Such was the outcome of this grand modern "trust," a combination of the wisest legislation, the most brilliant invention, and the most wisely applied capital. There are "trusts" of which the outcome is most beneficent.
Since the days of Watt, the improvement of the steam engine and the work of inventors has been confined to matters of detail. All the fundamental principles were developed by Watt and his predecessors and contemporaries and it only was left to his successors to find the best ways of carrying them into effect. But these matters of detail have been found to involve opportunities to make enormous strides in the direction of securing improved efficiency of the machine. The further application of the principle which led Watt to his greatest inventions; of the principle, keep the cylinder as hot as the steam which enters it, of that which he enunciated relative to the advantage of expanding steam, and of that affecting the regulation of the machine; have reduced the costs of steam and of fuel to a small fraction of their earlier magnitude. One ton of engine to-day does the work of eight or ten in the time of Watt: one pound of fuel or of steam gives to-day ten times the power then obtained from it. A steamship now crosses the Atlantic in one-eighth the time required by the famous "liner" of the "Black Ball Line." The wastes of the engine have been brought down from above eighty per cent. to eight; and a half-ounce of fuel on board ship will now transport a ton of cargo over a mile of ocean.
FREDERICK E. SICKELS gave us the first practicable form of expansion gear in 1841; GEORGE H. CORLISS gave a new type of engine of marvelous perfection and economy in 1849; Noble T. Green, Wm. Wright and many less well known but no less meritorious inventors have since done their part in the transformation of the old engine of Watt into the modern wonder of concentrated and economical power, and marvel of accurate and beautiful design and workmanship. The "trip cut-off," with reduced clearances, increased boiler pressure, higher rates of expansion, accelerated speeds of engine, better construction in all respects, as well as improved design, have enabled us to avail ourselves to the utmost of the principles of Watt, and our mills, our railways, our steamers and our fields, even, have gained almost as extraordinarily by these advances, since the days of the great inventor, as through his immediate labors.
With the introduction of the new form of older energy, electricity, with the reduction of the lightning into thraldom, has now come a new impulse affecting all the industries. Through its mysterious, its still unknown action, steam now reaches out far from its own place, driving the electric car along miles of rail; giving light throughout all the country about it, turning night into day, and repressing crime while encouraging legitimate labor, reaching into distant chambers and every little workshop, to offer its powerful aid in all the distributed work of cities. Without the steam engine there would be little work available for electricity, but the appearance of this, the latest and most useful handmaid of steam, has given the engine work to do in an uncounted number of new fields, has called in the inventor once more to adapt steam to its new work. The "high-speed engine" is the latest form of the universal helper. And such has been the readiness and the intelligence of the contemporary inventor that we now have engines capable of turning their shafts three hundred rotations a minute and without a perceptible variation of velocity, whatever the change of load or the suddenness with which it is varied. In the days of Watt a fluctuation of five per cent. in speed was thought wonderfully small; in those of Corliss, the variation was restricted to two per cent. and we wondered at this unanticipated success. To-day, thanks to Porter and Allen, to Hartnell, to Hoadley, to Sims, to Thomson, to Sweet, to Ide, and to Ball, we have seen the speed fluctuation restricted to even less than one per cent. of its normal average.
The inventors of the steam engine are, through their representatives of to-day, according to the statisticians, doing the equivalent of twelve times the work of a horse, for every man, woman and child on the globe. We have not less, probably, than a half million of miles of railway, transporting something over 150,000,000,000 of tons a mile a year. A horse is reckoned to haul a ton weight about six and a half miles, day by day, by the year together. In the United States, it is reckoned that the steam engine, on the railways alone, hauls a thousand tons one mile, for every inhabitant of the country, every year, or, if it is preferred to so state it, a ton a thousand miles. This is the way in which the East and the West are, by the inventors of the steam engine, enabled to help each other. This costs about $10 each individual; it would require some 25 millions of horses to do the work, and would cost about $1,000 a family, which is more than twice the average family earnings.
