INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS.

Wellington Independent, Volume XIV, Issue 1444, 7 August 1860, Page 5

INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS.

Is it true that the world has never known its greatest men ? Have all its benefactors been ignored and despised ; or rather, have not some occasionally found timely recognition aud fitting reward ? Human nature is stubborn, aud men are unwilling to be turned out of their own \rny ; but the hardest natures gradually soften into a new mould if pressed long enough and the most wilful feet take to unaccustomed paths after those paths have been well trodden by their neighbours. Every new invention has had its own special fight before it could get its hearing. Who recognises the prince in the beggar? Who sees the full-fledged eagle in that ordinary looking and somewhat unprepossessing egg? Who could always foretell that the new invention, untried and unproved, was a world's blessing in disguise, an embryo helper forward of humanity ? Wft do not wish to uphold ignorance in any form, but we must be just; and really those various Mr. Bat's Eyes may be pardoned for not seeing all that Christiana aud Mercy set out to seek. Besides every inventor has not been wronged by Iris generation : some have, and most grievously, but not all. We will follow the course taken by Mr. John Tiinbs, in his new book, Stories of Inventors and their Discoveries ; and, for every persecuted benefactor of society, we will find n. the least two who meet their reward.

We begiu with Archimedes, as of course. For, though the Pyramids were built and the the monoliths raised ; though the huge caves of Elephante and the city of Petrsa has been hewn oat of the living rock, and the Pelasgians —or who!— had built their Cyclodean walls wherever they had the chance., yet Archimedes always stands first on the list* of mechanical discoverers, as if the world had never known crank or pulley till he had made both, and had never raised a stone bigger than a man's hand. But we miut not forget that even Aichimedes stood upon the shoulders of the past. Well ! Archimedes was uo martyr. His Eureka, his boast about the world and the lever, were household words in every Greek mouth ; bis screw is one of the principal motors of the present day ;,aud his catapults aud burning-glasses his balists and the Galley of Heiro, received their due honours then, and remain unsurpassed even yet. The Great Eastern is not equal to that Galley of Heiro, with its temples and its baths, its storehouses, water tanks, and six hundred A.B.s sitting down to fish and flour in the fotecastle. Honoured by his sovereign, respected by the people, revered by posterity, tbe ghost of brave old Archimedes, wandering palely on the banks of the Styx, has no reason to complain, of the injustice of bu inanity.

No one was hung, drawn, or quartered for the magnet ; only Columbus, wheu the needle varied in the American Atlantic, bad to improvise a theory to save perhaps, his life from the mutinous bunds of his terrified sailors. Whether the Chinese to whom the honour of the discovery belongs, have a martyr magnetiser, like their martyr potter Pousa — now a god or something like it — we do not kuow ; but according to all accounts, their Magnetia Mountain, which played Sinbad such a sorry trick, has made martyrs and victims enough. Printing made a martyr, in a small way of poor Gutteuberg, who, what with debt (he spent the whole of a large private fortune in bringing his movable blocks to perfection), political frays, the ill-will of the priests, and the enmity of the guild of writers, hud but v troubled life of it. But, though he was persecuted, ami thought Faust was held as nothing bettor than lieutenant and vice-regent of the devil, all the early printers were not so reviled. Old Caxton was

honoured as he deserved ; and cost the parish good bard money for the " iin torches and the belle used at his bureying." Guttenberg's small napkin-press-like printing machiue has been slightly distanced now by Applegarth's machines of eight cylinders, which print twelves thousand impressions of the Timei per hour; by Messrs. Hoe's of ten cylinders, which prints twenty thousand in the hour; and by that other American monster, which can print twenty-two thousand double impressions in the same time. Little did the good old German philosooher and enthusiast dream of where bis invention would extend when he first hewed out his «ooden moveable blocks.

