Invention: The Master-key to Progress

Now, Nelson had not appeared at the mouth of the Nile because of any accident, or any chain of fortuitous circumstances; he did not fight the epochal battle there because of any accidental occurrences or conditions, and he did not gain the victory because of any similar causes. Nelson appeared at the mouth of the Nile in accordance with a plan that he had conceived as soon as he heard of Bonaparte's departure from Toulon on a destination carefully kept secret, but which Nelson divined as Egypt. He so divined it, by imagining himself in Bonaparte's place, and imagining for what purpose he, Nelson, would have left Toulon under the conditions prevailing then in France. He engaged the French fleet when he did, and he fought the French fleet in the way he did, in accordance with a plan that he had conceived long before. No men were ever more cautious, more solicitous about the future, more painstaking, more prudent, more insistent against taking undue risks, than those reputedly reckless devil-may-cares, Napoleon Bonaparte and Horatio Nelson.

Napoleon realized at once that his brilliant scheme had been shattered; but he could not now even take his army home, because the British fleet was in the way. Finally, he succeeded in making the trip himself, with only a few of his staff. Events ran rapidly then; and on the sixth of May, 1800, we see Napoleon leaving Paris to undertake a campaign in northern Italy, in accordance with a plan embodied to carry out an idea conceived in his fertile mind, of taking his army through the great St. Bernard pass, dragging his cannon with him through the snow. This plan (like most of his plans) was so brilliantly conceived, so skillfully planned, and so energetically executed, that when Napoleon suddenly appeared with his army in the North of Italy, the Austrian general was bewildered with amazement. The natural result developed quickly, and the Austrians retired beyond the Mincio River.

By this time affairs in Europe were vastly complicated, because of the fact that the maritime enemies of France (which meant virtually all the other maritime countries of Europe) became exasperated at one of their number, Great Britain, in consequence of what they considered her unreasonable insistence on certain doctrines concerning maritime affairs. A League of Armed Neutrality against her was finally formed, that soon assumed menacing proportions. This league was completely broken by the same Horatio Nelson in a naval battle off Copenhagen on April 2, 1801. This battle was the direct result of a plan conceived by Nelson, that was so original and so daring that for a long time he could not secure the consent of his Commander-in-Chief to its execution. The battle resulted in a victory that was brilliant in the highest degree; but it was brilliant only because the original idea was brilliant, and because it was developed into a plan that was constructively correct and skillfully carried out.

Meanwhile, a brief campaign had been going on between the French and the Austrians in Austria. It was carried on with great brilliancy of conception and skill of execution by Moreau, and ended with the battle of Hohenlinden and the disastrous defeat of the Austrians. The treaty of Lunéville followed in February, 1801, and left Great Britain as France's only antagonist.

The victory of Copenhagen having broken the strength of the Confederacy of Neutrals, and Napoleon seeing the folly of attempting further to ruin British commerce then, the Treaty of Amiens between Great Britain and France followed in March, 1802.

As part of this treaty, Great Britain agreed to give up Malta. For various reasons that do not concern this discussion, Great Britain did not do so, and war followed in May, 1803.

Before that time, Napoleon had realized that his principal enemy was England. He now conceived the project of sending an invading army across the English Channel, knowing that if he could accomplish that, he could march to London, and dictate his own terms of peace. But how could he get across the channel, in the face of the British fleet? From the numberless pictures conjured up in his brilliant imagination, Napoleon selected the one which showed a French fleet threatening British possessions in the West Indies, a British fleet rushing to the West Indies to save them, the French fleet returning and joining with another French fleet waiting for it, then the combined fleets securing the mastery of the English Channel from the depleted British fleet remaining, then a French flotilla of transports with an invading army forthwith starting across the channel, then a landing against an opposition easily overcome, then a march to London, then a capture of London: and finally, he, Napoleon, riding in triumph through London streets and sleeping in the palace at London – as he had slept in other palaces on the Continent.

It was a beautiful vision; – a beautiful series of moving pictures presented to his imagination. To embody all these pictures in realities became the pre-occupation of his waking and his sleeping hours. By dint of herculean exertions, he finally collected near Boulogne about 200,000 troops and 1,500 transports. At the proper time, Villeneuve, with a powerful fleet, was sent to the West Indies to threaten the British possessions there.

But the same man who had spoiled his India project by the battle of the Nile, and who had spoiled his project of ruining British commerce by the battle of Copenhagen, spoiled his present project: the same man, Horatio Nelson. Nelson had some imagination himself; and he imagined (correctly as usual) that Villeneuve had sailed for the West Indies – and away he went in pursuit. Arriving there, and finding that Villeneuve had been in the West Indies but had left, Nelson left also. He imagined that Villeneuve had sailed for Europe; and so Nelson sailed for Europe also, sending a fast frigate to inform the Admiralty of all that he had learned, and of all that he inferred. The frigate made such speed, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Admiral Lord Barham, acted with such sailor-like energy and skill, that a large British fleet intercepted Villeneuve on his return, brought him to action near the coast of Spain, and handled him so roughly that he went for repairs to Cadiz. He arrived there on August 20.

The news of this, reaching Napoleon, wiped all the beautiful pictures out of his mind. But he had other pictures in the background. These he put promptly into the foreground, and started off with incredible swiftness toward Austria. On October 19, he brought the Austrians to battle near Ulm, and achieved one of the most decisive victories of his career. The victory was mainly due to the clearness and correctness of Napoleon's conceived idea, and the amazing speed and certainty of his movements in carrying it into execution. The Austrian General Mack was so wholly taken by surprise that he found his army was completely surrounded before he had had time to take any preventive measures.

Napoleon had correctly judged the import of Villeneuve's interception by the British fleet, and realized that it would be mere folly afterward to attempt to cross the channel then. Still, the situation was not wholly bad for him, and the victory at Ulm made it beautiful. For, though England was still greater on the sea than France, France was also great, and was still a powerful weapon which he could wield against England, with all the power of genius. But, two days after the victory of Ulm, came the disaster near Cape Trafalgar, when Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets, and thereby secured for England a superiority at sea, vastly more pronounced than it had been before. This victory, by making Napoleon helpless at sea against Great Britain, ruined all Napoleon's chances of dominion, except upon the Continent.

Napoleon made two brilliant campaigns after this, that brought him to the summit of his career. Had he been content to stop there, had he not tried to climb still higher, his descendants might now sit on the throne of France. But the intoxicating fumes of success seem to have clouded that brilliant mind, and to have prevented those clear and correct pictures from forming there that had formed before. The result was that he embarked on a new project for ruining England that began with an invasion of Portugal and Spain, which brought on a war with Austria. It is true that, by a brilliant campaign, Napoleon worsted Austria and made an advantageous treaty with her, and then married the daughter of the emperor: but the continuance of the policy that underlay the war with Austria, brought on later a war with Russia that sent Napoleon to Elba, an exile.

We see the key to Napoleon's successes in the quality of his mind at the time of those successes, and we see the key to his failures in a lowering of the quality of that mind. Military writers tell us that his mind was not of the same quality when he planned his Russian campaign as it had been when he planned his early campaigns. Now the reasoning faculties do not grow dull when one approaches middle age; but the imaginative faculties do – (in most people). It is an old saying that "one cannot teach an old dog new tricks." Clearly, this cannot be because of any failing of memory, though memory fails with age; because the memory is not involved, save slightly. It must be therefore because of failing impressionability and receptivity. We all speak of the "receptive years," meaning the years of childhood and then of youth; and it is a common saying that young people are more receptive than old people. Of what are they receptive? Clearly, of mental impressions. Parents and teachers are warned not to forget that the minds of young people are very impressionable, and to be careful that their minds receive good impressions only, so far as they can compass it. Napoleon, when he made his Russian campaign, was only 43 years old in years; but he had lived a life that was far from normal or hygienic physically, and extremely abnormal and unhygienic mentally.

