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
CHAPTER I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND
HIS TIMESCHAPTER II. ELI
WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GINCHAPTER
III. STEAM IN CAPTIVITYCHAPTER IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND
NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLANDCHAPTER V.
THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTIONCHAPTER VI. AGENTS OF
COMMUNICATIONCHAPTER VII. THE
STORY OF RUBBERCHAPTER VIII. PIONEERS
OF THE MACHINE SHOPCHAPTER IX. THE
FATHERS OF ELECTRICITYCHAPTER X.
THE CONQUEST OF THE AIRCHAPTER
NOTES
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 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, separating 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 respectability 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 until 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 invention. 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 Patent 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.”
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.
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.”*
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.*
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.*
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.
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.
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.
“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.”*
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.”*
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.”*
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:
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.
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.*
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.”*
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.”*
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.
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.*
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!”
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.*
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.
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.”*
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.”**
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.
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.
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.
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.”*
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.”*
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
with 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.”*
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.
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.”*
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).