If any one requires proof of this statement he will find ample evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on Industrial Biography, where facts and dates are adduced to show that steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised roads, coal gas, photography, anæsthesia, and even telegraphy are inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their success has been based, are of very much older origin than the world generally supposes. The author, therefore, submits that he is justified in referring inventions to the century in which they produce successful results, not to that in which they may have been first vaguely thought of. And in this view it is obvious that many of those patents and suggestions which have been published in current literature during the nineteenth century, but which, although pregnant with mighty industrial influences, have not yet reached fruition, are essentially inventions of the twentieth century. More than this, it is extremely probable that the great majority of those ideas which will move the industrial world during the next ensuing hundred years have already been indicated, more or less clearly, by the inventive thought of the nineteenth century.
George Sutherland.
December, 1900.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| [CHAPTER I.] | |
| Inventive Progress | [1] |
| [CHAPTER II.] | |
| Natural Power | [22] |
| [CHAPTER III.] | |
| Storage of Power | [53] |
| [CHAPTER IV.] | |
| Artificial Power | [72] |
| [CHAPTER V.] | |
| Road and Rail | [91] |
| [CHAPTER VI.] | |
| Ships | [122] |
| [CHAPTER VII.] | |
| Agriculture | [144] |
| [CHAPTER VIII.] | |
| Mining | [167] |
| [CHAPTER IX.] | |
| Domestic | [195] |
| [CHAPTER X.] | |
| Electric Messages, Etc. | [216] |
| [CHAPTER XI.] | |
| Warfare | [233] |
| [CHAPTER XII.] | |
| Music | [249] |
| [CHAPTER XIII.] | |
| Art and News | [264] |
| [CHAPTER XIV.] | |
| Invention and Collectivism | [276] |