HISTORIC INVENTIONS
RUPERT S. HOLLAND

Gutenberg Takes the First Proof

Historic Inventions

By
RUPERT S. HOLLAND
Author of “Historic Boyhoods,” “Historic Girlhoods,” “Builders of United Italy,” etc.

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1911, by
George W. Jacobs and Company
Published August, 1911

All rights reserved
Printed in U.S.A.

To
J. W. H.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I
GUTENBERG AND THE PRINTING PRESS
About 1400-1468

The free cities of mediæval Germany were continually torn asunder by petty civil wars. The nobles, who despised commerce, and the burghers, who lived by it, were always fighting for the upper hand, and the laboring people sided now with one party, and now with the other. After each uprising the victors usually banished a great number of the defeated faction from the city. So it happened that John Gutenberg, a young man of good family, who had been born in Mainz about 1400, was outlawed from his home, and went with his wife Anna to live in the city of Strasburg, which was some sixty miles distant from Mainz. He chose the trade of a lapidary, or polisher of precious stones, an art which in that age was held in almost as high esteem as that of the painter or sculptor. He had been well educated, and his skill in cutting gems, as well as his general learning and his interest in all manner of inventions, drew people of the highest standing to his little workshop, which was the front room of his dwelling house.

One evening after supper, as Gutenberg and his wife were sitting in the room behind the shop, he chanced to pick up a playing-card. He studied it very carefully, as though it were new to him. Presently his wife looked up from her sewing, and noticed how much absorbed he was. “Prithee, John, what marvel dost thou find in that card?” said she. “One would think it the face of a saint, so closely dost thou regard it.”

“Nay, Anna,” he answered thoughtfully, “but didst thou ever consider how the picture on this card was made?”

“I suppose it was drawn in outline, and then painted, as other pictures are.”

“But there is a better way,” said Gutenberg, still studying the playing-card. “These lines were first marked out on a wooden block, and then the wood was cut away on each side of them, so that they were left raised. The lines were then smeared with ink and pressed on the cardboard. This way is shorter, Anna, than by drawing and painting each picture separately, because when the block is once engraved it can be used to mark any number of cards.”

Anna took the playing-card from her husband’s hand. It represented a figure that was known as the Knave of Bells. “It’s an unsightly creature,” she said, studying it, “and not to be compared with our picture of good St. Christopher on the wall yonder. Surely that was made with a pen?”

“Nay, it was made from an engraved block, just like this card,” said the young lapidary.

“St. Christopher made in that way!” exclaimed his wife. “Then what a splendid art it must be, if it keeps the pictures of the blessed saints for us!”

The picture of the saint was a curious colored woodcut, showing St. Christopher carrying the child Jesus across the water. Under it was an inscription in Latin, and the date 1423.

“Yes, thou art right, dear,” Gutenberg went on. “Pictures like that are much to be prized, for they fill to some extent the place of books, which are so rare and cost so much. But there are much more valuable pictures in the Cathedral here at Strasburg. Dost thou remember the jewels the Abbot gave me to polish for him? When I carried them back, he took me into the Cathedral library, and showed me several books filled with these engraved pictures, and they were much finer than our St. Christopher. The books I remember were the ‘Ars Memorandi,’ the ‘Ars Moriendi,’ and the ‘Biblia Pauperum,’ and the last had no less than forty pictures, with written explanations underneath.”

“That is truly wonderful, John! And what are they about?”

“The ‘Biblia Pauperum’ means ‘Bible for the Poor,’ and is a series of scenes from the Old and New Testaments.”

“I think I’ve heard of it; but I wish you’d tell me more about it.”

John leaned forward, his keen face showing unusual interest. “The forty pictures in it were made by pressing engraved blocks of wood on paper, just like the St. Christopher, or this playing-card. The lines are all brown, and the pictures are placed opposite each other, with their blank backs pasted together, so they form one strong leaf.”

“And how big are the pictures?”

“They are ten inches high and seven or eight inches wide, and each is made up of three small pictures, separated by lines. More than that, there are four half-length figures of prophets, two above and two below the larger pictures. Then there are Latin legends and rhymes at the bottom of each page.”

“And all that is cut on wood first?” said Anna, doubtfully. “It sounds almost like a miracle.”

“Aye. I looked very closely, and the whole book is made from blocks, like the playing-card.”

“Art thou sure it’s not the pencraft of some skilful scribe?”

“Assuredly I am. Dost thou see, Anna, how much better these blocks are than the slower way of copying by hand? When they’re once cut many books can be printed as easily as one.”

“Aye,” answered his wife, “and they will be cheaper than the works written out by the scribes, and still be so costly that whoever can make them ought to grow rich from the sale. If thou canst do it, it will make thy fortune. Thou art so ingenious. Canst thou not make a ‘Bible for the Poor’?”

“Little wife, thou must be dreaming!” But John Gutenberg smiled, for he saw that she had discovered the thought that had been in his mind.

“But couldst thou not?” Anna persisted. “Thou art so good at inventing better ways of doing things.”

Gutenberg laughed and shook his head. “I have found new ways to polish stones and mirrors,” said he, “but those are in my line of work. This is quite outside it, and much more difficult.”

Nothing more was said on the subject that night, but Anna could see, as day followed day, that her husband was planning something, and she felt very certain that he was thinking out a way of making books more quickly than by the old process of copying them word for word by hand.

A few weeks later the young lapidary surprised his wife by showing her a pile of playing-cards. “See my handicraft,” said he. “Aren’t these as good as the Knave of Bells I gave thee?”

She looked at them, delight in her eyes. “They are very much better, John. The lines are much clearer, and the color brighter.”

“Still, that is only a step. It is of little use unless I can cut letters, and press them on vellum as I did these cards. I shall try thy name, Anna, and see if I cannot engrave it here on wood.”

He took a small wooden tablet from the work-table in his shop, and marking certain lines upon it, cut away the wood so that it left a stamp of his wife’s name. Brushing ink over the raised letters he pressed the wood upon a sheet of paper, and then, lifting it carefully, showed her her own name printed upon the paper.

“Wonderful!” she cried. “The letters have the very likeness of writing!”

“Aye,” agreed Gutenberg, looking at the four letters, “it is not a failure. I think with patience and perseverance I could even impress a copy of our picture of St. Christopher. It must have been made from some manner of engraved block. See.” He took the rude print from the wall, and showed her on the back of it the marks of the stylus, or burnisher, by which it had been rubbed upon the wood. “Thou mayst be sure from this that these lines were not produced by a pen, as in ordinary writing,” said he.

“Well,” said Anna, “it would surely be a pious act to multiply pictures of the holy St. Christopher.”

Encouraged by his wife’s great interest, and spurred on by the passion for invention, Gutenberg now set himself seriously to study the problem of engraving. First of all he found it very difficult to find the right kind of wood. Some kinds were too soft and porous, others were liable to split easily. Finally he chose the wood of the apple-tree, which had a fine grain, was dense and compact, and firm enough to stand the process of engraving. Another difficulty was the lack of proper tools; but he worked at these until his box was supplied with a stock of knives, saws, chisels, and gravers of many different patterns. Then he started to draw the portrait of the saint.

At his first attempt he made the picture and the inscription that went with it on the same block, but as soon as he had finished it a better idea occurred to him. The second time he drew the picture and the inscription on separate blocks. “That’s an improvement,” he said to his wife, “for I can draw the picture and the letters better separately, and if I want I can use different colored inks for printing the two parts.” Then he cut the wood away from the drawings, and inking them, pressed them upon the paper. The result was a much clearer picture than the old “St. Christopher” had been.

He studied his work with care. “So far so good,” said he, “but it’s not yet perfect. The picture can’t be properly printed without thicker ink. This flows too easily, and even using the greatest care I can hardly keep from blotting it.”

He had to make a great many experiments to solve this difficulty of the ink. At last he found that a preparation of oil was best. He could vary the color according to the substances he used with this. Umber gave him lines of a darkish brown color, lampblack and oil gave him black ink. At first he used the umber chiefly, in imitation of the old drawings that he was copying.

When his ink was ready he turned again to his interested wife. “Now thou canst help me,” said he. “Stuff and sew this piece of sheepskin for me, while I get the paper ready for the printing.”

