Kitabı oku: «Invention: The Master-key to Progress», sayfa 13

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.

CHAPTER IX
INVENTIONS IN STEAM, ELECTRICITY AND CHEMISTRY CREATE A NEW ERA

When the nineteenth century opened, George III was King of England, Napoleon was First Consul of France, Francis II was Emperor of Germany, Frederick William III was King of Prussia, Alexander was Czar of Russia (beginning 1801), and John Adams was President of the United States.

By this time the influence of the inventions of the few centuries immediately preceding, especially the invention of the gun and that of printing, was clearly in evidence. The Feudal System had entirely vanished, the sway of great and powerful sovereigns had taken the place in Europe of the arbitrary rule of petty dukes and barons, the value of the natural sciences was appreciated, and a fine literature had developed in all the countries.

A terrible war was raging, however, that was not to end for fifteen years and that involved, directly or indirectly, nearly every European nation. The war had started in France, where the tremendous intellectual movement had aroused the excitable people of that land to a realization of the oppression of the nobility and a determination to make it cease.

The wars that ensued were not so different from the wars of the Egyptians and other ancient nations as one might carelessly suppose, because the weapons were not very different. The only weapon that was very novel was the gun; and the gun of the year 1800 was a contrivance so vastly inferior to the gun that exists today as not to be immeasurably superior to the bow and arrow. It had to be loaded slowly at the muzzle; and the powder was so non-uniform and in other ways inferior, that the gun's range was short and its accuracy slight. Even the artillery that Bonaparte used so skillfully was crude and ineffective, according to the standards of today. The cavalry was not very different from the cavalry of the Assyrians, and the military engineers performed few feats greater than that of Cæsar's, in building the bridge across the Rhine. There were no railroads, no steamships, no telegraphs, no telephones. There was less difference between the armies of 1800 A. D. and those of 1800 B. C., than between the armies of 1800 A. D. and those of 1900 A. D.

The same remark applies to virtually all the material conditions of living. There was less difference, for instance, between the fine buildings of 1800 B. C. and 1800 A. D. than between the fine buildings of 1800 and 1900 A. D. The influence of the new inventions on the material conditions of living was only beginning to be felt; for the twin agencies of steam and electricity, that were later to make the difference, had not yet got to work. It was the power of steam that was to transport men and materials across vast oceans and across great continents at high speed, and place in the hands of every people the natural fruits and the foods and the raw materials and the manufactured appliances of other lands; it was the subtle influence of electricity that was to give every people instant communication with every other. It was the co-working of steam and electricity that was to make possible the British navy and the British merchant marine, and the relatively smaller merchant marines and navies of other countries, and to bring all the world under the dominance of Great Britain and of the other countries that were civilized.

The opening of the nineteenth century, therefore, marks the opening of a new era. In 1800 the steam engine was already an effective appliance, but it was not yet in general use. Electricity was a little behind steam; and though Franklin and the others had proved that it possessed vast possibilities of many kinds, and also that it could be harnessed and put to work by man for the benefit of man, electricity had as yet accomplished little of real value.

Under the stimulating influence of the quick communication given by the art of printing, literature had blossomed especially in Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy; but in 1800 one has to notice the same fact as in previous years – literature had not improved. The literature of 1800 A. D. was no better than the literature of Greece or Elizabethan England – to state the truth politely; and no such poet lived as Homer, Shakespeare or John Milton. It seems to be a characteristic of literature, and of all the fine arts as well, that each great product is solely a product of one human mind, and not the product of the combined work of many minds. To the invention of Watt's steam engine, numberless obscure investigators and inventors had contributed, besides those whose great names everybody knows: but how can two men write a poem or any work of fiction, or paint a picture or carve a statue? It is true that each of these feats has been performed; but rarely and not with great success.

For this reason, it is not clear that mere literature as literature, or that any of the fine arts as such can exert much influence on history, and it is not clear that any of them have done so. That they have had great influence in conducing to the pleasure of individuals there can be no question; but the influence seems to have been transient. History is a record of such of the doings of men as have had influence at the time, or in the future. Of these doings, the agency that has had the most obvious influence is war, and next to war is invention. War, next after disease, has caused the most suffering the world knows of; but out of the suffering have emerged the great nations without which modern civilization could not exist. The influence of invention is not so obvious, but it is perhaps as great, or nearly so; the main reason being that invention has been the agency which has enabled those nations to emerge that have emerged. Without the appliances that invention has supplied, the civilized man could not have triumphed over the savage.

