The next year Bell succeeded in bringing the telephone to the condition in which it became of immediate practical value. Strange to say, the public was at first slow to appreciate the great importance of the invention, and when Bell took it to England, in 1877, he could find no purchaser for half the European rights at $10,000. In this country, thanks to the business energy of Professor Gardiner Hubbard, of Harvard, Bell's father-in-law, the telephone was soon made commercially valuable, and there are now said to be nearly six hundred thousand telephones in use in the United States alone.
Professor Bell, as may be imagined, is not idle. His vast fortune has enabled him to continue costly experiments in aiding deaf and dumb people, and it will probably be in this field that his next achievement will be made. Personally, he is a reserved and thoughtful man, wholly given up to his scientific work. His wife, whom he married in 1876, was one of his deaf and dumb pupils. It is often said that it was largely due to his intense desire to soften her misfortune that his experiments were so exhaustive and finally became so productive in another direction. His home life in Washington, where he bought, in 1885, the superb house on Scott Circle known as "Broadhead's Folly," after the man who built it and ruined himself in so doing, is said to be an ideally peaceful and happy one, given up to study and efforts to alleviate the troubles of the deaf and dumb.
As in the case of most inventions of such immense value as the telephone, a fortune has had to be spent in order to protect the patent rights; but in Bell's case the inventor's money reward has been ample and is now said to amount to more than $1,000,000 a year. Just at present Mr. Bell is engaged upon a modification of the phonograph, which may enable persons not wholly deaf to hear a phonographic reproduction of the human voice, even if they cannot hear the voice itself. Honors have poured in upon him within the last fifteen years. In 1880 the French Government awarded him the Volta prize of $10,000, which Mr. Bell devoted to founding the Volta Laboratory in Washington, an institution for the use of students. In 1882 he also received from France the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.
XI.
AMERICAN INVENTORS, PAST AND PRESENT.
There are now in force in this country nearly three hundred thousand patents for inventions and devices of more or less importance and aid to everyone. To how great a degree the world is indebted to the inventor, very few of us realize. The more we think of the matter, however, the more are we likely to believe that the inventor is mankind's great benefactor. Watt should stand before Napoleon in the hero-worship of the age, and the man who perfected the friction-match before the author of an epic. Some day this redistribution of the world's honors will surely take place, and it should be a satisfaction to us Americans that our country stands so high in the ranks of inventive genius. Within the last half century Americans have contributed, to mention only great achievements, the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the sewing-machine, the reaper, and vulcanized rubber, to the world's wealth—a far larger contribution than that of any other nation. What may not the next generation produce? Some people seem to believe that so much has already been invented as to have exhausted the field. In this connection I have quoted in another place some remarks Mr. Edison once made to me as to what the next fifty years might bring forth. Still more astonishing than our past fecundity in invention would be future barrenness. This century has done its work and produced its marvels with comparatively blunt tools, or no tools at all. The next century will be able to work with superb instruments of which our grandfathers knew nothing. The school-boy to-day knows more of the forces of nature and their useful application than the magician of fifty years ago. It has been said that the fifteen blocks in the "Gem" puzzle can be arranged in more than a million different ways. The material in the game at which man daily plays is so infinitely more complex that the number of combinations cannot be written out in figures. The rôle played by invention in modern life is infinitely greater than during preceding ages. One invention, by affording a new tool, makes others possible. The steam-engine made possible the dynamo, the dynamo made possible the electric light. In its turn the electric light may lead to wonders still more extraordinary.
The degree to which invention has contributed to civilization is far from suspected by the careless observer. Almost everything we have or use is the fruit of invention. Man might be defined as the animal that invents. The air we breathe and the water we drink are provided by Nature, but we drink water from a vessel of some kind, an invention of man. Even if we drink from a shell or a gourd, we shape it to serve a new purpose. If we want our air hotter or colder, we resort to invention, and a vast amount of ingenuity has been expended upon putting air in motion by means of fans, blowers, ventilators, etc. We take but a small part of our food as animals do—in the natural state. The savage who first crushed some kernels of wheat between two stones invented flour, and we are yet hard at it inventing improvements upon his process. The earliest inventions probably had reference to the procuring and preparing of food, and the ingenuity of man is still exercised upon these problems more eagerly than ever before. During the last fifty years the power of man to produce food has increased more than during the preceding fifteen centuries. Sixty years ago a large part of the wheat and other grain raised in the world was cut, a handful at a time, with a scythe, and a man could not reap much more than a quarter of an acre a day. With a McCormick reaper a man and two horses will cut from fifteen to twenty acres of grain a day. In the threshing of grain, invention has achieved almost as much. A man with a machine will thresh ten times as much as he formerly could with a flail.
It is less than sixty years since matches have come into common use. Many old men remember the time in this country when a fire could be kindled only with the embers from another fire, as there were no such things as matches. Most of us who have reached the age of forty remember the abominable, clumsy sulphur-matches of 1860, as bulky as they were unpleasant. And yet the first sulphur-matches, made about 1830, cost ten cents a hundred. To-day the safety match, certain and odorless, is sold at one-tenth of this price. The introduction of kerosene was one of the blessings of modern life. It added several hours a day to the useful, intelligent life of man, and who can estimate the influence of these evening hours upon the advance of civilization? The evening, after the day's work is done, has been the only hour when the workingman could read. Before cheap and good lights were given him, reading was out of the question. Gas marked a step in advance, but only for large towns, and now electricity bids fair soon to displace gas; and we hear vague suggestions of a luminous ether that will flood houses with a soft glow like that of sunlight.