Anna had soon done as he asked. Then Gutenberg added a handle to the stuffed ball. “I need this to spread the ink evenly upon the block,” said he. “One more servant of my new art is ready.”

He had ground the ink upon a slab. Now he dipped his printer’s dabber in it, and spread the ink over the wood. Then he laid the paper on it, and pressed it down with the polished handle of one of his new graving tools. He lifted it carefully. The picture was a great improvement over his first attempt. “This ink works splendidly!” he exclaimed in delight.

“Now I shall want a picture of St. Christopher in every room in the house,” said Anna.

“But what shall I do?” said Gutenberg. “I can’t afford the time and money to make these pictures, unless I can sell them in some way.”

“And canst thou not do that?”

“I know of no way at present; but I will hang them on the wall of the shop, and perhaps some of my customers will see them and ask about them.”

The young lapidary was poor, and he had spent part of his savings in working out his scheme of block-printing. He could give no more time to this now, but he hung several copies of the “St. Christopher” in his front room. Several days later a young woman, stopping at Gutenberg’s shop for her dowry jewels, noticed the pictures. “What are those?” said she. “The good saint would look well on our wall at home. If thou wilt wrap the picture up and let me take it home I will show it to my husband, and if he approves I will send thee the price of it to-morrow.”

Gutenberg consented, and the next day the woman sent the money for the “St. Christopher.” A few days later it happened that several people, calling at the shop to buy gems, chose to purchase pictures instead. Anna was very much pleased by the sales, and told her husband so at supper that evening. But he was less satisfied. “In spite of the sales I have lost money today,” said he. “Those who bought the prints had meant to buy jewels and mirrors, and if they had done so I should have made a bigger profit. The pictures take people’s attention from the gems, and so hurt my business.”

“But may it not be that the printing will pay thee better than the sale of jewels, if thou wilt keep on with it?” suggested the hopeful wife. “How soon shalt thou go to the Cathedral with the Abbot’s jewels?”

“As soon as I have finished the polishing. Engraving these blocks has kept me back even in that.”

“When thou dost go take some of thy prints with thee,” begged Anna, “and see what the Father has to say about them.”

By working hard Gutenberg had the Abbot’s jewels finished two days later, and he took them with several of his prints to the Cathedral. He was shown into the library, where often a score of monks were busied in making copies of old manuscripts. He delivered the jewels to the Abbot, and then showed him the pictures.

“Whose handiwork is this?” asked the Father.

But Gutenberg was not quite ready to give away his secret, and so he answered evasively, “The name of the artisan does not appear.”

“Where didst thou obtain them?” asked the Abbot.

“I pray thee let me keep that also a secret,” answered Gutenberg.

The Abbot looked them over carefully. “I will take them all,” said he. “They will grace the walls of our library, and tend to preserve us from evil.”

The young jeweler was very much pleased, and hurried home to tell his wife what had happened. She was delighted. “Now thou art in a fair way to grow rich,” said she.

But Gutenberg was by nature cautious. “We mustn’t forget,” he answered, “that the steady income of a regular trade is safer to rely on than occasional success in other lines.”

A few days later a young man named Andrew Dritzhn called at Gutenberg’s shop, and asked if he might come and learn the lapidary’s trade. Theretofore Gutenberg had had no assistants, but, on thinking the matter over, he decided that if he had a good workman with him he would have more time to study the art of printing. So he engaged Dritzhn. Soon after this the new apprentice introduced two young friends of his, who also begged for the chance to learn how to cut gems and set them, and how to polish Venetian glass for mirrors and frame them in carved and decorated copper frames. Gutenberg agreed and these two others, named Hielman and Riffe, came to work with him.

The shop was now very busy, with the three apprentices and the master workman all occupied. But Gutenberg was anxious to keep his new project secret, and so he fitted up the little back room as a shop, and spent his evenings working there with Anna.

On his next visit to the Cathedral he came home with a big package under his arm. He unwrapped it, and showed Anna a large volume. “See,” said he, “this is the ‘History of St. John the Evangelist.’ The Abbot gave it to me in return for some more copies of my St. Christopher. It is written on vellum with a pen, and all the initial letters are illuminated. There are sixty-three pages, and some patient monk has spent months, aye, perhaps years, in making it. But I have a plan to engrave it all, just as I did the picture.”

“Engrave a whole book! That would be a miracle!”

“I believe I can do it. And when once the sixty-three blocks are cut, a block to a page, I can print a score of the books as easily as one copy.”

“Then thou canst sell books as well as the monks! And when the blocks are done it may not take more than a day to make a book, instead of months and years.”

So John Gutenburg set to work with new enthusiasm. He needed a very quiet place in which to carry out his scheme, and more room than he had at home. It is said he found such a place in the ruined cloisters of the Monastery of St. Arbogast in the suburbs of Strasburg. Thither he stole away whenever he could leave the shop, and not even Anna went with him, nor even to her did he tell what he was doing. At last he brought home the tools he had been making, and started to cut the letters of the first pages of the “History of St. John.” Night after night he worked at it, until a great pile of engraved blocks was done.

Then one evening there was a knock at the door of the living-room, and before he could answer it the door was opened, and the two apprentices, Dritzhn and Hielman, came in. They saw their master bending over wooden blocks, a pile of tools, and the open pages of the History. “What is this?” exclaimed Dritzhn. “Some new mystery?”

“I cannot explain now,” said the confused inventor.

“But thou promised to teach us all thy arts for the money we pay thee,” objected Hielman, who was of an avaricious turn of mind.

“No, only the trade of cutting gems and shaping mirrors.”

“We understood we paid thee for all thy teaching,” objected the apprentice. “’Tis only fair we should have our money’s worth.”

Gutenberg thought a moment. “This work must be done in quiet,” said he, “and must be kept an absolute secret for a time. But I do need money to carry it on rightly.”

This made Dritzhn more eager than ever to learn what the work was. “We can keep thy secret,” said he, “furnish funds, and perhaps help in the business.”

Gutenberg had misgivings as to the wisdom of increasing his confidants, but he finally decided to trust them. First he pledged each to absolute secrecy. Then he produced his wooden cuts, and explained in detail how he had made them. Both the apprentices showed the greatest interest. “Being a draughtsman, I can help with the figures,” said Dritzhn.

“Yes,” agreed Gutenberg, “but just now I am chiefly busy in cutting blocks for books.”

“Books!” exclaimed the apprentice.

“Yes. I have found a new way of imprinting them.” Then he showed them what he was doing with the History.

Dritzhn was amazed. “There should be a fortune in this!” said he. “But will not this art do away with the old method of copying?”

“In time it may,” agreed the inventor. “That’s one reason why we must keep it secret. Otherwise the copyists might try to destroy what I have done.”

As a result of this interview a contract was drawn up between Gutenberg and his apprentices, according to the terms of which each apprentice was to pay the inventor two hundred and fifty florins. The work was to be kept absolutely secret, and in case any of the partners should die during the term of the agreement the survivors should keep the business entirely to themselves, on payment of one hundred florins to the heirs of the deceased partner. Riffe, the third apprentice, was admitted to the business, and after that the four took turns looking after the jewelry shop and working over the blocks for the History.

But the pupils were not so well educated as the master. They could not read, and had to be taught how to draw the different letters. They were clumsy in cutting the lines, and spoiled block after block. Gutenberg was very patient with them. Again and again he would throw away a spoiled block and show them how the letters should be cut properly.

In time the blocks were all finished. “Now I can help,” said Anna. “Thou must let me take the impressions.”

“So thou shalt,” her husband answered. “To-night we will fold and cut the paper into the right size for the pages, and grind the umber for ink. To-morrow we will begin to print the leaves.”

The following day they all took turns making the impressions. Page after page came out clear and true. Then Anna started to paste the blank sides of the sheets together, for the pages were only printed on one side. In a week a pile of the Histories was printed and bound, and ready to be sold.

The jewelers had little time to offer the books to the wealthy people of the city, and so Gutenberg engaged a young student at the Cathedral, Peter Schœffer by name, to work for him. The first week he sold two copies, and one other was sold from the shop. That made a good beginning, but after that it was more difficult to find buyers, and the firm began to grow doubtful of their venture.

The poor people of Strasburg could not read, and could not have afforded to buy the books in any event, the nobility were hard to reach, and the clergy, who made up the reading class of the age, were used to copying such manuscripts as they needed. But this situation did not prevent Gutenberg from continuing with his work. He knew that the young men who were studying at the Cathedral had to copy out word for word the “Donatus,” or manual of grammar they were required to learn. So the firm set to work to cut blocks and print copies of this book. When they were finished they sold more readily than the History had done, and the edition of fifty copies was soon disposed of. But by that time all the scholars of the city were supplied, and it was very difficult to send the books to other cities. There were no newspapers, and no means of advertising, and the only practical method of sale was to show the book to possible purchasers, and point out its merits to them. So Gutenberg turned to two other books that were used by the monks, and printed them. One was called the “Ars Memorandi,” or “Art of Remembering,” and the other the “Ars Moriendi,” or “Art of Knowing How to Die.”

Whenever he printed a new book Gutenberg took it to the Cathedral to show the priests. He carried the “Ars Moriendi” there, and found the Abbot in the library, looking over the manuscripts of several monks.

“Good-morning, my son,” said the Abbot. “Hast thou brought us more of thy magical books?”

“It is not magic, Father; it is simply patience that has done it,” said Gutenberg, handing the Abbot a copy of his latest book.

“Thanks, my son. It is always a pleasure to examine thy manuscripts.”

The monks gathered around the Abbot to look at the new volume. “It is strange,” said one of them, named Father Melchior. “How canst thou make so many books? Thou must have a great company of scribes.”

Another was turning over the pages of the book. “It is not quite like the work of our hands,” said he.

“It is certain that none of us can compete with thy speed in writing,” went on Father Melchior. “Every few weeks thou dost bring in twelve or more books, written in half the time it takes our quickest scribe to make a single copy.”

“Moreover,” said another, “the letters are all so exact and regular. Thou hast brought two copies, and one has just as many letters and words on a page as the other, and all the letters are exactly alike.”

The Abbot had been studying the book closely. Now he asked the monks to withdraw. When Gutenberg and he were alone, he said, “Are these books really made with a copyist’s pen?” He cast a searching glance at the lapidary.

Gutenberg, much embarrassed, had no answer for him.

“It is as I guessed,” said the Abbot. “They are made from blocks, like the St. Christopher.”

The Abbot smiled at the look of dismay on Gutenberg’s face. “Have no fear,” he added. “It may be that I can supply thee with better work for thy skill. We need more copies of the ‘Biblia Pauperum’ for our use here, and I have no doubt thou couldst greatly improve on the best we have.”

“I should like to do it,” said Gutenberg, “if there were not too much expense.”

“The priests will need many copies,” the Abbot assured him. “And thou shalt be well paid for them.”

So the young printer agreed to undertake this new commission. It meant much to him to have secured the patronage of the Abbot, for this would set a seal upon the excellence of his work, and bring him to the notice of the wealthy and cultivated people of the day.

Gutenberg took the Abbot’s copy of the “Biblia” home, and he and the apprentices started work upon the wooden blocks. There were many cuts in the book which had to be copied, and so they engaged two wood engravers who lived in Strasburg to help them. Even so, it took them months to finish the book. But when it was printed and bound, and a copy shown to the Abbot, he was delighted with it. “Thou hast done nobly, my son,” said he, “and thy labors will serve the interests of our Mother Church. Thou shalt be well paid.”

Gutenberg returned home with the money, and showed it delightedly to his wife. “I knew thou wouldst triumph,” said she. “Only to think of a real ‘Biblia Pauperum’ made by my John Gutenberg. We shall see wonderful days!”

Now fortune grew more favorable. The “Biblia” sold better than the other books had done, and they next printed the Canticles, or Solomon’s Song. This was impressed, as the others had been, on only one side of the page, and from engraved wooden blocks. Then Gutenberg thought he would like to print the entire Bible. Anna favored this, and he started to figure out how long the work would take.

“There are seven hundred pages in the Bible,” said he. “I cannot engrave more than two pages a month working steadily, and at such a rate it would take me fully three hundred and fifty months, or nearly thirty years, to make blocks enough to print the Holy Book.”

“Why, thou wouldst be an old man before it was done!” cried his wife in dismay.

“Yes, and more than that, this process of engraving is dimming to the eyes. I should be blind before my work was half done.”

“But couldst thou not divide the work with the others?”

“Yes, if only I could persuade them to attempt so big a work. They want to try smaller books, for they say my new process is hardly better for making a large book than the old method of copying. It may be that I can get them to print the Gospels gradually, one book at a time.”

Though the workmen were now growing more weary and disheartened with each new volume they undertook, Gutenberg would not give up. He persuaded them to start cutting the blocks for the Gospel of St. Matthew. But as he worked with his knives the apprentices grumbled about him. At last he had the first block nearly done. Then his hand slipped, the tool twisted, and the block was split across.

The other men looked aghast. So much work had gone for nothing.

Gutenberg sat studying the broken block of wood. As he studied it a new idea came to him. Picking up his knife he split the wood, making separate pieces of every letter carved on it. Then he stared at the pile of little pieces that lay before him like a bundle of splinters. He realized that he was now on the trail of a greater discovery than any he had yet made, for these separate letters could be used over and over again, not only in printing one book but in printing hundreds.

Taking a fresh block he split it into little strips, and cutting these down to the right size, he carved a letter on the end of each strip. This was more difficult than cutting on the solid block, and he spoiled many strips of wood before he got a letter that satisfied him. But finally he had made one, and then another, and another, until he had all the letters of the alphabet. He was careful to cut the sticks of the proper width, so that the letters would not be too far apart when they should be used for printing. When they were done he showed them to the others and called them stucke, or type. They soon saw what a great step forward he had made.

The first words he printed with type were Bonus homo, “a good man.” He took the letters that spelled the first word, and putting them in their proper order tied them together with a string. He only had one letter o, so he had to stop and cut two more. Then he made a supply of each letter of the alphabet, and put type of each letter separately in little boxes, to keep them from getting mixed. So he made the first font of movable type known to history.

As he experimented with these first type he made another improvement. He found it was hard to keep the letters tight together, so that he could ink them and print from them. He cut little notches in the edges of the different type, and by fastening his linen thread about the notches in the outside letters of each word he found that he could hold a word as tightly together as if all the letters in it were cut on a single block.

The cutting of the type and the studying out of new and better ways of holding them together took a great deal of time, and meanwhile the sales of gems and mirrors had fallen off. The apprentices had not the master’s skill in holding the letters together, and they grew discouraged as time after time the type would separate as they were ready to print from it. They wanted to go back to the blocks, but Gutenberg insisted that his new way was the better. At last he hit upon another idea. He would make a press which would hold the type together better than a linen thread or a knot of wire.

After many patient experiments he finished a small model of a press which seemed to him to combine all the qualifications needed for his work. He took this to a skilful turner in wood and metal, who examined it carefully. “This is only a simple wine-press I am to make, Master John,” said he.

“Yes,” answered Gutenberg, “it is in effect a wine-press, but it shall shortly spout forth floods of the most abundant and marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to quench the thirst of man.”

The mechanic, paying no heed to Gutenberg’s excitement, made the press for him according to the model. It was set up in the printing-rooms of Dritzhn’s dwelling, and the firm went on with their work of cutting movable type. But the sale of books was small, and for two years more the apprentices grumbled, and protested that they should have stuck to the lapidary’s art.

New troubles soon arose. It was found that the ink softened the type and spoiled the form of the letters. “We must make more fresh type,” said Gutenberg, “until we can find a way to harden the wood.” Then a bill was sent in of one hundred florins for press-work. The partners were angry, and said they saw no real advantage in the press. “But without the frame and press all our labor of making stucke will prove useless,” answered the inventor. “We must either give up the art, and disband, or make the necessary improvements as they are called for.”

Gutenberg was made of sterner stuff than his partner Dritzhn. Two years of small success and great doubt had told upon the latter, and so one day when Father Melchior of the Cathedral told him he noticed that he was worried, Dritzhn confessed to him the secret of the printing shop. “I have put money into the business,” said he, “and if I leave now I fear I shall lose it all.”

“Leave it by all means,” advised the Father, “for be sure that no good will come of these strange arts.”

But when he went back to the shop Dritzhn discovered the others setting type for a new work, a dictionary, that was called a “Catholicon.” They were all enthusiastic about this, believing it would have a readier sale than their other works, and so he decided to stay with them a little longer, in spite of the Father’s advice.

