Twentieth Century Inventions

Twentieth Century Inventions.

by George Sutherland.

PREFACE.

Twenty years ago the author started a career in technological journalism by writing descriptions of what he regarded as the most promising inventions which had been displayed in international exhibitions then recently held. From that time until the present it has been his constant duty and practice to take note of the advance of inventive science as applied to industrial improvement--to watch it as an organic growth, not only from a philosophical, but also from a practical, point of view. The advance towards the actual adoption of any great industrial invention is generally a more or less collective movement; and, in the course of a practice such as that referred to, the habit of watching the signs of progress has been naturally acquired.

Moreover, it has always been necessary to take a comprehensive, rather than a minute or detailed, view of the progress of the great industrial army of nineteenth century civilisation towards certain objectives. It is better, for some purposes of technological journalism, to be attached to the staff than to march with any individual company--for the war correspondent must ever place himself in a position from which a bird's-eye view is possible. The personal aspect of the campaign becomes merged in that which regards the army as an organic unit.

It may, therefore, be claimed that, in some moderate degree, the author is fitted by training and opportunities for undertaking the necessarily difficult task of foretelling the trend of invention and industrial improvement during the twentieth century. He must, of course, expect to be wrong in a certain proportion of his prognostications; but, like the meteorologists, he will be content if in a fair percentage of his forecasts it should be admitted that he has reasoned correctly according to the available data.

The questions to be answered in an inquiry as to the chances of failure or success which lie before any invention or proposed improvement are, first, whether it is really wanted; and, secondly, whether the environment in the midst of which it must make its debut is favourable. These requirements generally depend upon matters which, to a large extent, stand apart from the personal qualifications of any individual inventor.

In the course of a search through the vast acc.u.mulations of the patent specifications of various countries, the thought is almost irresistibly forced upon the mind of the investigator that "there is nothing new under the sun". No matter how far back he may push his inquiry in attempting to unveil the true source of any important idea, he will always find at some antecedent date the germ, either of the same inventive conception, or of something which is hardly distinguishable from it. The habit of research into the origin of improved industrial method must therefore help to strengthen the impression of the importance of gradual growth, and of general tendencies, as being the prime factors in promoting social advancement through the success of invention.

The same habit will also generally have the effect of rendering the searcher more diffident in any claims which he may entertain as to the originality of his own ideas. Inventive thought has been so enormously stimulated during the past two or three generations, that the public recognition of a want invariably sets thousands of minds thinking about the possible methods of ministering to it.

Startling ill.u.s.trations of this fact are continually cropping up in the experiences of patent agents and others who are engaged in technological work and its literature. The average inventor is almost always inclined to imagine--when he finds another man working in exactly the same groove as himself--that by some means his ideas have leaked out, and have been pirated. But those who have studied invention, as a social and industrial force, know that nothing is more common than to find two or more inventors making entirely independent progress in the same direction.

For example, while this book was in course of preparation the author wrote out an account of an application of wireless telegraphy to the purpose of keeping all the clocks within a given area correct to one standard time. Within a few days there came to hand a copy of _Engineering_ in which exactly the same suggestion was put forward, and an announcement was made to the effect that Mr. Richard Kerr, F.G.S., had been working independently on the same lines, the details of his method of applying the Hertzian waves to the purpose being practically the same as those sketched out by the author. This is only one of several instances of coincidences in independent work which have been noticed during the period while this volume was in course of preparation.

It may, therefore, be readily understood that the author would hardly like to undertake the task of attempting to discriminate between those forecasts in the subsequent pages which are the results of his own original suggestions, and those which have been derived from other sources. Whatever is of value has in all probability been thought of, or perhaps patented and otherwise publicly suggested, before. At any rate, the great majority of the forecasts are based on actual records of the trials of inventions which distinctly have a future lying before them in the years of the twentieth century.

