Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery

by George Iles

Early Talent in Construction.

An inventor is a man of unusual powers. To begin with he is cast in a larger mold than ordinary men; he has keener eyes, more skilful hands, a better knitting quality of brain. In his heart he believes every engine, machine, and process to be improvable without limit. He is thoroughly dissatisfied with things as they are and alert to detect where an old method can be bettered, or a gift wholly new be conferred on mankind, as in the telephone or the phonograph. His uncommon faculty of observation we have had occasion to remark. Another talent as much in evidence, and quite irrepressible even in early life, impels him to make, weave, and build. Invariably the man who has added to the resources of architecture, engineering, machine design, has begun as a boy in repeating the rabbit-hutches, windmills, and whittled sailing craft of bigger boys. This means that he soon acquires a mastery of chisel, plane, and drill, that the lathe becomes as obedient to him as his own hand. Watt, Maudslay, Stephenson, and every peer they ever had, could go to the bench and make a valve, a mitre-wheel, a link-motion just as imaged in their mind’s eye. Lacking this dexterity other men, occasionally fertile in good ideas, never bring them to the birth.

While inventors owe their talents to nature, these talents need sound training, if at a master’s hands, so much the better. Just as the best place to learn how to paint, is the studio of a great artist, so the best school for ingenuity is the workshop of a great inventor. Maudslay, who devised the slide-rest for lathes, and Clement, who designed the first rotary planer, were trained by Bramah, who invented the famous hydraulic press, and locks of radically new and excellent pattern. Whitworth, who created lathes of new refinement, who established new and exact standards of measurement in manufacturing, was trained by Maudslay; so was Nasmyth, who devised the steam hammer. Mr. Edison in his laboratory and workshop has called forth the ingenuity of many an assistant who has since won fame and fortune by independent work.

But as a rule inventors, like the vast brotherhood of other men, must toil by themselves, and get what good they can out of unaided diligence. Cobbett used to say that he thought with the point of his pen; the very act of writing lifted into consciousness many an idea which otherwise had died stillborn. Beethoven, like all other great tone-poets, would play a few bars as they came to his imagination, and while he touched the keys the music, as if with pinions of its own, took such heavenly flights as those of the Fifth Symphony. In just this mode while an inventor is shaping a new model he feels how he can better its lines, give it a simpler design than he first intended. His hands and eyes think as well as his brain; while lever, link, and cam unite together they suggest how they may be more compactly built, more effectively joined. His partner, the discoverer, is under the same spell with regard to some long-standing puzzle of rock, or plant, or star. Because in his soul he believes nature to be intelligible to her very core, he is sure that this particular puzzle can be fathomed, and he keeps thinking day by day of possible solutions. At other times, and even during sleep, his brain is subconsciously at work upon his problem, bringing to view promising points for attack. With new light he is bold enough to say, this problem can be solved by me. At last dawns the happy morning when he verifies a shrewd guess, or when a crucial experiment stamps a theory as proven truth, indispensable aid having arisen as one attempt, through baffling failure, suggested the next. All boys and girls are the better, happier, more useful when they are early and thoroughly trained to use their eyes, ears, and hands; to the inventor and discoverer this training opens a career which otherwise is denied.

Among the greatest of the sons of men who have united the faculties of invention and discovery stands Sir Isaac Newton. As with his compeers we find that his art as an inventor was but the flower of his handicraft as a mechanic.

Sir Isaac Newton almost from the cradle was a builder. His biographer, Sir David Brewster, says:—

Newton as a Boy—A Tireless Constructor.

“He had not been long at school before he exhibited a taste for mechanical inventions. With the aid of little saws, hammers, hatchets, and tools of all sorts, he was constantly occupied during his play hours in the construction of models of known machines, and amusing contrivances. The most important pieces of mechanism which he thus constructed, were a windmill, a water-clock, and a carriage to be moved by the person who sat in it. When a windmill was in course of being erected near Grantham, Sir Isaac frequently watched the operations of the workmen, and acquired such a thorough knowledge of its mechanism, that he completed a working model of it, which Dr. Stukely says was as clean and curious a piece of workmanship as the original. This model was frequently placed on the top of the house in which he lived at Grantham, and was put in motion by the action of the wind upon its sails. In calm weather, however, another mechanical agent was required, and for this purpose a mouse was put in requisition, which went by the name of miller.

“The water-clock constructed by Sir Isaac was a more useful piece of mechanism than his windmill. It was made out of a box which he begged from Mrs. Clark’s brother, and, according to Dr. Stukely, to whom it was described by those who had seen it, it resembled pretty much our common clocks and clock-cases, but was less in size, being about four feet in height, and of a proportional breadth. There was a dial-plate at top with figures of the hours. The index was turned by a piece of wood, which either fell or rose by water dropping.

“The mechanical carriage which Sir Isaac is said to have invented, was a four-wheeled vehicle, and was moved with a handle or winch wrought by the person who sat in it. We can find no distinct information respecting its construction or use, but it must have resembled a Merlin’s chair, which is fitted to move only on the smooth surface of a floor, and not overcome the inequalities of a common road.