Just as the dictionary was ready to be issued, in the autumn of 1439, an event occurred which threw the firm into confusion. Dritzhn died suddenly, and his two brothers demanded that Gutenberg should let them take his place in the firm. He read over the contract which they had all signed, and then told them that they could not be admitted as partners, but should be paid the fifteen florins which the books showed were due to Dritzhn’s heirs. They rejected this with scorn, and at once started a lawsuit against Gutenberg and his partners.

There were no such protections for inventions as patents then; rumor soon spread abroad the news that Gutenberg had discovered a new art that would prove a gold-mine, and the poor inventor saw that the lawsuit would probably end in his ruin. The printing-press had stood in Dritzhn’s house, and before Gutenberg could prevent it the two brothers had stolen parts of it. Then he had what was left of it carried to his own house; but even here spies swarmed to try to learn something of his secret. Finally he realized that his invention was not safe even there, and decided that every vestige of his work must be destroyed. “Take the stucke from the forms,” said he to his friends, “and break them up in my sight, that none of them may remain perfect.”

“What, all our labor for the last three years!” cried Hielman.

“Never mind,” answered Gutenberg. “Break them up, or some one will steal our art, and we shall be ruined.”

So, taking hammers and mallets, they broke the precious forms of type into thousands of fragments.

The lawsuit dragged along, and finally ended in Gutenberg’s favor. The firm was ordered to pay Dritzhn’s brothers the fifteen florins, and nothing more. But the type were destroyed, and the partners were afraid to make new ones, lest the suspicious public should spy upon them and learn their secret. When the term of the contract between the partners came to an end it was not renewed. Each of the firm went his own way, and John Gutenberg opened his lapidary’s shop again and tried to build up the trade he had lost.

His wife was still Gutenberg’s chief encouragement. She was certain that some day he would win success, and often in the evening she would urge him not to despair of his invention, but to wait till the time should be ripe for him to go on with it again. As a matter of fact it was impossible for him to give it up. Before long he was cutting stucke again in his spare hours, and then trying his hand at printing single pages.

He felt however that it would be impossible for him to resume his presswork in Strasburg. There was too much prejudice against his invention there. So he decided to go back to his home town of Mainz, where many of his family were living. Anna agreed with this decision, and so they closed their shop, sold their goods, and journeyed to his brother’s home. There one day his brother introduced him to a rich goldsmith named Faust, and this man said he understood that Gutenberg had invented a new way of making books. John admitted this, and told him some details of his process.

The goldsmith was most enthusiastic, and suggested that he might be able to help the inventor with money. Gutenberg said he should need two or three thousand florins. “I will give it to thee,” answered Faust, “if thou canst convince me that it will pay better than goldsmithing.”

Then the printer confided all his secrets to Faust, and the latter considered them with great care. At last he was satisfied, and told Gutenberg that he would enter into partnership with him. “But where shall we start the work?” he added. “Secrecy is absolutely necessary. We must live in the house in which we work.”

“I had thought of the Zum Jungen,” answered Gutenberg, naming an old house that overlooked the Rhine.

“The very place,” agreed Faust. “It is almost a palace in size, and will give us ample room; it is in the city, and yet out of its bustle. It is vacant now, and I will rent it at once. When canst thou move there?”

“At once,” said Gutenberg, more pleased than he dared show.

So the printer and his good wife moved to the Zum Jungen, which was more like a castle than a tradesman’s dwelling-house. Its windows looked over the broad, beautiful river to the wooded shores beyond. Faust advanced Gutenberg the sum of 2,020 florins, taking a mortgage on his printing materials as security. Then Faust moved his family and servants to the old house, and the firm started work. Hanau, the valet of Gutenberg’s father, and a young scholar named Martin Duttlinger, joined them at the outset.

Two well-lighted rooms on the second floor, so placed as to be inaccessible to visitors, were chosen for the workshops. Here the four worked from early morning until nearly midnight, cutting out new sets of type and preparing them for the presswork. They began by printing a new manual of grammar, an “Absies,” or alphabetical table, and the “Doctrinale.” All three of these it was thought would be of use to all who could read.

Soon Faust discovered the same defect in the type that the workmen at Strasburg had discovered. The wooden letters would soften when used, and soon lose their shape. He spoke to Gutenberg about it, and the latter studied the problem. At length an idea occurred to him. He opened a drawer and took out a bit of metal. He cut a letter on the end of it. “There is the answer,” said he. “We will make our type of lead. We can cut it, and ink cannot soften it as it does wood.”

Faust was very much pleased. Now that he understood Gutenberg’s invention he realized how great a thing it was destined to become, and was anxious to help its progress in every way he could. One day Gutenberg told him that they needed a good man to cut the designs for the engravings. “Dost thou know of one?” asked Faust. “Of only one,” was the answer. “He is Peter Schœffer, a youth who helped me before. He is now a teacher of penmanship in Paris.”

“We must send for him,” said Faust.

So Gutenberg sent for Schœffer, and the printing staff was increased to five.

Schœffer had considerable reputation as a scholar, and soon after he had joined them Gutenberg asked him what he thought was the most important book in the world. Schœffer replied that he was not sufficiently learned to answer the question.

“But to the best of thy knowledge,” persisted Gutenberg.

“I remember that when I was in the Cathedral school,” said Schœffer, “Father Melchior showed us the Gothic Gospels, or Silver Book, and said that more art and expense had been spent on the Bible than on any other book he knew. I believe therefore that it is the most useful and important book in the world.”

“So I believe,” agreed Gutenberg, “and I intend to print it in the best style possible to my art.”

“But what a tremendous undertaking, to print the whole Bible!” exclaimed Schœffer.

“Yes, a stupendous work,” Gutenberg agreed. “And so I want to start upon it at once.”

Schœffer was amazed when Gutenberg showed him the new press he had built at the Zum Jungen. He watched the master dab the type with ink, slide them under the platen, and having pressed it down, take out the printed page.

“It is wonderful!” said he. “How many impressions canst thou take from the press in a day?”

“About three hundred, working steadily.”

“Then books will indeed multiply! What would the plodding copyists say to this!”

When they began printing with the lead type they soon found that the metal was too soft. The nicest skill had to be used in turning the screw of the press, and only Gutenberg seemed able to succeed with it. Schœffer suggested that they should try iron.

“We have,” said Gutenberg, “but it pierced the paper so that it could not be used.”

Schœffer was used to experimenting in metals, and the next day he brought to the workroom an alloy which he thought might serve. It was a mixture of regulus of antimony and lead. They tried it, and found it was precisely the right substance for their use. Gutenberg and Faust were both delighted, and very soon afterward made Peter Schœffer a partner in the firm.

They now started on the great work of printing the Bible. Duttlinger was commissioned to buy a Bible to serve for his own use. This was brought in secret to the workrooms, and the partners inspected it carefully. They realized what a huge undertaking it would be to print such a long book, but nevertheless they set out to do it. Each man was allotted his share in the labor, and the work began.

The press Gutenberg was using was a very simple affair. Two upright posts were fastened together by crosspieces at top and bottom. In this frame a big iron screw was worked by means of a handle. A board was fastened beneath the screw, and the type, when inked and set in a wooden frame, were placed on this board. The printing paper was laid over the type, and the screw forced the platen, which was the board fixed to it, down upon the paper. Then the screw was raised by the handle, the platen was lifted with it, and the printed paper was ready to be taken out. The screw was worked up and down in a box, called a hose, and the board on which the type were set for the printing was actually a sort of sliding table. The frame or chase of type was fixed on this table, and when inked and with the paper laid in place, was slid under the platen, which was a smooth planed board. The screw was turned down, the platen was pressed against the sheet of paper, and the printing was done.

Each of the workers at the Zum Jungen suggested valuable changes and additions. Schœffer proved wonderfully adept at cutting type, and later at illuminating the initial letters that were needed. The copies we have of the books published by this first Mainz press bear striking witness to the rare skill and taste Peter Schœffer showed in designing and coloring the large capital letters that were considered essential at that day.

