WRITING BY MACHINE
In one sense we have taken up the various machines employed in printing in reverse order. Of course the first machine used is the typewriter, after which comes the composing machine, and finally the press.
It was in 1866 that two inventors, C. Latham Sholes and Samuel W. Soule, undertook to make a machine for printing numbers in serial order upon the pages of a blankbook. Carlos Glidden, another inventor, who was engaged in developing a spading machine designed to take the place of a plow, saw their work and suggested that they make their machine write letters and words as well as numbers. The three combined and proceeded to evolve the new machine. By the end of the summer of 1867 they had produced a typewriting machine that could be operated fairly rapidly and that produced fair work. It was one of the letters written by this machine that brought James Densmore into the enterprise. He furnished the money needed to improve the crude typewriter and make it a commercial machine. Many models were built but nothing was produced that seemed good enough for commercial production. This development work was too slow and discouraging for Soule and Glidden and they dropped out, but Sholes inspired by Densmore persevered until at last in 1873 he had produced a machine which he could offer for manufacture. The typewriter was then taken to the Remington factory at Ilion, N. Y., and the next year it was placed on the market and began its public career.
Such is the story of the early development of the typewriter. It has become so widely used and is so indispensable a part of the business office that it arouses the utmost astonishment to learn that there still are a few old-fashioned houses so conservative and so far behind that they continue to write their business letters with the pen. So common a machine, it is hardly necessary for us to describe in detail except to mention two steps in the development of the machine, namely the arrangement of the type bars whereby the typewriting is visible to the typist, and secondly the effort to overcome noise by limiting the stroke of the type bar and making it impinge upon the paper with a pressure stroke rather than a hammer blow.
A recent development is the “stenotype,” a small machine which prints shorthand characters, thus expediting the taking of rapid dictation.
CHAPTER XX
CAST IRON, WROUGHT IRON, AND STEEL
IT USED to be that wars were fought for gold, but nowadays the possession of rich iron mines is enough to arouse the cupidity of neighboring nations less favored by nature. In fact, even though an ounce of gold is worth twice as much as a ton of iron, the value of the iron we dig out of the earth each year is far greater than that of gold. When that rough ore is converted into iron and steel and then into thousands of useful articles, its value mounts so high that it cannot be estimated. The qualities of iron and its alloys are so excellent and so varied under different treatment that this metal may truly be said to form the foundation of all our mechanical progress. On the one hand it spans our wide rivers, carries the burden of heavy freight trains, or, in the form of armor plate, resists the terrific impact of high-powered shells; on the other hand the same metal, spun into a hair spring, governs the ship’s chronometer, or, in the compass, points a trembling finger to guide the navigator on his course.