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The Great Republic by the Master Historians
Triumphs of the Republic in Practical Science
by Bancroft, Hubert H.
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[History, in the school-books of our forefathers, was mainly the chronicles of
kings and warriors, statesmen, and the militant political factions they played
for power. The history of the grander and more beneficent conquests of our day
and the days to come is fitly written with the pen, and not the sword. The
constructive and wholly progressive achievements of the great era which is
marked by the dividing line between the centuries, happily make up the most
glorious part of our national history during the later years. The following
review of our brilliant contribution to scientific progress is taken from
"Achievements of the Nineteenth Century," by William Matthews Handy.]
Wonderful has been the part that the United States has taken in the multitude of
astonishing achievements of the nineteenth century, - always abreast of the
times, often leading. Yet in 1800 the Republic was less than twenty-five years
old, so that her greatness and eminence of themselves are a growth of a century.
In 1800 a country with only 5,308,483 inhabitants, hugging the seacoast, the
United States has grown to an immense area and to a population of over
76,000,000. Struggling during the period with grave domestic problems, many of
them entirely new, learning, growing, building, organizing, - to-day the United
States leads the world in wealth, mining, agriculture, fisheries, forestry,
transportation, education, and almost every field of endeavor. Her own
development chiefly an achievement of a century, she has led in making the
nineteenth century the age of greatest achievement.
While the period between 1825 and 1830 was pregnant with railway movements, it
can scarcely be said that any railway was successfully operated in the Americas
before 1830, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened its first section of
fifteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicotts Mills. The first genuine locomotive in
use in the United States was the "Stourbridge Lion," which made its trial trip
several months before the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio road, on a railway
connecting the coal mines of northeastern Pennsylvania with the Delaware and
Hudson Canal. From 1830 to 1835 many lines were projected, and at the end of
1835 there were over a thousand miles of railway in use in the United States.
Necessity was the mother of invention; the money which Great Britain lavished on
deep cuts and expensive tunnels was not forthcoming in the young republic, so
the engineers of the United States put their wits to work and devised flexible
locomotives which will round any curve, and ascend steep grades without
difficulty. The chief and most important of these inventions is the swivel
truck, which, placed under the front of the car, enables the driver to make a
sharp turn with perfect safety. The American locomotive is exported in larger
quantities every year. The first street railway was laid in New York in 1831,
the first cable car was used in San Francisco in 1873. In 1851 an electric
locomotive was tested on the Baltimore and Washington line, which ran nineteen
miles in an hour, but the trolley did not become commercially successful until
1893. In other modes of locomotion, as those of the bicycle and horseless
carriages, American ingenuity has kept ahead of foreign competition.
Robert Fulton built the first practicable steamboat, the Clermont, in 1807. In
order of construction it was the sixteenth, but it was the first to be used
permanently on the Hudson River. Two similar boats ran regularly within a year
between New York and Albany, taking thirty-two hours each way. The first
steamboat in England did not appear until 1812. At Pittsburg in 1811 the first
boat for Western rivers was built, and she made the trip to New Orleans. Great
enthusiasm was aroused when, with the construction of the Enterprise in 1815,
St. Louis was reached in twenty-five days from New Orleans.
The first steamer to cross the Atlantic was an American-built ship, the
Savannah. The vessel had been built in New York as a sailing-ship. She was of
350 tons' burden, clipper-built, full-rigged, and propelled by one inclined,
direct-acting, low-pressure engine, similar to those now in use. She had paddle-
wheels that could be taken out and put on deck. The Savannah steamed to the city
in whose honor she was named, and from there started for Liverpool May 24, 1819,
making the voyage in twenty-five days, being under steam eighteen days. She used
pitch-pine as fuel, the use of coal in American steamers not having been
introduced at that day. From Liverpool she went to St. Petersburg. For some
years she ran between Savannah and New York, and finally ran aground in a storm
off Long Island, and went to pieces.
England's first vessels to make regular trips across the ocean, were the ships,
Sirius and Great Western, in 1838, each averaging seven and a half knots an
hour. It was not until 1847 that the first American steamer, the United States,
was built expressly for the transatlantic trade, making the voyage in thirteen
days. The Britannia, owned by Samuel Cunard, had been running between Liverpool
and Boston since 1840, a fourteen-day trip. It is needless to speak of the
wonderful achievements in ship-building and sailing in recent years. Submarine
navigation is the latest development of American inventiveness and daring.
The invention of the first practicable telegraph by Samuel F. B. Morse, aided by
Alfred Vail and Professor Gail, dating from 1836, is a familiar story. It did
not come into general use until 1844. The first duplex system was invented by
Joseph B. Stearns, of Boston, in 1872. Thomas A. Edison improved on this in
1874, enabling two messages to be sent the same way on the same wire. In 1875
Elisha Gray extended this into a multiplex system, when the Stearns and Edison
systems were combined to form the quadruplex, by which four messages, two each
way, can be sent simultaneously along a single wire. In 1898 Prof. Rowland, of
Johns Hopkins University, perfected a method by which twelve messages can be
sent at once. By the wonderful ingenuity of a young Italian electrician,
Guiglielmo Marconi, a system of wireless telegraphy is being brought into
practical use. Messages are being received from ships several miles out at sea.
The spread of submarine cables has enabled the day's doings of the whole world
to be reported in the evening papers of that day.
Various devicesare being perfected by which the familiar miracle of the
telephone can be used for a nominal charge. Paris and London, 297 miles apart,
were enabled to converse with each other in April, 1891. New York and Cleveland
were connected, though 650 miles apart, in 1883, and the superiority of the
long-distance telephone to the telegraph was clearly shown during the great
blizzard of 1888, when for several days the only direct means of communication
between Boston and New York was a long-distance telephone wire, which withstood
the storm that destroyed all other lines. Chicago was brought into communication
with New York in October, 1892; and now conversation is carried on as easily
over this distance of a thousand miles as if between two residents in the same
place. Conversations have been carried on between Texas and Maine, 2,600 miles
apart.
America produced the first practicable type-writing machine, and still leads in
all new improvements.
In great feats of engineering, America has won a unique record. The Erie Canal,
351 miles long, was opened in 1825. When the Nicaragua Canal is commenced, the
world will be amazed at the celerity and ingenuity with which it will be
completed, so continuously are our skilled engineers devising new methods and
setting up new principles. Office buildings of eighteen and twenty stories have
ceased to be uncommon. They have been made necessary by the congestion of the
great cities. There was a limit beyond which structures of brick and wood might
be built; but the use of iron and steel made it possible to build taller
structures, two or three times the height of those possible by the old method.
The new method of construction known as the skeleton frame construction does
away with the use of brick and masonry except as a thin shell. Steel beams
support the walls of each story, and these are framed between columns,
permitting thin walls even at the base. The framework of iron and steel being
erected, the masons and carpenters can work on all floors at once, and build
from top and bottom. Great as have been the improvements in construction, the
erection of these buildings calls for the highest engineering skill. The
Manhattan Life building in New York, which is twenty-three stories high, weighs
21,000 tons, and there is a pressure of wind estimated at 2,400 tons against its
exposed sides, and the total weight is over 30,000 tons.
The utilization of water-power has been an accomplished fact for centuries; but
the modern turbine wheel owes its high repute to the improvements effected by an
American, A. M. Swain, in 1851. The development of electricity as a propelling
force may be recurred to in this connection. The germ of the electric motor is
found in the invention of Joseph Henry, an American, who, though little known to
the public, was one of the most prolific electrical inventors the world has
seen. Many improvements were made by him in the magnet. Exhaustive research was
made by him into the subject of the battery as a source of energy and the
efficiency of galvanic batteries, and in 1831 he constructed an electric motor,
the first of the kind the world had ever known.
A great step was made in the increased utilization of electricity when the
problem of the transmission of power over long distances was solved. Now a
current cannot only be distributed through a workshop with the utmost
convenience and economy, but it can be sent to a workshop from an engine or
waterwheel many miles away. The Niagara Falls is yoked to the wheels and lamps
of Buffalo. This in itself is typical of all the achievements of the century,
and is the crowning glory of electrical development.
The first experiments in this direction were made by Marcel Deprez, at Creil, in
1876 to 1886, and Deprez succeeded in transmitting mechanical power thirty-five
miles for industrial purposes in the latter year. Many inventors busied
themselves along these lines, and on February 3, 1892, Nikola Tesla, at the
Royal Institution, exhibited his alternate-current motor, by which currents are
transformed, by continually reversing the direction, into mechanical power. By
means of Tesla's apparatus the force of 77 horse-power was transmitted from the
rapids of the Neckar to Frankfort-on-the-Main, 110 miles, September, 1891.