Of gunpowder and its discoverers we need not speak. It has bad its martyrs by the million, and is altogether too ferocious a compound for us to meedle with. Torricelli and Pascal, Beaumur and Fahrenheit with their barometers and thermometer 1 :, are pleasanter subjects to consider ; so is Guericke, with his air-pump; so are all the inventors of the various divingbells, by which human beings can go down among tbe sea nympths and the coral roots, and crawl through the maize of brown, green, and purple weed, growing in tufted bowers among the arches of the wrecks. Tbe latest of these diving bells is the American Nautilus where the ballast or descending power is water and where the air for breathing is condensed' This American Nautilus seems to be about the' greatest success yet made in the diving bell department, allowing men to remain in under water longer thau any other contriranco hitherto devised, and with less risk or accident of suffocation. For the race of automata we confess to little absolute sympathy; though, relatively, both as furtherance! to the science of pure mechanics, and as examples of skill and engenuity, they are not without considerable value. They are among the earliest and most suiversal creations of man. India, China, and Japan, all have them in some or other form ; Egypt and Greece both dealt largely in tbera for their mysteries and imitation?. Greece, indeed, patronised them for pleasure, witness the Wooden Begion, made by Archytas of Tarentum ; tbe Homeric Tripods; the Venuses, that had to be tied up at night to pierent their rambling about unbidden ; and other things, which will readily be found by classical scholars not afraid of " roots."' Then there were rarious and sundry automata in the Dark Ages; Friar Bacon's Brazeu Head was one, and the thirty years' similar labour of Alberlus Magnus was another — that head, which, when it began to speak, Tbonaas of Aquinas broke to pieces, under fear and pain of tbe devil, as usual. Poor Alex of Provence fared badly with his iavention. He h<*d discovered the fact that two instruments tuned in unison were what we should now term harmoniously sympathetic. He made an auto maton skeleton, placed it in tbe window, put a guitar in its hand, and played another instru meat, tuned in unison and set at a distance. Tbe automaton skeleton moved its fingers; sounds were heard from the guitar ; the popu lace believed it was all a work of magic ana witchcraft; and poor Alex and the skeleton were burnt together, by command of Parliament. This was in 1674— think, reader! Not yet two hundred years ago ! Vaucanson's Duck was a grand triumph over all sorts of difficulties. Eveiy bone was anatomically correct, and the duck did all tuat a live duck should do ; eat, drank, dabbled with its beak in the true, quick, duck-like manner, moved its wings, and even quacked. It did moie than this, too ; but we need not particularise further. Droz the ellerraade a writitijr boy ; Droz the younger, a pianoforte boy ; and Droz the elder got caught by the Spanish Inquisition, and narrowly es caped with his life. It was a dangerous amusement in those days to fashion automata tbat could, by any possibility, be supposed to be imps or familiars ; and as even a pet dog or a tame toad might bring a person to tbe stake as a necromancer, what risks must have hung round a self moviug skeletou, or a brazeu head that could speak with a human voice ! Tbe Chess player, iuveuted by De Kempelen, was tbe most celebrated of the latter automata : but this, however, tinned rather upou tbe cleverness of sleight-of-hand than upou the wonders of mechanics, and ranks more as a trick than as a matter of science. De Kempelen also made a speaking automaton, which said distinctly, " Rotnanoru.n Imperator semper Augustus •/" •• Leopold us Secundus ;" " Vous etes mon ami;' •' Je vous aime de tout mon cceur." He had long laboured at this piece of mechanism, hut could only get the simple utterance of the sounds o, ou, and c : i and v would not come, at any price, neither would the consonants. Then he devised an apparatus, similar in action and construction to the human mouth and teeth, and this he placed at tbe extremity of the vocal tube. Good French aud Latin were the results. The Americans also made a speaking machine, but tbe inventor, Mr. Reale, destroyed his work of sixteen years, in a- moment of what people call " frenzy. 1 ' Afterwards, in 1846, Professor Faber exhibited iii the Egyptian Hall bis Euphonia, which is held to be the best speaking automaton of all. Houdin is our latest wonder in tbe mechanical way ; but every one knows everything about him his singing nightingale, magic boxes with rings in them that no mortal hands ever put there, his drawing figure, which so ominously broke its pencil when it began the crown foi the young Count de Paris, bis tricks, aud his triumphs ; his marvels wilh cards, eggs, birds, bats, bottles, and extinguishers. We have them all off by heart and pleasant lessons they were to learn, ton ! Well ! of these mechanical inventions, except, ing the questionable reputation that clunround Albertus Magnus, and the unhappy fate of Alex, there are none to whom au iiuliscriinii nating public showed marked ingratitude ; while, in later dcys, tame, honour, and riches I have heaped themselves up in overwhelming piles, on the beads of those who have showed inventive talent or mechanical skill. We the advocates of human nature as a whole, are glad of this, as confirmatory of our own theory. There is uo use in talking of the various schemes for aerial ships, or of the thousand and one baloons that have been sent up on new principles and with perfect good faith that each of those new principles was going to in augurate a new era in air navigation Perhaps aerial ships will be actual, commercial, and trading facts, before long ; perhaps the London General Baloon Company will take placo of the London General Omnibus Company, with stations on the roof-tops of certain accommodating British householders. Excepting the inartys of the experiment, beginning with Icarus and endjng with his American imitators of the other day, aerial navigation has not been a very ill-used pursuit. To be sure, people do say that they are all cracked who think it can ever 1 c made of positive every day use ; but then every new thing has been a sign of madness irom time imm. -mortal, and there is no reasou why this new thing should be exempt. Roger Bacon and the Marquis of Woi center wtsre both thought to be mad wLen they foreshadowed steam-engines and teles-copes ; Para celsus was evilly looked on for the sake of bis new drug, opium ; aud Napier of Msrchiston