In declining to enter into questions relating to the original authorship of the improvements or discoveries discussed, it should not be supposed that any wish is implied to detract from the merits of inventors and promoters of inventions, either individually or collectively. Many of these are the heroes and statesmen of that great nation which is gradually coming to be recognised as a true ent.i.ty under the name of Civilisation. Their life's work is to elevate humanity, and if mankind paid more attention to them, and to what they are thinking and doing, instead of setting so much store by the veriest t.i.ttle-tattle of what is called political life, it would make much faster progress.

Some of the industrial improvements referred to in the succeeding pages are necessarily sketched in an indefinite manner. The outlines, as it were, have been only roughed in; and no attempt has been made to supply particulars, which in fact would be out of place in an essay towards a comprehensive survey in so small a s.p.a.ce. It is upon the wise and skilful arrangement of details that sound and commercially profitable patents are usually founded, rather than upon the broad general principles of a proposed industrial advance or reform.

During the twentieth century this latter fact, already well recognised by experts in what is known as industrial property, will doubtless force itself more and more upon the attention of inventors. Every specification will require to be drawn up with the very greatest care in observing the truth taught by the fable of the boy and the jar of nuts. So rapidly does the ma.s.s of bygone patent records acc.u.mulate, that almost any kind of claim based upon very wide foundations will be found to have trenched upon ground already in some degree taken up.

Probably there is hardly anything indicated in this work which is not--in the strict sense of the rules laid down for examiners in those countries which make search as to originality--common public property.

The labour involved in gathering the data for a forecast of the inventions likely to produce important effects during the twentieth century has been chiefly that of selecting from out of a vast ma.s.s of heterogeneous ideas those which give promise of springing up amidst favourable conditions and of growing to large proportions and bearing valuable fruit. Such ideas, when planted in the soil of the collective mind through the medium of official or other records, generally require for their germination a longer time than that for which the patent laws grant protection for industrial property. Many of them, indeed, have formed the subjects of patents which, from one reason or another, lapsed long before the expiration of the maximum terms.

Nature is ever prodigal of seeds and of "seed-thoughts" but comparatively n.i.g.g.ardly of places in which the young plant will find exactly the kind of soil, air, rain, and sunshine which the young plant needs.

If any one requires proof of this statement he will find ample evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on _Industrial Biography_, where facts and dates are adduced to show that steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised roads, coal gas, photography, anaesthesia, and even telegraphy are inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their success has been based, are of very much older origin than the world generally supposes. The author, therefore, submits that he is justified in referring inventions to the century in which they produce successful results, not to that in which they may have been first vaguely thought of. And in this view it is obvious that many of those patents and suggestions which have been published in current literature during the nineteenth century, but which, although pregnant with mighty industrial influences, have not yet reached fruition, are essentially inventions of the twentieth century. More than this, it is extremely probable that the great majority of those ideas which will move the industrial world during the next ensuing hundred years have already been indicated, more or less clearly, by the inventive thought of the nineteenth century.

GEORGE SUTHERLAND.

_December_, 1900.

CHAPTER I.

INVENTIVE PROGRESS.

The year 1801, the first of the nineteenth century, was _annus mirabilis_ in the industrial history of mankind. It was in that year that the railway locomotive was invented by Richard Trevithick, who had studied the steam engine under a friend and a.s.sistant of James Watt. His patent, which was secured during the ensuing year, makes distinct mention of the use of his locomotive driven by steam upon tramways; and in 1803 he actually had an engine running on the Pen-y-Darran mining tramway in Cornwall. From that small beginning has grown a system of railway communication which has brought the farthest inland regions of mighty continents within easy reach of the seaboard and of the world's great markets; which has made social and friendly intercourse possible in millions of homes which otherwise would have been almost dest.i.tute of it; which has been the means of spreading a knowledge of literature, science and religion over the face of the civilised world; and which, at the present moment, const.i.tutes the outward and visible sign of the difference between Western civilisation and that of the Asiatic, as seen in China.

In another corner of the globe, during the year 1801, Volta was constructing his first apparatus demonstrating the material and physical nature of those mysterious electric currents which his friend Professor Galvani of Bologna, who died just two years earlier, had at first ascribed to a physiological source. The researches of the latter, it will be remembered, were begun in an observation of the way in which the legs of a dead frog twitched under certain conditions.

The voltaic pile was the first electric battery, and, therefore, the parent of the existing marvellous telegraphic and telephonic systems, while less immediately it led to the development of the dynamo and its work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both for industry and for science.

At the Exposition of National Industry, held in Paris during the year 1801, a working model of the Jacquard loom was exhibited--the prototype of those remarkable pieces of mechanism by which the most elaborately figured designs are worked upon fabrics during the process of weaving by means of sets of perforated cardboards. This was the crowning achievement of the inventions relating to textile fabrics, which had rendered the latter half of the eighteenth century so noteworthy in an industrial sense. It brought artistic designs in articles of common use within the reach of even poor people, and has been the means of unconsciously improving the public taste, in matters of applied art, more rapidly than could have been accomplished by an army of trained artists. The riots in which the mob nearly drowned Jacquard at Lyons for attempting to set up some of his looms were very nearly a counterpart of those which had occurred in England in connection with the introduction of spinning, weaving and knitting machinery.

In Paris, during the first year of the nineteenth century, Robert Fulton, an American, and friend of the United States representative in France, was making trials on the Seine with his first steam-boat--a little vessel imitated by him later on in the first successful steamers which plied on the river Hudson, carrying pa.s.sengers from New York. At the same time, William Symongton launched the _Charlotte Dundas_, the steam tug-boat which, on the Scottish ca.n.a.ls, did the first actually useful work in the conveyance of goods by steam power on the water. These small experiments have initiated a movement in maritime transport which is fully comparable to that brought about on land by the invention of the railway locomotive.

Again, in 1801, Sir Humphry Davy gave his first lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution in London, where he had just been installed as a professor, and began that long series of investigations into the chemistry of common things which, taken up by his successor Faraday, gave to the United Kingdom the first start in some of those industries depending upon a knowledge of organic chemistry and the use of certain essential oils.

Public attention at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, was directed anywhere but towards these small commencements of mighty forces which were to revolutionise the industrial world, and through it also the social and political. If in those days Cornwall was ever referred to, it was not by any means in connection with Trevithick and his steam-engine which would run on rails, but by way of reference to the relations of the Prince of Wales to the Duchy, and the proportion of its revenues which belonged to him from birth.

Glancing over the pages of any history compiled in the early half of the century, the eye will trace hardly the barest allusions to forces, the discoveries in which were, in the year 1801, still in the incipient stage. Canon Hughes, for instance, in his continuation of the histories of Hume and Smollett, devoted some forty pages to the record of that year. The s.p.a.ce which he could spare from the demands made upon his attention by the wars in Spain and Egypt, and the naval conflict with France, was mainly occupied with such matters as the election of the Rev. Horne Tooke for Old Sarum, and the burning question as to whether that gentleman had not rendered himself permanently ineligible for Parliamentary honours through taking Holy Orders, and with a miscellaneous ma.s.s of topics relating to the merely evanescent politics of the day.

The whole of the effects of invention and discovery in making history during the first year of the century were dismissed by this writer with a casual reference to the augmentation of the productive power of the labouring population through the use of machinery, and a footnote stating that "this was more particularly the case in the cotton manufacture".

Time corrects the historical perspective of the past, but it does not very materially alter the power of the historical vision to adjust itself to an examination of the present day forces which are likely to grow to importance in the making of future history. When we ask what are the inventions and discoveries which are really destined to grow from seeds of the nineteenth into trees of the twentieth century, we are at once confronted with the same kind of difficulty which would present itself to one who, standing in the midst of an ancient forest, should be requested to indicate in what spots the wide-spreading giants of the next generation of trees might be expected to grow. The company promoter labels those inventions in which he is commercially interested as the affairs which will grow to huge dimensions in the future; while the man of scientific or mechanical bent is very apt to predict a mighty future only for achievements which strike him as being peculiarly brilliant.

