Steam, Steel and Electricity

by James W. Steele

One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a "cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He is educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.

In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant, and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus. Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil idea begins again.

Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing, smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried; all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.

There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for those arrangements now in use.

All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles. There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have, of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the science.

It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary applications of electricity have been made by American inventors. Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed, and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this change has been the electric current, a something primarily having nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war, beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light, signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are loaded, fired, and even sighted by the same means. Her officers are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old régime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in operation.

I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the accuracy possible in the day of the Old Ironsides and the Guerriere.

And first it may be stated that the range-finder is largely a measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A. Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is, that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are directed at the object.

So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now it enters as the factor without which the device could have no adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily; with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but in distance to the apex of the triangle where the target is; in yards. The man at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves, or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns; these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone, and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters, and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted by a concealed and silent wire.

This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893 leave that service possible in the future without any question. Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and coolness, were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one side and too little on another, because switches placed at different points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed. Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will understand her voltage and her Ampères as she now does her drafts and dampers and the quality of her fuel.