Steam Steel and Electricity

in the mass and number of inventions, almost lost. It happens that many of the practical appli

njamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His e

urg, was instantly killed by lightning

. He was a philosopher like Diogenes, lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were no

r remembered a brilliant after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer, a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who had spent one-

ingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through which others of his countrymen were t

d almost as persistent. The chief of these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which spells without letters or writing or types, that may be

ause there was no alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed to be read, or used, by sound. Last, though hardly least if all facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who, shut in a room with Vai

1870, only served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was little surprise. The practical light of th

ull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change, to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics, business--in

e old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No mor

printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy, enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature, and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer, something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet befo

o old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel. These he arranged in such a way

n achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It

point on a diaphragm that was moved by the voice might be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards

invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived at that p

othes when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a "cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a work

t essential part, to be too small for Edison. But nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant, and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy Edison needed ther

led in a bulb almost absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of which to make it, and e

e shows many thousands of such in the aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are n

is most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has been th

c current, a something primarily having nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war, beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light, signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are loaded, fired, and even sighted by the same means. Her officers are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total effi

unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those w

ging positions and range. To change this, to either injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A. Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is, that it can be determined how far it is to a d

the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns; these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and shell.

ith an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one side and too little on another, because switches placed at different points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed. Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat was high and constant at

nature knew about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb abou

the loading and firing of naval guns to the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications, and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of t

ure shall be reared. Some of those few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the doing

nifestations that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its origin is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations o