If an inventor by any one invention shortened the hours of labor in an aggregate amount equivalent to a lifetime of his own work for the community, he ought to be relieved of the necessity of himself doing further work. If the invention were clearly due to inventive skill and not to accident, it would be to the interest of the industry in which he was engaged to furnish him with a laboratory where he could experiment with a view to further invention, as the General Electric Company does for its inventors and Mr. Westinghouse for his. There is not one inventor in a hundred but would laboriously avail of such an opportunity; for the delight of an inventor is to invent. So inventors would constitute one of the Honor group of the community. They would receive during their lives the consideration due to their inventiveness and industry. At present the enormous majority of inventors die poor and unknown. Of all the inventors in America only three that I know of are rich, Westinghouse, Bell, and Edison. Practically all the rest have been victims of their own inventive faculty. Who knows the name of the inventor of the slot machine so much in vogue to-day? His name was Percival Everitt, and he died a pauper in the street.
But we need not have recourse to argument to demonstrate that pecuniary reward is not necessary to stimulate invention. There is one profession in which a germ of self-respect has established the rule that no discovery or invention shall receive pecuniary reward—the medical profession. No doctor who wants to keep or earn a standing patents a medicine or surgical instrument. Those who do so are at once ostracized. Medicine or surgical inventions are deemed by self-respecting doctors too important to the community for the inventor to limit their use by patent.
If this idea of social service to-day animates the medical profession, why should it not ultimately animate other professions, other industries, other occupations? Why should it not animate them all?
Another profession has furnished the elements for all invention and has never asked a pecuniary reward—I mean the teachers. If, for example, we take such a subject as electricity, it will be found that all the fundamental discoveries that enable the modern use of electricity are due entirely to the researches of men who, out of sheer love of the work, added research to the occupations for which they were paid. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to discover the use of glass as a non-conductor of electricity. Galvani and Volta, who gave their names—one to Galvanic, and the other to Voltaic electricity—were professors in Italy. The action of the electric current on a compass needle was discovered by Professor H.O. Oersted in Copenhagen; and the nature of electro-motive force, current strength and resistance, were determined by Professor G.S. Ohm in Holland. But the greatest discoveries of all were made by Faraday, who refused a title in order to remain a professor all the days of his life. Is it possible that with the record of these men before us, we can maintain the theory that gain is the only stimulus to invention? If we think a little, we shall see how essentially childish this notion is.
There are three principal motives for invention:
The desire to make money is one, but my experience of inventors has persuaded me that it is the least, and is only perceptible in inventors of the smallest caliber.
The faculty of invention is itself the determining motive. A man who has a faculty must exercise that faculty or suffer. The artist must paint; the sculptor must sculpt; the musician must make music; the poet must make rhymes. Lowell said that when he had no time to state a proposition carefully in prose, he stated it in rhyme.
No one who has worked with inventors would be guilty of the error that inventors need the stimulus of money reward. The mind of the inventor teems with inventions as a herring at spawning season teems with spawn. And as the herring must relieve herself of her spawn so must the inventor relieve himself of his inventions. One great inventor of the present day was in 1883 so fertile that the company who had secured his exclusive services paid him to go to Europe and stop inventing in order to avoid the ruinous expense of taking out his patents. The inventor is driven by two forces: a function that insists upon being exercised, and the pleasure which this exercise occasions. Every man who can do a thing well loves doing that thing. To-day when athletics bring notoriety it is very natural to conclude that men row to get this notoriety. But in the old days when there was little or no notoriety, men who could row, rowed for the pleasure of it; men who could box, boxed for the pleasure of it. So to-day because a few inventors—a very few—have become wealthy, the conclusion is drawn that inventors invent only to make money. It is a pardonable fallacy, but one that it takes very little intellectual effort to explode.
A man gifted with curiosity and imagination will forget altogether the needs of the body in his effort to attain his end. Inventors are notoriously improvident. Bernard Palissy not only forgot to eat, but to furnish food to his wife and children. Nay, he not only starved himself and them, but burned his furniture to the last chair in his desperate efforts to get the glaze he was in search of. A chemist will forget mealtime and bedtime in his laboratory. There is no force in the world more compelling than the force of an idea; none to which the body is under a more complete subjection. An inventor in pursuit of a solution needs no more stimulus than a stag in the rutting season in pursuit of his doe. The theory that he does, and that it is the stimulus of money that he needs, is that of the amateur who has never seen an inventor at work, or of the bookkeeper who reduces everything—body, mind, soul, and heart—to dollars and cents.
An inventor may have been compelled to abandon research by the necessity of making money or by the difficulty of finding it. Many an one has been crushed by just such difficulties as these; and indeed it may justly be said that more inventions are lost to us by the money difficulty than are secured to us by the stimulus of a money reward.