The intention of the last sentence is to point out that mental health cannot be long preserved amid surroundings mentally unhealthful, any more than physical health can be long preserved amid surroundings physically unhealthful; and that the highest qualities of our nature are the most difficult to maintain and therefore are the first to fail, under unhealthful surroundings. The spiritual faculties fail first, then the moral, then the mental and lastly the physical. Now the imagination, while a mental quality, rather than a moral one, partakes in a measure of the spiritual, and is one of the highest of the mental attributes. For this reason imagination is one of the first to be impaired.

The especial picture of the imagination that becomes faulty under certain conditions, is the picture of one's self. Under conditions such as Napoleon had lived under for several years, the picture of himself in his mind had become unduly magnified in relation to the pictures of other men. Now is there any one thing more dangerous to a man than to carry in his mind an incorrect picture of himself?

In Napoleon's case, it led him to the unforgivable military crime; that of underestimating the enemy. His imagination, by presenting a magnified image of himself, presented relatively dwarfed images of his antagonists. The very faculty (imagination) which started Napoleon on his great successes, started him now on his great reverses. The actual beginning of these was in his carelessly planned campaign in Russia. His invention seems to have failed him both in planning the campaign and in meeting situations afterwards; because his imagination failed to picture each situation to him exactly as it was.

But the Russian campaign did not wholly ruin him. Even after that, even after Elba, situations were sometimes presented to him, such that (although Trafalgar had prevented him from achieving European domination), yet, if he had been able to see them as clearly as he had seen situations in his unspoiled days, he might, at least have saved himself from ruin. But his imagination had become impaired and therefore his powers of invention also.

Napoleon as general, and Nelson as admiral were what we may term "opportunistic inventors," who made inventions for meeting transient situations with success, as distinguished from inventors like Newton and Watt, who made permanent contributions to the welfare of mankind. Napoleon as statesman, however, made contributions of a permanent character.

A supremely valuable contribution of this kind was the stethoscope, which was invented about 1819 by Dr. Laennec in Paris, and by means of which the science and art of diagnosis were given an amazing impetus almost instantly. Possibly one cannot find in the whole history of modern invention any instrument so small and so inexpensive that has been so widely and definitely useful. A painful interest hangs to it in the fact that by means of his own invention, Laennec discovered that he himself was dying of tuberculosis of the lungs.

In July, 1820, a discovery of a vastly different character was made by Oersted in Copenhagen; the discovery that if a current of electricity be passed over or under a magnetic needle, the needle will be deflected in a direction and to a degree depending on the strength and direction of the current and the position of the conducting wire relatively to the needle. Now Laennec invented a simple and little instrument that began virtually perfect, and that exists today substantially as it started. Oersted did something equally important, that ultimately initiated intricate inventions of many kinds, and yet he did not really invent anything whatever. The importance of his discovery was recognized at once; so quickly, in fact, and by so many experimenters and inventors, that Oersted soon found himself in the extraordinary position of being left behind, in an art to which himself had almost unknowingly given birth! That some relation existed between magnetism and electricity had long been evident to physicists; but what that relation was they did not know until Oersted told them. They seized on his information with avidity, with results that the whole world knows now.

The first man heard from was Ampère, who communicated the results of his experiments in the new art to the Institute of France as early as September 18th. Almost immediately afterward, Arago discovered that, if a conducting wire were wrapped around iron wires, those iron wires became magnets and remained magnets as long as the electric current continued to pass. Thereupon, Arago made and announced his epoch-making invention, the electro-magnet. The influence of this invention on the subsequent history of the machine of civilization, it is hardly needful to point out.

The experiments of Oersted gave rise at once to much speculation as to the nature of the action between electric currents and magnets, and also to considerable experimental and mathematical research. As had been the case for many thousand years in other endeavors, speculation accomplished little, but experimental research accomplished much. By this time mathematics had been highly developed, not only as an abstract science but also as an aid to physical and chemical research. The man who attacked the problem in the most scientific manner was Ampère, who in consequence solved it in the following year, after a series of mathematically conducted experiments of the utmost originality and inductiveness. As a result in 1820, he showed that all the actions and reactions of magnets could be performed by coils of wire through which electric currents were passing, even if there was no iron within the coils: – but that they were more powerful, if iron were within. From this and kindred facts, which he developed by experiment – (especially the fact that electric currents act and react on each other as magnets do), he established a new science to which he gave the name electro-dynamics. In recognition of his contributions to electricity, the name given many years later to the unit of electric current was ampère.

