NOTHING MORE TO INVENT.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144857, 8 December 1915, Page 6

NOTHING MORE TO INVENT.

A CURIOUS OLD LETTER. Someone poring over the old files in tho United States Patent OIUco at "Washington tho other day found a letter written in 1333 that illustrates the limitations of the human'imagination. It was from an old employee of tho Patent Office, offering his resignation to tho head of tho department. His reason was that as everything inveutable had been invented tho Patent Office would soon bo discontinued and there would bo no further need of his services or the services of any of his fellow clbrks. Ho, therefore, decided to loavo before tho blow fell. Everything invontublu had been invented! The writer of this letter journeyed in a stage coach or a canal bout. Ho had never soon a limited train or an ocean greyhound. He read at night by candlelight, if ho read at all in tho evening; more likely ho went to bod soon after dark and did all his reading by daylight. Ho had never, soon a house ligated by illuminating gas. Tbo arc and incandescent electric lights wore not to be invented for nearly a half century. If ho bad over hoard of electricity ho thought of it as tho mysterious and dangerous fluid that strikes from the clouds during a thunderstorm. That it could bo harnessed to do man’s will had never occurred to him.

Ho never heard the clicking of a telegraph sounder. Tho telephone would have seemed as wonderful to him as a voyage to tho moon. 'Motion pictures would have reminded him of black art, and the idea that a machine could be invented whereby man would fly above the clouds like a bird, ascending and descending at will, would have seemed to him merely absurd. The modern printing press, the linotype machine, which seems almost to think; tho X-ray, by means of which surgeons diagnose disease and injury and lay out thoir work with sciontiiic certainty, these things wore yet to bo invented long after he was dead. He could not imagine tho automobile, now so common that they cover the streets and roads of all tho world. Ho could not dream that a cannon would tse made to throw a projectile more than twenty miles, that repeating rifles, revolvers, and machine-guns would ho invented, that steel monsters of the deep would speed invisibly under tho seas with tho power to send a giaut ocean liner to tho bottom within a matter of moments Ho lacked tho imagination to see all tho thousands’and tens of thousands of comparatively small inventions that havo come into being sinco his day, somo of them for good and some for evil, but all tolling a story of progress of one sort or another. Probably m this ho did not differ from most of his fellowmen in Iris day. It is very likely most of his friends agreed with him that the limit of invention had been reached. He seems unfortunately deficient in imagination and in optimism, as wo road of his letter of resignation in tho musty files of the Patent Office. But let us not take too much unction to our souls. We are quite as ignorant of what tho next eighty years may bring forth as ho was of the future of American inventions.