Industrial Biography

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At a much more recent period new inventions have had to encounter
serious rioting and machine-breaking fury. Kay of the fly-shuttle,
Hargreaves of the spinning-jenny, and Arkwright of the
spinning-frame, all had to fly from Lancashire, glad to escape with
their lives. Indeed, says Mr. Bazley, "so jealous were the people,
and also the legislature, of everything calculated to supersede men's
labour, that when the Sankey Canal, six miles long, near Warrington,
was authorized about the middle of last century, it was on the
express condition that the boats plying on it should be drawn by men
only!"*
[footnote...
Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 2nd Series,
117.
...]
Even improved agricultural tools and machines have had the same
opposition to encounter; and in our own time bands of rural labourers
have gone from farm to farm breaking drill-ploughs, winnowing,
threshing, and other machines, down even to the common drills,--not
perceiving that if their policy had proved successful, and tools
could have been effectually destroyed, the human race would at once
have been reduced to their teeth and nails, and civilization
summarily abolished.*
[footnote...
Dr. Kirwan, late President of the Royal Irish Academy, who had
travelled much on the continent of Europe, used to relate, when
speaking of the difficulty of introducing improvements in the arts
and manufactures, and of the prejudices entertained for old
practices, that, in Normandy, the farmers had been so long accustomed
to the use of plough's whose shares were made entirely of WOOD that
they could not be prevailed on to make trial of those with IRON; that
they considered them to be an idle and useless innovation on the
long-established practices of their ancestors; and that they carried
these prejudices so far as to force the government to issue an edict
on the subject. And even to the last they were so obstinate in their
attachment to ploughshares of wood that a tumultuous opposition was
made to the enforcement of the edict, which for a short time
threatened a rebellion in the province.-- PARKES, Chemical Essays,
4th Ed. 473.
...]

It is, no doubt, natural that the ordinary class of workmen should
regard with prejudice, if not with hostility, the introduction of
machines calculated to place them at a disadvantage and to interfere
with their usual employments; for to poor and not very far-seeing men
the loss of daily bread is an appalling prospect. But invention does
not stand still on that account. Human brains WILL work. Old tools
are improved and new ones invented, superseding existing methods of
production, though the weak and unskilled may occasionally be pushed
aside or even trodden under foot. The consolation which remains is,
that while the few suffer, society as a whole is vastly benefitted by
the improved methods of production which are suggested, invented, and
perfected by the experience of successive generations.

The living race is the inheritor of the industry and skill of all
past times; and the civilization we enjoy is but the sum of the
useful effects of labour during the past centuries. Nihil per saltum.
By slow and often painful steps Nature's secrets have been mastered.
Not an effort has been made but has had its influence. For no human
labour is altogether lost; some remnant of useful effect surviving
for the benefit of the race, if not of the individual. Even attempts
apparently useless have not really been so, but have served in some
way to advance man to higher knowledge, skill, or discipline. "The
loss of a position gained," says Professor Thomson, "is an event
unknown in the history of man's struggle with the forces of inanimate
nature." A single step won gives a firmer foothold for further
effort. The man may die, but the race survives and continues the
work,--to use the poet's simile, mounting on stepping-stones of dead
selves to higher selves.

Philarete Chasles, indeed, holds that it is the Human Race that is
your true inventor: "As if to unite all generations," he says, "and
to show that man can only act efficiently by association with others,
it has been ordained that each inventor shall only interpret the
first word of the problem he sets himself to solve, and that every
great idea shall be the RESUME of the past at the same time that it
is the germ of the future." And rarely does it happen that any
discovery or invention of importance is made by one man alone. The
threads of inquiry are taken up and traced, one labourer succeeding
another, each tracing it a little further, often without apparent
result. This goes on sometimes for centuries, until at length some
man, greater perhaps than his fellows, seeking to fulfil the needs of
his time, gathers the various threads together, treasures up the gain
of past successes and failures, and uses them as the means for some
solid achievement, Thus Newton discovered the law of gravitation, and
thus James Watt invented the steam-engine. So also of the Locomotive,
of which Robert Stephenson said, "It has not been the invention of
any one man, but of a race of mechanical engineers." Or, as Joseph
Bramah observed, in the preamble to his second Lock patent, "Among
the number of patents granted there are comparatively few which can
be called original so that it is difficult to say where the boundary
of one ends and where that of another begins."

