem was to invent a lathe
for turning the irregular wooden stocks. Here he also succeeded
and produced a lathe that would copy precisely and rapidly any
pattern. It is from this invention that the name of Blanchard is
best known. The original machine is preserved in the United
States Armory at Springfield, to which Blanchard was attached for
many years, and where scores of the descendants of his copying
lathe may be seen in action today.

Turning gunstocks was, of course, only one of the many uses of
Blanchard's copying lathe. Its chief use, in fact, was in the
production of wooden lasts for the shoemakers of New England, but
it was applied to many branches of wood manufacture, and later on
the same principle was applied to the shaping of metal.

Blanchard was a man of many ideas. He built a steam vehicle for
ordinary roads and was an early advocate of railroads; he built
steamboats to ply upon the Connecticut and incidentally produced
in connection with these his most profitable invention, a machine
to bend ship's timbers without splintering them. The later years
of his life were spent in Boston, and he often served as a patent
expert in the courts, where his wide knowledge, hard common
sense, incisive speech, and homely wit made him a welcome
witness.

We now glance at another New England inventor, Samuel Colt, the
man who carried Whitney's conceptions to transcendent heights,
the most dashing and adventurous of all the pioneers of the
machine shop in America. If "the American frontier was
Elizabethan in quality," there was surely a touch of the
Elizabethan spirit on the man whose invention so greatly affected
the character of that frontier. Samuel Colt was born at Hartford
in 1814 and died there in 1862 at the age of forty-eight, leaving
behind him a famous name and a colossal industry of his own
creation. His father was a small manufacturer of silk and woolens
at Hartford, and the boy entered the factory at a very early age.
At school in Amherst a little later, he fell under the
displeasure of his teachers. At thirteen he took to sea, as a boy
before the mast, on the East India voyage to Calcutta. It was on
this voyage that he conceived the idea of the revolver and
whittled out a wooden model. On his return he went into his
father's works and gained a superficial knowledge of chemistry
from the manager of the bleaching and dyeing department. Then he
took to the road for three years and traveled from Quebec to New
Orleans lecturing on chemistry under the name of "Dr. Coult." The
main feature of his lecture was the administration of nitrous
oxide gas to volunteers from the audience, whose antics and the
amusing showman's patter made the entertainment very popular.

Colt's ambition, however, soared beyond the occupation of
itinerant showman, and he never forgot his revolver. As soon as
he had money enough, he made models of the new arm and took out
his patents; and, having enlisted the interest of capital, he set
up the Patent Arms Company at Paterson, New Jersey, to
manufacture the revolver. He did not succeed in having the
revolver adopted by the Government, for the army officers for a
long time objected to the percussion cap (an invention, by the
way, then some twenty years old, which was just coming into use
and without which Colt's revolver would not have been
practicable) and thought that the new weapon might fail in an
emergency. Colt found a market in Texas and among the
frontiersmen who were fighting the Seminole War in Florida, but
the sales were insufficient, and in 1842 the company was obliged
to confess insolvency and close down the plant. Colt bought from
the company the patent of the revolver, which was supposed to be
worthless.

Nothing more happened until after the outbreak of the Mexican War
in 1846. Then came a loud call from General Zachary Taylor for a
supply of Colt's revolvers. Colt had none. He had sold the last
one to a Texas ranger. He had not even a model. Yet he took an
order from the Government for a thousand and proceeded to
construct a model. For the manufacture of the revolvers he
arranged with the Whitney plant at Whitneyville. There he saw and
scrutinized every detail of the factory system that Eli Whitney
had established forty years earlier. He resolved to have a plant
of his own on the same system and one that would far surpass
Whitney's. Next year (1848) he rented premises in Hartford. His
business prospered and increased. At last the Government demanded
his revolvers. Within five years he had procured a site of two
hundred and fifty acres fronting the Connecticut River at
Hartford, and had there begun the erection of the greatest arms
factory in the world.

Colt was a captain of captains. The ablest mechanic and
industrial organizer in New England at that time was Elisha K.
Root. Colt went after him, outbidding every other bidder for his
services, and brought him to Hartford to supervise the erection
of the new factory and set up its machinery. Root was a great
superintendent, and the phenomenal success of the Colt factory
was due in a marked degree to him. He became president of the
company after Colt's death in 1862, and under him were trained a
large number of mechanics and inventors of new machine tools, who
afterwards became celebrated leaders and officers in the
industrial armies of the country.

The spectacular rise of the Colt factory at Hartford drew the
attention of the British Government, and in 1854 Colt was invited
to appear in London before a Parliamentary Committee on Small
Arms. He lectured the members of the committee as if they had
been school boys, telling them that the regular British gun was
so bad that he would be ashamed to have it come from his shop.
Speaking of a plant which he had opened in London the year before
he criticized the supposedly skilled British mechanic, saying: "I
began here by employing the highest-priced men that I could find
to do difficult things, but I had to remove the whole of these
high-priced men. Then I tried the cheapest I could find, and the
more ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose;
and the result was this: I had men now in my employ that I
started with at two shillings a day, and in one short year I can
not spare them at eight shillings a day."* Colt's audacity,
however, did not offend the members of the committee and they
decided to visit his American factory at Hartford. They did; and
were so impressed that the British Government purchased in
America a full set of machines for the manufacture of arms in the
Royal Small Arms factory at Enfield, England, and took across the
sea American workmen and foremen to set up and run these .
machines. A demand sprang up in Europe for Blanchard copying
lathes and a hundred other American tools, and from this time on
the manufacture of tools and appliances for other manufacturers,
both at home and abroad, became an increasingly important
industry of New England.

* Henry Barnard, "Armsmear", p. 371.


The system which the gunmakers worked out and developed to meet
their own requirements was capable of indefinite expansion. It
was easily adapted to other kinds of manufacture. So it was that
as new inventions came in the manufacturers of these found many
of the needed tools ready for them, and any special modifications
could be quickly made. A manufacturer, of machine tools will
produce on demand a device to perform any operation, however
difficult or intricate. Some of the machines are so versatile
that specially designed sets of cutting edges will adapt them to
almost any work.

Standardization, due to the machine tool, is one of the chief
glories of American manufacturing. Accurate watches and clocks,
bicycles and motor cars, innumerable devices to save labor in the
home, the office, the shop, or on the farm, are within the reach
of all, because the machine tool, tended by labor comparatively
unskilled, does the greater part of the work of production. In
the crisis of the World War, American manufacturers, turning from
the arts of peace, promptly adapted their plants to the
manufacture of the most complicated engines of destruction, which
were produced in Europe only by skilled machinists of the highest
class.



CHAPTER IX. THE FATHERS OF ELECTRICITY

It may startle some reader to be told that the foundations of
modern electrical science were definitely established in the
Elizabethan Age. The England of Elizabeth, of Shakespeare, of
Drake and the sea-dogs, is seldom thought of as the cradle of the
science of electricity. Nevertheless, it was; just as surely as
it was the birthplace of the Shakespearian drama, of the
Authorized Version of the Bible, or of that maritime adventure
and colonial enterprise which finally grew and blossomed into the
United States of America.

The accredited father of the science of electricity and magnetism
is William Gilbert, who was a physician and man of learning at
the court of Elizabeth. Prior to him, all that was known of these
phenomena was what the ancients knew, that the lodestone
possessed magnetic properties and that amber and jet, when
rubbed, would attract bits of paper or other substances of small
specific gravity. Gilbert's great treatise "On the Magnet",
printed in Latin in 1600, containing the fruits of his researches
and experiments for many years, indeed provided the basis for a
new science.

On foundations well and truly laid by Gilbert several Europeans,
like Otto von Guericke of Germany, Du Fay of France, and Stephen
Gray of England, worked before Benjamin Franklin and added to the
structure of electrical knowledge. The Leyden jar, in which the
mysterious force could be stored, was invented in Holland in 1745
and in Germany almost simultaneously.

Franklin's important discoveries are outlined in the first
chapter of this book. He found out, as we have seen, that
electricity and lightning are one and the same, and in the
lightning rod he made the first practical application of
electricity. Afterwards Cavendish of England, Coulomb of France,
Galvani of Italy, all brought new bricks to the pile. Following
them came a group of master builders, among whom may be
mentioned: Volta of Italy, Oersted of Denmark, Ampere of France,
Ohm of Germany, Faraday of England, and Joseph Henry of America.