when he asserted that he could bet ships on fitt by a burniug glass, sail under water, by help of a certain machine, destroy thirty thousand Turks without the risk of losing one Christian, manure profitably with common salt, and calculate by logarithms, was held as little better than a maniac, i-f not a wizard, which was worse. Rupert and bis experiments fared better. But then Rupert was a prince, closely connected with the blood royal, and royalty, in those days meant something more than taking off one's hat, or standing while the national air was played. Rupert did many noticeable philosophic things, fiery soldier of fortune though he was; he brought forward Van Seigen's invention of mezzotint, made the toy called Prince Rupert's drops, which no one can rightly explain even now ; blew up rocks and mines underwater, made an hydraulic machine, improved the naval quadrant, made glass at Chelsea, cast hail shot, and devised the useful metal since called " Prince's metal." He worked luxuriously at Windsor Castle, of which his cousin Charles the Second, appointed him governor ; and there, in his apaitinent swords and crucibles, rapiers, retorts, spurs, and mathematical instruments lay scattered all about in a confuMO.i befitting his multiplex life.

The first watchmaker was a great man. Was he accused of witchcraft, and burned at the stake for tampering with the mysterious laws of life and motion F We do not know :h« might have been. And John Harrison of Faulby, the country carpenter's uneducated son, and the maker of the first marine chronometer, was a great man too ; and be did not suffer by bis invention. Quite the contrary ; for he got twenty thousand pounds for it, when, after forty years' incessant labour, he had fully perfected it, and made it the reliable creation that it is now. No, all the inventors and discoverer* hava not suffered. True, fcColumbus was ungratefully treated, and Galileo knew (under a dominant priesthood) more of the superstition and cruelty than of the recognition and gratitude of men ; but all hare not been so evilly bandied. To William Hervey no one has grudged honours, though to be sure poor Servetus was burned, partly for disproving the theory then existing that the veins carried the blood to the various parts of the body, a disapproval afterwards confirmed by Harvey. Dr. Jennet has bis statue ami his colleges, and rewards were not wanting even in his lifetime. Lady Mary Wojtley Montagu had a harder fight to go through than fell to his lot, and yet she was victorious in the end. To Newton and Herschel, Lord Rosse and Le Verricr, to Neipce, Daguerre, Fox, Talbot, and Wheatstone, to Brewster and Davy, the world owes great and glorious benefits ; but we never heard of any disposition to repay those benefits with ingratitude So, after all, men and Women are not so bad as it sometimes suits bystanders to say, and humanity is of smoother skin than the cynical will allow.