Patent experts, on the other hand, when asked by their clients to state candidly what cla.s.s of inventions may be relied upon to bring the most certain returns, generally reply that "big money usually comes from small patents". In other words, an invention embodying some comparatively trivial, but yet really serviceable, improvement on a very widely used type of machine; or a little bit of apparatus which in some small degree facilitates some well known process; or a fashionable toy or puzzle likely to have a good run for a season or two, and then a moderate sale for a few years longer; these are the things to be recommended to an inventor whose main object is to make money. Thus the most qualified experts in patent law and practice do not fail to disclose this fact to those who seek their professional advice in a money-making spirit, as the great majority of inventors do.

The full term of fourteen years in the United Kingdom, or seventeen in the United States, may be a ridiculously long period for which to grant a monopoly to the inventor of some ephemeral toy, although absolutely inadequate to secure the just reward for one who labours for many years to perfect an epoch-making invention, and then to introduce it to the public in the face of all the opposition from vested interests which such inventions almost invariably meet.

Thus the fact that a man has made money out of one cla.s.s of patents may not be any safe guide at all to arriving at a due estimate of his ideas on industrial improvements of greater "pith and moment," but, on the contrary, it is generally exactly the reverse. The law offers an immense premium for such inventions as are readily introduced, and the inventor who has made it his business to take advantage of this fact is usually one of the last men from whom to get a trustworthy opinion on patents of a different cla.s.s.

Of the patents taken out during the latter portion of the nineteenth century, many undoubtedly contain the germs of great ideas, and, nevertheless, have excited comparatively little attention from business men or from the general public. It was so in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and history is only repeating itself when the seeds of twentieth century industrial movements are permitted to germinate unseen.

For all practical purposes each invention must be referred to the age in which it actually does useful work in the service of mankind. Thus, Hero of Alexandria, in the third century B.C., devised a water fountain worked by the expansive power of steam. From time to time during the succeeding twenty centuries similar pieces of apparatus excited the curiosity of the inquisitive and the interest of the learned. The clever and eccentric Marquis of Worcester, in his little book published in 1663, _A Century of the Names and Scantlings of Inventions_, generally known as the _Century of Inventions_, gave an account of one application of the power of steam to lift water which he had worked out, probably on a scale large enough to have become of practical service. Thomas Savery and Denis Papin, both of them men of high attainments and great ingenuity, made important improvements before the end of the seventeenth century.

Yet, if we refer to the question as to the proper age to which the steam-engine as a useful invention is to be a.s.signed, we shall unhesitatingly speak of it as an eighteenth century invention, and this notwithstanding the fact that Savery's patent for the first pumping engine which came into practical use was dated 1698. The real introduction of steam as a factor in man's daily work was effected later on, partly by Savery himself and partly by Newcomen, and above all by James Watt. The expiration of Watt's vital patent occurred in 1800, and he himself then retired from the active supervision of his engineering business, having virtually finished his great life's work on the last year of the century which he had marked for all time by the efforts of his genius.

Similarly we may confidently characterise the locomotive engine as an invention belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century, although tramways on the one hand, and steam-engines on the other hand, were ready for the application of steam transport, and the only work that remained to be accomplished in the half century indicated was the bringing of the two things together. The dynamo, as a factor in human life--or, in other words, the electric current as a form of energy producing power and light--is an invention of the second half of the nineteenth century, although the main principles upon which it was built were worked out prior to the year 1851.

It will be seen, in the course of the subsequent pages, that portable electric power has as yet won its way only into very up-to-date workshops and mines, and that the means by which it will be applied to numerous useful purposes in the field, the road, and the house will be distinctly inventions of the twentieth century. Similarly the steam-engine has not really been placed upon the ordinary road, although efforts have been made for more than a century to put it there, the conception of a road locomotive being, in fact, an earlier one than that of an engine running on rails. Steam automobiles and traction engines are still confined to special purposes, the natures of which prove that certain elements of adaptability are still lacking in order to render them universally useful as are the locomotive and the steam-ship.