The arts are indeed reared but slowly; and it was a wise observation
of Lord Bacon that we are too apt to pass those ladders by which they
have been reared, and reflect the whole merit on the last new
performer. Thus, what is hailed as an original invention is often
found to be but the result of a long succession of trials and
experiments gradually following each other, which ought rather to be
considered as a continuous series of achievements of the human mind
than as the conquest of any single individual. It has sometimes taken
centuries of experience to ascertain the value of a single fact in
its various bearings. Like man himself, experience is feeble and
apparently purposeless in its infancy, but acquires maturity and
strength with age. Experience, however, is not limited to a lifetime,
but is the stored-up wealth and power of our race. Even amidst the
death of successive generations it is constantly advancing and
accumulating, exhibiting at the same time the weakness and the power,
the littleness and the greatness of our common humanity. And not only
do we who live succeed to the actual results of our predecessors'
labours,--to their works of learning and of art, their inventions and
discoveries, their tools and machines, their roads, bridges , canals,
and railways,--but to the inborn aptitudes of blood and brain which
they bequeath to us, to that "educability," so to speak, which has
been won for us by the labours of many generations, and forms our
richest natural heritage.

The beginning of most inventions is very remote. The first idea, born
within some unknown brain, passes thence into others, and at last
comes forth complete, after a parturition, it may be, of centuries.
One starts the idea, another developes it, and so on progressively
until at last it is elaborated and worked out in practice; but the
first not less than the last is entitled to his share in the merit of
the invention, were it only possible to measure and apportion it
duly. Sometimes a great original mind strikes upon some new vein of
hidden power, and gives a powerful impulse to the inventive faculties
of man, which lasts through generations. More frequently, however,
inventions are not entirely new, but modifications of contrivances
previously known, though to a few, and not yet brought into practical
use. Glancing back over the history of mechanism, we occasionally see
an invention seemingly full born, when suddenly it drops out of
sight, and we hear no more of it for centuries. It is taken up de
novo by some inventor, stimulated by the needs of his time, and
falling again upon the track, he recovers the old footmarks, follows
them up, and completes the work.

There is also such a thing as inventions being born before their time
--the advanced mind of one generation projecting that which cannot be
executed for want of the requisite means; but in due process of time,
when mechanism has got abreast of the original idea, it is at length
carried out; and thus it is that modern inventors are enabled to
effect many objects which their predecessors had tried in vain to
accomplish. As Louis Napoleon has said, "Inventions born before their
time must remain useless until the level of common intellects rises
to comprehend them." For this reason, misfortune is often the lot of
the inventor before his time, though glory and profit may belong to
his successors. Hence the gift of inventing not unfrequently involves
a yoke of sorrow. Many of the greatest inventors have lived neglected
and died unrequited, before their merits could be recognised and
estimated. Even if they succeed, they often raise up hosts of enemies
in the persons whose methods they propose to supersede. Envy, malice,
and detraction meet them in all their forms; they are assailed by
combinations of rich and unscrupulous persons to wrest from them the
profits of their ingenuity; and last and worst of all, the successful
inventor often finds his claims to originality decried, and himself
branded as a copyist and a pirate.

Among the inventions born out of time, and before the world could
make adequate use of them, we can only find space to allude to a few,
though they are so many that one is almost disposed to accept the
words of Chaucer as true, that "There is nothing new but what has
once been old;" or, as another writer puts it, "There is nothing new
but what has before been known and forgotten;" or, in the words of
Solomon, "The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there
is no new thing under the sun." One of the most important of these is
the use of Steam, which was well known to the ancients; but though it
was used to grind drugs, to turn a spit, and to excite the wonder and
fear of the credulous, a long time elapsed before it became employed
as a useful motive-power. The inquiries and experiments on the
subject extended through many ages. Friar Bacon, who flourished in
the thirteenth century, seems fully to have anticipated, in the
following remarkable passage, nearly all that steam could accomplish,
as well as the hydraulic engine and the diving-bell, though the
flying machine yet remains to be invented: --

