Invention: The Master-key to Progress

CHAPTER VII

THE RISE OF ELECTRICITY, STEAM AND CHEMISTRY

The invention of the first electrical machine was made by Otto Von Guericke, of Magdeburg, about 1670. It consisted of a sulphur ball, a stick with a point, and a linen thread "an ell or more long," hanging from the stick. The lower end of the thread being made to hang "a thumb breadth distance" from some other body, and the sulphur ball rubbed and brought near the point of the stick, the lower end of the thread moved up to the body. The ball being removed, the lower end of the thread would drop away from the body; so that by moving the ball back and forth, the lower end of the thread would be made to move back and forth simultaneously.

It may be objected that Guericke made no invention, because he did not conceive the idea of making a machine or instrument and did not, in fact, produce one: that he merely made a discovery. The author admits that such an objection would have great reasonableness, and that Guericke's feat is a little hard to class. It is classed by many as an invention, however, and the present author is inclined to class it so; because there seems no reason to doubt that Guericke first conceived the idea of doing what he did do, and that he did produce a device whereby an actual motion of a rubbed ball at one place caused actual motion at another place, through the medium of a current of electricity that traversed a conductor joining the two places. The device is sometimes spoken of as the first telegraph instrument.

Guericke (like Gilbert) was more distinctly an experimenter than an inventor, – and (like Gilbert) his work was not only in electricity, but in most of the other branches of science. Of the two, Guericke seems to have covered a wider field, and to have been more distinctly an inventor. His celebrated experiment of holding two hollow hemispheres together, then exhausting the air from the hollow sphere thus formed, and then demonstrating the force of the atmosphere by showing that sixteen horses could not pull the hemispheres apart, indicates just the kind of clear apprehension of the laws of Nature that characterizes the inventor.

By some, Guericke is esteemed the inventor of the first electric light, because by rubbing a sulphur ball in a dark room he produced a feeble electric illumination. Of Guericke's discoveries and inventions, the only one that has survived as a concrete apparatus is the air pump; but it is doubtful if the direct influence on history of the air pump, great as it has been, has actually been any greater than the indirect influence of his less widely known discoveries and experiments.

One of the early influences of the art of printing was to bring to the notice of some restless minds the writings of Hero and Archimedes. In Hero's Pneumatics, published more than 120 years before Christ, he gives such a clear account of an invention of his own, in which the expansive force of steam was used to give and maintain motion, as to establish thoroughly his right to the basic invention of the steam engine. He described three apparatus that he devised. In one, the currents of air and aqueous vapor rising through a tube from a hollow sphere, containing water, under which a fire is burning, support a ball placed immediately above the tube, and make it seem to dance. In another apparatus, a hollow sphere into which steam has arisen from what we now call a boiler, is supported on a horizontal or vertical axis, and provided with tubes that protrude from the sphere, and are bent at right angles to the radius and also to the pivot. The inner ends of these tubes lie within the sphere, so that the steam passes from the sphere through the tubes. As soon as this happens, the sphere takes up a rapid rotation, that continue so long as the steam continues to escape from the nozzles of the tubes, which point rearwardly. A third apparatus was merely an elaboration of the second, in that the sphere was connected with an altar which supported a large drum on which were figures representing human beings. The fire being lighted, the sphere would soon begin to revolve, and with it the drum; and the figures on it would seem to dance around, above the altar. The invention was probably to impress the people with the idea that the priests were exerting supernatural power.

Hero's wonderful invention remained unused and unappreciated for nearly 2,000 years. About 1601, an Italian named Della Porta, published a book that seems to show acquaintance with it, also with the fact that if water be heated it is converted into a gas that can raise water to a height. In 1615, a Frenchman named de Caus published a book in which he showed a hollow sphere into which water could be introduced through an orifice that could then be closed; the sphere carrying a vertical tube that dipped into the water at its lower end, and ending in a small nozzle at its upper end. When a fire was started under the sphere, the air in the upper part expanded, and forced down the water that occupied the lower part, so that a jet of water would soon issue from the upper end of the tube. Of course, this was really less than Hero had done, because the appliance described did not constitute a machine, in any real sense of the word.

In 1629, an Italian named Branca carried Hero's invention a step further, by inventing a simple apparatus whereby the revolution of Hero's hollow sphere was communicated to a series of pestles in mortars, and put to the useful work of compounding drugs. Branca seems entitled to the basic invention of the steam engine as an industrial machine.

