Invention: The Master-key to Progress

by Bradley A. Fiske

Leupold's Engine

In 1765, James Watt made the very great improvement of providing a condenser separate from the cylinder of the engine, so that the great loss of heat caused by cooling the cylinder and then heating it at each stroke was wholly avoided. He covered the cylinder entirely, and surrounded it with an external cylinder kept always full of steam, that maintained the cylinder at a high temperature. The steam, instead of being condensed within the cylinder, after it had done its work, was allowed to escape into the condenser. To facilitate this action, the condenser was fitted with an air-pump that maintained a good vacuum in it.

In 1769, Watt invented an improvement that consisted mainly of means whereby the supply of steam to the cylinder could be shut off at any desired part of the stroke, and the steam allowed to complete the rest of the stroke by virtue of its expansive force. This invention increased tremendously the efficiency of the engine: that is, the amount of work done with a given amount of steam.

During all this time, Watt had realized that virtually all the work was done on the down stroke, and none on the up stroke, and also realized that it would be highly desirable to devise an apparatus whereby the reciprocating motion of the piston could be converted into a rotary motion. Watt was able to accomplish both feats, and to connect the bottom and top of the cylinder alternately with the condenser and boiler by a simple mechanism driven by a wheel rotated by the engine. The result was the reciprocating steam engine in its main features, as it exists today.

The influence of Hero's invention on history is not direct, because his engine has never been employed for any industrial purpose. But Hero's engine has had an enormous influence on history, nevertheless, because it supplied the basis on which the steam engine of the last two centuries has rested. The influence of Hero's invention was not realized until two thousand years after he had died, and until after all those men had died whose names have just been mentioned. It is inconceivable that any of those men could really have expected that their work was to have even a small fraction of the influence on mankind that it actually has had. The influence of Watt's work became visible to some degree before he died, and became clearly visible not very long after he had died; so clearly visible that by many men Watt is credited with the invention of the steam engine. But his good work was built on the good work of his predecessors, whose main work was in making Watt's work possible. The successive feats of all, like the successive layers in the foundations of any building, were to support, in time, the whole superstructure of the great and beneficent science of steam engineering.

But the work done by these men was not all the work that had to be done, to make Watt's steam engine the efficient machine it was. These men were the men who are directly to be credited, but they were not the only men engaged. Neither did they belong to the only class of men engaged. There was another class of men whose labors were equally arduous, and equally important, though not so clearly in evidence—the physicists, as we now call them. It was by the knowledge which they gleaned regarding the properties of steam and air and water and iron, regarding the laws of motion and heat and work and force and weight and mass, that the inventors' experiments were guided. It is true that the science of physics was then in its infancy, as we realize with the knowledge of the science today; but Aristotle in the days of Greece, and Archimedes and Hero later, and Galileo and many others in Italy—as well as Guericke in Germany, Newton and Gilbert in England, and others of less note, had evolved a good deal of order out of what had been chaos, and had given inventors a great deal of firm ground on which to stand themselves and raise their structures. And reciprocally, the inventors found themselves confronted with problems of a kind that gave opportunities for the physicists to show their skill and knowledge.

Thus were opened up promising avenues of investigation, and not only of investigation, but of invention also. For it is obvious that, while investigation and experimentation can hardly fail to secure data, they may secure nothing else, and usually do. But mere data are mere facts; and, valuable as they are if suitably classified, they are not valuable unless they are classified; and even after data are classified, they are not useful until some use is found for them. The data in card-indexes are mere unrelated facts, and are almost useless, until they have been classified and arranged in boxes alphabetically labeled. Then they are useful whenever any use is found; when, for instance, some one is seeking information on a certain subject. In this condition, data are like material substances, in that they are available for use,—in fact, data are often spoken of by writers as "material"; a certain series of incidents, for instance, supply "material" for a story. Now, just as pieces of iron and brass supply material with which an inventor can create a new machine, so classified facts, or data, supply material with which an inventive investigator can create a new theory, or formulate a new law.

Our books on physics are full of accounts of experiments and investigations conducted by such men as Hero, Archimedes, Gilbert, Galileo and many others, the consequent discoveries that they made, and the consequent laws that they enunciated; but those books could not possibly describe all the investigations that have ever been made. Those which they describe are those that ended in some definite creations, such as the hydrostatic law enunciated by Archimedes. Most investigations, experiments and researches have ended in nothing definite:—most of them, in all probability, have not even established facts. The investigations that we studied about when boys were such as those of Archimedes, that presented us with inventions, in the form of useful and usable laws. No appreciable difference is apparent between the mental operations of Archimedes in inventing these laws and his mental operations in inventing his screw: for in both cases the mental operations consisted mainly in conceiving an idea and then embodying it. The Archimedean screw was a machine of an entirely new kind that, in the hands of a man understanding its use, would enable the man to do something he could not do before—or enable him to do a thing he could do before, but do it better. So were his laws. The laws have been utilized ever since, as definite and concrete devices; and to a much greater extent than the special form of screw that he invented.

In a like way, all the laws that investigators have put into concrete and usable form, have been used by other investigators as bases for further investigations, and by inventors as bases for future inventions. Even the inventor of the fist-hammer had to know something about the material which he employed; he had to know that it was hard and heavy, for instance, and that it could be hammered so as to have a point and a sharp edge. He had to know also something about the flesh of a man: he had to know that if his flesh was struck with a sharp hard instrument, it would be bruised, and the man injured, and maybe killed. Similarly, the inventor of the gun, and the inventor of printing, and the inventors of steam engines, had to know a good deal about the materials which they employed, and about the uses to which their appliances could be put. Naturally, they had to know much more than did the inventor of the fist-hammer. But the inventor of today has to know still more, because there is still more to know. An inventor of the present day who knew no more about physical science than Galileo did would not be able to go far.

A like remark may be made about any man in any vocation, as compared with his predecessor in Galileo's time. The machine of civilization is so vast and so complex, that the amount of knowledge which anyone of us needs in mere daily life is almost incredible. Let anyone try to enumerate all the facts he knows! The attempt will convince him quickly.