Among these men, who were, it should be noted, theoretical
investigators, rather than practical inventors like Morse, or
Bell, or Edison, the American Joseph Henry ranks high. Henry was
born at Albany in 1799 and was educated at the Albany Academy.
Intending to practice medicine, he studied the natural sciences.
He was poor and earned his daily bread by private tutoring. He
was an industrious and brilliant student and soon gave evidence
of being endowed with a powerful mind. He was appointed in 1824
an assistant engineer for the survey of a route for a State road,
three hundred miles long, between the Hudson River and Lake Erie.
The experience he gained in this work changed the course of his
career; he decided to follow civil and mechanical engineering
instead of medicine. Then in 1826 he became teacher of
mathematics and natural philosophy in the Albany Academy.

It was in the Albany Academy that he began that wide series of
experiments and investigations which touched so many phases of
the great problem of electricity. His first discovery was that a
magnet could be immensely strengthened by winding it with
insulated wire. He was the first to employ insulated wire wound
as on a spool and was able finally to make a magnet which would
lift thirty-five hundred pounds. He first showed the difference
between "quantity" magnets composed of short lengths of wire
connected in parallel, excited by a few large cells, and
"intensity" magnets wound with a single long wire and excited by
a battery composed of cells in series. This was an original
discovery, greatly increasing both the immediate usefulness of
the magnet and its possibilities for future experiments.

The learned men of Europe, Faraday, Sturgeon, and the rest, were
quick to recognize the value of the discoveries of the young
Albany schoolmaster. Sturgeon magnanimously said: "Professor
Henry has been enabled to produce a magnetic force which totally
eclipses every other in the whole annals of magnetism; and no
parallel is to be found since the miraculous suspension of the
celebrated Oriental imposter in his iron coffin."*

* Philosophical Magazine, vol. XI, p. 199 (March, 1832).


Henry also discovered the phenomena of self induction and mutual
induction. A current sent through a wire in the second story of
the building induced currents through a similar wire in the
cellar two floors below. In this discovery Henry anticipated
Faraday though his results as to mutual induction were not
published until he had heard rumors of Faraday's discovery, which
he thought to be something different.

The attempt to send signals by electricity had been made many
times before Henry became interested in the problem. On the
invention of Sturgeon's magnet there had been hopes in England of
a successful solution, but in the experiments that followed the
current became so weak after a few hundred feet that the idea was
pronounced impracticable. Henry strung a mile of fine wire in the
Academy, placed an "intensity" battery at one end, and made the
armature strike a bell at the other. Thus he discovered the
essential principle of the electric telegraph. This discovery was
made in 1831, the year before the idea of a working electric
telegraph flashed on the mind of Morse. There was no occasion for
the controversy which took place later as to who invented the
telegraph. That was Morse's achievement, but the discovery of the
great fact, which startled Morse into activity, was Henry's
achievement. In Henry's own words: "This was the first discovery
of the fact that a galvanic current could be transmitted to a
great distance with so little a diminution of force as to produce
mechanical effects, and of the means by which the transmission
could be accomplished. I saw that the electric telegraph was now
practicable." He says further, however: "I had not in mind any
particular form of telegraph, but referred only to the general
fact that it was now demonstrated that a galvanic current could
be transmitted to great distances, with sufficient power to
produce mechanical effects adequate to the desired object."*

* Deposition of Joseph Henry, September 7, 1849, printed in
Morse, "The Electra-Magnetic Telegraph", p. 91.


Henry next turned to the possibility of a magnetic engine for the
production of power and succeeded in making a reciprocating-bar
motor, on which he installed the first automatic pole changer, or
commutator, ever used with an electric battery. He did not
succeed in producing direct rotary motion. His bar oscillated
like the walking beam of a steamboat.

Henry was appointed in 1839. Professor of Natural Philosophy in
the College of New Jersey, better known today as Princeton
University. There he repeated his old experiments on a larger
scale, confirmed Steinheil's experiment of using the earth as
return conductor, showed how a feeble current would be
strengthened, and how a small magnet could be used as a circuit
maker and breaker. Here were the principles of the telegraph
relay and the dynamo.

Why, then, if the work of Henry was so important, is his name
almost forgotten, except by men of science, and not given to any
one of the practical applications of electricity? The answer is
plain. Henry was an investigator, not an inventor. He states his
position very clearly: "I never myself attempted to reduce the
principles to practice, or to apply any of my discoveries to
processes in the arts. My whole attention exclusive of my duties
to the College, was devoted to original scientific
investigations, and I left to others what I considered in a
scientific view of subordinate importance--the application of my
discoveries to useful purposes in the arts. Besides this I
partook of the feeling common to men of science, which
disinclines them to secure to themselves the advantages of their
discoveries by a patent."

Then, too, his talents were soon turned to a wider field. The
bequest of James Smithson, that farsighted Englishman, who left
his fortune to the United States to found "the Smithsonian
Institution, for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among
men," was responsible for the diffusion of Henry's activities.
The Smithsonian Institution was founded at Washington in 1846,
and Henry was fittingly chosen its Secretary, that is, its chief
executive officer. And from that time until his death in 1878,
over thirty years, he devoted himself to science in general.

He studied terrestrial magnetism and building materials. He
reduced meteorology to a science, collecting reports by
telegraph, made the first weather map, and issued forecasts of
the weather based upon definite knowledge rather than upon signs.
He became a member of the Lighthouse Board in 1852 and was the
head after 1871. The excellence of marine illuminants and fog
signals today is largely due to his efforts. Though he was later
drawn into a controversy with Morse over the credit for the
invention of the telegraph, he used his influence to procure the
renewal of Morse's patent. He listened with attention to
Alexander Graham Bell, who had the idea that electric wires might
be made to carry the human voice, and encouraged him to proceed
with his experiments. "He said," Bell writes, "that he thought it
was the germ of a great invention and advised me to work at it
without publishing. I said that I recognized the fact that there
were mechanical difficulties in the way that rendered the plan
impracticable at the present time. I added that I felt that I had
not the electrical knowledge necessary to overcome the
difficulties. His laconic answer was, 'GET IT!' I cannot tell you
how much these two words have encouraged me."

Henry had blazed the way for others to work out the principles of
the electric motor, and a few experimenters attempted to follow
his lead. Thomas Davenport, a blacksmith of Brandon, Vermont,
built an electric car in 1835, which he was able to drive on the
road, and so made himself the pioneer of the automobile in
America. Twelve years later Moses G. Farmer exhibited at various
places in New England an electric-driven locomotive, and in 1851
Charles Grafton Page drove an electric car, on the tracks of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, from Washington to Bladensburg, at
the rate of nineteen miles an hour. But the cost of batteries was
too great and the use of the electric motor in transportation not
yet practicable.

The great principle of the dynamo, or electric generator, was
discovered by Faraday and Henry but the process of its
development into an agency of practical power consumed many
years; and without the dynamo for the generation of power the
electric motor had to stand still and there could be no
practicable application of electricity to transportation, or
manufacturing, or lighting. So it was that, except for the
telegraph, whose story is told in another chapter, there was
little more American achievement in electricity until after the
Civil War.

The arc light as a practical illuminating device came in 1878. It
was introduced by Charles F. Brush, a young Ohio engineer and
graduate of the University of Michigan. Others before him had
attacked the problem of electric lighting, but lack of suitable
carbons stood in the way of their success. Brush overcame the
chief difficulties and made several lamps to burn in series from
one dynamo. The first Brush lights used for street illumination
were erected in Cleveland, Ohio, and soon the use of arc lights
became general. Other inventors improved the apparatus, but still
there were drawbacks. For outdoor lighting and for large halls
they served the purpose, but they could not be used in small
rooms. Besides, they were in series, that is, the current passed
through every lamp in turn, and an accident to one threw the
whole series out of action. The whole problem of indoor lighting
was to be solved by one of America's most famous inventors.

The antecedents of Thomas Alva Edison in America may be traced
back to the time when Franklin was beginning his career as a
printer in Philadelphia. The first American Edisons appear to
have come from Holland about 1730 and settled on the Passaic
River in New Jersey. Edison's grandfather, John Edison, was a
Loyalist in the Revolution who found refuge in Nova Scotia and
subsequently moved to Upper Canada. His son, Samuel Edison,
thought he saw a moral in the old man's exile. His father had
taken the King's side and had lost his home; Samuel would make no
such error. So, when the Canadian Rebellion of 1837 broke out,
Samuel Edison, aged thirty-three, arrayed himself on the side of
the insurgents. This time, however, the insurgents lost, and
Samuel was obliged to flee to the United States, just as his
father had fled to Canada. He finally settled at Milan, Ohio, and
there, in 1847, in a little brick house, which is still standing,
Thomas Alva Edison was born.