About 1663, the Marquis of Worcester invented a steam engine that exerted about two horse-power, and was employed to raise water from the Thames River, and supply it to the town of Vauxhall. Six years later (1669) Captain Thomas Savery erected a steam engine about twenty-five feet above the water in a mine, and successfully drew water out. This was a very important feat, because the difficulties surrounding the problem of freeing the mines from water were extremely great, and the desirability of overcoming them was equally so. In Savery's engine, there were two boilers in which steam was raised, and two receivers communicating with them. Steam being admitted to one receiver, the connection with the boiler was shut off by a valve, and a cold jet was then suddenly thrown on the receiver, condensing the steam and forming a partial vacuum. This vacuum the water below immediately rushed up to overcome. Connection with the pipe leading down was then shut off, and steam introduced to the receiver. This steam forced out the water from the receiver into a pipe, which discharged it above. This operation was then performed by the other boiler and receiver; so that, by their continued and alternate action, a fairly continuous stream of discharged water was maintained.

This invention was quickly followed by Captain Savery with another, by means of which the discharge stream was made to fall on a mill-wheel, as though from a natural waterfall. Several of these machines were erected for actuating the machinery of mills and factories in the district.

In 1690, Dr. Papin invented a steam engine, in which he used a cylinder containing water, with a piston so arranged that, when the water was heated, the steam would raise the piston. The fire being then removed the pressure of the atmosphere would force down the piston. This was followed shortly by an invention of Newcomer and Cawley, which was a very considerable advance on previous engines. It comprised a separate boiler and furnace, a separate cylinder and piston, means for condensing the steam in the cylinder by injecting water into it, and a system of self-acting valves that were opened and closed by a long beam that was moved by the piston. Furthermore, this beam communicated motion to a pump that pumped the water up directly. This engine was so efficient and so practically useful, that it was very generally introduced into service for draining mines throughout England. About 1775, Smeaton built an engine carefully designed on these lines, of which the cylinder was 72 inches in diameter, and the length of stroke was 10 feet and 6 inches.

In 1725, Jacob Leupold invented an engine, in which the work was done by steam alone, instead of by the atmosphere, as in the engines that immediately preceded it. Leupold used two cylinders. They were open at the top to the atmosphere as in the others, but he used higher pressures of steam, and arranged a four-way cock between the bottoms of the two cylinders in such a way that the bottom of each cylinder, in its turn, was connected to the boiler or to the open air. Each cylinder actuated directly a separate vibrating beam, which in turn actuated the piston of a pump; the two pistons acting reciprocally, each drawing up water in its turn.

In 1765, James Watt made the very great improvement of providing a condenser separate from the cylinder of the engine, so that the great loss of heat caused by cooling the cylinder and then heating it at each stroke was wholly avoided. He covered the cylinder entirely, and surrounded it with an external cylinder kept always full of steam, that maintained the cylinder at a high temperature. The steam, instead of being condensed within the cylinder, after it had done its work, was allowed to escape into the condenser. To facilitate this action, the condenser was fitted with an air-pump that maintained a good vacuum in it.

In 1769, Watt invented an improvement that consisted mainly of means whereby the supply of steam to the cylinder could be shut off at any desired part of the stroke, and the steam allowed to complete the rest of the stroke by virtue of its expansive force. This invention increased tremendously the efficiency of the engine: that is, the amount of work done with a given amount of steam.

During all this time, Watt had realized that virtually all the work was done on the down stroke, and none on the up stroke, and also realized that it would be highly desirable to devise an apparatus whereby the reciprocating motion of the piston could be converted into a rotary motion. Watt was able to accomplish both feats, and to connect the bottom and top of the cylinder alternately with the condenser and boiler by a simple mechanism driven by a wheel rotated by the engine. The result was the reciprocating steam engine in its main features, as it exists today.

The influence of Hero's invention on history is not direct, because his engine has never been employed for any industrial purpose. But Hero's engine has had an enormous influence on history, nevertheless, because it supplied the basis on which the steam engine of the last two centuries has rested. The influence of Hero's invention was not realized until two thousand years after he had died, and until after all those men had died whose names have just been mentioned. It is inconceivable that any of those men could really have expected that their work was to have even a small fraction of the influence on mankind that it actually has had. The influence of Watt's work became visible to some degree before he died, and became clearly visible not very long after he had died; so clearly visible that by many men Watt is credited with the invention of the steam engine. But his good work was built on the good work of his predecessors, whose main work was in making Watt's work possible. The successive feats of all, like the successive layers in the foundations of any building, were to support, in time, the whole superstructure of the great and beneficent science of steam engineering.

