Trying out chemical compounds without knowing something of the reactions they produce is far more wasteful of time and money than puttering around with mechanical and electrical devices, especially when one’s line of business is selling ribbons, and besides it’s more or less dangerous too.
Should you get an idea for making an explosive more powerful than any yet invented, either dish the idea or pave the way by taking a course in advanced chemistry and even then your idea is liable to perish with you. Better let the Maxims or the du Ponts do it.
Fig. 9. A COMMON ELECTRIC BELL
Ideas for Electrochemical Inventions.—Just as there are ideas that call for the use of mechanics and electricity in a single device so there are ideas for processes that combine both chemistry and electricity.
The action of a common dry cell is electrochemical and so is electroplating. But there are a large number of chemicals and chemical substances that are produced by electricity such as nitric acid from the air, calcium carbide from which acetylene gas is made, carborundum which is used as an abrasive in the place of emery, and then there is the electrolytic refining of copper, the manufacture of aluminum, besides a whole string of other electrochemical inventions.
Fig. 10. AN ORDINARY TELEGRAPH SOUNDER
While it is quite safe to work along electrochemical lines still it takes a considerable amount of technical knowledge in these days to invent anything that the kultured German scientists haven’t thought of and worked out.
Protecting your Raw Ideas.—Just as soon as you have an idea for an invention write as clear a description of it as you can, read it to the members of your family, have them sign it and file it away as this is a record you may have to produce sometime in the future to prove your priority, that is that you were the first in time to conceive the idea.