When the boy was seven the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan.
The fact that he attended school only three months and soon
became self-supporting was not due to poverty. His mother, an
educated woman of Scotch extraction, taught him at home after the
schoolmaster reported that he was "addled." His desire for money
to spend on chemicals for a laboratory which he had fitted up in
the cellar led to his first venture in business. "By a great
amount of persistence," he says, "I got permission to go on the
local train as newsboy. The local train from Port Huron to
Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles, left at 7 A.M. and
arrived again at 9.30 P.M. After being on the train for several
months I started two stores in Port Huron--one for periodicals,
and the other for vegetables, butter, and berries in the season.
They were attended by two boys who shared in the profits."
Moreover, young Edison bought produce from the farmers' wives
along the line which he sold at a profit. He had several newsboys
working for him on other trains; he spent hours in the Public
Library in Detroit; he fitted up a laboratory in an unused
compartment of one of the coaches, and then bought a small
printing press which he installed in the car and began to issue a
newspaper which he printed on the train. All before he was
fifteen years old.

But one day Edison's career as a traveling newsboy came to a
sudden end. He was at work in his moving laboratory when a lurch
of the train jarred a stick of burning phosphorus to the floor
and set the car on fire. The irate conductor ejected him at the
next station, giving him a violent box on the ear, which
permanently injured his hearing, and dumped his chemicals and
printing apparatus on the platform.

Having lost his position, young Edison soon began to dabble in
telegraphy, in which he had already become interested,
"probably," as he says, "from visiting telegraph offices with a
chum who had tastes similar to mine." He and this chum strung a
line between their houses and learned the rudiments of writing by
wire. Then a station master on the railroad, whose child Edison
had saved from danger, took Edison under his wing and taught him
the mysteries of railway telegraphy. The boy of sixteen held
positions wt small stations near home for a few months and then
began a period of five years of apparently purposeless wandering
as a tramp telegrapher. Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis,
Memphis, Louisville, Detroit, were some of the cities in which he
worked, studied, experimented, and played practical jokes on his
associates. He was eager to learn something of the principles of
electricity but found few from whom he could learn.

Edison arrived in Boston in 1868, practically penniless, and
applied for a position as night operator. "The manager asked me
when I was ready to go to work. 'Now,' I replied." In Boston he
found men who knew something of electricity, and, as he worked at
night and cut short his sleeping hours, he found time for study.
He bought and studied Faraday's works. Presently came the first
of his multitudinous inventions, an automatic vote recorder, for
which he received a patent in 1868. This necessitated a trip to
Washington, which he made on borrowed money, but he was unable to
arouse any interest in the device. "After the vote recorder," he
says, "I invented a stock ticker, and started a ticker service in
Boston; had thirty or forty subscribers and operated from a room
over the Gold Exchange." This machine Edison attempted to sell in
New York, but he returned to Boston without having succeeded. He
then invented a duplex telegraph by which two messages might be
sent simultaneously, but at a test the machine failed because of
the stupidity of the assistant.

Penniless and in debt, Edison arrived again in New York in 1869.
But now fortune favored him. The Gold Indicator Company was a
concern furnishing to its subscribers by telegraph the Stock
Exchange prices of gold. The company's instrument was out of
order. By a lucky chance Edison was on the spot to repair it,
which he did successfully, and this led to his appointment as
superintendent at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. When
a change in the ownership of the company threw him out of the
position he formed, with Franklin L. Pope, the partnership of
Pope, Edison, and Company, the first firm of electrical engineers
in the United States.

Not long afterwards Edison brought out the invention which set
him on the high road to great achievement. This was the improved
stock ticker, for which the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company paid
him forty thousand dollars. It was much more than he had
expected. "I had made up my mind," he says, "that, taking into
consideration the time and killing pace I was working at, I
should be entitled to $5000, but could get along with $3000." The
money, of course, was paid by check. Edison had never received a
check before and he had to be told how to cash it.

Edison immediately set up a shop in Newark and threw himself into
many and various activities. He remade the prevailing system of
automatic telegraphy and introduced it into England. He
experimented with submarine cables and worked out a system of
quadruplex telegraphy by which one wire was made to do the work
of four. These two inventions were bought by Jay Gould for his
Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company. Gould paid for the
quadruplex system thirty thousand dollars, but for the automatic
telegraph he paid nothing. Gould presently acquired control of
the Western Union; and, having thus removed competition from his
path, "he then," says Edison, "repudiated his contract with the
automatic telegraph people and they never received a cent for
their wires or patents, and I lost three years of very hard
labor. But I never had any grudge against him because he was so
able in his line, and as long as my part was successful the money
with me was a secondary consideration. When Gould got the Western
Union I knew no further progress in telegraphy was possible, and
I went into other lines."*

* Quoted in Dyer and Martin. "Edison", vol. 1, p. 164.


In fact, however, the need of money forced Edison later on to
resume his work for the Western Union Telegraph Company, both in
telegraphy and telephony. His connection with the telephone is
told in another volume of this series.* He invented a carbon
transmitter and sold it to the Western Union for one hundred
thousand dollars, payable in seventeen annual installments of six
thousand dollars. He made a similar agreement for the same sum
offered him for the patent of the electro-motograph. He did not
realize that these installments were only simple interest upon
the sums due him. These agreements are typical of Edison's
commercial sense in the early years of his career as an inventor.
He worked only upon inventions for which there was a possible
commercial demand and sold them for a trifle to get the money to
meet the pay rolls of his different shops. Later the inventor
learned wisdom and associated with himself keen business men to
their common profit.

* Hendrick, "The Age of Big Business".


Edison set up his laboratories and factories at Menlo Park, New
Jersey, in 1876, and it was there that he invented the
phonograph, for which he received the first patent in 1878. It
was there, too, that he began that wonderful series of
experiments which gave to the world the incandescent lamp. He had
noticed the growing importance of open arc lighting, but was
convinced that his mission was to produce an electric lamp for
use within doors. Forsaking for the moment his newborn
phonograph, Edison applied himself in earnest to the problem of
the lamp. His first search was for a durable filament which would
burn in a vacuum. A series of experiments with platinum wire and
with various refractory metals led to no satisfactory results.
Many other substances were tried, even human hair. Edison
concluded that carbon of some sort was the solution rather than a
metal. Almost coincidently, Swan, an Englishman, who had also
been wrestling with this problem, came to the same conclusion.
Finally, one day in October, 1879, after fourteen months of hard
work and the expenditure of forty thousand dollars, a carbonized
cotton thread sealed in one of Edison's globes lasted forty
hours. "If it will burn forty hours now," said Edison, "I know I
can make it burn a hundred." And so he did. A better filament was
needed. Edison found it in carbonized strips of bamboo.

Edison developed his own type of dynamo, the largest ever made up
to that time, and, along with the Edison incandescent lamps, it
was one of the wonders of the Paris Electrical Exposition of
1881. The installation in Europe and America of plants for
service followed. Edison's first great central station, supplying
power for three thousand lamps, was erected at Holborn Viaduct,
London, in 1882, and in September of that year the Pearl Street
Station in New York City, the first central station in America,
was put into operation.

The incandescent lamp and the central power station, considered
together, may be regarded as one of the most fruitful conceptions
in the history of applied electricity. It comprised a complete
generating, distributing, and utilizing system, from the dynamo
to the very lamp at the fixture, ready for use. It even included
a meter to determine the current actually consumed. The success
of the system was complete, and as fast as lamps and generators
could be produced they were installed to give a service at once
recognized as superior to any other form of lighting. By 1885 the
Edison lighting system was commercially developed in all its
essentials, though still subject to many improvements and capable
of great enlargement, and soon Edison. sold out his interests in
it and turned his great mind to other inventions.

The inventive ingenuity of others brought in time better and more
economical incandescent lamps. From the filaments of bamboo fiber
the next step was to filaments of cellulose in the form of
cotton, duly prepared and carbonized. Later (1905) came the
metalized carbon filament and finally the employment of tantalum
or tungsten. The tungsten lamps first made were very delicate,
and it was not until W. D. Coolidge, in the research laboratories
of the General Electric Company at Schenectady, invented a
process for producing ductile tungsten that they became available
for general use.

The dynamo and the central power station brought the electric
motor into action. The dynamo and the motor do precisely opposite
things. The dynamo converts mechanical energy into electric
energy. The motor transforms electric energy into mechanical
energy. But the two work in partnership and without the dynamo to
manufacture the power the motor could not thrive. Moreover, the
central station was needed to distribute the power for
transportation as well as for lighting.