Possibilities of the utilization of waterfalls for the transmission of power
electrically immediately attracted attention to the world's greatest waterfall,
that of Niagara. At Niagara River and Falls, about 18,000,000 cubic feet of
water flow per minute through a descent of more than 300 feet, including both
falls and rapids; this represents something like 7,000,000 horse-power.
Engineers had been aware that the enormous power which goes to waste over the
Niagara was sufficient to turn the wheels of every factory in the United States,
but there seemed to be no possibility of its utilization. While a few paper-
mills and flour-mills had been established near there, the expense of the direct
application of the power was too great to make the attempt desirable. But when
dynamos had been perfected and electricity made commercially available,
attention became attracted to the waste of power. Siemens, the great German
inventor, in 1877 prophesied that a few more years would see the great water-
courses like that of Niagara utilized in part to generate electricity and to
transmit by its means electric light and power to surrounding industrial
stations. It seemed a wild dream then; but before twenty years had passed, it
had been realized, and to-day the power of Niagara is tuning machinery and
running street-cars in Buffalo, twenty-six miles away. Power from the falls has
been used to operate machinery in New York, being thus employed at the
electrical exposition.
When a waterfall is to be used for power the ordinary method is to dig a canal
from a point above to a point below the waterfall, this canal being called a
mill-race. The water in this canal is so directed as either to fall upon or to
flow under a wheel, and the revolution of this wheel furnishes the motive power
of the mill with whose machinery it is connected, by means of shafts and belts.
Aesthetic reasons alone would have prevented the employment of these means at
Niagara, and would merely have resulted in building a canal which would be lined
with mills. An entirely different method was proposed by Thomas Ever-shed, state
engineer of New York, and his suggestion was adopted by the company. At a point
about a mile above the falls, 1,200 acres of land were bought, and here a short
canal was dug and an enormous pit, 140 feet in length, 18 feet in width and 178
feet deep was excavated. From the bottom of this pit a tunnel was also made to
the river tunnel level some distance below the falls. This tunnel is 6,807 feet
(over a mile and a quarter) in length, and it took a thousand men more than
three years to dig it, even with the improved tunnelling appliances of this
generation. Enough limestone rock was dug out of the tunnel to make some twenty
acres of new land worth $5,000 an acre along the shore of the Niagara, and the
construction of the tunnel and mainwheel pits cost twenty-seven lives. The
tunnel is shaped like a horse-shoe, 18 feet 10 inches wide at its broadest part,
and 14 feet wide at the bottom. It is 21 feet high, and has a downward pitch
varying from 4 to 7 feet in 1,000. It is lined at the lower end with heavy steel
plates, and the rest of the way with from four to six rings of brick, especially
prepared to withstand the wear and tear of water for generations to come.
This tunnel is the "tail-race," as the millwright would call it. The water drawn
from it falls a distance of 154 feet to the bottom, where, by its fall, it may
revolve ten enormous horizontal or turbine wheels. These in turn may revolve ten
dynamos in the power-house above, each capable of furnishing 5,000 horse-power;
only three of these turbines have as yet been built. The water having thus given
its power to the company, which has transferred it into electricity, runs off
through the tunnel, and is discharged into the river below.
The turbine wheels, placed at the bottom of that mighty pit cut straight down
for 200 feet into the solid rocks, are the monarchs of their kind. The force of
the volume of water that each of the three now in place receives is so great
that it would sweep away a considerable structure made as strong as man could
build it with stone and masonry.
Tesla's alternating current is employed. A wire no thicker than a man's thumb
transmits the power that runs the street railways of Buffalo. It is believed
that the power of Niagara will some day run machinery is New York and Chicago.
Water-power by long-distance transmission is being used in California on a large
scale.
So many and varied are the uses of electricity that it enters into every
science. To barely enumerate these devices would require a volume. It stores
speech in the phonograph and executes condemned criminals, both devices being
American. The induction balance has been used as a sonometer, or machine for
measuring hearing, and the bottom of the sea has been explored by sonometers for
sunken treasure. Leaks in water-pipes have been localized by the microphone, and
the story is told of a Russian woman who was saved from premature burial because
the microphone made audible her feeble heart-beats. The peculiar sensitiveness
of electricity makes it a means of surpassing delicacy in measuring heat, light,
or chemical action. By the bolometer, invented by Prof. S. P. Langley, a change
of temperature of one-millionth of a degree Fahrenheit has been recorded, a
refinement scarcely approached by any other means of scientific detection.
American inventiveness is largely occupied in the constant multiplication of
labor-saving machines. Patents are being applied for and issued daily on
mechanical constructions designed either to aid or supplant man-power. There is
no field of industry, however unimportant, which has not been invaded by the
inventor with a view to minimizing the human effort required therein to produce
its quota of material. The sewing-machine, patented by Elias Howe in 1846, may
stand as the best known illustration. Nearly a million are made every year. The
shoe-making industry has been revolutionized by the American sewing-machine, and
its exported product is playing havoc with the shoe trade of Europe. The first
machine for sewing on soles was brought out in 1861. It sewed 900 soles in ten
hours. A shoe factory in Lynn, Mass., made a pair of ladies' boots for the Paris
Exposition of 1889 in just twenty-four minutes. For this feat the pair of shoes
went through the usual routine of the shop. Forty-two machines and fifty-seven
different operators contributed to the operation, which included the cutting up
and stitching of twenty-six pieces of leather, and fourteen pieces of cloth, the
sewing on of twenty-four buttons, the working of twenty-four button-holes, and
the insertion of eighty tacks, twenty nails, and two steel shanks. Since that
time still more perfect machinery has been introduced into the industry, and a
pair of ladies' shoes may now be turned out in twenty minutes.
Equally marvellous is the history of cotton-spinning and weaving machinery, from
the invention of the gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. The same is true of the wool-
weaving industry. It is difficult to name a single mechanical trade that has not
been literally revolutionized by American skill and genius during the nineteenth
century. The industrial history of the period is one long tribute to the
ceaseless painstaking efforts of American scientific thinkers and practical
workers to lessen the burden of labor and improve its output. From tallow to
oil, and from gas to electricity, the progress of artificial illumination has
been slow but steady. It is amusing now to look back at the opposition to gas-
light. Philadelphia fought for more than twenty years against its introduction
as a means for lighting the city. Peale, in his museum in the State House, had
as early as 1816 or 1817 produced a fine illumination through the use of gas
obtained from a private plant belonging to a man on Lombard Street, whose
dwelling was probably the first in America to be lighted with gas. Peale was
immediately enjoined from continuing his luminous exhibition, as it was declared
to be a menance not only to the historic old State House, but to the entire city
as well.
The United States Gazette declared it a folly and a nuisance, and insisted that
common lamps would "take the shine off all the gas-lights that ever exhaled
their intolerable stench." All manner of objections were brought against the
obnoxious fluid. The newspapers dwelt emphatically on the dire warning that the
introduction of gas would result in terrific carnage and destruction, and that
the refuse of the works would kill the fish in adjacent streams. Even from the
University of Pennsylvania came the voice of Professor Hare, protesting, that,
even if gas were the good thing which its supporters declared it to be, tallow
candles and common oil lamps were good enough for him. On March 23, 1833, a
formal petition of remonstrance, signed by twelve hundred of the wealthiest
citizens of Philadelphia, was carried to the State House. Gas triumphed,
nevertheless.
Photography, the biograph, and the many wonderful branchings out from these
processes, owe much to American skills, both of invention and perfecting.
From the gold days in California to the discovery of deposits in the Klondike
region, American mining processes and machinery have commanded the world's
markets. The machinery for collecting, refining, and carrying petroleum, and its
product, natural gas, tells the same tale of progressive endeavor.
In agricultural machinery, American genius has won world-wide honors and
rewards. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick, of Virginia, invented a successful grain-
harvesting machine, containing the essential elements of every reaping-machine
built from that day to this. It was first successfully operated on the farm of
John Steele, near Steels's Tavern, Virginia. Two years later Obed Hussey built a
machine which was much like the McCormick reaper, except that it had no reel and
no divider and no platform on which the cut grain could accumulate. Both of
these machines were shown in 1851 at the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All
Nations in London. Under the auspices of the Royal Agricultural Society of
England they were tested in the field, and the "Grand Council Medal" was awarded
to the McCormick one, which was referred to by the judges as being worth to the
people of England "the whole cost of the exposition." Subsequently the French
Government decorated its inventor with the Legion of Honor for "having done more
for the cause of agriculture than any living man."