"I will now," says the Friar, "mention some of the wonderful works of
art and nature in which there is nothing of magic, and which magic
could not perform. Instruments may be made by which the largest
ships, with only one man guiding them, will be carried with greater
velocity than if they were full of sailors. Chariots may be
constructed that will move with incredible rapidity, without the help
of animals. Instruments of flying may be formed, in which a man,
sitting at his ease and meditating on any subject, may beat the air
with his artificial wings, after the manner of birds. A small
instrument may be made to raise or depress the greatest weights. An
instrument may be fabricated by which one man may draw a thousand men
to him by force and against their will; as also machines which will
enable men to walk at the bottom of seas or rivers without danger."
It is possible that Friar Bacon derived his knowledge of the powers
which he thus described from the traditions handed down of former
inventions which had been neglected and allowed to fall into
oblivion; for before the invention of printing, which enabled the
results of investigation and experience to be treasured up in books,
there was great risk of the inventions of one age being lost to the
succeeding generations. Yet Disraeli the elder is of opinion that the
Romans had invented printing without being aware of it; or perhaps
the senate dreaded the inconveniences attending its use, and did not
care to deprive a large body of scribes of their employment. They
even used stereotypes, or immovable printing-types, to stamp
impressions on their pottery, specimens of which still exist. In
China the art of printing is of great antiquity. Lithography was well
known in Germany, by the very name which it still bears, nearly three
hundred years before Senefelder reinvented it; and specimens of the
ancient art are yet to be seen in the Royal Museum at Munich.*
[footnote...
EDOUARD FOURNIER, Vieux-Neuf, i. 339.
...]

Steam-locomotion by sea and land, had long been dreamt of and
attempted. Blasco de Garay made his experiment in the harbour of
Barcelona as early as 1543; Denis Papin made a similar attempt at
Cassel in 1707; but it was not until Watt had solved the problem of
the steam-engine that the idea of the steam-boat could be developed
in practice, which was done by Miller of Dalswinton in 1788. Sages
and poets have frequently foreshadowed inventions of great social
moment. Thus Dr. Darwin's anticipation of the locomotive, in his
Botanic Garden, published in 1791, before any locomotive had been
invented, might almost be regarded as prophetic:

Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, and drive the rapid car.

Denis Papin first threw out the idea of atmospheric locomotion; and
Gauthey, another Frenchman, in 1782 projected a method of conveying
parcels and merchandise by subterraneous tubes,*
[footnote...
Memoires de l' Academie des Sciences, 6 Feb. 1826.
...]
after the method recently patented and brought into operation by the
London Pneumatic Despatch Company. The balloon was an ancient Italian
invention, revived by Mongolfier long after the original had been
forgotten. Even the reaping machine is an old invention revived. Thus
Barnabe Googe, the translator of a book from the German entitled 'The
whole Arte and Trade of Husbandrie,' published in 1577, in the reign
of Elizabeth, speaks of the reaping-machine as a worn-out
invention--a thing "which was woont to be used in France. The device
was a lowe kinde of carre with a couple of wheeles, and the frunt
armed with sharpe syckles, whiche, forced by the beaste through the
corne, did cut down al before it. This tricke," says Googe, "might be
used in levell and champion countreys; but with us it wolde make but
ill-favoured woorke."*
[footnote...
Farmer's Magazine, 1817, No. ixxi. 291.
...]
The Thames Tunnel was thought an entirely new manifestation of
engineering genius; but the tunnel under the Euphrates at ancient
Babylon, and that under the wide mouth of the harbour at Marseilles
(a much more difficult work), show that the ancients were beforehand
with us in the art of tunnelling. Macadamized roads are as old as the
Roman empire; and suspension bridges, though comparatively new in
Europe, have been known in China for centuries.

There is every reason to believe--indeed it seems clear that the
Romans knew of gunpowder, though they only used it for purposes of
fireworks; while the secret of the destructive Greek fire has been
lost altogether. When gunpowder came to be used for purposes of war,
invention busied itself upon instruments of destruction. When
recently examining the Museum of the Arsenal at Venice, we were
surprised to find numerous weapons of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries embodying the most recent English improvements in arms,
such as revolving pistols, rifled muskets, and breech-loading cannon.
The latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modem idea, though in a
rude form, had been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where
the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even
Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci
and by him attributed to Archimedes.*
[footnote...
Vieux-Neuf, i. 228; Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 742.
...]
The Congreve rocket is said to have an Eastern origin, Sir William
Congreve having observed its destructive effects when employed by the
forces under Tippoo Saib in the Mahratta war, on which he adopted and
improved the missile, and brought out the invention as his own.