The first motors to use Edison station current were designed by
Frank J. Sprague, a graduate of the Naval Academy, who had worked
with Edison, as have many of the foremost electrical engineers of
America and Europe. These small motors possessed several
advantages over the big steam engine. They ran smoothly and
noiselessly on account of the absence of reciprocating parts.
They consumed current only when in use. They could be installed
and connected with a minimum of trouble and expense. They emitted
neither smell nor smoke. Edison built an experimental electric
railway line at Menlo Park in 1880 and proved its practicability.
Meanwhile, however, as he worked on his motors and dynamos, he
was anticipated by others in some of his inventions. It would not
be fair to say that Edison and Sprague alone developed the
electric railway, for there were several others who made
important contributions. Stephen D. Field of Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, had a patent which the Edison interests found it
necessary to acquire; C. J. Van Depoele and Leo Daft made
important contributions to the trolley system. In Cleveland in
1884 an electric railway on a small scale was opened to the
public. But Sprague's first electric railway, built at Richmond,
Virginia, in 1887, as a complete system, is generally hailed as
the true pioneer of electric transportation in the United States.
Thereafter the electric railway spread quickly over the land,
obliterating the old horsecars and greatly enlarging the
circumference of the city. Moreover, on the steam roads, at all
the great terminals, and wherever there were tunnels to be passed
through, the old giant steam engine in time yielded place to the
electric motor.

The application of the electric motor to the "vertical railway,"
or elevator, made possible the steel skyscraper. The elevator, of
course, is an old device. It was improved and developed in
America by Elisha Graves Otis, an inventor who lived and died
before the Civil War and whose sons afterward erected a great
business on foundations laid by him. The first Otis elevators
were moved by steam or hydraulic power. They were slow, noisy,
and difficult of control. After the electric motor came in; the
elevator soon changed its character and adapted itself to the
imperative demands of the towering, skeleton-framed buildings
which were rising in every city.

Edison, already famous as "the Wizard of Menlo Park," established
his factories and laboratories at West Orange, New Jersey, in
1887, whence he has since sent forth a constant stream of
inventions, some new and startling, others improvements on old
devices. The achievements of several other inventors in the
electrical field have been only less noteworthy than his. The new
profession of electrical engineering called to its service great
numbers of able men. Manufacturers of electrical machinery
established research departments and employed inventors. The
times had indeed changed since the day when Morse, as a student
at Yale College, chose art instead of electricity as his calling,
because electricity afforded him no means of livelihood.

From Edison's plant in 1903 came a new type of the storage
battery, which he afterwards improved. The storage battery, as
every one knows, is used in the propulsion of electric vehicles
and boats, in the operation of block-signals, in the lighting of
trains, and in the ignition and starting of gasoline engines. As
an adjunct of the gas-driven automobile, it renders the starting
of the engine independent of muscle and so makes possible the
general use of the automobile by women as well as men.

The dynamo brought into service not only light and power but
heat; and the electric furnace in turn gave rise to several great
metallurgical and chemical industries. Elihu Thomson's process of
welding by means of the arc furnace found wide and varied
applications. The commercial production of aluminum is due to the
electric furnace and dates from 1886. It was in that year that H.
Y. Castner of New York and C. M. Hall of Pittsburgh both invented
the methods of manufacture which gave to the world the new metal,
malleable and ductile, exceedingly light, and capable of a
thousand uses. Carborundum is another product of the electric
furnace. It was the invention of Edward B. Acheson, a graduate of
the Edison laboratories. Acheson, in 1891, was trying to make
artificial diamonds and produced instead the more useful
carborundum, as well as the Acheson graphite, which at once found
its place in industry. Another valuable product of the electric
furnace was the calcium carbide first produced in 1892 by Thomas
L. Wilson of Spray, North Carolina. This calcium carbide is the
basis of acetylene gas, a powerful illuminant, and it is widely
used in metallurgy, for welding and other purposes.

At the same time with these developments the value of the
alternating current came to be recognized. The transformer, an
instrument developed on foundations laid by Henry and Faraday,
made it possible to transmit electrical energy over great
distances with little loss of power. Alternating currents were
transformed by means of this instrument at the source, and were
again converted at the point of use to a lower and convenient
potential for local distribution and consumption. The first
extensive use of the alternating current was in arc lighting,
where the higher potentials could be employed on series lamps.
Perhaps the chief American inventor in the domain of the
alternating current is Elihu Thomson, who began his useful career
as Professor of Chemistry and Mechanics in the Central High
School of Philadelphia. Another great protagonist of the
alternating current was George Westinghouse, who was quite as
much an improver and inventor as a manufacturer of machinery. Two
other inventors, at least, should not be forgotten in this
connection: Nicola Tesla and Charles S. Bradley. Both of them had
worked for Edison.

The turbine (from the Latin turbo, meaning a whirlwind) is the
name of the motor which drives the great dynamos for the
generation of electric energy. It may be either a steam turbine
or a water turbine. The steam turbine of Curtis or Parsons is
today the prevailing engine. But the development of
hydro-electric power has already gone far. It is estimated that
the electric energy produced in the United States by the
utilization of water powers every year equals the power product
of forty million tons of coal, or about one-tenth of the coal
which is consumed in the production of steam. Yet
hydro-electricity is said to be only in its beginnings, for not
more than a tenth of the readily available water power of the
country is actually in use.

The first commercial hydro-station for the transmission of power
in America was established in 1891 at Telluride, Colorado. It was
practically duplicated in the following year at Brodie, Colorado.
The motors and generators for these stations came from the
Westinghouse plant in Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse also supplied
the turbo-generators which inaugurated, in 1895, the delivery of
power from Niagara Falls.



CHAPTER X. THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR

The most popular man in Europe in the year 1783 was still the
United States Minister to France. The figure of plain Benjamin
Franklin, his broad head, with the calm, shrewd eyes peering
through the bifocals of his own invention, invested with a halo
of great learning and fame, entirely captivated the people's
imagination.

As one of the American Commissioners busy with the extraordinary
problems of the Peace, Franklin might have been supposed too
occupied for excursions into the paths of science and philosophy.
But the spaciousness and orderly furnishing of his mind provided
that no pursuit of knowledge should be a digression for him. So
we find him, naturally, leaving his desk on several days of that
summer and autumn and posting off to watch the trials of a new
invention; nothing less indeed than a ship to ride the air. He
found time also to describe the new invention in letters to his
friends in different parts of the world.

On the 21st of November Franklin set out for the gardens of the
King's hunting lodge in the Bois de Boulogne, on the outskirts of
Paris, with a quickened interest, a thrill of excitement, which
made him yearn to be young again with another long life to live
that he might see what should be after him on the earth. What
bold things men would attempt! Today two daring Frenchmen,
Pilatre de Rozier of the Royal Academy and his friend the Marquis
d'Arlandes, would ascend in a balloon freed from the earth--the
first men in history to adventure thus upon the wind. The crowds
gathered to witness the event opened a lane for Franklin to pass
through.

At six minutes to two the aeronauts entered the car of their
balloon; and, at a height of two hundred and seventy feet, doffed
their hats and saluted the applauding spectators. Then the wind
carried them away toward Paris. Over Passy, about half a mile
from the starting point, the balloon began to descend, and the
River Seine seemed rising to engulf them; but when they fed the
fire under their sack of hot air with chopped straw they rose to
the elevation of five hundred feet. Safe across the river they
dampened the fire with a sponge and made a gentle descent beyond
the old ramparts of Paris.

At five o'clock that afternoon, at the King's Chateau in the Bois
de Boulogne, the members of the Royal Academy signed a memorial
of the event. One of the spectators accosted Franklin.

"What does Dr. Franklin conceive to be the use of this new
invention?"

"What is the use of a new-born child?" was the retort.

A new-born child, a new-born republic, a new invention: alike dim
beginnings of development which none could foretell. The year
that saw the world acknowledge a new nation, freed of its ancient
political bonds, saw also the first successful attempt to break
the supposed bonds that held men down to the ground. Though the
invention of the balloon was only five months old, there were
already two types on exhibition: the original Montgolfier, or
fireballoon, inflated with hot air, and a modification by
Charles, inflated with hydrogen gas. The mass of the French
people did not regard these balloons with Franklin's serenity.
Some weeks earlier the danger of attack had necessitated a
balloon's removal from the place of its first moorings to the
Champ de Mars at dead of night. Preceded by flaming torches, with
soldiers marching on either side and guards in front and rear,
the great ball was borne through the darkened streets. The
midnight cabby along the route stopped his nag, or tumbled from
sleep on his box, to kneel on the pavement and cross himself
against the evil that might be in that strange monster. The fear
of the people was so great that the Government saw fit to issue a
proclamation, explaining the invention. Any one seeing such a
globe, like the moon in an eclipse, so read the proclamation,
should be aware that it is only a bag made of taffeta or light
canvas covered with paper and "cannot possibly cause any harm and
which will some day prove serviceable to the wants of society."

