Robert Henry Thurston.—Distinguished as an educator, an inventor, and a writer on engineering subjects was Robert H. Thurston (1839–1903). He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Brown University in 1859. During the Civil War he served as an engineer in the Federal Navy; in 1865 he was appointed assistant professor of natural and experimental philosophy at the United States Naval Academy. In 1871 he became professor of engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology, remaining here until 1885, when he was made director of Sibley College in Cornell University. His writings, always clear, exact, and authoritative, have circulated widely among engineers. They include “A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine” (1878, revised in 1901, and translated into French and German), “Materials of Engineering” (three volumes, 1882–1886), “Manual of the Steam Engine” (1890–1891), “Manual of Steam Boilers” (1890), with other valuable works, and about 250 scientific papers. Thurston served on several important government engineering commissions. Of him it has justly been said that “he made engineers better scientists, promoted engineering education, helped to put engineering upon a higher professional plane, and constantly was on the watch to dispel the fogs of prejudice by help of the truths of science.”
The Youmans Brothers.—The life of Edward Livingston Youmans (1821–1887) was spent chiefly in popularising science. Born in Albany County, New York, he inherited a strong bent toward scientific study. For many years he wrestled with threatening blindness, and was never well. His “Class-Book of Chemistry” (1851) was remarkably successful. “There was,” Mr. Fiske says of it, “a firm grasp of the philosophical principles underlying chemical phenomena, and the meaning and functions of the science were set forth in such a way as to charm the student and make him wish for more.” He spent many years in delivering lyceum lectures, for which he was well fitted. His “Handbook of Household Science” (1857) was a carefully written treatise on the applications of science to the problems of food, light, heat, and sanitation. Its popularity led him to plan a comprehensive “Household Cyclopædia” which he did not live to finish. Besides editing “The Correlation and Conservation of Forces” (1864), a series of expositions by Grove, Helmholtz, Mayer, Faraday, Liebig, and Carpenter, and “The Culture Demanded by Modern Life” (1867), a collection of addresses and arguments in favour of scientific education, Youmans published several addresses and papers, and did much to give the views of Darwin and Spencer a favourable reception in America. He was the originator and general editor of “The International Scientific Series,” of which fifty-seven volumes appeared in his lifetime. It was a difficult but eminently useful task to secure popular scientific books by masters; and the series of seventy-nine volumes has done much for education. Youmans was also the founder of The Popular Science Monthly (begun in 1872) and edited the first twenty-eight volumes.
While it was his main intent [to quote Mr. Fiske again] to give in popular form an account of the progress of the several departments of science, he never lost sight of the aim to show wherein the scientific method was applicable to the larger questions of life—of education, social relations, morals, government, and religion.
William Jay Youmans (1838–1901) first studied chemistry at Columbia and Yale and privately with his brother Edward, then took a medical course at New York University. After practising medicine for some three years, he became connected with The Popular Science Monthly, which he edited from 1887 till 1900. He wrote “Pioneers of Science in America” (1895).
Henry Carrington Bolton.—Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903) did much for the bibliography of chemistry; his “Select Bibliography of Chemistry, 1492–1892” (1893–1905) comprises over 12,000 titles in twenty-four languages. He also wrote many papers on the history of chemistry. His “Counting-out Rhymes of Children” (1888) gave him prominence as a folklorist, and he published also some important papers on various other subjects in folklore.
VII. THE PERIODICALS.
Their Importance.—No apology need be offered for including in this volume a section on the history of American periodicals. As Professor Smyth has well said, in speaking of the early magazines of Philadelphia, such a division “helps to exhibit the process of American literature as an evolution.” Much of our best literature made its first appearance in periodicals; and the remuneration received by authors from this source has great significance in the economics of literature. Likewise much of our best and most searching criticism, whether reprinted or not, appeared originally in newspapers and magazines, which have thus had a prominent part in the making of American literature. In 1810 there were only about thirty periodicals altogether; in 1900 there were 239 classed as general and literary, some of them having a considerable circulation on the other side of the Atlantic. In the brief space allotted to this section it will be impossible to do more than to mention a few of the most important literary periodicals; the full extent of the journalistic activity of the United States may be inferred from the fact that in 1900 over eight billion copies of periodicals were circulated, having a market value of nearly $225,000,000.
The Eighteenth Century.—The eighteenth century will not long detain us. Only ten years after Edward Cave had founded The Gentleman’s Magazine in London (1731), Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin founded in Philadelphia the first monthly magazines in America. Of Bradford’s venture, The American Magazine, edited by John Webbe, only three numbers appeared; while Franklin published only six numbers of The General Magazine. In the course of the century several others appeared, among them The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle (Boston, 1743–1746); The Independent Reflector (New York, 1752–1753), among whose contributors were Governor William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and Aaron Burr; The American Magazine (Philadelphia, 1757–1758, revived in 1769), which Professor Tyler calls “by far the most admirable example of our literary periodicals in the colonial time,” edited by Rev. William Smith, first provost of the College of Philadelphia; The New American Magazine (Woodbridge, New Jersey, 1758–1760), edited by S. Nevil; The Royal American Magazine (Boston, 1774–1775); The Pennsylvania Magazine (Philadelphia, 1775–1776), edited by Thomas Paine, to which articles were sent by Francis Hopkinson, John Witherspoon, and William Smith; The Columbian Magazine (Philadelphia, 1786–1790), edited at first by Matthew Carey and later by Alexander J. Dallas, and changed in 1790 to The Universal Asylum (1790–1792; to this Benjamin Rush was a faithful contributor); The American Museum (Philadelphia, 1787–1792, 1798), for which Carey abandoned The Columbian and which was “the first really successful literary undertaking of the kind in America”; The Massachusetts Magazine (Boston, 1789–1796); The New York Magazine (1790–1797); The Farmers’ Museum (Walpole, New Hampshire, 1793–1799), of which Joseph Dennie, the editor from 1796 to 1799, boasted that “it is read by more than two thousand individuals, and has its patrons in Europe and on the banks of the Ohio”; and The Monthly Magazine and American Review (New York, 1799–1800), founded by Charles Brockden Brown, and carried on in 1801–1802 as The American Review and Literary Journal. But the reading public of those days was small, and other conditions were unfavourable to publishers; in consequence, almost none of these publications lived into the next century.
The Nineteenth Century.—Of the literary magazines established before 1850, only one or two have survived. Yet we now begin to see the periodicals exhibiting greater vitality; and gradually they come to deal more and more with native literature and to exhibit a greater self-reliance on the part of American writers. The first half of the century was the period in which the national spirit took deep root and made rapid growth; and this national spirit is fully reflected in the literature of the time.