Was not Watt honoured, and did not George Stephensor find backers, friends, and disciples, Did not Arkwright, the Bolton b^rbe-" make a colossal fortune? And what would be the Peels and tbe Marslialls, the Harg reaves and the Croinptons, if their ancestors had not been inventors? Ah well! humanity has something to answer for here, for the machinery inventors, the men who have made straps and wheels and pulleys ilo the work of living thews and sinews, have seldom got off well in the outset. They interfered with existing rights, with a mans vested interest in his own muscles, and consequently had every working hand dead against them, at all events for a time, and until the sum of comparative advantage was pretty clearly made out. Hargreaves, tho inventor of the spinning jenny, died at Nottingham, in great poverty and distress ; Croinptosi's mule was taken to pieces for safety against the mohs, warriug against all new-fangled machinery ; Cartwright was defrauded ; the elder Peel had his carding machines broken, and was Anally driven out of the country where he lived ; Jacqard, the great benefactor of all figure-pat, tern weavers, made no fortune by his invention hut left his family in such poverty tbat they were obliged to offer for sale the golden in dal, which Louis the Eighteenth had given him. The Chamber of Commerce at Lyons generously bought the medal, and gave twenty-four pounds for it — being exactly four pjuncls more than the intrinsic value of the gold ! Earlier than all this, we find .Lee, the first stocking weaver, dyiug in Paris, heart- broken by poverty and disappointment ; while later, John Lorabe is poisoned by the Italians, whose secret of silkweaving he stole and transported into England. No : the history of machine inventors is not, on the whole satisfactory ; for we rarely find that those who originated an idea got anything by it except persecution and hatred, while all the great fortunes made have some sly taint or other in some ont-of-the-waycoruer, where only the most piying and impolite of biographers would think oflooking. Even the highest names are net quite stable, and in the most portly bankers' books may be found a few dog's eared pages with a smirch and a stain over the larger figured.

Street gas lighting had a hard day of it once, when a committee of the Royal Society, Appointed by government, met to decide on its merits. It was almost hunted to death then, and tossed over to the kites and crows. Brougham, Davy, Woollaston, and Watt, weri all dead against the possibility of such a plan. Brougham bitterly ridiculed Accum the chemist, and one of the upholders and believers in t!;r idea; and Sir Humphrey D.ivy asked, with r scientific sneer, if the dome of St. Paul's wera to be taken as a gasometer? Frederick AlbeFt Winsor and his scheme stood the ground ; and after the due and proper amount of badgering which such an innovation must expect, the point was gained, and London was lighted with gas. This was in 1825 ; though the first triumphant experiment of lighting St. Jame's Park had been made three years ealier, namely, 1822. But we have not come to the end of streetlighting yet; though, indeed, nothing has hitherto been discovered which can satisfactorily supersede coal gas. But it has to come, being among the future "destinies" of science. Trie patient air-light (from hydnrcarbon mixed with atmospheric ah) cost thirty thousand pounds in the experiments which were made, to see if it would do better thau gas — but it failed; and though the lime bull, the Bude, ard the electric lights are all flaming successes in themselves, they are a 1 too expensive for the open streets and public buildings. Still we may he very sure that street- lighting, like many other things, is in its infancy, and that when it comes to maturity, it will be widely different tv what it i* now. The question is stirring, evidently. We hear of sundry working chemists pouring over all sorts of calculations and anjlysea.preparatory to selling the world in a blaze with a new light ; we may rest assured that our g!is-lam;>s will bo blown out, and some new-fashioned fitnvstako their place It is the way of the woild — die way by which all inventions have fmglic, rUen, culminated, and gone out, when a better thing has been discovered. — All the Ye&r R.nmd.