Coal-gas was regularly used by the Chinese for lighting purposes long
before it was known amongst us. Hydropathy was generally practised by
the Romans, who established baths wherever they went. Even chloroform
is no new thing. The use of ether as an anaesthetic was known to
Albertus Magnus, who flourished in the thirteenth century; and in his
works he gives a recipe for its preparation. In 1681 Denis Papin
published his Traite des Operations sans Douleur, showing that he had
discovered methods of deadening pain. But the use of anaesthetics is
much older than Albertus Magnus or Papin; for the ancients had their
nepenthe and mandragora; the Chinese their mayo, and the Egyptians
their hachisch (both preparations of Cannabis Indica), the effects of
which in a great measure resemble those of chloroform. What is
perhaps still more surprising is the circumstance that one of the
most elegant of recent inventions, that of sun-painting by the
daguerreotype, was in the fifteenth century known to Leonardo da
Vinci,*
[footnote...
Vieux-Neuf, i. 19. See also Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 803.
...]
whose skill as an architect and engraver, and whose accomplishments
as a chemist and natural philosopher, have been almost entirely
overshadowed by his genius as a painter.*
[footnote...
Mr. Hallam, in his Introduction to the History of Europe, pronounces
the following remarkable eulogium on this extraordinary genius: --
"If any doubt could be harboured, not only as to the right of
Leonardo da Vinci to stand as 'the first name of the fifteenth
century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so
many discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such
circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis not very
untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a
height which mere books do not record." "Unpublished MSS. by Leonado
contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr.
Hallam, "within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with
something like the awe of preternatural knowledge."
...]
The idea, thus early born, lay in oblivion until 1760, when the
daguerreotype was again clearly indicated in a book published in
Paris, written by a certain Tiphanie de la Roche, under the
anagrammatic title of Giphantie. Still later, at the beginning of the
present century, we find Thomas Wedgwood, Sir Humphry Davy, and James
Watt, making experiments on the action of light upon nitrate of
silver; and only within the last few months a silvered copper-plate
has been found amongst the old household lumber of Matthew Boulton
(Watt's partner), having on it a representation of the old premises
at Soho, apparently taken by some such process.*
[footnote...
The plate is now to be seen at the Museum of Patents at South
Kensington. In the account which has been published of the above
discovery it is stated that "an old man of ninety (recently dead or
still alive) recollected, or recollects, that Watt and others used to
take portraits of people in a dark (?) room; and there is a letter
extant of Sir William Beechey, begging the Lunar Society to desist
from these experiments, as, were the process to succeed, it would
ruin portrait-painting."
...]

In like manner the invention of the electric telegraph, supposed to
be exclusively modern, was clearly indicated by Schwenter in his
Delasements Physico-Mathematiques, published in 1636; and he there
pointed out how two individuals could communicate with each other by
means of the magnetic needle. A century later, in 1746, Le Monnier
exhibited a series of experiments in the Royal Gardens at Paris,
showing how electricity could be transmitted through iron wire 950
fathoms in length; and in 1753 we find one Charles Marshall
publishing a remarkable description of the electric telegraph in the
Scots Magazine, under the title of 'An expeditions Method of
conveying Intelligence.' Again, in 1760, we find George Louis Lesage,
professor of mathematics at Geneva, promulgating his invention of an
electric telegraph, which he eventually completed and set to work in
1774. This instrument was composed of twenty-four metallic wires,
separate from each other and enclosed in a non-conducting substance.
Each wire ended in a stalk mounted with a little ball of elder-wood
suspended by a silk thread. When a stream of electricity, no matter
how slight., was sent through the wire, the elder-ball at the
opposite end was repelled, such movement designating some letter of
the alphabet. A few years later we find Arthur Young, in his Travels
in France, describing a similar machine invented by a M. Lomond of
Paris, the action of which he also describes.*
[footnote...
"l6th Oct.l787. In the evening to M. Lomond, a very ingenious and
inventive mechanic, who has made an improvement of the jenny for
spinning cotton. Common machines are said to make too hard a thread
for certain fabrics, but this forms it loose and spongy. In
electricity he has made a remarkable discovery: you write two or
three words on a paper; he takes it with him into a room, and turns a
machine inclosed in a cylindrical case, at the top of which is an
electrometer, a small fine pith ball; a wire connects with a similar
cylinder and electrometer in a distant apartment; and his wife, by
remarking the corresponding motions of the ball, writes down the
words they indicate; from which it appears that he has formed an
alphabet of motions. As the length of the wire makes no difference in
the effect, a correspondence might be carried on at any distance:
within and without a besieged town, for instance; or for a purpose
much more worthy, and a thousand times more harmless, between two
lovers prohibited or prevented from any better connexion. Whatever
the use may be, the invention is beautiful."--Arthur Young's Travels
in France in 1787-8-9. London, 1792, 4to. ed. p. 65.
...]
In these and similar cases, though the idea was born and the model of
the invention was actually made, it still waited the advent of the
scientific mechanical inventor who should bring it to perfection, and
embody it in a practical working form.

