Possibly, all the work that men have done in building up civilization is like the work that children have done with building blocks. Certainly there are many points of similarity. The mental efforts are similar; and, so far as we can see, the results are similar also. Toy temples have been built of building blocks, and then have been destroyed. Civilizations also have been built and then destroyed. And in the case of both the building blocks and the civilizations, the pleasure seems to come, not from the result achieved, but from an enjoyable expenditure of energy in achieving it. In both cases it has been the inventors who have pointed out the ways in which to expend the energy, and achieve the results.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE RISE OF ELECTRICITY, STEAM AND CHEMISTRY
The invention of the first electrical machine was made by Otto Von Guericke, of Magdeburg, about 1670. It consisted of a sulphur ball, a stick with a point, and a linen thread "an ell or more long," hanging from the stick. The lower end of the thread being made to hang "a thumb breadth distance" from some other body, and the sulphur ball rubbed and brought near the point of the stick, the lower end of the thread moved up to the body. The ball being removed, the lower end of the thread would drop away from the body; so that by moving the ball back and forth, the lower end of the thread would be made to move back and forth simultaneously.
It may be objected that Guericke made no invention, because he did not conceive the idea of making a machine or instrument and did not, in fact, produce one: that he merely made a discovery. The author admits that such an objection would have great reasonableness, and that Guericke's feat is a little hard to class. It is classed by many as an invention, however, and the present author is inclined to class it so; because there seems no reason to doubt that Guericke first conceived the idea of doing what he did do, and that he did produce a device whereby an actual motion of a rubbed ball at one place caused actual motion at another place, through the medium of a current of electricity that traversed a conductor joining the two places. The device is sometimes spoken of as the first telegraph instrument.
Guericke (like Gilbert) was more distinctly an experimenter than an inventor,—and (like Gilbert) his work was not only in electricity, but in most of the other branches of science. Of the two, Guericke seems to have covered a wider field, and to have been more distinctly an inventor. His celebrated experiment of holding two hollow hemispheres together, then exhausting the air from the hollow sphere thus formed, and then demonstrating the force of the atmosphere by showing that sixteen horses could not pull the hemispheres apart, indicates just the kind of clear apprehension of the laws of Nature that characterizes the inventor.
By some, Guericke is esteemed the inventor of the first electric light, because by rubbing a sulphur ball in a dark room he produced a feeble electric illumination. Of Guericke's discoveries and inventions, the only one that has survived as a concrete apparatus is the air pump; but it is doubtful if the direct influence on history of the air pump, great as it has been, has actually been any greater than the indirect influence of his less widely known discoveries and experiments.
Hero's Engines