Now literature and painting and sculpture and music, while they have made life easier and pleasanter, have contributed little to this work, and in many ways have rather prevented it from going further by softening people, physically and mentally. This statement must not be accepted without reservations of course; for the reason that some poems, some works of fiction, and some paintings and (especially) some musical compositions have tended to strengthen character, and even to stimulate the martial spirit. But a careful inspection of most works of pure literature and fine art must lead a candid person to admit that the major part of their effect has been to please, – to gratify the appetite of the mind rather than to inspire it to action.

The author here requests any possible reader of these pages, not to infer that he has any objection to being pleased himself, or to having others pleased; or that he regards the influence of literature and the fine arts as being detrimental to the race. On the contrary, he regards them as being valuable in the highest degree. He is merely trying to point out the difference between the influence of inventions in the useful arts and those in the fine arts.

A like remark may be made concerning inventors and other men; the word inventors being here supposed to mean the men who make inventions of all kinds. These men seem to have been those who have brought into existence those machines and books and projects of all kinds that have determined the kind of machine of civilization that has now been produced. These men are very few, compared with the great bulk of humanity; but it seems to be they who have given direction to the line along which the machine has been developed.

This does not mean, of course, that these men have been more estimable themselves than the men who kept the machine in smooth and regular motion, and made the repairs, and supplied the oil and fuel; but it does mean that they had more influence in making its improvements. Naturally, their work in making improvements would have been of no avail, if other men had not exerted industry and carefulness and intelligence and courage, in the countless tasks entailed in maintaining the machine in good repair, in keeping it running smoothly, and in receiving with open minds and helping hands each new improvement as it came along. And it was not only in welcoming real improvements, but in keeping out novelties which seemed to be improvements but were not improvements that the work of what may be called the operators, as distinguished from the inventors, was beneficent. Nothing could be more injurious to the machine than to permit the incorporation in it of parts that would not improve it. There has been little danger to fear from this source, however; for the inertia of men is such that it is only rarely that one sees any new device accepted, until it has proved its value definitely and unmistakably in practical work.

Possibly the greatest single impetus given to progress about the year 1800 was that given by Lavoisier shortly before, which started the science of chemistry on the glorious career it has since pursued. As a separate branch of science, chemistry then began, though it had been the subject of investigation for many centuries, beginning in Egypt and the other ancient countries of the East. In the Middle Ages, it was known in Europe by the name Alchemy. Originally, and in all the long ages of its infancy, the investigations of the experimenters were carried on mainly to discover new remedies in medicine, or to learn methods to transmute base metals into precious metals; though there was a considerable degree also of pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. As a result of the investigations, many startling facts were developed, and many discoveries were made; but, for the reason that the investigations were not conducted on the mathematical or quantitative lines that had led to so much success in developing physics, alchemy or chemistry did not rest on any sure basis, and therefore had no fixed place to start from. It was in the same vague status that some subjects of thoughtful speculation are in today, such as telepathy, which may (or may not) be put on a basis of fact some day, and started forward thence, as chemistry was started.

What gave chemistry its basis was the methods introduced by Lavoisier who was a practiced physicist. He introduced the balance into the study of chemistry, and raised it instantly from a collection of speculations to an exact science, capable of progressing confidently and assuredly thereafter, instead of wandering in a maze. Lavoisier gave chemistry a mathematical basis to start from, and sure beacon lights to guide it; and though many changes in its theory have been made from time to time, they have been due only to increase of knowledge and not to departure from fundamental principles. Finding that a substance was not an element, but was a compound of two elements, or more than two, did not require any rejection of accepted principles, but merely a readjustment.

We now see that it was impossible because of the exact nature of the way in which the various elements combine, that chemistry could have become a science until the balance had been used to weigh the substances investigated; and we also see that it was impossible that the balance could have been so used until physics had been developed to the point permitting it, and men skilled in exact measurements had been brought up by practice in physical researches. Lavoisier himself had served a long apprenticeship, and his earliest claim to fame was his mathematical researches on heat, embodied in an essay, written in connection with Laplace, and published in 1784. Even after an enormous mass of facts had been collected and announced, chemistry could not take her place by the side of physics, and Bacon's teachings could not be followed, until those facts had been mathematically investigated, and their mathematical relations to each other had been established. This Lavoisier and his followers did.

