Invention: The Master-key to Progress

by Bradley A. Fiske

Possibly the greatest single impetus given to progress about the year 1800 was that given by Lavoisier shortly before, which started the science of chemistry on the glorious career it has since pursued. As a separate branch of science, chemistry then began, though it had been the subject of investigation for many centuries, beginning in Egypt and the other ancient countries of the East. In the Middle Ages, it was known in Europe by the name Alchemy. Originally, and in all the long ages of its infancy, the investigations of the experimenters were carried on mainly to discover new remedies in medicine, or to learn methods to transmute base metals into precious metals; though there was a considerable degree also of pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. As a result of the investigations, many startling facts were developed, and many discoveries were made; but, for the reason that the investigations were not conducted on the mathematical or quantitative lines that had led to so much success in developing physics, alchemy or chemistry did not rest on any sure basis, and therefore had no fixed place to start from. It was in the same vague status that some subjects of thoughtful speculation are in today, such as telepathy, which may (or may not) be put on a basis of fact some day, and started forward thence, as chemistry was started.

What gave chemistry its basis was the methods introduced by Lavoisier who was a practiced physicist. He introduced the balance into the study of chemistry, and raised it instantly from a collection of speculations to an exact science, capable of progressing confidently and assuredly thereafter, instead of wandering in a maze. Lavoisier gave chemistry a mathematical basis to start from, and sure beacon lights to guide it; and though many changes in its theory have been made from time to time, they have been due only to increase of knowledge and not to departure from fundamental principles. Finding that a substance was not an element, but was a compound of two elements, or more than two, did not require any rejection of accepted principles, but merely a readjustment.

We now see that it was impossible because of the exact nature of the way in which the various elements combine, that chemistry could have become a science until the balance had been used to weigh the substances investigated; and we also see that it was impossible that the balance could have been so used until physics had been developed to the point permitting it, and men skilled in exact measurements had been brought up by practice in physical researches. Lavoisier himself had served a long apprenticeship, and his earliest claim to fame was his mathematical researches on heat, embodied in an essay, written in connection with Laplace, and published in 1784. Even after an enormous mass of facts had been collected and announced, chemistry could not take her place by the side of physics, and Bacon's teachings could not be followed, until those facts had been mathematically investigated, and their mathematical relations to each other had been established. This Lavoisier and his followers did.

No better illustration of the influence of invention on history can be found than the fact that chemistry hovered in the dim twilight of speculation, guess-work and even superstition, until Lavoisier brought to bear the various inventions made in physics. Then, presto, the science of chemistry was born.

We must not let the fact escape us, however, that Lavoisier would have left mankind none the wiser, if he had merely brought mathematical research to bear and discovered what he did, and then stopped. If he had stopped then, his knowledge would have remained locked inside of his own mind, useless. The good work that Lavoisier actually did was in actually producing an invention; in conceiving a certain definite method of chemical research, then embodying it in such a concrete form that "persons skilled in the art could make and use it," and then giving it to the world.

The first important effect of Lavoisier's work was the announcement by Dalton about 1808 of his Atomic Theory, which has been the basis of most of the work of chemistry ever since. Dalton's earlier work had been in physics, and its principal result had been "Dalton's Laws" in regard to the evaporation and expansion of gases, announced by him about 1801. These investigations led his mind to the consideration of the various speculations that had been entertained concerning the nature of matter itself, as distinguished from the actions and reactions between material objects that physics studies; and they brought him to the conclusion that there are certain substances or elements which combine together to form compounds that are wholly different from each of the elements (oxygen and hydrogen, for instance, combining to form water); and that those elements are made up of units absolutely indivisible, which combine with each other in absolutely exact proportions. The units he called atoms. He built up a theory wonderfully convincing and coherent, that explained virtually all the chemical phenomena then known, and supplied a stepping-stone following Lavoisier's, from which chemists could advance still further. Dalton classified certain substances as elements which we now know are not elements, because they have been found since to be compounds of two or more elements; but this in itself does not disprove his theory, because he himself pointed out that means might be found later to decompose certain materials that seemed then to be elements, because no means had then been found to decompose them.

It may be instructive to note here that Dalton was not the first to imagine that certain forms of matter were elemental, or that matter was indivisible beyond a certain point, or that substances entered into combination with each other in definite proportions. Speculation on all these points had been rife for many years, but it had not produced the invention of any workable law or even theory. Similarly, many men later speculated on the possibility of devising an electrical instrument that would transform the mechanical energy of sound waves into electrical energy, transfer the electrical energy over a wire, and re-convert it into sound; but no one succeeded in producing such an instrument, until Bell invented the telephone in 1876.

History is a record of acts, and not of dreams. And yet the greatest acts were dreamed of before they were performed. Every process, no matter how small or how great, seems to proceed by three stages—conception, development and production. Most of our acts are almost automatic, and the three stages succeed each other so quickly that only the final stage itself is noted. But the greatest acts, from which great results have followed, have begun with the conception of a picture not of an ordinary kind, such as a great campaign, a new machine, a novel theory, a book, painting, statue or edifice:—then a long process of development, during which the conception is gradually embodied in some concrete form, as, for instance, a statue, a painting or an instrument;—and then production. Finis opus coronat, the end crowns the work; but the work is not crowned until it is finished, and a concrete entity has been brought forth.

Lavoisier finished his work. Not only did he dream a dream, but he embodied his dream in a definite form, and gave it to mankind to use. Dalton did similarly. This does not mean that their work was not improved upon thereafter, or that they invented the chemistry of today. They merely laid the foundation of chemistry, and placed the first two stones.

A remarkable exemplar of the meaning of this declaration was Benjamin Thomson, who was an American by birth, but who entered the Austrian Army after the War of the Revolution, and made an unprecedented record in the application of physical and chemical science to the relief of the distressed and ignorant and poor, especially the mendicant classes. For his services he was made Count Rumford. His researches were mostly in the line of saving heat and light, and therefore saving food and fuel. He ascertained by experiments of the utmost ingenuity and thoroughness that the warmth of clothing was because of the air entangled in its fibers; he investigated the radiation, conduction and convection of heat, analyzed the ways in which heat could be economized, and invented a calorimeter for testing the heat-giving value of different fuels. In 1798 he had noted the fact that heat was developed when cannon were being bored. He immediately conceived the idea that the heat developed was related to the amount of work expended driving the boring tool, and invented a means of measuring it. This consisted simply of a blunt boring tool that pressed into a socket in a metal block that was immersed in water, of which the temperature could be taken. To get a basis for his investigations into the problem of lighting economically the dwellings of the poor, Rumford invented a photometer for measuring illumination. No man in history shows more clearly the co-working of a high order of imagination, and a careful and accurate constructiveness; and no man ever secured more intensely practical and beneficent results. In the hospital at Verona he reduced the consumption of fuel to one-eighth.