Franklin wrote a description of the Montgolfier balloon to Sir
Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society of London:

"Its bottom was open and in the middle of the opening was fixed a
kind of basket grate, in which faggots and sheaves of straw were
burnt. The air, rarefied in passing through this flame, rose in
the balloon, swelled out its sides, and filled it. The persons,
who were placed in the gallery made of wicker and attached to the
outside near the bottom, had each of them a port through which
they could pass sheaves of straw into the grate to keep up the
flame and thereby keep the balloon full . . . . One of these
courageous philosophers, the Marquis d'Arlandes, did me the honor
to call upon me in the evening after the experiment, with Mr.
Montgolfier, the very ingenious inventor. I was happy to see him
safe. He informed me that they lit gently, without the least
shock, and the balloon was very little damaged."

Franklin writes that the competition between Montgolfier and
Charles has already resulted in progress in the construction and
management of the balloon. He sees it as a discovery of great
importance, one that "may possibly give a new turn to human
affairs. Convincing sovereigns of the folly of war may perhaps be
one effect of it, since it will be impracticable for the most
potent of them to guard his dominions." The prophecy may yet be
fulfilled. Franklin remarks that a short while ago the idea of
"witches riding through the air upon a broomstick and that of
philosophers upon a bag of smoke would have appeared equally
impossible and ridiculous." Yet in the space of a few months he
has seen the philosopher on his smoke bag, if not the witch on
her broom. He wishes that one of these very ingenious inventors
would immediately devise means of direction for the balloon, a
rudder to steer it; because the malady from which he is suffering
is always increased by a jolting drive in a fourwheeler and he
would gladly avail himself of an easier way of locomotion.


The vision of man on the wing did not, of course, begin .with the
invention of the balloon. Perhaps the dream of flying man came
first to some primitive poet of the Stone Age, as he watched,
fearfully, the gyrations of the winged creatures of the air; even
as in a later age it came to Langley and Maxim, who studied the
wing motions of birds and insects, not in fear but in the light
and confidence of advancing science.

Crudely outlined by some ancient Egyptian sculptor, a winged
human figure broods upon the tomb of Rameses III. In the Hebrew
parable of Genesis winged cherubim guarded the gates of Paradise
against the man and woman who had stifled aspiration with sin.
Fairies, witches, and magicians ride the wind in the legends and
folklore of all peoples. The Greeks had gods and goddesses many;
and one of these Greek art represents as moving earthward on
great spreading pinions. Victory came by the air. When Demetrius,
King of Macedonia, set up the Winged Victory of Samothrace to
commemorate the naval triumph of the Greeks over the ships of
Egypt, Greek art poetically foreshadowed the relation of the air
service to the fleet in our own day.

Man has always dreamed of flight; but when did men first actually
fly? We smile at the story of Daedalus, the Greek architect, and
his son, Icarus, who made themselves wings and flew from the
realm of their foes; and the tale of Simon, the magician, who
pestered the early Christian Church by exhibitions of flight into
the air amid smoke and flame in mockery of the ascension. But do
the many tales of sorcerers in the Middle Ages, who rose from the
ground with their cloaks apparently filled with wind, to awe the
rabble, suggest that they had deduced the principle of the
aerostat from watching the action of smoke as did the
Montgolfiers hundreds of years later? At all events one of these
alleged exhibitions about the year 800 inspired the good Bishop
Agobard of Lyons to write a book against superstition, in which
he proved conclusively that it was impossible for human beings to
rise through the air. Later, Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci,
each in his turn ruminated in manuscript upon the subject of
flight. Bacon, the scientist, put forward a theory of thin copper
globes filled with liquid fire, which would soar. Leonardo,
artist, studied the wings of birds. The Jesuit Francisco Lana, in
1670, working on Bacon's theory sketched an airship made of four
copper balls with a skiff attached; this machine was to soar by
means of the lighter-than-air globes and to be navigated aloft by
oars and sails.

But while philosophers in their libraries were designing airships
on paper and propounding their theories, venturesome men,
"crawling, but pestered with the thought of wings," were making
pinions of various fabrics and trying them upon the wind. Four
years after Lana suggested his airship with balls and oars,
Besnier, a French locksmith, made a flying machine of four
collapsible planes like book covers suspended on rods. With a rod
over each shoulder, and moving the two front planes with his arms
and the two back ones by his feet, Besnier gave exhibitions of
gliding from a height to the earth. But his machine could not
soar. What may be called the first patent on a flying machine was
recorded in 1709 when Bartholomeo de Gusmao, a friar, appeared
before the King of Portugal to announce that he had invented a
flying machine and to request an order prohibiting other men from
making anything of the sort. The King decreed pain of death to
all infringers; and to assist the enterprising monk in improving
his machine, he appointed him first professor of mathematics in
the University of Coimbra with a fat stipend. Then the
Inquisition stepped in. The inventor's suave reply, to the effect
that to show men how to soar to Heaven was an essentially
religious act, availed him nothing. He was pronounced a sorcerer,
his machine was destroyed, and he was imprisoned till his death.
Many other men fashioned unto themselves wings; but, though some
of them might glide earthward, none could rise upon the wind.

While the principle by which the balloon, father of the
dirigible, soars and floats could be deduced by men of natural
powers of observation and little science from the action of
clouds and smoke, the airplane, the Winged Victory of our day,
waited upon two things--the scientific analysis of the anatomy of
bird wings and the internal combustion engine.

These two things necessary to convert man into a rival of the
albatross did not come at once and together. Not the dream of
flying but the need for quantity and speed in production to take
care of the wants of a modern civilization compelled the
invention of the internal combustion engine. Before it appeared
in the realm of mechanics, experimenters were applying in the
construction of flying models the knowledge supplied by Cayley in
1796, who made an instrument of whalebone, corks, and feathers,
which by the action of two screws of quill feathers, rotating in
opposite directions, would rise to the ceiling; and the full
revelation of the structure and action of bird wings set forth by
Pettigrew in 1867.

"The wing, both when at rest and when in motion," Pettigrew
declared, "may not inaptly be compared to the blade of an
ordinary screw propeller as employed in navigation. Thus the
general outline of the wing corresponds closely with the outline
of the propeller, and the track described by the wing in space IS
TWISTED UPON ITSELF propeller fashion." Numerous attempts to
apply the newly discovered principles to artificial birds failed,
yet came so close to success that they fed instead of killing the
hope that a solution of the problem would one day ere long be
reached.


"Nature has solved it, and why not man?"

From his boyhood days Samuel Pierpont Langley, so he tells us,
had asked himself that question, which he was later to answer.
Langley, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1834, was another
link in the chain of distinguished inventors who first saw the
light of day in Puritan New England. And, like many of those
other inventors, he numbered among his ancestors for generations
two types of men--on the one hand, a line of skilled artisans and
mechanics; on the other, the most intellectual men of their time
such as clergymen and schoolmasters, one of them being Increase
Mather. We see in Langley, as in some of his brother New England
inventors, the later flowering of the Puritan ideal stripped of
its husk of superstition and harshness--a high sense of duty and
of integrity, an intense conviction that the reason for a man's
life here is that he may give service, a reserved deportment
which did not mask from discerning eyes the man's gentle
qualities of heart and his keen love of beauty in art and Nature.

Langley first chose as his profession civil engineering and
architecture and the years between 1857 and 1864 were chiefly
spent in prosecuting these callings in St. Louis and Chicago.
Then he abandoned them; for the bent of his mind was definitely
towards scientific inquiry. In 1867 he was appointed director of
the Allegheny Observatory at Pittsburgh. Here he remained until
1887, when, having made for himself a world-wide reputation as an
astronomer, he became Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at
Washington.

It was about this time that he began his experiments in
"aerodynamics." But the problem of flight had long been a subject
of interested speculation with him. Ten years later he wrote:

"Nature has made her flying-machine in the bird, which is nearly
a thousand times as heavy as the air its bulk displaces, and only
those who have tried to rival it know how inimitable her work is,
for the "way of a bird in the air" remains as wonderful to us as
it was to Solomon, and the sight of the bird has constantly held
this wonder before men's minds, and kept the flame of hope from
utter extinction, in spite of long disappointment. I well
remember how, as a child, when lying in a New England pasture, h
watched a hawk soaring far up in the blue, and sailing for a long
time without any motion of its wings, as though it needed no work
to sustain it, but was kept up there by some miracle. But,
however sustained, I saw it sweep in a few seconds of its
leisurely flight, over a distance that to me was encumbered with
every sort of obstacle, which did not exist for it . . . . How
wonderfully easy, too, was its flight! There was not a flutter of
its pinions as it swept over the field, in a motion which seemed
as effortless as that of its shadow. After many years and in
mature life, I was brought to think of these things again, and
to. ask myself whether the problem of artificial flight was as
hopeless and as absurd as it was then thought to be"... In three
or four years Langley made nearly forty models. "The primary
difficulty lay in making the model light enough and sufficiently
strong to support its power," he says. "This difficulty continued
to be fundamental through every later form; but, beside this, the
adjustment of the center of gravity to the center of pressure of
the wings, the disposition of the wings themselves, the size of
the propellers, the inclination and number of the blades, and a
great number of other details, presented themselves for
examination."