In nearly every other important line of human needs and desires it will be found that merely tentative efforts have been made by ingenious minds resulting in inventions of greater or less promise.

Many of the finest conceptions which have necessarily been set down as failures have missed fulfilling their intended missions, not so much by reason of inherent weakness, as through the want of accessory circ.u.mstances to a.s.sist them. As in biology, so in industrial progress the definition of fitness appended to the law of the survival of the fittest must have reference to the environment.

A foolish law or public prejudice results in the temporary failure of a great invention, and the inventor's patent succ.u.mbs to the inexorable operation of the struggle for existence. Yet, fortunately for mankind, if not for the individual inventor, an idea does not suffer extinction as the penalty for non-success in the struggle. "The beginning of creation," says Carlyle, "is light," and the kind of light which inventors throw upon the dark problems involving man's industrial progress is providentially indestructible.

Twentieth century inventions--as the term is used in this book--are, therefore, those which are destined to fulfil their missions during the ensuing hundred years. They are those whose light will not only exist in hidden places, but will also shine abroad to help and to bless mankind. Or, if we may revert to the former figure, they are those which have not only been planted in the seed and have germinated in the leaf, but which have grown to goodly proportions, so that none may dare to a.s.sert that they have been planted for nought. A man's age is the age in which he does his work rather than that in which he struggles to years of maturity. Moore and Byron were poets of the nineteenth century, although the one had attained to manhood and the other had grown from poverty to inherit a peerage before the new century dawned.

The prophetic role--although proverbially an unsafe one--is nevertheless one which every business man must play almost every day of his life. The merchant, the manufacturer, the publisher, the director, the manager, and even the artist, must perforce stake some portion of his success in life upon the chance of his forecast as to the success of a particular speculation, article of manufacture, or artistic conception, and its prospects of proving as attractive or remunerative as he has expected it to be. The successful business man no doubt makes his plans, as far as may be practicable, upon the system indicated by the humorist, who advises people never to prophesy unless they happen to know, but the nature of his knowledge is almost always to some extent removed from certainty. He may spend much time in laborious searching; make many inquiries from persons whom he believes to be competent to advise him; diligently study the conditions upon which the problem before him depends--in short, he may take every reasonable precaution against the chances of failure, yet, in spite of all, he must necessarily incur risks. And so it is with regard to the task of forecasting the trend of industrial improvement.

All who are called upon to lay their plans for a number of years beforehand must necessarily be deeply interested in the problems relating to the various directions which the course of that improvement may possibly take. Meanwhile their estimates of the future, although based upon an intimate knowledge of the past and aided by naturally clear powers of insight, must be hypothetical and conditional. Unfortunately for the vast majority of manufacturing experts, the thoroughness with which they have mastered the details of one particular branch of industry too often blinds them to the chances of change arising from localities beyond their own restricted fields of vision.

The merriment occasioned by the first proposals for affixing pneumatic tyres to bicycles may be cited as a striking instance of the lack of forecasting insight displayed by very many of those who are best ent.i.tled to p.r.o.nounce opinions on the minutiae of their particular avocations. In almost every "bike" shop and factory throughout the United Kingdom and America, the suggestion of putting an air-filled hosepipe around each wheel of the machine to act as a tyre was received with shouts of ridicule!

Railway men, who understood the wonderful elasticity imparted by air to pieces of mechanism, such as the pneumatic brake, were not by any means so much inclined to laughter; but naturally, for the most part, they deferred to the rule which enjoins every man to stick to his trade. The rule in question--when applied to the task of estimating the worth of inventions claiming to produce revolutionary effects in any industry--is necessarily, in the majority of cases, more or less irrelevant, because such an invention should be regarded not so much as a proposed _innovation_ in an old trade as the _creation_ of a new one.