The firm had by now prepared several hundred pounds’ weight of metal type for the Bible, had discovered that a mixture of linseed oil and lampblack made the best ink, and had invented ink-dabbers made of skin stuffed with wool. Then it occurred to Schœffer that there must be some easier way of making type than by cutting it out by hand. After some study he found it, and the firm began taking casts of type in plaster moulds. But the success of this method seemed very doubtful at first, for it was hard to get a good impression of such small things as type in the soft plaster. Again Schœffer showed his skill. He planned the cutting of punches which would stamp the outline of the type upon the matrix. He cut matrices for the whole alphabet, and then showed the letters cast from them to Gutenberg and Faust.

“Are these letters cast in moulds?” exclaimed the astonished Faust.

“Yes,” answered Schœffer.

“This is the greatest of all thy inventions then,” said Faust. “Thou art beyond all question a great genius!”

With type cast in this new way the firm printed the first page of their Bible in the spring of 1450. The press worked to perfection, and when they removed the vellum sheet the printed letters were clear, beautifully formed, and ranged in perfect lines. So began the printing of what was to become famous as the Mazarine Bible. But it was not until five years later, in 1455, that the book was finished.

The Bible was printed, but its cost had been great, and the returns from its sale were small. Faust was dissatisfied with Gutenberg, and took occasion to tell Schœffer one evening that he believed the firm would do better without the master. “Thou hast devised the ink, the forms for casting type, and the mixture of metals,” he said. “These are almost all that has been invented. Gutenberg spent 4,000 florins before the Bible was half done, and I do not see how he can ever repay me the sums I have advanced.”

Faust played upon young Schœffer’s vanity, he praised him continually and disparaged Gutenberg, and finally persuaded him they would be better off without the latter. Peter Schœffer was, moreover, in love with Faust’s daughter Christiane, and wished to marry her. This was another inducement for him to side with the rich goldsmith.

Then one day Faust asked Gutenberg blankly when he intended to repay him the money he had advanced. Gutenberg was surprised, and told him he had nothing but the small profits the firm was making.

“I will give thee thirty days to pay the debt,” said Faust, “and if thou dost fail to pay within that time I shall take steps to collect it.”

“But how am I to procure it? Wouldst thou ruin me?” cried Gutenberg.

“The money I must have, and if thou art honest thou wilt pay me,” came the hard answer.

The month ended, and Gutenberg had not found the money. He protested and pleaded with Faust, but the latter was obdurate. He started a lawsuit at once to recover the sums he had expended, and judgment was given against Gutenberg, commanding that he should pay what he had borrowed, together with interest. Gutenberg could not do this, and so Faust took possession of all the presses, the type, and the copies of the Bible that were already printed.

Gutenberg knew that he was ruined. His wife tried to console him. “I am worse than penniless,” said he. “My noble art is at an end. What I most feared has happened. They have stolen my invention, and I have nothing left.”

Meantime Schœffer had married Faust’s daughter, and the two men took up the printing business for themselves. Faust showed the Bibles to friends, and was advised to carry a supply of them to Paris. He went to that city, and at first met with great success. He sold the King a copy for seven hundred and fifty crowns, and private citizens copies at smaller prices. But soon word spread abroad that this stranger’s stock was inexhaustible. “The more he sells the more he has for sale,” said one priest. Then some one started the report that the stranger was in league with the devil, and soon a mob had broken into his lodgings and found his stock of Bibles. Faust was arrested on the charge of dealing in the black art, and was brought before the court. He now decided that he would have to tell of the printing press if he were to escape, and so he made a full confession. So great was the wonder and admiration at the announcement of this new invention that he was at once released, loaded with honors, and soon after returned to Mainz with large profits from his trip.

But Gutenberg was not entirely left to despair. His brother Friele, who was well-to-do, came to his aid, and interested friends in starting John at work on his presses again. He missed Schœffer’s discoveries as to ink and the casts for type, but although he had not the means to print another copy of the Bible, he contrived to print various other books which were bought by the clerical schools and the monasteries. After a time Faust, realizing perhaps that Gutenberg was in reality the inventor of the art which he was beginning to find so lucrative, came to him, and asked his forgiveness. He admitted that he had been unfair in the prosecution of the lawsuit, and urged Gutenberg to take his old place in their firm. But Gutenberg could not be persuaded, he preferred to work after his own fashion, and to be responsible only to himself.

For eight years he carried on the business of his new printing shop in the Zum Jungen, with his brother and Conrad Humery, Syndic of Mainz, to share the expenses and profits. Then his wife, Anna, died, and he could not keep on with the work. His brother advised him to leave Mainz for a time and travel. So he sold his presses and type to the Syndic, and left Mainz. Wherever he journeyed he was received with honor, for it was now widely known that he had invented the new art of printing. The Elector Adolphus of Nassau invited him to enter his service as one of his gentlemen pensioners, and paid him a generous salary. Thus he was able to live in peace and comfort until his death in 1468.

Meanwhile Faust and Schœffer had continued to print the Bible and other works, and had found a prosperous market in France and the German cities. Schœffer cast a font of Greek type, and used this in printing a copy of Cicero’s “De Officiis,” which was eagerly bought by the professors and students of the great University of Paris. But as Faust was disposing of the last copies of this book in the French capital he was seized with the plague, and died almost immediately. For thirty-six years Peter Schœffer continued printing books, making many improvements, and bringing out better and better editions of the Bible.

The capture of Mainz in 1462 by the Elector Adolphus of Nassau gave the secrets of the printing press to the civilized world. Presses were set up in Hamburg, Cologne, Strasburg, and Augsburg, two of Faust’s former workmen began printing in Paris, and the Italian cities of Florence and Venice eagerly took up the new work. Between 1470 and 1480 twelve hundred and ninety-seven books were printed in Italy alone, an indication of what men thought of the value of Gutenberg’s invention.

William Caxton, an English merchant, learned the new art while he was traveling in Germany, and when he returned home started a press at Westminster with a partner named Wynken de Worde. This was the first English press, but others were quickly set up at Oxford and York, Canterbury, Worcester, and Norwich, and books began to appear in a steady stream.

The art of printing has seen great changes since Gutenberg’s day. The type is now made by machinery, inked by machinery, set and distributed again by machinery. The letters, when once set up, are cast in plates of entire pages, so that they can be kept for use whenever they are wanted. Stereotyping and electrotyping have made this possible. The Mergenthaler Linotype machine sets and casts type in the form of solid lines. The great presses of to-day can accomplish more in twelve hours than the presses of 1480 in as many months.

But the great press we have is the direct descendant of the little one that John Gutenberg built in the Zum Jungen at Mainz, and the letters we read on the printed page are after all only another form of those he cut out with so much patient labor on his wooden blocks in Strasburg. Printing is one of the greatest inventions the world has ever seen, but it had its beginning in the simple fact that a young German polisher of gems fell to wondering how a rude playing-card had been made.

II
PALISSY AND HIS ENAMEL
About 1510-1589

The discovery of a long-sought enamel and the successful manufacture of a new and beautiful type of pottery can scarcely be ranked among the great inventions of history, but the story of Bernard Palissy is far too interesting to need any such excuse. He was a worker in the fine arts, in a day when objects of beauty were considered of the first importance, and his success was then regarded as almost as great a thing as the building of the first McCormick reaper in another age.

This maker of a new and beautiful porcelain was a Frenchman, born about 1510 at the little village of La Chapelle Biron, which lies between the Lot and Dordogne, in Perigord. His parents were poor peasants, without the means or the opportunity to give Bernard much of a schooling, but he picked up a very fair knowledge of reading and writing, and kept his eyes so wide open that he learned much more than the average country boy. It was the age when the churches of France were being made glorious with windows of many-colored glass, and Bernard, watching the glass-workers, dared to ask if they would take him as apprentice. One of them would, and so the boy of Perigord began his career of artist, his field covering not only the manufacture of glass, but its cutting, arranging, and sometimes its painting for the rose-windows of the Gothic churches. And so skilled were those glass-workers and so deeply in love with their art that their glass has been the despair of the later centuries that have tried to copy them.

Like a true artist he was very much in earnest. With his spare time and such money as he could save he studied all subjects that seemed apt to be of help to him. He learned geometry, and drawing, painting, and modeling. In his desire for the greatest subjects for his windows and the finest treatment of them, Bernard turned to Italy, the home of the great painters, and copied their works. This led his eager mind to delve into Italian literature, and shortly the young workman was not only draughtsman and artist, but something of a man of letters as well. The little village of La Chapelle Biron found that the peasant’s son, without any education in the church schools, was already a man of many talents and quite remarkable learning.