American skill and courage have been conspicuously exhibited in the healing art
and science. In the invention and operation of surgical instruments, in
appliances for the relief of pain, and minimizing the inconvenience caused by
the loss of limb or organ, our surgeons stand in the front rank among the
benefactors of humanity. So do our physicians, whose contributions to medical
science are the pride of the profession the world over.
The United States has led the way in the ligation of the larger blood-vassels,
some of the Americans who have gained distinction by the performance of such
feats - each one of which was a triumph of surgery - are Amos Twitchell (1781-
1850), first to tie the primitive carotid artery; John Syng Dorsey (1783-1818),
first American to tie the external iliac artery; William Gibson (1784-1868),
first to tie the common iliac artery; Valentine Mott (1785-1865) tied the
arteria innominata; J. Kearney Rodgers (1793-1857) tied the left subclavian
artery between the scaleni in 1846; John Murray Carnochan (1817-1887), ligation
of the femoral artery in 1851; Hunter McGuire tied the abdominal aorta in 1868.
This had been accomplished, in 1817, by Sir Astley Cooper. Not only are such
wonders wrought with blood-vessels and frightful haemorrhages prevented, but
cases of internal aneurism which were formerly thought hopeless are now cured.
The later names of Gross, Jacobi, and Marion Simms, are familiar in every centre
of learning.
The American dentist has led the way in the perfection of his art, and he is
justly celebrated all over the world. The first native dentist in the United
States in supposed to have been John Greenwood, who began to practise in 1788.
Thirty-two years after there were one hundred follwers of his calling in the
United States; in 1892 there were 18,000. So important has the science of the
teeth grown that from 1800 to 1892 there were published two hundred volumes
devoted to that subject alone. The first dental school in the United States was
chartered by the Maryland Legislature in 1839. Since then colleges and schools
of dentistry have sprung up all over the land. If there are as good dentists in
other countries as there are in this, it is largely due to the fact that they
have been trained in American schools. Men come from all over the civilized
world to the United States for higher education in dentistry. American ingenuity
has invented numerous mechanical aids to the practice of the art. From 1880 to
1890 over 500 dental instruments were patented. Horace Wells first used
"laughing-gas" or an anaesthetic. Dr. Younger, of San Francisco, made the first
artificial socket for a tooth.
A hundred additional examples of American progressiveness might be culled from
the scientific records of the century, but space forbids. Wherever we search, we
shall find our country nobly represented. In the achievements of astronomy,
geology, anthropology, chemistry; in the triumphs of explorers in the Polar
region, in Africa, and the far East, and in the unknown expanses of our own
West, some of the most glorious discoveries are credited to American
"Pathfinders."
The science of war gained much from our experiences in the sixties. In the
matter of battle-ships the lesson changed the old-world system entirely. There
had been iron-clad vessels in Europe for several years before our war; but they
had not stood the test of action. The first effective vessel of this kind was
the Confederate ram Merrimack, and her famous conflict with the Monitor has been
called the most important naval battle in the world. The Merrimack was a wooden
frigate that had burned to the water's edge and sunk. The Confederates raised
and rebuilt her, enclosing her vitals with iron plates two inches thick. A
bulwark was built, and similarly covered, and a cast-iron ram was attached to
the bow about two feet under water. The Monitor had been built after a design of
John Ericsson, who for twenty years had been endeavoring to secure its adoption.
It was an iron-plated hull, 172 feet over all, 41 feet beam, and 11 1-3 feet
depth, and with a revolving iron turret containing two guns. The target surface
was reduced to a minimum, the hull being less than two feet high and plated with
five inches of iron. The turret was nine inches high, and covered with eight
inches of iron. It was a floating fortress. The story of the fight needs no
telling here. Its moral revolutionized the navies of the world.
