The vital mechanism in the production of this power is the dynamo, and it is to Charles F. Brush, of Cleveland, Ohio, that its development is principally due. He was interested in electricity from his earliest years, and when he was only thirteen, distinguished himself by making magnetic machines and batteries for the Cleveland high-school, where he was a pupil. During his senior year, the physical apparatus of the school laboratory was placed under his charge, and he constructed an electric motor having its field magnets as well as its armature excited by the electric current. He devised an apparatus for turning on the gas in the street lamps of Cleveland, lighting it and turning it off again, thus doing away with the expensive process of lighting them and turning them out by hand.
After graduating from the University of Michigan with the degree of mining engineer, he returned to Cleveland, where, in 1875, his attention was drawn to the great need of a more effective dynamo than the clumsy and inefficient types then in use. In two months, Brush had made a dynamo so perfect in every way that it was running until taken to the Chicago Exposition, in 1893. Six months more of experimenting resulted in the Brush arc light, and in 1879 the Brush Electric Company was organized. A year later, the first Brush lights were installed in New York City, and now there is scarcely a town in the country which does not pay tribute to the inventor.
Let us turn for a moment from the field of electricity, in which America has been pre-eminent, to another in which Yankee ingenuity has also led the world—the railroad. It was in this country that the sleeping-car, the diner, the parlor-car were first used; no other country affords such luxury of travel; and no other country has added to railroading any device comparable in importance to the invention of George Westinghouse, the air-brake. Before its introduction, to stop a train brakes must be set painfully by hand, and even then were not always effective. Now, the engineer, by pulling a single lever, sets the brakes instantly all along his train, and so effectively that the passengers sometimes feel as though the train had struck a rock. More than that, should any accident occur, breaking the train in two, the brakes are instantly set automatically. All of which is done by the power of compressed air, working through a series of pipes and air-hose beneath the cars.
George Westinghouse's father was superintendent of the Schenectady Agricultural Works, and it was there that the boy found his vocation. Before he was fifteen, he had modelled and built a steam engine, and followed that with a steel railroad frog, which was so great an improvement over the frogs then in use that it was soon widely adopted, and brought the young inventor both money and reputation. He moved to Pittsburgh, as the centre of the iron and steel business, and began the manufacture of his frogs there.
One day he came across a newspaper account of the successful use of compressed air in the digging of the Mont Cenis tunnel, in Switzerland, and the thought occurred to him that perhaps a railroad train could be controlled by the same agency. He worked over the problem for a time, but when he mentioned his idea to his friends, they were inclined to think it absurd to suppose that a rubber-tube strung along under the cars could work the brakes effectively. However, Westinghouse was not discouraged, but continued to experiment, and the air-brake as we have it to-day was the result.
Which brings us to the most remarkable genius in the field of invention the world has ever known—the man who has made invention, as it were, a business, whose life has been devoted to rendering practical and useful the dreams of other men, who has reduced invention to a science—Thomas Alva Edison. There are some who are inclined to belittle Edison's achievements because some of the greatest of them have been founded upon the ideas of others. He is best known, for instance, as the inventor of the modern incandescent light; but the discovery that light may be obtained from wire heated to incandescence in a glass bulb from which the air has been exhausted, was made when Edison was only two years old. Experiments with this light were made by a dozen scientists, but it remained a mere laboratory curiosity until Edison took hold of it, and with a patience, ingenuity and fertility of resource, in which he stands alone, made it a practicable, efficient and convenient source of light. That the incandescent light, as it is known to-day, is his through and through cannot be questioned.
It is as a scientific inventor that Edison likes to be known. He abhors the word discoverer, as applied to himself. "Discovery is not invention," he once said. "A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident, while an invention is purely deductive. In my own case, but few, and those the least important, of my inventions, owed anything to accident. Most of them have been hammered out after long and patient labor, and are the result of countless experiments all directed toward attaining some well-defined object."
There is, however, one modern marvel for which Edison is wholly responsible, both for the initial idea and for its practical working-out—the phonograph—but let us tell something of his early life, before we relate the achievements of his manhood.