By 1891 Langley had a model light enough to fly, but proper
balancing had not been attained. He set himself anew to find the
practical conditions of equilibrium and of horizontal flight. His
experiments convinced him that "mechanical sustenation of heavy
bodies in the air, combined with very great speeds, is not only
possible, but within the reach of mechanical means we actually
possess."

After many experiments with new models Langley at length
fashioned a steam-driven machine which would fly horizontally. It
weighed about thirty pounds; it was some sixteen feet in length,
with two sets of wings, the pair in front measuring forty feet
from tip to tip. On May 6, 1896, this model was launched over the
Potomac River. It flew half a mile in a minute and a half. When
its fuel and water gave out, it descended gently to the river's
surface. In November Langley launched another model which flew
for three-quarters of a mile at a speed of thirty miles an hour.
These tests demonstrated the practicability of artificial flight.

The Spanish-American War found the military observation balloon
doing the limited work which it had done ever since the days of
Franklin. President McKinley was keenly interested in Langley's
design to build a power-driven flying machine which would have
innumerable advantages over the balloon. The Government provided
the funds and Langley took up the problem of a flying machine
large enough to carry a man. His initial difficulty was the
engine. It was plain at once that new principles of engine
construction must be adopted before a motor could be designed of
high power yet light enough to be borne in the slender body of an
airplane. The internal combustion engine had now come into use.
Langley went to Europe in 1900, seeking his motor, only to be
told that what he sought was impossible.

His assistant, Charles M. Manly, meanwhile found a builder of
engines in America who was willing to make the attempt. But,
after two years of waiting for it, the engine proved a failure.
Manly then had the several parts of it, which he deemed hopeful,
transported to Washington, and there at the Smithsonian
Institution he labored and experimented until he evolved a light
and powerful gasoline motor. In October, 1903, the test was made,
with Manly aboard of the machine. The failure which resulted was
due solely to the clumsy launching apparatus. The airplane was
damaged as it rushed forward before beginning to soar; and, as it
rose, it turned over and plunged into the river. The loyal and
enthusiastic Manly, who was fortunately a good diver and swimmer,
hastily dried himself and gave out a reassuring statement to the
representatives of the press and to the officers of the Board of
Ordnance gathered to witness the flight.

A second failure in December convinced spectators that man was
never intended to fly. The newspapers let loose such a storm of
ridicule upon Langley and his machine, with charges as to the
waste of public funds, that the Government refused to assist him
further. Langley, at that time sixty-nine years of age, took this
defeat so keenly to heart that it hastened his death, which
occurred three years later. "Failure in the aerodrome itself," he
wrote, "or its engines there has been none; and it is believed
that it is at the moment of success, and when the engineering
problems have been solved, that a lack of means has prevented a
continuance of the work."


It was truly "at the moment of success" that Langley's work was
stopped. On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made the first
successful experiment in which a machine carrying a man rose by
its own power, flew naturally and at even speed, and descended
without damage. These brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who at last
opened the long besieged lanes of the air, were born in Dayton,
Ohio. Their father, a clergyman and later a bishop, spent his
leisure in scientific reading and in the invention of a
typewriter which, however, he never perfected. He inspired an
interest in scientific principles in his boys' minds by giving
them toys which would stimulate their curiosity. One of these
toys was a helicopter, or Cayley's Top, which would rise and
flutter awhile in the air.

After several helicopters of their own, the brothers made
original models of kites, and Orville, the younger, attained an
exceptional skill in flying them. Presently Orville and Wilbur
were making their own bicycles and astonishing their neighbors by
public appearances on a specially designed tandem. The first
accounts which they read of experiments with flying machines
turned their inventive genius into the new field. In particular
the newspaper accounts at that time of Otto Lilienthal's
exhibitions with his glider stirred their interest and set them
on to search the libraries for literature on the subject of
flying. As they read of the work of Langley and others they
concluded that the secret of flying could not be mastered
theoretically in a laboratory; it must be learned in the air. It
struck these young men, trained by necessity to count pennies at
their full value, as "wasteful extravagance" to mount delicate
and costly machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage.
They turned from the records of other inventors' models to study
the one perfect model, the bird. Said Wilbur Wright, speaking
before the Society of Western Engineers, at Chicago:

"The bird's wings are undoubtedly very well designed indeed, but
it is not any extraordinary efficiency that strikes with
astonishment, but rather the marvelous skill with which they are
used. It is true that I have seen birds perform soaring feats of
almost incredible nature in positions where it was not possible
to measure the speed and trend of the wind, but whenever it was
possible to determine by actual measurements the conditions under
which the soaring was performed it was easy to account for it on
the basis of the results obtained with artificial wings. The
soaring problem is apparently not so much one of better wings as
of better operators."*

* Cited in Turner, "The Romance of Aeronautics".


When the Wrights determined to fly, two problems which had beset
earlier experimenters had been partially solved. Experience had
brought out certain facts regarding the wings; and invention had
supplied an engine. But the laws governing the balancing and
steering of the machine were unknown. The way of a man in the air
had yet to be discovered.

The starting point of their theory of flight seems to have been
that man was endowed with an intelligence at least equal to that
of the bird; and, that with practice he could learn to balance
himself in the air as naturally and instinctively as on the
ground. He must and could be, like the bird, the controlling
intelligence of his machine. To quote Wilbur Wright again:

"It seemed to us that the main reason why the problem had
remained so long unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain
any adequate practice. Lilienthal in five years of time had spent
only five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was
not that he had done so little but that he had accomplished so
much. It would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider
to attempt to ride through a crowded city street after only five
hours' practice spread out in bits of ten seconds each over a
period of five years, yet Lilienthal with his brief practice was
remarkably successful in meeting the fluctuations and eddies of
wind gusts. We thought that if some method could be found by
which it would be possible to practice by the hour instead of by
the second, there would be a hope of advancing the solution of a
very difficult problem."

The brothers found that winds of the velocity they desired for
their experiments were common on the coast of North Carolina.
They pitched their camp at Kitty Hawk in October, 1900, and made
a brief and successful trial of their gliding machine. Next year,
they returned with a much larger machine; and in 1902 they
continued their experiments with a model still further improved
from their first design. Having tested their theories and become
convinced that they were definitely on the right track, they were
no longer satisfied merely to glide. They set about constructing
a power machine. Here a new problem met them. They had decided on
two screw propellers rotating in opposite directions on the
principle of wings in flight; but the proper diameter, pitch, and
area of blade were not easily arrived at.

On December 17, 1903, the first Wright biplane was ready to
navigate the air and made four brief successful flights.
Subsequent flights in 1904 demonstrated that the problem of
equilibrium had not been fully solved; but the experiments of
1905 banished this difficulty.

The responsibility which the Wrights placed upon the aviator for
maintaining his equilibrium, and the tailless design of their
machine, caused much headshaking among foreign flying men when
Wilbur Wright appeared at the great aviation meet in France in
1908. But he won the Michelin Prize of eight hundred pounds by
beating previous records for speed and for the time which any
machine had remained in the air. He gave exhibitions also in
Germany and Italy and instructed Italian army officers in the
flying of Wright machines. At this time Orville was giving
similar demonstrations in America. Transverse control, the
warping device invented by the Wright brothers for the
preservation of lateral balance and for artificial inclination in
making turns, has been employed in a similar or modified form in
most airplanes since constructed.

There was no "mine" or "thine" in the diction of the Wright
brothers; only "we" and "ours." They were joint inventors; they
shared their fame equally and all their honors and prizes also
until the death of Wilbur in 1912. They were the first inventors
to make the ancient dream of flying man a reality and to
demonstrate that reality to the practical world.


When the NC flying boats of the United States navy lined up at
Trepassey in May, 1919, for their Atlantic venture, and the press
was full of pictures of them, how many hasty readers, eager only
for news of the start, stopped to think what the initials NC
stood for?