He had mastered his profession, and the town in Perigord was somewhat too small for him. He must see something of that outer world where many others were making works of art. His skill as a painter of glass, as a draughtsman, and land-measurer, would earn him a living wherever he might go. So he set forth on his travels, as many young scholars and artisans were used to do in those days, working here and there, collecting new ideas, talking with many men of different minds, and gaining a first-hand knowledge of the world that lay about him. He visited the chief provinces of France, saw something of Burgundy and Flanders, and stayed for a time on the banks of the Rhine. His love of acquiring knowledge grew as he traveled, and he studied natural history, geology and chemistry. Where churches were being built he painted glass, where towns or nobles needed measurers or surveyors of their lands he worked for them. When he had seen as much of the world as he wished, he went to the town of Saintes, married, and settled there as a man of several trades.

It was in 1539 that Palissy became a citizen of Saintes, and several years later that chance sent his way a beautiful cup of enameled pottery. Some have said that the cup came from Italy, and some from Nuremberg, but it was of a new pattern to Palissy, and the more he looked at it and handled it the more he wanted to learn the secret of its making, and duplicate it or improve on it. He had the artist’s wish to create something beautiful, and with it was the belief that he could provide well for his wife and children, and raise the potter’s art to a new height if he could learn the secret of this enamel. That thought became his lodestone, and he left all his other work to accomplish it. Much as he knew about glass, he knew nothing about enamel. He had no notion of the materials he should need, nor how he was to combine them. He started to make earthen vessels without knowing how other men had made them. He knew that he should need a furnace, and so he built one, although he had never seen a furnace fired.

The attempt seemed foolhardy from the start. What he had saved he spent in his attempts to find the right materials. Soon his savings were gone, and he had to look about for a new means of living. A survey and plan of the great salt-marshes of Saintonge was wanted in 1543, and Palissy obtained the work. He finished it, was paid the stipulated sum, and immediately spent it in fresh experiments to find the coveted enamel. But he could not find it. One experiment after another ended in rebuff. He labored day and night, and the result of all his labors was the same. But the desire to find that enamel had possessed Palissy’s mind, and it was not a mind to veer or change.

The man was beset by friends who told him he was mad to continue the chase, and that his undoubted talents in other lines were being wasted. He was implored, reproached, and belabored by his wife, who begged him to leave his furnace, and turn to work that would feed and clothe his growing family. He might well have seemed a fanatic, he might well have seemed distraught and cruel to his family, but he met each protest with a simple frankness that disarmed all attacks and showed his indomitable purpose. Those were days of intense suffering for Palissy, and later he described them in his own writings in a way that showed his real depth of feeling and his constant struggle against what he held to be temptations.

He borrowed money to build a new furnace, and when this was done he lived by it, trying one combination of materials after another in his search for the secret of the enamel. Those were superstitious days, and some of his more ignorant neighbors thought that Bernard Palissy must be in league with the devil, since he spent day and night feeding fuel to his furnace, and sending a great volume of smoke and sparks into the air. Some said he was an alchemist trying to turn base metals into gold, some that he was discovering new poisons, some frankly believed that his learning had turned his mind and made him mad. They were all certain of one thing, and that was that his great fires were providing very ill for his family, who became in time a charge on the town’s charity.

For sixteen years Palissy experimented. For sixteen years he had to resist the reproaches of wife and children, and the threats of neighbors. That was an epic struggle, well worth the recording. We can picture the little mediæval town, surrounded by its salt marshes, the prosperous burghers, and the strange man, Bernard Palissy, at whom all others scoffed, whose children played in the streets in rags and tatters, but who, himself, was always working at his furnace with demoniac zeal. “Too much learning,” says one burgher, shaking his head. “What business had a simple glass-worker to study those texts out of Italy?” “Seeking for more learning than other folk have is apt to league one with the Evil One,” says number two. “Bernard has sold his soul. He will fall in his furnace some day, and go up in smoke.” “Nay,” says the third burgher, “he will live forever, to bring shame to our town of Saintes. He is like one of those plagues the priests tell us of.” And he crosses himself devoutly.

Palissy, the Potter, after an Unsuccessful Experiment

But Palissy cared for nothing but to learn that secret. At first he had had a workman to help him; now he let him go. He had no money to pay him, and so gave him all his clothes except those he had on. He knew his family were starving, and he dared not go out into the streets for fear of the maledictions of his neighbors. But he fed that furnace and he melted his different compositions. When he could get no other fuel he turned to the scant furnishings of his house. He burned his bed and chairs, his table, and everything that was made of wood. He felt that he was now on the verge of his discovery; but he must have more fire. He tore strips of board from the walls, and piled them in the furnace. Still he needed more heat, and ran out into the yard behind his dwelling. There were sticks that supported vines, and a fence that ran between his land and the next. He took the wood of the fence, the sticks of the vines, and hurried back with them to the furnace. He threw them on the blaze, he bent over his composition, and he found the secret answered for him. After sixteen years he learned how to make that rare enamel.

It was a glorious achievement, and it brought Palissy fame and fortune. With his new knowledge he had soon fashioned pottery, decorated with rustic scenes, and exquisitely enameled, that all lovers of works of art desired at any price. The first pieces of his rustic pottery soon reached the court of France, and Henry II and his nobles ordered vases and figures from him to ornament the gardens of their châteaux. Catherine de’ Medici became his patron, and the powerful Constable de Montmorenci sent to Saintes for Palissy to decorate his château at Ecouen. Fragments of this work have been preserved, exquisite painted tiles, and also painted glass, setting forth the story of Psyche, which Palissy prepared for the château.

The people of Saintes now found that their madman, instead of bringing obloquy upon their town, was to bring it fame. The Reformation had made many Protestants in that part of France, and Palissy was one of them. But when the Parliament of Bordeaux, in 1562, ordered the execution of the edict of 1559, that had been directed against the Protestants, the Catholic Duke of Montpensier gave him a special safeguard, and ordered that his porcelain factory should be exempted from the general proscription. Party feeling ran very high, however, and in spite of the Duke’s safeguard Palissy was arrested, his workshop ordered destroyed by the judges at Saintes, and the King himself had to send a special messenger to the town and claim that Palissy was his own servant, in order to save his life. The royal family, in spite of their many faults, were sincere lovers of beautiful workmanship, and they summoned Palissy to Paris, where they could insure his safety. Catherine de’ Medici gave him a site for his workshop on a part of the ground where the Palace of the Tuilleries stood later, and used often to visit him and talk with him about his art. He made the finest pieces of his porcelain here in Paris. Here he also resumed his earlier studies, and came to lecture on natural history and physics to all the great scholars of the day. When the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve deluged France with the blood of Protestants Catherine saw that Palissy was spared from the general destruction.

Palissy had shown the inborn courage of his nature during those sixteen lean years in Saintes. The perilous ups and downs of life in sixteenth century France were to show that courage in another light. In spite of royal favor the Catholic League reached for him, and in 1588, when he was nearly eighty years old, he was arrested by order of the Sixteen, thrown into the Bastille, and threatened with death. Henry III, son of Catherine, and in his own way a friend of artists, went to see Palissy in prison. “My good friend,” said the King, “you have now been five and forty years in the service of my mother and myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of fire and slaughter. Now I am so pressed by the Guises and my own people that I am constrained to deliver you up into the hands of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are converted.”

“Sire,” answered the old man, “I am ready to resign my life for the glory of God. You have told me several times that you pity me, and I, in my turn, pity you, who have used the words I am constrained. It was not spoken like a king, sire; and these are words which neither you nor those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people, will ever be able to make me utter, for I know how to die.”

The King, however, admiring Palissy’s talents, and remembering his mother’s fondness for the artist, would not give him up to the party of the League. Instead he let him remain in his dungeon in the Bastille, where he died in 1589.

The maker of Palissy ware, as it is called, had many talents, and among them was that of the writer. During his days in prison he busied himself in penning his philosophic, religious, and artistic meditations, as many other illustrious prisoners have done. His autobiography is curious, and its note of sincerity has given it great value as a human document. Says Lamartine of the writings of Palissy, they are “real treasures of human wisdom, divine piety, and eminent genius, as well as of great simplicity, vigor, and copiousness of style. It is impossible, after reading them, not to consider the poor potter one of the greatest writers of the French language. Montaigne is not more free and flowing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is scarcely more graphic; neither does Bossuet excel him in poetical power.”