But the work done by these men was not all the work that had to be done, to make Watt's steam engine the efficient machine it was. These men were the men who are directly to be credited, but they were not the only men engaged. Neither did they belong to the only class of men engaged. There was another class of men whose labors were equally arduous, and equally important, though not so clearly in evidence – the physicists, as we now call them. It was by the knowledge which they gleaned regarding the properties of steam and air and water and iron, regarding the laws of motion and heat and work and force and weight and mass, that the inventors' experiments were guided. It is true that the science of physics was then in its infancy, as we realize with the knowledge of the science today; but Aristotle in the days of Greece, and Archimedes and Hero later, and Galileo and many others in Italy – as well as Guericke in Germany, Newton and Gilbert in England, and others of less note, had evolved a good deal of order out of what had been chaos, and had given inventors a great deal of firm ground on which to stand themselves and raise their structures. And reciprocally, the inventors found themselves confronted with problems of a kind that gave opportunities for the physicists to show their skill and knowledge.

Thus were opened up promising avenues of investigation, and not only of investigation, but of invention also. For it is obvious that, while investigation and experimentation can hardly fail to secure data, they may secure nothing else, and usually do. But mere data are mere facts; and, valuable as they are if suitably classified, they are not valuable unless they are classified; and even after data are classified, they are not useful until some use is found for them. The data in card-indexes are mere unrelated facts, and are almost useless, until they have been classified and arranged in boxes alphabetically labeled. Then they are useful whenever any use is found; when, for instance, some one is seeking information on a certain subject. In this condition, data are like material substances, in that they are available for use, – in fact, data are often spoken of by writers as "material"; a certain series of incidents, for instance, supply "material" for a story. Now, just as pieces of iron and brass supply material with which an inventor can create a new machine, so classified facts, or data, supply material with which an inventive investigator can create a new theory, or formulate a new law.

Our books on physics are full of accounts of experiments and investigations conducted by such men as Hero, Archimedes, Gilbert, Galileo and many others, the consequent discoveries that they made, and the consequent laws that they enunciated; but those books could not possibly describe all the investigations that have ever been made. Those which they describe are those that ended in some definite creations, such as the hydrostatic law enunciated by Archimedes. Most investigations, experiments and researches have ended in nothing definite: – most of them, in all probability, have not even established facts. The investigations that we studied about when boys were such as those of Archimedes, that presented us with inventions, in the form of useful and usable laws. No appreciable difference is apparent between the mental operations of Archimedes in inventing these laws and his mental operations in inventing his screw: for in both cases the mental operations consisted mainly in conceiving an idea and then embodying it. The Archimedean screw was a machine of an entirely new kind that, in the hands of a man understanding its use, would enable the man to do something he could not do before – or enable him to do a thing he could do before, but do it better. So were his laws. The laws have been utilized ever since, as definite and concrete devices; and to a much greater extent than the special form of screw that he invented.

In a like way, all the laws that investigators have put into concrete and usable form, have been used by other investigators as bases for further investigations, and by inventors as bases for future inventions. Even the inventor of the fist-hammer had to know something about the material which he employed; he had to know that it was hard and heavy, for instance, and that it could be hammered so as to have a point and a sharp edge. He had to know also something about the flesh of a man: he had to know that if his flesh was struck with a sharp hard instrument, it would be bruised, and the man injured, and maybe killed. Similarly, the inventor of the gun, and the inventor of printing, and the inventors of steam engines, had to know a good deal about the materials which they employed, and about the uses to which their appliances could be put. Naturally, they had to know much more than did the inventor of the fist-hammer. But the inventor of today has to know still more, because there is still more to know. An inventor of the present day who knew no more about physical science than Galileo did would not be able to go far.

A like remark may be made about any man in any vocation, as compared with his predecessor in Galileo's time. The machine of civilization is so vast and so complex, that the amount of knowledge which anyone of us needs in mere daily life is almost incredible. Let anyone try to enumerate all the facts he knows! The attempt will convince him quickly.

It may be pointed out here that, while modern civilization differs from ancient civilization in many ways, it differs more in complexity than in any other one way. Some of the factors of ancient civilization were as good as those of today; such things, for instance as temples and pyramids and stationary objects in general. But the ancients did not understand motion clearly, especially irregular motion; and they had no fast vehicles of any kind. Their knowledge of statics must have been fairly complete, or they could not have built their temples and pyramids; but their records show little understanding of dynamics.