The seaplane is the chief contribution of Glenn Hammond Curtiss
to aviation, and the Navy Curtiss Number Four, which made the
first transatlantic flight in history, was designed by him. The
spirit of cooperation, expressed in pooling ideas and fame, which
the Wright brothers exemplified, is seen again in the association
of Curtiss with the navy during the war. NC is a fraternity badge
signifying equal honors.

Curtiss, in 1900, was--like the Wrights--the owner of a small
bicycle shop. It was at Hammondsport, New York. He was an
enthusiastic cyclist, and speed was a mania with him. He evolved
a motor cycle with which he broke all records for speed over the
ground. He started a factory and achieved a reputation for
excellent motors. He designed and made the engine for the
dirigible of Captain Thomas S. Baldwin; and for the first United
States army dirigible in 1905.

Curtiss carried on some of his experiments in association with
Alexander Graham Bell, who was trying to evolve a stable flying
machine on the principle of the cellular kite. Bell and Curtiss,
with three others, formed in 1907, the Aerial Experimental
Association at Bell's country house in Canada, which was fruitful
of results, and Curtiss scored several notable triumphs with the
craft they designed. But the idea of a machine which could
descend and propel itself on water possessed his mind, and in
1911 he exhibited at the aviation meet in Chicago the
hydroaeroplane. An incident there set him dreaming of the
life-saving systems on great waters. His hydroaeroplane had just
returned to its hangar, after a series of maneuvers, when a
monoplane in flight broke out of control and plunged into Lake
Michigan. The Curtiss machine left its hangar on the minute,
covered the intervening mile, and alighted on the water to offer
aid. The presence of boats made the good offices of the
hydroaeroplane unnecessary on that occasion; but the incident
opened up to the mind of Curtiss new possibilities.

In the first years of the World War Curtiss built airplanes and
flying boats for the Allies. The United States entered the arena
and called for his services. The Navy Department called for the
big flying boat; and the NC type was evolved, which, equipped
with four Liberty Motors, crossed the Atlantic after the close of
the war.

The World War, of course, brought about the magical development
of all kinds of air craft. Necessity not only mothered invention
but forced it to cover a normal half century of progress in four
years. While Curtiss worked with the navy, the Dayton-Wright
factory turned out the famous DH fighting planes under the
supervision of Orville Wright. The second initial here stands for
Havilland, as the DH was designed by Geoffrey de Havilland, a
British inventor.

The year 1919 saw the first transatlantic flights. The NC4, with
Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read and crew, left
Trepassey, Newfoundland, on the 16th of May and in twelve hours
arrived at Horta, the Azores, more than a thousand miles away.
All along the course the navy had strung a chain of destroyers,
with signaling apparatus and searchlights to guide the aviators.
On the twenty-seventh, NC4 took off from San Miguel, Azores, and
in nine hours made Lisbon--Lisbon, capital of Portugal, which
sent out the first bold mariners to explore the Sea of Darkness,
prior to Columbus. On the thirtieth, NC4 took off for Plymouth,
England, and arrived in ten hours and twenty minutes. Perhaps a
phantom ship, with sails set and flags blowing, the name
Mayflower on her hull, rode in Plymouth Harbor that day to greet
a New England pilot.

On the 14th of June the Vickers-Vimy Rolls-Royce biplane, piloted
by John Alcock and with Arthur Whitten Brown as
observer-navigator, left St. John's, Newfoundland, and arrived at
Clifden, Ireland, in sixteen hours twelve minutes, having made
the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Hawker and Grieve
meanwhile had made the same gallant attempt in a single-engined
Sopwith machine; and had come down in mid-ocean, after flying
fourteen and a half hours, owing to the failure of their water
circulation. Their rescue by slow Danish Mary completed a
fascinating tale of heroic adventure. The British dirigible R34,
with Major G. H. Scott in command, left East Fortune, Scotland,
on the 2d of July, and arrived at Mineola, New York, on the
sixth. The R34 made the return voyage in seventy-five hours. In
November, 1919, Captain Sir Ross Smith set off from England in a
biplane to win a prize of ten thousand pounds offered by the
Australian Commonwealth to the first Australian aviator to fly
from England to Australia in thirty days. Over France, Italy,
Greece, over the Holy Land, perhaps over the Garden of Eden,
whence the winged cherubim drove Adam and Eve, over Persia,
India, Siam, the Dutch East Indies to Port Darwin in northern
Australia; and then southeastward across Australia itself to
Sydney, the biplane flew without mishap. The time from Hounslow,
England, to Port Darwin was twenty-seven days, twenty hours, and
twenty minutes. Early in 1920 the Boer airman Captain Van
Ryneveld made the flight from Cairo to the Cape.

Commercial development of the airplane and the airship commenced
after the war. The first air service for United States mails was,
in fact, inaugurated during the war, between New York and
Washington. The transcontinental service was established soon
afterwards, and a regular line between Key West and Havana.
French and British companies began to operate daily between
London and Paris carrying passengers and mail. Airship companies
were formed in Australia, South Africa, and India. In Canada
airplanes were soon being used in prospecting the Labrador timber
regions, in making photographs and maps of the northern
wilderness, and by the Northwest Mounted Police.

It is not for history to prophesy. "Emblem of much, and of our
Age of Hope itself," Carlyle called the balloon of his time, born
to mount majestically but "unguidably" only to tumble "whither
Fate will." But the aircraft of our day is guidable, and our Age
of Hope is not rudderless nor at the mercy of Fate.



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

GENERAL

A clear, non-technical discussion of the basis of all industrial
progress is "Power", by Charles E. Lucke (1911), which discusses
the general principle of the substitution of power for the labor
of men. Many of the references given in "Colonial Folkways", by
C. M. Andrews ("The Chronicles of America", vol. IX), are
valuable for an understanding of early industrial conditions. The
general course of industry and commerce in the United States is
briefly told by Carroll D. Wright in "The Industrial Evolution of
the United States" (1907), by E. L. Bogart in "The Economic
History of the United States" (1920), and by Katharine Coman in
"The Industrial History of the United States" (1911). "A
Documentary History of American Industrial Society", 10 vols.
(1910-11), edited by John R. Commons, is a mine of material. See
also Emerson D. Fite, "Social and Industrial Conditions in the
North During the Civil War" (1910). The best account of the
inventions of the nineteenth century is "The Progress of
Invention in the Nineteenth Century" by Edward W. Byrn (1900).
George Iles in "Leading American Inventors" (1912) tells the
story of several important inventors and their work. The same
author in "Flame, Electricity and the Camera" (1900) gives much
valuable information.

CHAPTER I

The primary source of information on Benjamin Franklin is
contained in his own writings. These were compiled and edited by
Jared Sparks, "The Works of . . . Franklin . . . with Notes and a
Life of the Author", 10 vols. (1836-40); and later by John
Bigelow, "The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin; including His
Private as well as His Official and Scientific Correspondence,
and Numerous Letters and Documents Now for the First Time
Printed, with Many Others not included in Any Former Collection,
also, the Unmutilated and Correct Version of His Autobiography",
10 vols. (1887-88). Consult also James Parton, "The Life and
Times of Benjamin Franklin", 2 vols. (1864); S. G. Fisher, "The
True Benjamin Franklin" (1899); Paul Leicester Ford, "The
Many-Sided Franklin" (1899); John T. Morse, "Benjamin Franklin"
(1889) in the "American Statesmen" series; and Lindsay Swift,
"Benjamin Franklin" (1910) in "Beacon Biographies. On the Patent
Office: Henry L. Ellsworth, A Digest of Patents Issued by the
United States from 1790 to January 1, 1839" (Washington, 1840);
also the regular Reports and publications of the United States
Patent Office.

CHAPTER II

The first life of Eli Whitney is the "Memoir" by Denison Olmsted
(1846), and a collection of Whitney's letters about the cotton
gin may be found in "The American Historical Review", vol. III
(1897). "Eli Whitney and His Cotton Gin," by M. F. Foster, is
included in the "Transactions of the New England Cotton
Manufacturers' Association", no. 67 (October, 1899). See also
Dwight Goddard, "A Short Story of Eli Whitney" (1904); D. A.
Tompkins, "Cotton and Cotton Oil" (1901); James A. B. Scherer,
"Cotton as a World Power" (1916); E. C. Bates, "The Story of the
Cotton Gin" (1899), reprinted from "The New England Magazine",
May, 1890; and Eugene Clyde Brooks, "The Story of Cotton and the
Development of the Cotton States" (1911).

