Evening Star Newspaper, April 7, 1929, Page 89

ILLUSTRATED 'FEATURES Part 7—8 Pages MAGAZINE SECTION The Sunday Star. WASHINGTON, D. €., SUNDAY MORNING, APRIL 7, 1929. Results of Inventors’ Dreams Assembled on Miles of Shelves White steamer automo- bile of 1901, The Berliner grama- * phone of 1887. Morse telcgrra‘ph receiving and recording apparatus of 1837. Progress—Exhibits May Have Little BY DON GLASSMAN. ESTERDAY we walked through the Patent Office and counted 120 linear miles of shelves supporting records of 1,800,000 in- ventions. Next month it will be 120.5 miles, next year 125 miles and by 2029 A.D. the shelvage will have stretched to 500 miles! . 7 This savage attack on human comprehension of achievements and distances is the sensational commentary on our national culture. A broad land and its heterogeneous life has yielded nothing more American than this museum of inventive progress. ‘More space, longer shelves, higher shelves, new rooms and build- ings. A million-dollar invention may occupy cne and one-half inches of shelf: A $50,000,000 invention may rate five inches. Reckon ap- proximately $1,000,000 to an inch. Multiply 63,000 inches to the rough mile times 120 times $1,000,000 and the estimation of America’s material wealth yesterday approximates $7,560,000,000,000. If steel is the barometer of bank e balances, the kilowatt hour rises with |in zcientific theory and ignorant of industrial progress, the inchage of |laboratory practice. shelves in the Patent Office is equal| “As a matter of fact, the great in- to the number of millions that Yankee | ventors more often took little note of genius has coined on this earth. In- | established theories in physics and me- ventive' economics! chanics. Of course, the one outstand- Pigures, facts and mileage do ot |ing exception is radio. which grew out compose the epic of American inven-|of the Hertzian wave theory.” tion. Why do the Patent Office shelves | Examine the 1,800,000 inventions on groan? Not from the tonnage of print- | file and you will find certain mind cre- | ¢ ed paper, but from the staggering|ations which blaze brilliantly as the weight of ideas, dreams, imagin mainsprings of progress. They are rel- and hallucinations that streaked and |atively few, and the evidence tends to creative minds. Where? | show that they are the main trunks flashed In ettics, shelves, barns, basements, | from which, later, minor developments risons and sheds. The spark of bril- | have stemmed. The fundamental in- E.‘nu is kindled in the lowliest hovels. ventions served not only as material The down-at-the-heel, frayed-at-the- | foundations, but as stimuli for awaken- collar inventor still flourishes in these | ing dormant talent. States. Great laboratories and research * ko tional trait that it is better tected and esteemed higher here tion, the Patent Office Has Become Great Museum of Material Represented Are of Incalculable Weight—Many Mind Creations Blaze Brilliantly as Main- springs of National Life. institutions offer improvements, Sd 8. | ¥NVENTION in America is such a na- brake and the Wright brothers' air- plane; in telephony, *én‘n telephone i “The Genius of Invention,” a painting in the Fatent Office Library. Replica of Edison’s basic patent on in- candescent lamp. N €8 Bulk, But Ideas and Berliner’s transmitter; in warfare, Colt's. revolver and Holland's subma- rine; in phonography, Edison’s talking machine and Berliner's lateral disk rds; in moving pictures, “Edison’s Kkinetoscope and Jenkins projector and so on. The list might be quadrupled and thus include practically every tions form the grand facade to a monu- ment of American ingenuity. Making a selection of basic invention: is not fraught with as much difficulty as simply naming the first achievement of ma teresting essay on “Invention and Dis- leovery" Abraham Lincoln said: “Man'’s first discovery was his naked- ness. “His first invention was the fig-leaf apron; this simple article, the apron, made of leaves, seems to e been the origin of clothing, and the most im- tion with clothing was spinning and weaving.” - A million people hat fire with drills and bows,” . Another authority claims that man's first invention was the al- phabet, by which he learned to record . But this was a very advanced | creation, although it seems to have been invented as far back as 4,000 years iuo by the Phoenicians. e S e e it invent ive peti- tioned the Phoenician patent office for ¢ | upon it, shall not equal the hundredth part of what is exerted by the wind on the same place. And yet it has not be- come proportionately valuable as a mo- in any other