But Palissy did not explain his art of enamel in detail in any of his writings, and after the death of his brothers or nephews, who succeeded to his work, the secret of Palissy ware, like that of certain other arts of the Renaissance, was lost.

Palissy did not decorate his porcelain with flat painting. His figures, which usually dealt with historical, mythological, or allegorical subjects, were executed in relief, and colored. These colors were bright, and were generally yellows, blues, and grays, although sometimes he used greens, violets, and browns. He never acquired the pure white enamel of Luca della Robbia, nor that of the faience of Nevers. His enamel is hard, but the glaze is not so fine as that of Delft. The back of his ware is never all the same color, but usually mottled with several colors, often yellow, blue, and brown.

Palissy’s studies in natural history helped him when he came to decorate his pottery. The figures are strikingly true in form and color, and seem to have been moulded directly from nature, as they probably were. Thus the fossil shells which he frequently used in his border decorations are the shells found in the Paris basin, his fish are those of the Seine, his plants, usually the watercress, the hart’s tongue, and the maidenhair fern, are those which he found in the country about Paris. His rustic scenes have that same charm of fidelity to nature.

He also made very beautiful tiles to overlay walls, stoves, and floors. The château at Ecouen has a large room entirely paved with them, and many are to be seen in the chapel. They bear heraldic designs, the devices of the Constable de Montmorenci, and the colors are fresh and bright, due to the artist’s unique method of enameling.

Like so many Renaissance artists Palissy tried his skill in many lines. If his most remarkable work was his “rustic pieces,” as they are called, great dishes ornamented with fishes, reptiles, frogs, shells, and plants in relief, intended to be used as ornaments and not for service, scarcely less interesting were his statuettes, his stands for fountains, his “rustic figures” for gardens, his candlesticks, ewers and basins, saltcellars, ink-stands, and baskets. Large collections of his work are to be found in the Louvre, the Hôtel de Cluny, and at Sèvres. Many pieces have strayed into the hands of great private collectors of rare porcelain, and both England and Russia have many fine examples of his masterpieces.

He had two assistants, either brothers or nephews, and they knew the secret of his process. They had worked with him, and they continued his art into the reign of Henry IV. One of their productions shows that king surrounded by his family. But these successors had not the artistic instinct or touch of the master. They had little originality, and speedily became servile copyists, so that Palissy ware for a time lost the high place it had held. But these successors did not hand on the secret, and when no more of the ware was forthcoming good judges of the potter’s art found it easy to distinguish between the work of Bernard and of his followers, and his own porcelain was again enthroned among the greatest productions of French art. Connoisseurs of to-day find it easy to know real Palissy ware.

Such is the story of a great artist of the Renaissance in France, of a man born with the love of beauty, who found a new way of giving the world delight, and who overcame what seemed almost superhuman trials.

III
GALILEO AND THE TELESCOPE
1564-1642

Three days before the death of the great Italian Michael Angelo, in the year 1564, there was born in Pisa a boy who was given the name of Galileo Galilei, and who was destined to become one of the greatest philosophers and inventors the world has ever known. He came of a noble family of Florence, which had originally borne the name of Bonajuti, but had later changed it to that of Galilei, and he is usually known by his baptismal name of Galileo, according to the Italian custom of that age. His father was a merchant, engaged in business in Pisa, a man well versed in the Latin and Greek tongues, and well known for his knowledge of mathematics. He was anxious that each of his three sons should have a good education, and so he sent Galileo, his eldest boy, to the famous monastery of Vallombrosa, situated in a beautiful wooded valley not far from Florence. But the father did not intend his son to become a priest, and so, when he found his thoughts tending in that direction, he took him away from the monastery, planning to make him a merchant like himself.

But the mind of the young Galileo was already remarkably acute. He was a good musician, a skilful draughtsman and painter, something of a poet, and had shown considerable talent in designing and building a variety of toy machines. His father soon decided that his son’s bent did not lie in the direction of a dealer in cloths, and, casting about for a scientific career, chose that of medicine for Galileo. So he took up this study at the University of Pisa.

One afternoon the youth of eighteen went to the great Cathedral of the city. He knelt to make his devotions. From the roof of the nave hung a large bronze lamp, and as the boy watched he saw an attendant draw the lamp toward him to light it, and then let it swing back again. The swinging caught his attention, and he watched it with more and more interest. At first the arc of the swinging lamp was wide, but gradually it grew less and less. But what struck him as singular was that the oscillations all seemed to be made in the same time. He had no watch, so he put his fingers on his wrist in order to note the pulse-beats. As nearly as he could determine the swings of the lamp as they lessened were keeping the same times.

When he went home he began to experiment with this idea of the swinging lamp, or pendulum as it came to be called, and soon had constructed an instrument which marked with very fair accuracy the rate and variation of the pulse-beats. It was imperfect in many respects, but when he showed it to his teachers at the university they were delighted with it, and it was soon generally used by the physicians of the day under the name of the Pulsilogia.

But, to his father’s dismay, the young Galileo did not show great interest in the study of medicine. Instead he spent his time studying the mathematics of Euclid, and from them went on to the writings of Archimedes and the laws of mechanics. These latter absorbed him, and fresh from reading them he constructed for himself a hydrostatic balance, the purpose of which was to ascertain accurately the relative proportions of any two metals in an alloy. He wrote an essay on his invention, and circulated it among his friends and teachers. This added to his reputation as a scientist, but brought him no money. His family were poor, and he needed a means of support, and so he applied for, and after a time obtained, appointment to the post of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.

For centuries the laws of mechanics as laid down by the Greek Aristotle had been accepted without much dispute by the civilized world. But a spirit of new thought and investigation was now rising in Europe, and more especially in Italy. Galileo determined to study the laws of mechanics by experiment, and not, as so many earlier scientists had done, by argument or mere theoretical opinions. Therefore he undertook to establish definitely the laws relating to falling bodies.

Aristotle, almost two thousand years before, had announced that if two bodies of different weights were dropped from the same height the heavier would reach the ground sooner than the lighter, according to the proportion of their weights. Galileo doubted this, and decided to try it. Accordingly he assembled the teachers and students of the university one morning about the base of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa. He himself climbed to the top, carrying with him a ten-pound shot and a one-pound shot. He balanced them on the edge of the tower and let them fall together. They struck the ground together. As a result of this experiment Galileo declared three laws in relation to falling bodies. He said that if one neglected the resistance of the air, or in other words supposed the bodies to fall through a vacuum, it would be found, first, that all bodies fall from the same height in equal times; second, that in falling the final velocities are proportional to the times; and third, that the spaces fallen through are proportional to the squares of the times.

The first of these laws was shown by his experiment on the Leaning Tower. To show the others he built a straight inclined plane with a groove down its centre. A bronze ball was free to move in the groove with the least possible friction. By means of this he showed that no matter how much he inclined the plane, and so changed the time, the ball would always move down it according to the laws he had stated.

But in disproving the accuracy of the old laws of Aristotle the young scientist had raised a hornet’s nest about his ears. The men of the old school would not believe him, a conspiracy was set on foot against him, and finally the criticism of his new teachings grew so severe that he was forced to resign his position, and move to Florence.

In spite of his wide-spread reputation no school or university was ready to welcome the young scientist. He was known as a man of a very original turn of mind, and therefore one who would be apt to clash with those who clung to their belief in the old order of thought. At last, however, he succeeded in obtaining the chair of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua, then one of the greatest seats of learning in Italy. Here again he showed the great scope of his knowledge, and wrote on military architecture and fortifications, the laws of motion, of the sphere, and various branches of mechanics. He invented a machine for raising water, and was granted a patent which secured him his rights in it for twenty years, and he also produced what he called his Geometrical and Military Compass, but what was later commonly known as the Sector.

