Nobel died in 1896, at the age of 63; after providing legacies to relatives and friends he left about $12,000,000, its income to be annually divided into fifths, each fifth to be awarded for the most important discovery or improvement in chemistry, physics, physiology, or medicine, and for the work in literature highest in the ideal sense. In distributing these prizes no considerations of nationality prevail.
Invention Organized.
In these days of organization, the career of the inventor takes on a new breadth. If his ideas are sound, poverty need be no bar to his success. To-day a man of proved ability who entertains an idea for a new machine, engine, or process may choose among the great firms or companies interested in the field he would enter. His plans are then canvassed by competent critics; if his suggestions harbor a fallacy it is pointed out; if his aims, though feasible, would be unprofitable, they are left severely alone. Perhaps in essence his schemes are good, but need modification; this is duly supplied. Instead of working all alone in twilight or darkness, the inventor now takes up experiment with the aid of carefully chosen assistants, with amassed information as to what others have done in the same path, both at home and abroad.
When an inventor is an Edison, as remarkable in executive ability as in creative power, it is he who organizes, as a general, the forces which test his ideas and perfect such of them as prove sound. Let Edison imagine a new storage battery; forthwith he enlists a corps of chemists and metallurgists, engineers and mechanics, and keeps them busy attacking the difficulties of his quest mechanical, chemical, electrical. What if his mathematics go no further than arithmetic, are not masters of the calculus to be engaged on moderate terms in every university town? His personal command of the pencil falls far short of the facility of professional draftsmen who, at reasonable salaries, will turn out plans and elevations quickly and accurately. His staff, bound to him by affection and pride as with hooks of steel, are the fingers of his hands to win triumphs which neither he alone, nor his men by themselves, could ever accomplish.
It has been solely by organized ability, unfaltering faith in ultimate success, and massed capital, that the steam turbine has become the rival of the steam engine of Watt. A vast sum, expended during nine years, was required to perfect its delicate and exacting mechanism. One day a young engineer saw it whirling away at high speed; with the efficiency of the gas engine in mind, he asked, “Why not drive a turbine by gas instead of by steam?” He took his idea to a leading manufacturing concern; it was approved, and now that young inventor is attacking the difficulties, neither few nor small, which stand in the way of building an effective gas turbine.
Great Combinations Create New Opportunities.
In these latter days new doors are opened to ingenuity by the comprehensiveness of great industries, by the huge scale on which they conduct their business. A country blacksmith is served well enough by a hand-blown bellows; at the Homestead Steel Works the blowing machinery has been designed by the best engineering talent in America. When the output of a trust, or even of a single company, rises to scores of millions of dollars every year, it is worth while to measure how far moisture in a blast may do harm, and adopt the elaborate plans of Mr. James Gayley for drying air before sending it into a furnace. Take an example of how the United States Steel Company has planned every detail betwixt mine and mill. Each lake carrier, of immense size, has its hold so curved that automatic clam-shells lift ten tons of ore at each descent, shoveler and shovel being dismissed. Vessels and docks dovetail into one another. The car-lengths, as a freight train stands on its track, correspond to the distance between one steamer-hoist and the next. In like fashion every link in the chain is devised to save every possible foot-pound of energy, every dispensable moment of time. Capital, always cheaper than labor, is expended with both hands, and in no direction more liberally than in setting at work the inventor of economical devices, and his twin brother, the organizer, who deals with the whole industry as a single mechanism to be reduced to the lowest working cost and the highest ultimate efficiency.
Team-Work in Research and Invention.
During 1904 the General Electric Company at Schenectady, New York, perfected for the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad an electric locomotive such as will be used for passenger service between New York and Croton. That locomotive, far outvying anything else that ever before moved on wheels, was created by a council of locomotive builders, electricians, engineers, and mechanics. Some of the plans which they adopted with success had failed in times past. Each motor was made part and parcel of the axle it turns, a directness of construction which had never before proved to be feasible. Usually an electric motor has many magnetic poles; the motors in this locomotive have each only two poles.
On much the same lines this Company is constantly experimenting with a view to cheapen and improve electric lighting. Every filament, every luminous rod or vapor, as newly devised, is tested and modified by as acute a band of investigators as exist in the world, with all the benefit of daily conference and mutual aid.