country. And so popular | the that statesmen, prosateurs and poets have embraced it for both pleasure and it Mwnn are these fundamental inven- tions? In agriculture, Whitney’s cot- ton gin and McCormick's reaper; u'rl matnspring of invention. Or 70 inven- Harmonic reed used by Alexander Graham Bell in perfecting the telephone. In a little-known, but intensely in- | contradicts himself. All that is known was summed up by Lincoln thus: “All creation is a mine and every “In the beginning the mine was un- opened, and the miner stood naked and knowledgeless upon it. “Pishes, birds, beasts and creeping | things are not miners, but feeders and lodgers merely. Beavers build houses, but they build them in nowise differ- | ently or better now than they did T 5,000 years ago. Man is not the only animal that la- bors, but he is the only one who im- proves his workmanship. “Of all the forces of nature I should think the wind contains the largest amount of motive power, that is, power to move things. Take, for instance, II- linois; all the power exerted by water over and portant_improvement made in connec-' 'HAT was the Emancipator talking, not as a rail splitter, or a presiden- tial candidate, or a court ad as one who himself had received I patent for an invention. Lincoln spoke before the Golden Age ! to metals, At that time, the wt.nlzmln. After perfecting his vacuum of Mechanics. patents granted American inventors was about 80,000. In the 50 | thread so that it glowed behind sealed ,~ | glass walls for 40 hours. Thus the first ‘ashing- | usable electric lamp. years beginning with 1870, 000 patents were issued fro Britain, Yankee ingeunity, issued 500, the same interval. an untamed, unhar- discoveries made will be the taming and harnessing “The use of steam power is a'modern to to clothes—from the pipes of orchestra—{rom a crooked from echoes to phonographs—trumpet to telephone—slavery to freedom—appear- ance to fact—and fear to reason!™ Aladdin’s lamp threw no such light as | | electricity sheds on mankind. What | difference, then? Aladdin rubbed a | ]amp, whereas, we push a button. The paternity of electricity is, long and involved. A German monk was Prof. Charles Manly's airpiane radial gas engine. The Duryea gasoline automobile oi 1893. l—p_low-—rmm hieroglyphics to printing— | | found. More than 6.000 vegetable | trical devices. | growths were tried out. Everything | | carbonizable was substituted. One hot | captain: “Should you hear of the tele- | day Edison picked up a paim leaf fan |graph as a wonder of the world, re- i It was the most powerful for its weight in 1903. Y : - of this innovation, but didn't believe.| Thus, with an enviable training in Three thousand officials chartered a |art and ro background in science, he | special train and came to be convinced. | was struck by the strange idea of elec- sto They saw. Edison conquered. | trical communication. He But paper carbon broke down too | sketching human figures in his notebook easily. Some other substance must be | and filled it with sketches of crude elec- ed in New York he told the As he la: bothered by birds eating his grain, so he | and noticed it was bound with a strip | member that the discovery was made | devised a machine to electrocute the | of bamboo. { vandals, Some years later, a famous | { anything he had used heretofore. Then | of science and beset by poverty, he la- telegraph operator was bothered by cockroaches eating his lunch. He killed the pests by electrocuting them, too. That was Thomas A. Edison. Europe studied electricity for many years be- fore Franklin enchanted a bolt of light- ning and caused deadly current to de- scend from heaven. Theoretically, and on the strength of present knowledge, Ben Franklin should have been killed. But he survived for other work. His experiment marked the marriage cere- mony of two forces, man-made sparks generated in & laboratory and electricity | shot from lightning bolts.. They were the same! { When Viola first demonstrated that | electricity flows in a current, he brought | the invention before Napoleon. But the | Nightmare of Europe shrugged his mili- ftary shoulders and said, “That toy of yours has no earthly value.” Had he | harnessed that “toy,” the Corsican could discovery. Yet as much as 2,000 years | have fought all Europe with a single ago the power of steam was not only ob- | battalion. served but an ingenious toy was made | When the wizard of Menlo Park de- end put in motion by it at Alexandria | clared his intention to invent a small | electric lamp to replace the arc type. in Egypt. “What appears strange is that the in- | his