No better illustration of the influence of invention on history can be found than the fact that chemistry hovered in the dim twilight of speculation, guess-work and even superstition, until Lavoisier brought to bear the various inventions made in physics. Then, presto, the science of chemistry was born.

We must not let the fact escape us, however, that Lavoisier would have left mankind none the wiser, if he had merely brought mathematical research to bear and discovered what he did, and then stopped. If he had stopped then, his knowledge would have remained locked inside of his own mind, useless. The good work that Lavoisier actually did was in actually producing an invention; in conceiving a certain definite method of chemical research, then embodying it in such a concrete form that "persons skilled in the art could make and use it," and then giving it to the world.

The first important effect of Lavoisier's work was the announcement by Dalton about 1808 of his Atomic Theory, which has been the basis of most of the work of chemistry ever since. Dalton's earlier work had been in physics, and its principal result had been "Dalton's Laws" in regard to the evaporation and expansion of gases, announced by him about 1801. These investigations led his mind to the consideration of the various speculations that had been entertained concerning the nature of matter itself, as distinguished from the actions and reactions between material objects that physics studies; and they brought him to the conclusion that there are certain substances or elements which combine together to form compounds that are wholly different from each of the elements (oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, combining to form water); and that those elements are made up of units absolutely indivisible, which combine with each other in absolutely exact proportions. The units he called atoms. He built up a theory wonderfully convincing and coherent, that explained virtually all the chemical phenomena then known, and supplied a stepping-stone following Lavoisier's, from which chemists could advance still further. Dalton classified certain substances as elements which we now know are not elements, because they have been found since to be compounds of two or more elements; but this in itself does not disprove his theory, because he himself pointed out that means might be found later to decompose certain materials that seemed then to be elements, because no means had then been found to decompose them.

It may be instructive to note here that Dalton was not the first to imagine that certain forms of matter were elemental, or that matter was indivisible beyond a certain point, or that substances entered into combination with each other in definite proportions. Speculation on all these points had been rife for many years, but it had not produced the invention of any workable law or even theory. Similarly, many men later speculated on the possibility of devising an electrical instrument that would transform the mechanical energy of sound waves into electrical energy, transfer the electrical energy over a wire, and re-convert it into sound; but no one succeeded in producing such an instrument, until Bell invented the telephone in 1876.

History is a record of acts, and not of dreams. And yet the greatest acts were dreamed of before they were performed. Every process, no matter how small or how great, seems to proceed by three stages – conception, development and production. Most of our acts are almost automatic, and the three stages succeed each other so quickly that only the final stage itself is noted. But the greatest acts, from which great results have followed, have begun with the conception of a picture not of an ordinary kind, such as a great campaign, a new machine, a novel theory, a book, painting, statue or edifice: – then a long process of development, during which the conception is gradually embodied in some concrete form, as, for instance, a statue, a painting or an instrument; – and then production. Finis opus coronat, the end crowns the work; but the work is not crowned until it is finished, and a concrete entity has been brought forth.

Lavoisier finished his work. Not only did he dream a dream, but he embodied his dream in a definite form, and gave it to mankind to use. Dalton did similarly. This does not mean that their work was not improved upon thereafter, or that they invented the chemistry of today. They merely laid the foundation of chemistry, and placed the first two stones.

A remarkable exemplar of the meaning of this declaration was Benjamin Thomson, who was an American by birth, but who entered the Austrian Army after the War of the Revolution, and made an unprecedented record in the application of physical and chemical science to the relief of the distressed and ignorant and poor, especially the mendicant classes. For his services he was made Count Rumford. His researches were mostly in the line of saving heat and light, and therefore saving food and fuel. He ascertained by experiments of the utmost ingenuity and thoroughness that the warmth of clothing was because of the air entangled in its fibers; he investigated the radiation, conduction and convection of heat, analyzed the ways in which heat could be economized, and invented a calorimeter for testing the heat-giving value of different fuels. In 1798 he had noted the fact that heat was developed when cannon were being bored. He immediately conceived the idea that the heat developed was related to the amount of work expended driving the boring tool, and invented a means of measuring it. This consisted simply of a blunt boring tool that pressed into a socket in a metal block that was immersed in water, of which the temperature could be taken. To get a basis for his investigations into the problem of lighting economically the dwellings of the poor, Rumford invented a photometer for measuring illumination. No man in history shows more clearly the co-working of a high order of imagination, and a careful and accurate constructiveness; and no man ever secured more intensely practical and beneficent results. In the hospital at Verona he reduced the consumption of fuel to one-eighth.