Now the basis of dynamics is mathematics. Dynamics is the result of the application of mathematics to the observed effects of force on bodies, in producing motion. Dynamics is a branch of the science of mechanics, and a most difficult branch. It is built on the observations, calculations and conclusions of Newton and a host of experimenters and mathematicians of lesser mentality, and it could not have come into being without them.

But dynamics has not been the only physical science involved in making the machine of civilization. All the physical sciences have taken part; and each one has taken a part which was essential to the final result, and without which the final result could not have been attained. The science of light made possible the solution of our problems of illumination and the development of inventions for producing it; the science of acoustics made possible the solution of our problems of sound, including music, and the invention of acoustic and musical instruments; the science of heat made possible the invention of all the complex and powerful steam and gas engines that have revolutionized society; the science of electricity (including magnetism) has made possible the invention of those electric and electro-magnetic machines that have supplemented the work of the steam engine; and the science of pneumatics has made possible the invention of those "flying machines" of many kinds, that promise to complicate civilization further still.

But let us realize clearly that no one of these sciences by itself has been able to perform any of the feats just mentioned. Each one was virtually dependent on every other one; and all were dependent on mathematics. In order to make the steam engine work efficiently, it was not enough that heat should expand water into steam: the mathematical laws which showed how much water was needed to secure a certain amount of steam, for instance, and how a certain desired pressure of steam could be secured, had first to be comprehended and then to be followed. In order to have boilers and engines so designed as to prevent disastrous explosions, the laws governing the strength of materials had to be known and followed. In order that a projectile could be so fired from a gun as to reach a certain predetermined spot, the laws of heat, pneumatics, chemistry and dynamics had all to be understood and followed with exactness.

But it was not only the machines and instruments that needed the assistance of those sciences, it was the sciences themselves; because it was only after eliminating phenomena caused by one agency from those caused by another, that accuracy in any conclusions whatever could be secured; and in order that the phenomena caused by one agency could be kept separate from the phenomena caused by another agency, the laws underlying both had to be understood. The science of light could not be developed until the action of heat was fairly well understood; dynamics had to wait on statics; Newton could not have contributed what he did to astronomy, unless the science of light (including optics) was sufficiently understood; and the laws of pneumatics could not have been developed, unless the laws of heat had been developed, etc. And not one of the physical sciences could have gone beyond the state of infancy, if the science of mathematics had not been invented and made into a workable machine.

The paragraph above may be put into a different form, and made to state that all the physical sciences have been brought up to their present stage, by subjecting the phenomena studied by each science to quantitative investigation. It was by making these quantitative investigations that Newton and the others were able to ascertain the exact facts from which to start in their endeavor to discover the laws of nature; and it was from the laws of nature thus induced that later investigators were able to start on still further expeditions of discovery into the unknown. As the common basis of all quantitative work is mathematics, the common basis of all the physical sciences is mathematics. This makes all the physical sciences interdependent, despite the fact that each is independent of the others. Each one of the physical sciences has contributed its part to building the machine of civilization; the part that each has specially contributed can be clearly specified; and yet, since the machine is the result of the combination of what all have contributed, their contributions are interdependent. This remark applies to the various parts of all machines. The piston of a steam engine, for instance, and the valve that admits steam to the cylinder are entirely separate from each other; but from the mere fact that they both work together, each one must be designed and operated with reference to the other; so that both in their construction and their operation, they are interdependent.

Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth century, may be said to have inaugurated the system on which the whole of modern progress has been based, and Newton in the seventeenth century to have taken up Bacon's work and carried it further on. Following Newton, only a few great investigators can be seen in the seventeenth century; but in the eighteenth, began that intense and brilliant movement of investigation, discovery and invention, that has been adding more and more to the machine of civilization – and still is adding more.

One of the earliest and most important contributions was an apparatus for measuring time accurately. Who was the inventor is not precisely known. It seems fairly well established, however, that Galileo was the first to call attention to the fact that the vibrations of a pendulum were nearly isochronous, and could be used to measure the lapse of time; and that Galileo's son (as well as Dr. Hooke, Huygens and a London mechanic named Harris, in the early part of the seventeenth century) made clocks based on that principle. It is fairly well established also that Huygens was the first one to make a mathematical investigation of the properties of the pendulum, and to enumerate the laws since utilized for making accurate clocks and watches.

Most of the investigators of the eighteenth century occupied themselves with studies indirectly or directly caused by the invention of the steam engine, that is with studies relating to heat and light; but, by reason of the interdependence of all the physical sciences, their investigations led them automatically into the allied fields of acoustics and electricity. Their investigations led even further; they led to the establishment, on the ruins of the illusions of alchemy, of a wholly new and supremely important science, chemistry.