Some of the most valuable inventions have descended to us without the
names of their authors having been preserved. We are the inheritors
of an immense legacy of the results of labour and ingenuity, but we
know not the names of our benefactors. Who invented the watch as a
measurer of time? Who invented the fast and loose pulley? Who
invented the eccentric? Who, asks a mechanical inquirer,*
[footnote...
Mechanic's Magazine, 4th Feb. 1859.
...]
"invented the method of cutting screws with stocks and dies? Whoever
he might be, he was certainly a great benefactor of his species. Yet
(adds the writer) his name is not known, though the invention has
been so recent." This is not, however, the case with most modern
inventions, the greater number of which are more or less disputed.
Who was entitled to the merit of inventing printing has never yet been
determined. Weber and Senefelder both laid claim to the invention of
lithography, though it was merely an old German art revived. Even the
invention of the penny-postage system by Sir Rowland Hill is
disputed; Dr. Gray of the British Museum claiming to be its inventor,
and a French writer alleging it to be an old French invention.*
[footnote...
A writer in the Monde says: --"The invention of postage-stamps. is far
from being so modern as is generally supposed. A postal regulation in
France of the year 1653, which has recently come to light, gives
notice of the creation of pre-paid tickets to be used for Paris
instead of money payments. These tickets were to be dated and
attached to the letter or wrapped round it, in such a manner that the
postman could remove and retain them on delivering the missive. These
franks were to be sold by the porters of the convents, prisons,
colleges, and other public institutions, at the price of one sou."
...]
The invention of the steamboat has been claimed on behalf of Blasco
de Garay, a Spaniard, Papin, a Frenchman, Jonathan Hulls, an
Englishman, and Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, a Scotchman. The
invention of the spinning machine has been variously attributed to
Paul, Wyatt, Hargreaves, Higley, and Arkwright. The invention of the
balance-spring was claimed by Huyghens, a Dutchman, Hautefeuille, a
Frenchman, and Hooke, an Englishman. There is scarcely a point of
detail in the locomotive but is the subject of dispute. Thus the
invention of the blast-pipe is claimed for Trevithick, George
Stephenson, Goldsworthy Gurney, and Timothy Hackworth; that of the
tubular boiler by Seguin, Stevens, Booth, and W. H. James; that of
the link-motion by John Gray, Hugh Williams, and Robert Stephenson.

Indeed many inventions appear to be coincident. A number of minds are
working at the same time in the same track, with the object of
supplying some want generally felt; and, guided by the same
experience, they not unfrequently arrive at like results. It has
sometimes happened that the inventors have been separated by great
distances, so that piracy on the part of either was impossible. Thus
Hadley and Godfrey almost simultaneously invented the quadrant, the
one in London, the other in Philadelphia; and the process of
electrotyping was invented at the same time by Mr. Spencer, a working
chemist at Liverpool, and by Professor Jacobi at St. Petersburg. The
safety-lamp was a coincident invention, made about the same time by
Sir Humphry Davy and George Stephenson; and perhaps a still more
remarkable instance of a coincident discovery was that of the planet
Neptune by Leverrier at Paris, and by Adams at Cambridge.

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