Great Inventions and Discoveries

by Willis Duff Piercy

The modern phosphorus friction match came into use about 1833. It is not possible to ascertain precisely who the inventor was. But in that year Preschel had a factory in Vienna, Austria, for the manufacture of friction matches with phosphorus as the chief chemical. For years Austria and the States in the south of Germany were the center of the match industry. Phosphorus is still used as the principal chemical ingredient in the manufacture of matches. The first patent in the United States for a friction match was issued October 24, 1836, to Alonzo D. Phillips, of Springfield, Massachusetts. The "safety match," which will not ignite unless brought into contact with the side of the box in which it is packed, was invented by Lundström of Sweden, in 1855. The match industry in Norway and Sweden has developed during the last few years with great rapidity. About sixty factories are in operation in these countries. One town alone contains six thousand matchmakers. In France the government has the sole right to manufacture matches.

Phosphorus is very poisonous, and the early manufacture of phosphorus matches was attended with loss of life and great suffering. Inhalation of phosphorus fumes produced necrosis, or decay of the bone, usually of the lower jaw. In the first years of phosphorus match making, the business was chiefly carried on by the poorer people in large cities. The work was done in damp, foul cellars; and the peculiar disease of the bone caused by the phosphorus fumes became so widespread that the different governments drove the match factories out of the cellars and ordered that the business be conducted in better ventilated buildings. But the discovery of red phosphorus, which never produces the disease, the use of lessened quantities of the ordinary phosphorus, and better ventilation have all combined to make the malady now very rare.

The first matches were made by hand, one by one, and were of necessity few and costly. Matches are now made and boxed by machinery. One million splints can be cut in an hour with the machinery in use. Some single manufacturing firms make as many as one hundred millions of matches in a day. With diminished cost of production have come decreased prices, so that now a large box can be purchased for a very few cents. Until about 1860 railroads in the United States would not receive matches for transportation, owing to the danger involved. The distribution before that year was mainly by canal or wagon. A match is a little thing, but it is one of the world's really great inventions.

CHAPTER XIV

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is one of the many triumphs of the human mind over time and space. Thousands of miles are between you and the wonderful Taj Mahal. You may never be able to go to it. But as the mountain would not go to Mohammed and Mohammed therefore went to the mountain, so photography brings the Taj Mahal to you. The chief struggle for civilization is with these two abstract antagonists—time and space. In this struggle the achievements of photography are such as to win it a place among the world's great inventions and discoveries.

Here, again, we borrow words from the Greeks. Photography comes from the Greek noun phos meaning "light" and the Greek verb graphein signifying "to write," already referred to several times in this volume. Photography is therefore the science and the art of writing or reproducing objects by means of light. The science of photography depends upon the action of light on certain chemicals, usually compounds of silver. These chemicals are spread upon a delicately sensitized metallic plate, which is exposed to light. The action of light fixes the object desired upon this plate, from which copies of the picture are made on paper of suitable kind.

Like most of the great discoveries and inventions, photography is not old. It had its beginning in 1777, when the Swedish chemist Scheele began to inquire scientifically into the reason and effect of the darkening of silver chloride by the rays of the sun. The first picture ever made by the use of light on a sensitive surface was made in 1791 by Thomas Wedgewood, an Englishman. The principle of the photographer's camera was discovered in 1569 by Della Porta, of Naples. To Nicéphore Niepce, a Frenchman, belongs the honor of producing the first camera picture. This was in 1827 after thirteen years of experimenting. He called his process "heliography," helios being the Greek word for sun. His process consisted of coating a piece of plated silver or glass with asphaltum or bitumen, and exposing the plate in the camera for a time varying in length from four to six hours. The light acted on the asphaltum in such a way as to leave the image on the plate.

The predecessor of the modern photograph was the daguerreotype. It was named for its inventor, Louis Daguerre, a French scene-painter, who was born in 1789. In 1829 he formed a partnership with Niepce, and together they labored to advance the art of photography. The discovery of the daguerreotyping process was announced in January, 1839. The process of Daguerre consisted in "exposing a metal plate covered with iodide of silver for a suitable time in a photographic camera, the plate being afterwards transferred to a dark room, and exposed to the vapor of mercury, which develops the latent image, it being afterwards fixed. Although this process has become almost obsolete, it was really the first which was of any practical value, and experts all agree that no other known process reproduces some subjects—for example, the human face—with such fidelity and beauty."