CHAPTER III

For an account of James Watt's achievements, see J. Cleland,
"Historical Account of the Steam Engine" (1825) and John W.
Grant, "Watt and the Steam Age" (1917). On Fulton: R. H.
Thurston, "Robert Fulton" (1891) in the "Makers of America"
series; A. C. Sutcliffe, "Robert Fulton and the 'Clermont'"
(1909); H. W. Dickinson, "Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist; His
Life and Works" (1913). For an account of John Stevens, see
George Iles, "Leading American Inventors" (1912), and Dwight
Goddard, "A Short Story of John Stevens and His Sons in Eminent
Engineers" (1905). See also John Stevens, "Documents Tending to
Prove the Superior Advantages of Rail-Ways and Steam-Carriages
over Canal Navigation" (1819.), reprinted in "The Magazine of
History with Notes and Queries", Extra Number 54 (1917). On
Evans: "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," by Coleman Sellers, in
"The Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886, vol. CXXII.

CHAPTER IV

On the general subject of cotton manufacture and machinery, see:
J. L. Bishop, "History of American Manufactures from 1608 to
1860", 3 vols. (1864-67); Samuel Batchelder, "Introduction and
Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the United States"
(1863); James Montgomery, "A Practical Detail of the Cotton
Manufacture of the United States of America" (1840); Melvin T.
Copeland, "The Cotton Manufacturing Industry of the United
States" (1912); and John L. Hayes, "American Textile Machinery"
(1879). Harriet H. Robinson, "Loom and Spindle" (1898), is a
description of the life of girl workers in the early factories
written by one of them. Charles Dickens, "American Notes",
Chapter IV, is a vivid account of the life in the Lowell mills.
See also Nathan Appleton, "Introduction of the Power Loom and
Origin of Lowell" (1858); H. A. Miles, "Lowell, as It Was, and as
It Is" (1845), and G. S. White, "Memoir of Samuel Slater" (1836).
On Elias Howe, see Dwight Goddard, "A Short Story of Elias Howe
in Eminent Engineers" (1905).

CHAPTER V

The story of the reaper is told in: Herbert N. Casson, "Cyrus
Hall McCormick; His Life and Work" (1909), and "The Romance of
the Reaper" (1908), and Merritt F. Miller, "Evolution of Reaping
Machines" (1902), U. S. Experiment Stations Office, Bulletin 103.
Other farm inventions are covered in: William Macdonald, "Makers
of Modern Agriculture" (1913); Emile Guarini, "The Use of
Electric Power in Plowing" in The "Electrical Review", vol.
XLIII; A. P. Yerkes, "The Gas Tractor in Eastern Farming" (1918),
U. S. Department of Agriculture, Farmer's Bulletin 1004; and
Herbert N. Casson and others, "Horse, Truck and Tractor; the
Coming of Cheaper Power for City and Farm" (1913).

CHAPTER VI

An account of an early "agent of communication" is given by W. F.
Bailey, article on the "Pony Express" in "The Century Magazine",
vol. XXXIV (1898). For the story of the telegraph and its
inventors, see: S. I. Prime, "Life of Samuel F. B. Morse" (1875);
S. F. B. Morse, "The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph" (1858) and
"Examination of the Telegraphic Apparatus and the Process in
Telegraphy" (1869); Guglielmo Marconi, "The Progress of Wireless
Telegraphy" (1912) in the "Transactions of the New York
Electrical Society", no. 15; and Ray Stannard Baker, "Marconi's
Achievement" in McClure's Magazine, vol. XVIII (1902). On the
telephone, see Herbert N. Casson, "History of the Telephone"
(1910); and Alexander Graham Bell, "The Telephone" (1878). On the
cable: Charles Bright, "The Story of the Atlantic Cable" (1903).
For facts in the history of printing and descriptions of printing
machines, see: Edmund G. Gress, "American Handbook of Printing"
(1907); Robert Hoe, "A Short History of the Printing Press and of
the Improvements in Printing Machinery" (1902); and Otto
Schoenrich, "Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler and History of the
Linotype" (1898), written under Mr. Mergenthaler's direction. On
the best-known New York newspapers, see: H. Hapgood and A. B.
Maurice, "The Great Newspapers of the United States; the New York
Newspapers," in "The Bookman", vols. XIV and XV (1902). On the
typewriter, see Charles Edward Weller, "The Early History of the
Typewriter" (1918). On the camera, Paul Lewis Anderson, "The
Story of Photography" (1918) in "The Mentor", vol. vi, no. 19.;
and on the motion picture, Colin N. Bennett, "The Handbook of
Kinematography"; "The History, Theory and Practice of Motion
Photography and Projection", London: "Kinematograph Weekly"
(1911).

CHAPTER VII

For information on the subject of rubber and the life of Charles
Goodyear, see: H. Wickham, "On the Plantation, Cultivation and
Curing of Para Indian Rubber", London (1908); Francis Ernest
Lloyd, "Guayule, a Rubber Plant of the Chihuahuan Desert",
Washington (1911), Carnegie Institute publication no. 139;
Charles Goodyear, "Gum Elastic and Its Varieties" (1853) ; James
Parton, "Famous Americans of Recent Times" (1867); and "The
Rubber Industry, Being the Official Report of the Proceedings of
the International Rubber Congress" (London, 1911), edited by
Joseph Torey and A. Staines Manders.

CHAPTER VIII

J. W. Roe, "English and American Tool Builders" (1916), and J. V.
Woodworth, "American Tool Making and Interchangeable
Manufacturing" (1911), give general accounts of great American
mechanics.

For an account of John Stevens and Robert L. and E. A. Stevens,
see George Iles, "Leading American Inventors" (1912); Dwight
Goddard, "A Short Story of John Stevens and His Sons" in "Eminent
Engineers" (1905), and R. H. Thurston, "The Messrs. Stevens, of
Hoboken, as Engineers, Naval Architects and Philanthropists"
(1874), "Journal of the Franklin Institute", October, 1874. For
Whitney's contribution to machine shop methods, see Olmsted's
"Memoir" already cited and Roe and Woodworth, already cited. For
Blanchard, see Dwight Goddard, "A Short Story of Thomas
Blanchard" in "Eminent Engineers" (1905), and for Samuel Colt,
see his own "On the Application of Machinery to the Manufacture
of Rotating Chambered-Breech Fire Arms, and Their Peculiarities"
(1855), an excerpt from the "Minutes of Proceedings of the
Institute of Civil Engineers", vol. XI (1853), and Henry Barnard,
"Armsmear; the Home, the Arm, and the Armory of Samuel Colt"
(1866). 

CHAPTER IX

"The Story of Electricity" (1919) is a popular history edited by
T. C. Martin and S. L. Coles. A more specialized account of
electrical inventions may be found in George Bartlett Prescott's
"The Speaking Telephone, Electric Light, and Other Recent
Electrical Inventions" (1879).

For Joseph Henry's achievements, see his own "Contributions to
Electricity and Galvanism" (1835-42) and "On the Application of
the Principle of the Galvanic Multiplier to Electromagnetic
Apparatus" (1831), and the accounts of others in Henry C.
Cameron's "Reminiscences of Joseph Henry" and W. B. Taylor's
"Historical Sketch of Henry's Contribution to the
Electro-Magnetic Telegraph" (1879), Smithsonian Report, 1878.

"A List of References on the Life and Inventions of Thomas A.
Edison " may be found in the Division of Bibliography, U. S.
Library of Congress (1916). See also F. L. Dyer and T. C. Martin,
"Edison; His Life and Inventions" (1910), and "Mr. Edison's
Reminiscences of the First Central Station" in "The Electrical
Review", vol. XXXVIII. On other special topics see: F. E. Leupp,
"George Westinghouse, His Life and Achievements" (1918); Elihu
Thomson, "Induction of Electric Currents and Induction Coils"
(1891), "Journal of the Franklin Institute", August, 1891; and
Alex Dow, "The Production of Electricity by Steam Power" (1917).

CHAPTER X

Charles C. Turner, "The Romance of Aeronautics" (1912); "The
Curtiss Aviation Book", by Glenn H. Curtiss and Augustus Post
(1912); Samuel Pierpont Langley and Charles M. Manly, "Langley
Memoir on Mechanical Flight" (Smithsonian Institution, 1911);
"Our Atlantic Attempt", by H. G. Hawker and K. Mackenzie Grieve
(1919); "Flying the Atlantic in Sixteen Hours", by Sir Arthur
Whitten Brown (1920); "Practical Aeronautics", by Charles B.
Hayward, with an Introduction by Orville Wright (1912);
"Aircraft; Its Development in War and Peace", by Evan J. David
(1919). Accounts of the flights across the Atlantic are given in
"The Aerial Year Book and Who's Who in the Air" (1920), and the
story of NC4 is told in "The Flight Across the Atlantic", issued
by the Department of Education, Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor
Corporation (1919).





End of Project Gutenberg's The Age of Invention, by Holland Thompson