CHAPTER XIV[ToC]
THE SIMPLICITY OF GREAT INVENTIONS, AND OF
NATURE'S MANIFESTATIONS
If there is anything in the realm of mechanics which excites the wonder and admiration of man, it is the knowledge that the greatest inventions are the simplest, and that the inventor must take advantage of one law in nature which is universal in its application, and that is vibration.
There is a key to every secret in nature's great storehouse. It is not a complicated one, containing a multiplicity of wards and peculiar angles and recesses. It is the very simplicity in most of the problems which long served as a bar to discovery in many of the arts. So extremely simple have been some of the keys that many inventions resulted from accidents.
Invention Precedes Science.—Occasionally inventions were brought about by persistency and energy, and ofttimes by theorizing; but science rarely ever aids invention. The latter usually precedes science. Thus, reasoning could not show how it might be possible for steam to force water into a boiler against its own pressure. But the injector does this
If, prior to 1876, it had been suggested that a sonorous vibration could be converted into an electrical pulsation, and transformed back again to a sonorous vibration, science would have proclaimed it impossible; but the telephone does it. Invention shows how things are done, and science afterwards explains the phenomena and formulates theories and laws which become serviceable to others in the arts.
Simplicity in Inventions.—But let us see how exceedingly simple are some of the great discoveries of man.