Not only have battle-ships changed, but their guns and ammunition have been
radically modernized, chiefly by American inventors, of whom Gatling and Maxim
are probably the most famous. The heliograph first demonstrated its efficiency
and utility for field intercommunication in the Indian wars of the Western
frontier, beginning in 1886. There years later Major W. J. Volkman, U. S. A.,
demonstrated in Arizona and New Mexico the possibility of carrying on
communication by heliograph over a range of 200 miles. The network of
communication begun by General Miles in 1886, and continued by Lieutenant W. A.
Glassford, was perfected in 1889 at ranges of 85, 88, 95, and 125 miles, over a
country inconceivably rugged and broken, the stronghold of the Apache and other
hostile Indian tribes.
In 1862 General McClellan organized a balloon corps, with Thaddeus S. C. Lowe at
its head. The innovation soon became a component part of the Army of the
Potomac, as it did good service in disclosing the military operations of the
Confederates. Now all the leading military nations of the world have their
balloon corps, specially trained and equipped for reconnoitering purposes. At
the battle of Santiago, on July 1, 1898, the movements of the enemy were
observed from a balloon by Sergeant Thomas Carroll Boone. A telegraph wire
connected the basket of the balloon with the ground, and observations were
transmitted in that manner to the officers below.
The use of compressed air is one of the latest developments of science, to which
Americans have contributed their full share. Rocks are tunnelled by compressed
air. It operates hoists and travelling cranes. The great drainage canal in
Chicago had fifty air-compressors at work excavating a channel 160 feet wide, 35
feet deep, and containing over 12,000,000 cubic yards of solid rock. The noise
and dust of the steam-engine are done away with.
The same principle as that used in the rock-boring machine is employed in the
little tool with which the dentist compacts the films of gold-leaf in a tooth.
In these machines the part which holds the actual tool is not operated directly
by the air, but just above it lies a plunger, which is vibrated back and forward
by the air, and this strikes blows on the head of the working tool when the tool
is pressed back against it. Tools moved in this manner are used to set up the
rivets which hold together steam-boilers, the iron work of bridges and " sky-
scrapers " and in many shops hand-riveting has been abolished by their use.
A pneumatic breast-drill, weighing 18 pounds, with 80 pounds air-pressure, will
drill a 5-16 inch hole through cast iron one inch thick in one minute. Air
strikes 20,000 blows a minute, a man averages thirty. In England and France
pneumatic tubes carry postal matter from suburbs to the central office as
rapidly as the money-carriers fly in the department stores of our cities. There
is a probability that cable- and trolley-cars may yet be superseded by
compressed air motors.
The latest outcome of investigation into the properties of air is the discovery
of a new force, more marvellous in its possibilities than either steam or
electricity, though hardly yet completely harnessed for practical service. This
force is liquefied air. That air might be liquefied if the temperature were made
low enough has long been known to scientists. In 1878 air was liquefied by Raoul
Pictet, of Geneva, and by Calletet, of Paris; and on June 5, 1885, Professor
James Dewar exhibited liquid air obtained at a temperature of 316 degrees below
zero, Fahrenheit, before the Royal Institution, London. But the possibilities of
its commercial use were not conceived until twenty years later. In March, 1897,
a mysterious explosion occurred at the Endicott Hotel, in New York, which, being
inquired into, developed the fact that Professor Tripler, of that place, had
been experimenting with the new force for several years, with a view to its
manufacture upon a scale and at a price which would allow of its use for
practical purposes. Almost simultaneously, Professor Linde, of Berlin, announced
that he had succeeded in producing liquefied air at a cost which would allow of
its use as a motive power for engines of different kinds. Liquid air furnishes a
clean, dry cold, which produces no dampness, and renders the transportation of
meats, fruit, etc., to any distance an easy matter. In a large hotel, where the
liquid air is used as the motive power for driving the dynamos and running the
elevators, it might be made to serve for all kinds of refrigeration. Its
discoverers claim, that, by its use, it is quite as easy to cool a house in
summer as to heat it in winter, and much less expensive, while the gas produced
would purify the air, being equivalent to the purest mountain air. The
temperature of a hospital ward could at any time be lowered, even in the
tropics, to any desired degree, and in cases of yellow fever the "white gift of
the frost" might be had at any moment. It can be handled as a motive force with
perfect safety, in an ordinary engine, without requiring the intense heat which
makes the duties of the engineers and stokers, on an ocean steamer, so arduous;
and in submarine boats the motor itself would, in place of exhausting the air,
furnish all that was needed for healthy respiration. Moreover, it is claimed
that it will render the problem of aerial navigation a simple one, since all
that is needed is a motor, strong, light in weight, and safe. Indeed, if one-
tenth of what is claimed for the new force be true, its possibilities are
revolutionary.
