American inventors echo the dictum of the English physician. Says Mr. Octave Chanute:—“It has taken many men to bring any great invention to perfection, the last successful man adding little to what was previously known. As a rule the basis of his success lies in a thorough acquaintance with what has been done before him, and his setting about his work in a thoroughly scientific way.” Professor W. A. Anthony observes:—“If the army of would-be inventors would enter the field with a full knowledge of what science has already done, the conquest of new territory would be rapidly accomplished.” To the same effect speaks Mr. Leicester Allen:—“While rarely there appears a man so highly endowed by nature with originating faculty that we call his talent genius, it will be found in the last analysis that his inventive power lies, not in some vague, mysterious intuition, but in a logical mind that can draw correct inferences from established premises; in an analytical mind that enables him to reason from correct data, discovering those which are false; in natural and cultivated perceptive faculties that enable him to determine the effect of a given set of conditions, and through exercise of which he is able to place clearly before his mental vision the exact statement or proposition which defines the thing to be accomplished; in the ability to concentrate his attention upon the problem in hand to the exclusion of everything else, for the time being, and a perseverance that will not be denied—that failure cannot wear out.”
Much is Still to be Discovered.
“To many,” says Sir Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge, “scientific knowledge seems to be advancing by leaps and bounds; every day brings its fresh discovery, opening up strange views, turning old ideas upside down. Yet every thoughtful man of science who has looked round on what others beside himself are doing will tell you that nothing weighs more heavily on his mind than this: the multitude of questions crying aloud to be answered, the fewness of those who have at once the ability, the means, and the opportunity of attempting to find the answers. Among the many wants of a needy age, few, if any, seem to him more pressing than that of the adequate encouragement and support of scientific research.” With his own field of science in view he continues: “We want to know more about the causation and spread of disease and about the circumstances affecting health before we can legislate with certainty of success. At home we want to know more about the spread of tubercle, of typhoid fever, and other infectious diseases; we want to know more about the proper means to secure that the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe, should not be channels of disease; we want to know more about the invisible elfic micro-organisms which swarm around us, to learn which are our friends, and which our foes, how to nourish the one, how to defeat the other; we want to know the best way to shield man in the factory and the workshop against the works of man.”
As to the fewness of those who have the highest capacity for original research, who have it in them to add to known truth in a notable way, Professor Simon Newcomb of Washington, the acknowledged dean of science in America, has said:—“It is impressive to think how few men we should have to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. In the seventeenth century there would only have been Galileo, Newton and a few other contemporaries; in the eighteenth, they could almost have been counted on the fingers; and they have not crowded the nineteenth. Even to-day, almost every great institution for scientific research owes its being to some one man, who, as its founder or regenerator, breathed into it the breath of life. If we think of the human personality as comprehending not merely mind and body, but all that the brain has set in motion, then may the Greenwich Observatory of to-day be called Airy; that of Pulkowa, Struve; the German Reichsanstalt, Helmholtz; the Smithsonian Institution, Henry; the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoölogy, Agassiz; the Harvard Observatory, Pickering.”
Planning an Inquiry.
The late Professor Robert H. Thurston, of Cornell University, once said:—“Methods of planning scientific investigation involve, first, the precise definition of the problem to be solved; secondly, they include the ascertainment of ‘the state of the art,’ as the engineer would say, the revision of earlier work in the same and related fields, and the endeavor to bring all available knowledge into relation with the particular case in hand; then the investigator seeks information which will permit him, if possible, to frame some theory or hypothesis regarding the system into which he proposes to carry his experiment, his studies, and his logical work, such as will serve him as a guide in directing his work most effectively.
“The empirical, the imaginative, and even the guess work systems, or perhaps lack of system, have their place in scientific research. The dim Titanic figure of Copernicus seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that overshadow them and catches the first glimpse of the rising sun. But first Copernicus made a shrewd guess, and then followed with mathematical work and confirmation. . . . Kepler, also, was strong almost beyond competition in speculative subtlety and innate mathematical perception. . . . For nineteen years he guessed at the solution of a well-defined problem, finding his speculation wrong every time, until at last a final trial of a last hypothesis gave rise to deductions confirmed by observation. His first guess was that the orbits of the planets were circular, next that they were oval, and last that they were elliptical.”
Pascal, great in what he knew, was great also in what he was. Walter Pater thus depicts his powers:—“Hidden under the apparent exactions of his favorite studies, imagination, even in them, played a large part. Physics, mathematics, were with him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, precocious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work, and his way of painting things that surprised those most able to judge. He might have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it is alleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him from instruction in them.”
No such gift of intuition as that displayed by Pascal fell to the lot of Buffon, who tells us:—“Invention depends on patience. Contemplate your subject long. It will gradually unfold itself, till an electric spark convulses the brain for a moment.”
As to the modes in which invention manifests itself, Mr. William H. Smyth says:—“Examine at random any one of half a dozen lines of mechanical invention, one characteristic common to them all will instantly arrest attention—they present nothing more than a mere outgrowth of the manual processes and machines of earlier times. Some operation, once performed by hand tools, is expedited by a device which enables the foot as well as the hand to be employed. Then power is applied; the hand or foot operation, or both, are made automatic, and possibly, as a still further improvement, several of these automatic devices are combined into one. All the while the fundamental basis is the old, original hand process; hence, except in the extremely improbable event that this was the best possible method, all the successive improvements are simply in the direction, not of real novelty, but of mere modification and multiplication. The most important and radical departures from old methods, by which many of the industries of the world have been completely revolutionized, are nearly always originated by persons wholly ignorant of the accepted practice in the particular industry concerned. The first and most important prerequisite to invention is an absolutely clear insight into, and a comprehensive grasp of, all the conditions involved in the problem. A scheme for the cultivation of invention should in part include:—(1) Accurate and methodical observation. (2) Cultivation of memory and the faculty of association. (3) Cultivation of clear visualization. (4) Logical reasoning from actual observation. The course should include exercises in drawing from simple objects, and the solution of a simple problem, such as that of a can-soldering machine.”