Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

True, the turning-lathe, the axe, the hammer, the chisel, the saw, the auger, the plane, the screw, and cutting and other wood-shaping instruments in simple forms existed in abundance. The Egyptians used their saws of bronze. The Greeks deified their supposed inventor of the saw, Talus, or Perdix, and they claimed Theodore of Lamos as the inventor of the turning-lathe; although the main idea of pivoting an object between two supports, so that it could be turned while the hands were free to apply a tool to its shaping, was old in the potter’s wheel of the Egyptians, which was turned while the vessel resting upon it was shaped and ornamented by the hand and tools. It appears also to have been known by the Hindoos and the Africans.

Pliny refers to the curled chips raised by the plane, and Ansonius refers to mills driven by the waters of the Moselle for sawing marble into slabs. Early records mention saw-mills run by water-power in the thirteenth century in France, Germany and Norway; and Sweden had them in the next century. Holland had them one hundred years at least before they were introduced into England.

Fearful of the entire destruction of the forests by the wood used in the manufacture of iron, and incited by the opposition and jealousy of hand sawyers, England passed some rigid laws on the subject in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, although preserving the forests, gave for a long time the almost exclusive manufacture of iron and lumber to Germany and Holland. Even as late as 1768, a saw-mill, built at Limehouse, under the encouragement of the Society of Arts, by James Stansfield, was destroyed by a mob. Saw-mills designed to be run by water-power had been introduced into the American colonies by the Dutch more than a century before they made their appearance in England. William Penn found that they had long been at work on the Delaware when he reached its shores in 1682.

It was nothing indigenous to the climate or race that rendered the Americans inventors. The early colonists, drawn from the most civilised countries of Europe, carried to the new world knowledge of the latest and best appliances known to their respective countries in the various arts. With three thousand miles of water between them and the source of such appliances, and between them and the source of arbitrary power and laws to hamper efforts and enterprise, with stern necessity on every hand prompting them to avail themselves of every means to meet their daily wants, all known inventions were put to use, and brains were constantly exercised in devising new means to aid, or take the place of, manual labour, which was scarce. Surrounded, too, by vast forests, from which their houses, their churches and their schools must be constructed, these pioneers naturally turned their thoughts toward wood-working machinery. The attention to this art necessarily created interest in and developed other arts. Thus constant devotion to pursuits strenuously demanding labour-saving devices evolved a race of keen inventors and mechanics. So that when Watt had developed his wonderful application of steam to industrial purposes, America was ready to substitute steam for water-power in the running of saw-mills.

Steam saw-mills commenced to buzz with the opening of the century.

As to the relation of that humble machine, the saw-mill, to the progress of civilisation, it was once said: “The axe produces the log hut, but not until the saw-mill is introduced do framed dwellings and villages arise; it is civilisation’s pioneer machine; the precursor of the carpenter, wheelwright and turner, the painter, the joiner, and legions of other professions. Progress is unknown where it is not. Its comparative absence in the Southern American continent was not the least cause of the trifling advancement made there during three centuries and a half. Surrounded by forests of the most valuable and variegated timber, with water-power in mountain streams, equally neglected, the masses of the people lived in shanties and mud hovels, not more commodious than those of the aborigines, nor more durable than the annual structures of birds. Wherever man has not fixed and comfortable homes, he is, as regards civilisation, stationary; improvement under such circumstances has never taken place, nor can it.”

Miller, in England, in 1777, had described in his patent a circular saw, and Hatton, in 1776, had vaguely described a planing machine; but the inception of the marvellous growth in wood-working machinery in the nineteenth century occurred in England during the last decade of the eighteenth. It was due to the splendid efforts of General Samuel Bentham, and of Bramah and Branch, both as to metal-working and wood-working machinery.

General Bentham, a brother of the celebrated jurist, Jeremy Bentham, had his attention drawn to the slow, laborious, and crude methods of working in wood, while making a tour of Europe, and especially in Russia, and engaged in inspecting the art of ship-building in those countries, in behalf of the British Admiralty. On his return, 1791-1792, he converted his home into a shop for making wood-working machines. These included “Planing, moulding, rabbeting, grooving, mortising, and sawing, both in coarse and fine work, in curved, winding, and transverse directions, and shaping wood in complicated forms.”

Of the amount of bills presented to and paid for by the Admiralty for these machines, General Bentham received about £20,000.

These machines were developed and in use just as the new century approached. Thus, with the exception of the saw-mill, it may be again said that prior to this century the means mankind had to aid them in their work in metals and in wood were confined to hand tools, and these were for the most part of a simple and crude description.