SCIENCE UP TO DATE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17335, 25 November 1916, Page 13

SCIENCE UP TO DATE.

FIRST PROFESSIONAL INVENTOR. 11. (By JAMES COLLIER.) ' Edison was the-world's first professional inventor, but not yet did lie definitely enter on his career as such, i An early assumption of it can, indeed, , be dated, but it was premature. In tho "Telegrapher" of January 10, . ISo9, it was stated that " T. A. Edison . has resigned his situation in the West- . ern Union office, Boston, and will de- ! vote his time to bringing out his inventions." Tho announcement was alto- , gother too hopeful. In 1876 ho may i be said to have fairly embarked on his ! career as an inventor, and he was the ' first of his sort tho world has seen. " Lewes, it will be remembered, advised ' Herbert Spencer to adopt the profes- ! sion in his earlier impecunious years, ' I but George Eliot and Spencer himself ' laughed at the idea, as well they ,' might. Little could have come of it 1 J in those uninventire days. In Edison s ' case vast and still unimaginable results were to conio of the assumption. He \ was orobably 'the world's greatest pa- ' tenteo, and he has doubtless broken the record by his tremendous tale of pa- ! tents. Between iSb'O a"d DIO lie applied for 1328 separate patents, or tlurtyviwo every year, and one every ! eleven da vs. ' The climax was reached ' | in 1882, when he applied for 141. Of j these perhaps not more than about | half were assigned him. Many more ' | inventions were not patented, but kept | &i trade secrets. In each cusc the acj tual patented invention was the latest , I phase of one or more lines ol uevelopuicut. AUTOMATIC TELEGK APHY. An Englishman named Little brought to INow "Xork a system of automatic or rapid telegraphy; and it is one more examplo ol a common rule, that Englishmen often initiate an invention, but arc unable to develop it. The fault of Littles system was that, while effective over short distances, it was n inoperable over long spaces. It was taken up bv some Now York telegraph magnate.-, but turned down on an adverse report. There it might have remained, had there been no Edison. But he soon perceived its merits. He said that it had in it tho germ of a good thing, but needed working out. So he took it in hand and devised an apparently so efficient a system that he dispatched messages from Nov,- York to Washington at the rate of 1000 words a minute, though manual transmission bv key did not exceed fifty words. To Philadelphia he sent messages at the rate of 35C0 words. The improvements that Edison made in the system rendered it practicable to transmit at hia;h speeds over lines of great length. Almost entirely by his individual labour was the invention made commercial. He further applied the system to the printing of messages in Roman letters. Messages could then be sent between New York and Philadelphia, and printed as well, at the rate of 3000 words a minute. DUPLEX AND QUAPRAPLEX TELEGRAPHY. All Edison's inventive efforts in the field of telegraphy led up to the quadruples', hut the path to it lay through the duplex. The duplex had beer, suggested and elaborated by many ingenious inventors before Edison again took it up. Tho object was to transmit simultaneously two messages on tho same wire—either in the same or in opposite directions. By Edison's invention (patented in 1873) the signal' were transmitted in one direction l»;v reversing the polarity of a conf-U\;it current, and in opposite directions l.v increasing or decreasing the strong!* of the same current, In this lay the germ of tho quiidruplex system. The principle embodied in tin quadruwlox i.s that of working over a line with two currents at each end differing in strength or character in such a way that "they respond to just such currents and no others; and by grouping • a pair of those at. each end of the line, the quadruples is the result. It is estimated that by this ingenious discoverv a sum of '.64.000.000 has heen saved by means of tho quadruples in . the cost of line construction in the , United States alone. The difficulties to be overcome were, enormous. The '. problems were of the most, complicated . kind, and Edison bent all his energies ' on their solution. The scientific imagination was brought into play. A peculiar effort of the mind was demanded. ; He had to imagine, he himself said. i eight different things moving together ■ on a mental plane, but had nothing to i demonstrate, their effective action. «. As ' Newton, after the fearful strain of . composing the ,: Prineipia " < lost his - self-consciousness or found it impaired, ■ Edison forgot his own name on a eriti- ■ cnl occasion, and had to nay smartly ' for the lapse. Lord Kelvin, who saw it in operation , at Philadelphia, has described tbein- ' vention. "Edison, ho says, utilised • Professor Joseph Henry's discovery of > electro-magnetic induction in a single . circuit, and this was the electrical secret of the great speed achieved. • Besides this, the main peculiarities of Edison's automatic telegraph are the • perforator, tho contact-maker, the electro-magnetic shunt and the ferric cyanide of iron solution. And Lord ' Kelvin eulogised it as "a very import- ' ant step in land-telegraphy." ORGANISING INVENTIONS. The next thing was to get up a company to take over the invention. Two companies were rivals, and one of those • was controlled by the notorious «>ay • Gould. After much intriguing, the Edison system was adopted, and Edi- • son received tho small sum of £0000; or. rather, ho received the promise of • it. Tho litigation over the invention i \v,ns protracted through thirty years. ! and Edison got never a cent. So, at 1 least, one would infer, but other state- ■ me.nts are inconsistent, American jus--1 tice amazingly resembles the grossest possible! injustice. ; VARIOUS INVENTIONS. During these anxious, harassed years the factory nt Newark, in New Jersey, , was kept working up to the maximum speed. No fewer than forty-live different inventions were at one time in hand'. Tho hours kept would have horrified the legislators who legalised the eight hours' day or the socialists who demand a six or a four hours' ' working day. Sometimes the work- ' men toiled unintermitteiitly for sixty hours over an invention. These in- ' volitions were not all confined to elcc- ' tricity. Edison claimed to havo " got into commercial shape" a typewriter brought him by Sholes. of Milwaukee, the inventor of the Remington. Edison found the alignment " awful " ; all tho letters " wanted" to wander out of tho line. In the specimen given tho alignment is perfect. He worked on it till it gave fair results. In 1875 Edison invented a mimeograph for multiplying copies of letters, etc. As many as 3000 copies have been made from a single stencil. In .this form it is electric, and a small battery energises the pen. The invention has since been adopted all over the world. THE TELEPHONE. Edison appears to have been identified with mosti of the electric inventions of his tune, and he left his mark on almost all of them. Ho was certainly not connected with, the origination of the telephone, but ha competed with its final inventors and contested . with them tha palm of discovery. An American, Page, a young French soldier in Algeria, Bourseul, and a Gorman professor, Philip Reis, threw out the idea that spoken words could be transmitted by means of an electric battery, two vibrating, discs, and a wire, or built several forms of electric telephonic apparatus, all in some degree imitating the human ear. In