In the following years, while pursuing a series of investigations into the new science, Faraday invented the first electro-magnetic machines. In the first machine, a magnet floating in mercury was made to revolve continuously around a central conducting wire through which an electric current was passing; in the second a conductor was made to revolve continuously around a fixed magnet; in a third machine, a magnet so mounted on a longitudinal axis that an electric current could be made to pass from one pole half way to the other pole, and then out, would revolve continuously as long as the electric current was made to pass. Faraday invented the first machines that converted the energy of the electric current into mechanical motion; though Oersted was the first who merely effected the conversion. It can hardly be said that Oersted invented a machine; but Faraday certainly did.

The first utilization of Oersted's discovery in a concrete and practically usable device was the galvanometer, invented by Schweigger in 1820. It was a brilliant invention, and solved perfectly the important problem of measuring accurately the strength of an electric current. The apparatus consisted merely of a means of multiplying the effect of the deflecting current by winding the conductor into a coil, the magnetic needle being within the coil. The galvanometer (named after Galvani) was an invention of the utmost value, and it is in use to this day, though in many modified forms. When one realizes how obvious a utilization of Oersted's discovery the galvanometer was, and that Schweigger did not invent it until two years later, he wonders why Oersted himself did not invent it. But the history of invention is full of such cases and of cases still more amazing. Why did the world wait several thousand years before Wise invented the metal pen? Why are we not now inventing a great many more things than we are? Nature is holding out suggestions for inventions to us by the million, but we do not see them.

In the year before Schweigger's invention, in 1821, the important discovery had been made by Seebeck in Berlin, that if two different metals are joined at their ends, and one junction be raised to a higher temperature than the other, a current of electricity will be generated, the strength of which will vary with the metals employed and the difference in temperature of the junctions. The discovery was soon utilized in Nobili's invention of the thermopile in which the current was increased by employing several layers of dissimilar metals (say antimony and bismuth) in series with each other. The main use of the thermopile has been in scientific investigations, especially in the science of heat.

One of the results of the increased use of mathematics, especially arithmetic, was the invention of Babbage's calculating machine in 1822. The usefulness of this invention was so apparent that it was not long in coming into use, or long in causing the invention of improvements on it of many kinds. The calculating machine was a distinct contribution to civilization.

Another contribution, but of quite a different kind, was made by Faraday in the following year (1823) when, after a series of experiments, he announced that he had succeeded in liquefying many of the gases then known by the combined action of cold and pressure. The possibility of doing this had long been suspected by physicists reasoning from known phenomena; but the actual accomplishment of the liquefaction of gas was none the less a feat of a high order of brilliancy and usefulness. In experiments subsequently made, Dewar received the gases in a vessel of his invention which had double walls, the space between which he had exhausted of air, and thus made a vacuum – which is a non-conductor of heat. The "thermos bottle" of today was invented by the great chemist Dewar, and is not therefore a new invention.

Meanwhile, the steam engine had been undergoing rapid development, though the use of locomotives for drawing passenger trains does not seem to have come into regular use until the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad was opened in 1830. In 1828, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company constructed a short railroad, and sent an agent to England to buy the necessary locomotives and rails. In the four years following twelve railroad companies were incorporated. The Baltimore and Susquehanna began actual operations in 1831.

The inventions of Hero, Branca, Worcester, Savery, Papin and Leupold, brought to practicality by Watt, had now come to full fruition, and entered upon that career of world-wide usefulness that has advanced civilization so tremendously and still continues to advance it.

But the most decisive triumph of the steam engine had come more than a decade before, when in 1819 the American steamship Savannah crossed the Atlantic ocean in 26 days, going from the United States to Liverpool.