Dr. Strong, in that remarkable book, "Our Country," says: "One man, by the aid of steam, is able to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men at the beginning of the century. The machinery of Massachusetts alone represents the labor of more than 100,000,000 men, as if one-half of all the workmen of the globe had engaged in her service." And again: "Some thirty years ago, the power of machinery in the mills of Great Britain was estimated to be equal to 600,000,000 men, or more than all the adults, male and female, of all mankind." Mr. Gladstone estimated that the aggregation of wealth on the globe during the whole period from the birth of Christ to that of Watt was equaled by the production in twenty years, at the middle of this century, with the aid of machinery driven by the fruit of the brain of the inventors of the steam engine. We may probably now safely estimate the former quantity as rivaled in less than five years, while, since the birth of Watt and his engine, and the production of the spinning mule, the power loom, the cotton gin and our own patent system and its marvelous mechanism, all events of a century ago, we may estimate that they have, together, accomplished more in this period which we now celebrate than could have been done in a millenium of milleniums without these now subjected genii. But the power behind all these curious inventions and their work is that of steam. The steam engine even supplies power to the telegraph and transports words and thought as well as cotton bales and coal.
And now what has this combination of legislation for private protection and public good, of a genius producing great inventions, and of the accumulated capital of earlier years, brought about?
It has given us the best fruits of science in permanent possession. The study of science invariably aids, in a thousand ways, the progress of mankind. It gives us new conceptions of nature and of the possibilities of art; it promotes right ways of work and of study; it teaches the inventor and the discoverer how most surely and promptly to gain their several ends, it gives the world the results of all acquired knowledge in concrete form. This one instance which we are now especially interested in contemplating has performed more wonderful miracles than ever Aladdin's genii attempted. One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives forty thousand spindles, applies a thousand horse power to daily work in the spinning of threads, the weaving of cloth, the impulsion of a steamboat, or the drawing of great masses of hot iron into finest wire. This puny creature, his mind in his finger tips, exerts the power of ten thousand men, working with muscle alone, and, aided by a handful of women, boys and girls, clothes a city. A half dozen men in the engine room of an ocean steamer, with a hundred strong laborers in the boiler room and on deck, transports colonies and makes new nations, brings separated peoples together, unites countries on opposite sides of the globe, brings about easy exchanges between pole and equator. One man on the footboard of the locomotive, one man shoveling into the furnaces the black powder that incloses the energy stored in early geological ages, a half dozen men mounted on the long train of following vehicles, combine to bring to the mill girl in Massachusetts, the miner in Pennsylvania, the sewing woman, and the wealthy merchant, her neighbor in New York, the flour made in Minnesota from the grain harvested a few weeks earlier in Dakota. All the world is served faithfully and efficiently by this unimaginable power, this product of the brain of the inventor, protected by the law, stimulated and aided by the capital that it has itself almost alone produced.
And thus have the inventors of the steam engine set in motion and placed at the disposal of mankind for every form of useful work all the great forces of nature; thus Hero of Alexandria touched the then concealed spring which called all the genii of earth, fire, water and air to do the bidding of the race. Thus Papin, Worcester, Newcomen, Watt, and Corliss and others of our own contemporaries, have applied the genii to their task of leveling mountains, traversing seas, continents, and the depths of the earth, building ships, locomotives, hamlets and cities, cottages and palaces, turning the spindle, operating the loom, and setting motion and giving energy to every machine, doing the work of thousands of millions of men, converting barbarism into civilization, giving necessaries of life in profusion, comforts in plenty, and luxuries in superabundance.
Aiding and working hand in hand with those other genii of progress, the inventors of the printing press and of the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric railway, of the modern system of textile manufactures, of iron and steel making, of the mowing machine and the harvester, they have compressed into two centuries the progress of a millennium, destitute of their aid. Every step taken under their stimulus, and with their help, is a step toward a higher life for all, intellectually and morally as well as physically; every advance in the improvement of their work is a gain to every man, woman, and child; every improvement of the steam engine is a help to the whole world. This progress makes the day of the extinction of the system now grinding the populations of the earth into the ground, the day of the abolition of armies and the restoration to the people of that freedom which characterized the times of the patriarchs, and of the restoration of the rights of the citizen to his own time and strength and producing power, perceptibly nearer.