Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

Window screens for the purpose of excluding flies, mosquitoes, and other insects, while freely admitting the air, are now made extensible and adjustable in different ways to fit different sizes of windows. Curtains and shades are provided with neat and most attractive supporting rods, to which they are attached by brass or wooden rings, and provided with easily manipulated devices to raise and securely hold them in any desired position.

The art of steaming wood and bending it, by iron pattern forms adjustable to the forms desired, as particularly devised in principle by Blanchard in America in 1828-1840, referred to in Wood-working, has produced great changes in the art of furniture making, especially in chairs. A particularly interesting illustration of the results of this art occurred in Austria. About forty years ago the manufacture in Germany and Austria of furniture by machinery, especially of bent wood-ware, became well established there; and by the time of the Vienna Exposition in 1873, factories on a most extensive scale for the construction of bed furniture were in operation among the vast mountain beech forests of Moravia and Hungary. The greatest of these works were located in Great Urgroez, Hungary, and Bisritz, Moravia, with twenty or more auxiliary establishments. Between five and six thousand work people were employed, the greater part of whom were females, and it was necessary to use steam and water motors, to the extent of many hundred horse power.

The forests were felled, and the tree-tops removed and made into charcoal for use in the glass works of Bohemia. The trunks were hauled to the mills and sawed into planks of suitable thickness by gang-saws. The planks in turn were cut with circular saws into square pieces for turning, and then the pieces turned and cut on lathes, to give them the size required and the rounded shape; the pieces then steamed while in their green state for twenty-four hours in suitable boilers, then taken out and bent to the desired shape on a cast-iron frame by hand, then subjected, with the desired pattern, to the pattern-turning table, and cut; then kept locked in the pattern’s iron embrace until the pieces were dried and permanently set in shape, then clamped to a bench, filed, rasped, stained, and French polished by the deft hands of the women; then assembled in proper position in frames of the form of the chair or other article to be made, their contact surface sawed to fit at the joints, and then finally the parts glued together and further secured by the addition of a few screws or balls.

Chairs, lounges and lighter furniture were thus made from bent pieces of wood with very few joints, having a neat and attractive appearance, and possessing great strength. The art has spread to other forests and other countries, and the turned, bent, highly polished and beautiful furniture of this generation would have been but a dream of beauty to the householder of a century ago.

Children’s chairs are made so that the seat may be raised or lowered, or the chair converted into a perambulator. Dentist’s chairs have been developed until it is only necessary for the operator to turn a valve governing a fluid, generally oil, under pressure to raise or lower the chair and the patient. In the more agreeable situation at the theatre or concert one may hang his hat on the bottom of the chair, upturned to afford access to it through a crowded row, and turning down the chair, sit with pleasure, as the curtain is rolled up by compressed air, or electricity, at the touch of a button.

To the unthinking and unobserving, the subject of bottle stoppers is not entrancing, but those acquainted with the art know with what long, continuous, earnest efforts, thousands of inventors have sought for the best and cheapest bottle stopper to take the place of corks—the enormous demand for which was exhausting the supply and rendering their price almost prohibitive.

One of the most successful types is a stopper of rubber combined with a metal disk, and hung by a wire on the neck of the bottle, so that the stopper can be used over and over again; another form composed of glass, or porcelain, and cork; another is a thin disk of cork placed in a thin metal cap which is crimped over a shoulder on the neck of the bottle, and still another is a thin disk of pasteboard adapted for milk bottles and pressed tightly within a rim on the inside of the neck of the bottle.

In this connection should be mentioned that self-sealing fruit jar, known from its inventor as “Mason’s fruit jar,” which came into such universal use—that combination of screw cap, screw-threaded jar-neck and the rubber ring, or gasket, on which the cap was screwed so tightly as to seal the jar hermetically.

In lamplighting, what a wonderful change from the old oil lamps of former ages! The modern lamp may be said to be an improved means of grace, as it will hold out much longer, and shed a far more attractive light for the sinner, whose return, by its genial light, is, even to the end, so greatly desired.

The discovery of petroleum and its introduction as a light produced a revolution in the construction of lamps. Wicks were not discarded, but changed in shape from round to flat, and owing to the coarseness and disagreeable odour of coal oil, especially in its early unrefined days, devices first had for their object the easy feeding of the wick, and perfect combustion. To this end the burner portion through which the wick passed was perforated at its base to create a proper draft, and later the cap over the base was also perforated. But with refined oil the disagreeable odour continued. It was found that this was mainly due to the fact that both in lamps and stoves the oil would ooze out of the wick on to the adjacent parts of the lamps or stove, and when the wick was lit the heat would burn or heat the oil and thus produce the odour. Inventors therefore contrived to separate the oil reservoir and wick part when the lamp or stove were not in use; and finally, in stoves, to dispense with the wick altogether. As wickless oil stoves are now in successful use the wickless lamp may be expected to follow.