announcement brought farth sighs of ventor of the toy should not perceive that steam would move useful ma- chinery as well as a toy.” { regret that a young man should sacrifice his talents to hopeless tomfoolery. Looking for a substance with a high ' melting point to withstand the white- { hot glow of luminous electricity, he l hit upon carbon. Charred paper mount- ed in an airless glass vessel did not V“““mz'r‘:lmd up more than 8 minutes. He {turned to the metals, abandoned them i for carbon, dropped carbon, came back then returned to .carbon | pump, he managed to char a cotton And over the world, | and the total number granted was probably But when Lincoln wrote, only 150,000 letters patent had been issued on this earth. i ‘We count inventions as Bob Ingersoll | on_board the good ship Sully. Japanese bamboo was better than| No mechanical skill, little knowledge began a $100,000 quest that reflects the | bored on telegraphic communication for | restless spirit of invention. He wanted igrasses and fibers. He sent one man | three years. In 1835 he was appointed a professor of art in the University of to China, others to Cuba, Jamaica,|New York and there met Leonard D. plant eollectors faced death and torture in jungles. But the inventor got his | grasses—bales of grasses. And in the | {end, the original plece of Japanese ' bamboo was the best natural electric | | That was just a laboratory test. At filament. found the whole world over. Next he built the first central light- ing station and power house, the fa- mous Pearl street plant in New York. He slept there on a cot and attended to the thousand details that arose daily out of failures of machinery and in- efficiency of assistants. In one of those laboratory accidents | that always haj it was learned by | e o Y [ £X teacher of deaf mutes. He said: later experiments that if carbon fila- ments were packed in graphite and baked, they glowed better in &’ globe. These were “treated” filaments. Soon Dr. W. D. Coolidge leatried how to make tungsten malleable and the ideal | filament came into use. The old yel- low electric light was replaced by a healthful to the eyes but cuts the housewives’ electric bill in half. The crusade for better lighting has not ceased. The last word, researchers say, will be “cold” light such as comes from a glow-worm. * K ¥ K | Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Cey- Gale, professor of chemistry, who as- !lon, India, Burma and Japan. The sisted in the construction of apparatus. Then Judge Stephen Vail gave him financial assistance. In January, 1838, the first telegraphic message sped over Morse's instrument. It was: “A patient waiter is no loser.” length Congress appropriated $30,000 | for an experimental test between Balti- more and Washington and on May 24, 1844, these words, “What hath God wrought?” leaped & gap of 40 miles and | returned within a few ticks of a watch. * K K X LEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, “If I can make deaf mutes talk I ean make iron talk.” He had held an interest in the musi- cal telegraph, but the dream of speech transmission, the conveyance of human voice emissions, wrapped him in ecstasy. He set about inventing a talking tele~ white glow that ngt only is more |gr aph. Bell lamented: “I do’'not have a sei- A entific knowledge of electricity.” friend replied: “Get it!” And he wrote to his mother: “I am beginning to realize the cares and anx- feties of being an inventor. I had to put off pupils and classes, for flesh and QAMUEL F. B. MORSE was never | blood could not stand much longer such reared to be an inventor.' ‘He was a painter of note and distinction, a member of the British Royal Academy and an acknowledged miniaturist. He won a gold medal in unsmre, Re- turning to Ameriea after studying art in England, he was welcomed home by mm:l;&l;\lfl“ltl in Boston, but no one In 1832 & was returning from Bu- rope on the packet ship Suily. .He spoke with a man named Dr. Charles gt and ol of sxpefiments by the magnet. an of & ents by the Frenchman Ampere. Morse learned that the great Michael Faraday con- sidered the of electricity as in- rd nmunooua.w % !a strain as I have had upon me.” Installed in an attic with a $9-pers week assistant, Thomas A. Watson, Bell et and e iephans. ~ Forty legrap) . . Forty weeks they sweated and groaned, and 40 weeks brought more than a faint squeak from the baby telephone. Imagine what thunderous roar would cut_loose if all the telephone voices in the United States were-to let loose in & single chord! His chance came during the Centen~ nial tion . He exhibif from a small table in the 3