A few facts may appropriately be added showing the vast improvements and new
inventions that have given the printing-press its tremendous power for good and
ill. It is impossible to mention all the innumerable devices which have brought
printing machines to their present perfection; but the wonderful typesetting
contrivances demand notice. In 1875 Ottmar Mergenthaler, a Swiss mechanic and
inventor, living in Baltimore, constructed a machine that has been an
immeasurable revolutionizing factor in the composing-room. The linotype is a
machine controlled by finger-keys, like a typewriter, which creates the type
matter as demanded, ready for the press, to be used once, and then melted down.
Instead of producing single type of the ordinary character, it casts type-metal
bars or slugs, each line complete in one piece, and having on the upper edge
type characters to print a line. These bars are called linotypes, and are
assembled automatically in a galley side by side, in proper order, so that they
constitute a form, answering the same purpose and used in the same manner as the
ordinary forms consisting of types set singly. After being used, the linotypes,
instead of being distributed at great expense, like type forms, are simply
thrown into the melting-pot attached to the machine and are recast into new
linotypes. The linotype is operated by a single attendant sitting at the
keyboard. The manipulation of the finger-keys by this single operator results in
the production, delivery, and assemblage of the linotypes in the galley ready
for use. In the hands of a skilful operator it will do the work of five men "at
the case," or setting type by hand, and will make better wages for him, without
half the wear and tear of bone, and blood, and muscle. Within two hours the
operator on the machine is able to cast as much new type as the fastest printer
can set in seven or eight hours' hard and steady work by the old method.
The only formidable rival of the linotype is the typesetting machine. While the
former is a line-casting machine, the latter actually sets the type.
The first great step towards facilitating the production of the modern newspaper
was made by Colonel Robert Hoe, of New York, in 1840, when the first of the
type-revolving presses was built. This invention marked the beginning of an
epoch in the history of the printing industry. The Hoe press embodied a new
principle, the type being placed on the circumference of a cylinder which
rotates about a horizontal axis. Among the first of the multiple cylinder
presses erected by Robert Hoe was one for the Philadelphia Ledger, in 1846; and
one for the Parisian daily paper, La Patric, in 1848. The first eight-cylinder
press was built for the New York Herald, in 1857. The printed matter is cast in
a solid stereotype plate, from which, bent into cylinder shape, the paper is
printed.
The perfecting of the stereotyping process gave a great impetus to the
development of the newspaper as we know it to-day. The type-revolving printing-
presses, with their capacity of from 10,000 to 20,000 sheets an hour, were the
marvel of their time, and did good service during the Civil War, from 1861 to
1865. Effective as they were, their supremacy was short-lived, and they are now
only a memory. In 1863, the first web perfecting press was erected by Bullock,
and the printing industry experienced another great revolution, whose ultimate
results are the marvellous machines now in use, capable of turning out from
50,000 to 100,000 papers, perfected and folded, in an hour. The Hope octuple
press of the present day is indeed one of the modern mechanical wonders of the
world. This press prints, folds, and cuts 96,000 complete eight-page papers per
hour, or 1,600 every minute, or 48,000 sixteen-page papers, the size of the page
being that of the ordinary newspaper. Colored supplements are a recent feature.
These new devices have given an equal impetus to the book trade. Publishing
developed to an amazing extent in the closing decade of the nineteenth century.
This development has been distinctly along two lines, and represents two
extremes. In the first place, there was never a time when so many fine books
were made. There is absolutely no limit to the sumptuousness of the editions de
luxe. The demand for costly books increases year by year. What makes it more
surprising is that while the trade in fine books increases year by year the
demand for cheap ones likewise grows. Within recent years the publication of
books for sale by subscription only has become an important branch of the
business. This kind of publication is becoming more and more popular every year,
and justly so, for it is the only means whereby a large portion of the reading
public are enabled to purchase books, and by the proportionately smaller cost of
large editions reducing the selling price.
Thus we learn that the means by which history is being recorded for future ages
have kept pace with the other mighty forces of which history is made.
William Matthews Handy
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