the yea~r~lß7s three unconscious rivals competed against one another for a patent—Alexander Graham Bell, a voting Quaker carpenter named dray, and Edison. But Edison was on a different tack. . He invented a small solenoid arrangement, not for transmitting spoech. but as "an apparatus for analysing the complex waves arising from various sounds." It was only later that Edison found that ho had produced (in 1875) an instrument that could be used .as a telephone. Graham Bell's telephone was a commercial failure because of its faintness and its repetition of extraneous sounds. Edison was sent for by the head of a rival organisation, and the work that he did in developing the carbon-trans-mitter was so important that tho instrument is now in universal use. That and two valuable -principles—tho varying the resistance of the transmitting circuit and the using the induction coil—made modern telephony the indispensable thing that it is. Without them it would not and could not exist. But his telephone inventions, mad-a through many later years, included all kinds of carbon instruments —no fewer than eight distinct telephones (the water, electrostatic, chemical, magneto, inertia, mercury, and Ihe voltaic pile), the musical transmitter and the clc.-;-tromotogroph. Not for all these, but mainly for the carbon-transmitter, Edison received £looo a year for seventeen years, the life of the patent. Ho trained twenty young men in an exchange he set up and sent them to Lonrfbn, where thev found rt vivacious Homer in George Bernard Shaw. In London his patent for his telephone was sustained by the courts, and it kept the • monopoly in England for many years, while Graham Ball's patent was refused: and in this eonnection Edison naturally pavs a high tribute to the r-niiity and superior business methods of lviigh'-.!i fourth of iusfcice. where Kir [iiHwd Webster. I'itolv Lord ffrei' .!r.-,i.-\ was Edison's counsel. But it was Bell and not Edison who profitably forecast the ;ulvent of the modern telephone exchange. Still, the competition between the two systems brought about an unexpected expansion in the exchanges and a corresponding advance in their importance, value and usefulness. THE MICROPHONE! Edison also claimed that ihe microphone, an apparatus for making faint sounds distinctly audible, was hut one of the many forms that could lve given t'l vl'«" r;M--on-lv.- -r.1M.l T. HU'dlOSll see him described now ns an Englishman, now as n United States'citizen). Hughes, be says, first saw Ed'son's transmitter in London a month before he produced the microphone. In other forms Edison has applied the idea of tho transmitter. Among them is ihe tnsimeter. v.bi-h has a delicate .sensibility in prw.icp of heat Astonishing though it may seem, if rccordsthe hpat given out by the rays of light emitted by tho reairlc star, Arciurns. | We now approach the four great in- i volitions that have immortalised (fie nnino "of Edison- -the phonograph, the incandescent lamn. electric lighting, and the electric railway. But we have no space left to do justice to even one of these great discoveries. A third article may ninvar not excessive, tho more that electric agecies are precisely those that differe-.-.tinte the present war from all its predecessors.