Galileo’s fame as a teacher had now spread widely throughout Europe, and students began to flock to Padua to study under him. He had a large house, where a number of his private pupils lived with him, a garden, in which he delighted, and a workshop. Here he experimented on his next invention, that of the air thermometer. One of his friends, Castelli, wrote of this in a letter many years later, dated 1638. “I remember,” he writes, “an experiment which our Signor Galileo had shown me more than thirty-five years ago. He took a small glass bottle about the size of a hen’s egg, the neck of which was two palms long, and as narrow as a straw. Having well heated the bulb in his hand, he inserted its mouth in a vessel containing a little water, and, withdrawing the heat of his hand from the bulb, instantly the water rose in the neck more than a palm above its level in the vessel. It is thus that he constructed an instrument for measuring the degrees of heat and cold.”

In 1604 the attention of all the astronomers of Europe was attracted by a new star which suddenly appeared in the constellation Serpentarius. Galileo studied it, and shortly began to lecture on the comparatively new science of astronomy. Formerly he had taught the old system of Aristotle to his classes, now, after a searching investigation, he declared his belief in the contrary conclusions of Copernicus. This study led him on and on. He became interested in the magnetic needle, and its use as a compass in navigation. Columbus’ discovery of its changing its position according to its relation to the North Pole took place on his first voyage to America, and reports of this had reached Padua. All educated men were rousing to the fact that the age was fertile with new discoveries in every branch of knowledge, and Galileo and those who were working with him gave eager heed to each month’s batch of news.

Mere chance is said to have brought about the making of the first telescope. The story goes that an apprentice of Hans Lipperhey, an optician of Middleburg, in Holland, was, one day in October, 1608, playing with some spectacle lenses in his master’s shop. He noticed that by holding two of the lenses in a certain position he obtained a large and inverted view of whatever he looked at. He told Master Hans about this, and the optician fixed two lenses in a tube, and looking at the weathercock on a neighboring steeple saw that it seemed much nearer and to be upside down. He hung the tube in his shop as a curious toy, and one day the Marquis Spinola examined it and bought it to present to Prince Maurice of Nassau. Soon a number of Hans Lipperhey’s scientific neighbors were trying to make copies of his tube, and before very long reports of it were carried to Italy. The news reached Galileo while on a visit to Venice in June, 1609. This is his account of what followed, taken from a letter written to his brother-in-law Landucci, and dated August 29, 1609.

Galileo’s Telescope

“You must know then that about two months ago a report was spread here that in Flanders a spy-glass had been presented to Prince Maurice, so ingeniously constructed that it made the most distant objects appear quite near, so that a man could be seen quite plainly at a distance of two miles. This result seemed to me so extraordinary that it set me thinking, and as it appeared to me that it depended upon the laws of perspective, I reflected on the manner of constructing it, and was at length so entirely successful that I made a spy-glass which far surpasses the report of the Flanders one. As the news had reached Venice that I had made such an instrument, six days ago I was summoned before their Highnesses, the Signoria, and exhibited it to them, to the astonishment of the whole senate. Many of the nobles and senators, although of a great age, mounted more than once to the top of the highest church tower in Venice, in order to see sails and shipping that were so far off that it was two hours before they were seen, without my spy-glass, steering full sail into the harbor; for the effect of my instrument is such that it makes an object fifty miles off appear as large as if it were only five.

“Perceiving of what great utility such an instrument would prove in naval and military operations, and seeing that His Serenity the Doge desired to possess it, I resolved on the 24th inst. to go to the palace and present it as a free gift.” So Galileo did, and as a result the senate elected him to the Professorship at Padua for life, with a salary of one thousand florins yearly.

But what were Galileo’s claims to the invention of this great instrument? Here is what he wrote in 1623. “Perhaps it may be said that no great credit is due for the making of an instrument, or the solution of a problem, when one is told beforehand that the instrument exists, or that the problem is solvable. It may be said that the certitude of the existence of such a glass aided me, and that without this knowledge I would never have succeeded. To this I reply, the help which the information gave me consisted in exciting my thoughts in a particular direction, and without that, it is possible they may never have been directed that way; but that such information made the act of invention easier to me I deny, and I say more—to find the solution of a definite problem requires a greater effort of genius than to resolve one not specified; for in the latter case hazard, chance, may play the greater part, while in the former all is the work of the reasoning and intelligent mind. Thus, we are certain that the Dutchman, the first inventor of the telescope, was a simple spectacle-maker, who, handling by chance different forms of glasses, looked, also by chance, through two of them, one convex and the other concave, held at different distances from the eye; saw and noted the unexpected result; and thus found the instrument. On the other hand, I, on the simple information of the effect obtained, discovered the same instrument, not by chance, but by the way of pure reasoning. Here are the steps: the artifice of the instrument depends either on one glass or on several. It cannot depend on one, for that must be either convex, or concave, or plain. The last form neither augments nor diminishes visible objects; the concave diminishes them, the convex increases them, but both show them blurred and indistinct. Passing then to the combination of two glasses, and knowing that glasses with plain surfaces change nothing, I concluded that the effect could not be produced by combining a plain glass with a convex or a concave one; I was thus left with the two other kinds of glasses, and after a few experiments I saw how the effect sought could be produced. Such was the march of my discovery, in which I was not assisted in any way by the knowledge that the conclusion at which I aimed was a verity.”

The telescope that Galileo presented to the Doge of Venice, and which was later lost, consisted of a tube of lead, with what is called a plano-concave eye-glass and a plano-convex object glass, and had a magnifying power of three diameters, which made objects look three times nearer than they actually were, and as a result nine times larger. The tube was about seventy centimeters long and about forty-five millimeters in diameter. It was first used in public from the top of the campanile in the piazza at Venice on August 21, 1609, and the most distant object that could be seen through it was the campanile of the church of San Giustina in Padua, about thirty-five kilometers away.

As soon as Galileo returned to his home in Padua he busied himself with improving his invention. First he constructed a new telescope, which as he said “made objects appear more than sixty times larger.” Soon he had a still better one, which enlarged four hundred times. He used this to examine the moon, and said that it brought that body “to a distance of less than three semi-diameters of the earth, thus making it appear about twenty times nearer and four hundred times larger than when seen by the unaided eye.” To use the instrument more accurately he built a support which held it firmly. He had also now learned to make the lenses adjustable, by fixing the tubes that held them so that they could be drawn out of, or pushed into the main tube of the telescope. To see objects not very far distant very clearly he would push the glasses a little way apart, and to see things very far distant he drew the glasses together.

But this last telescope did not altogether satisfy him, and so he built a still larger one. This brought objects more than thirty times closer and showed them almost a thousand times larger in size. With this he discovered the moons of Jupiter, and some of the fixed stars, and added much to what was already known concerning the Milky Way, a region of the sky which had long been a puzzle to astronomers.

He spent a great part of his time now in his workshop, making and grinding glasses. They were expensive and very difficult to prepare properly. Out of more than one hundred that he ground at first he found only ten that would show him the newly found moons of Jupiter. The object glasses were the more difficult, for it was this glass which had to bring to a focus as accurately as possible all the rays of light that passed into the telescope.

As the voyage of Columbus had brought a new world in the western ocean to the notice of Europe, so Galileo’s discoveries with his telescope brought forth a new world in the skies. Galileo wrote out statements of his discoveries, and sent these, with his new telescopes, to the princes and learned men of Italy, France, Flanders, and Germany. At all the courts and universities the telescopes were received with the greatest enthusiasm, and put to instant use in the hope of discovering new stars. But again the followers of Aristotle, those who were unwilling to admit that anything new could be learned about the laws of nature or the universe, arose in wrath. They attacked Galileo and his discoveries. They would not admit that Jupiter had four attendant moons, although these satellites could be seen by any one through the telescope, and a little later, when Galileo stated that the planet Saturn was composed of three stars which touched each other (later found to be one planet with two rings) they rose up to denounce him. But as yet these protests against the discoverer had little effect. Europe was too much interested in what he was showing it to realize how deeply he might affect men’s views of the universe.

Fame was now safely his. Men came from all parts of Europe to study under this wonderful professor of Padua. But teaching gave him too little time to carry on his own researches. So he looked about for some other position that would give him greater leisure, and finally stated his wishes to Cosimo II, Duke of Florence. Galileo had named the satellites of Jupiter after the house of Medici, to which this Duke belonged, and Cosimo was much flattered at the compliment. As a result he was soon after made First Mathematician of the University of Pisa, and also Philosopher and Mathematician to the Grand Duke’s Court of Florence.

Settled at last at Florence his work as an astronomer steadily went forward. He discovered that the planet Venus had a varying crescent form, that there were small spots circling across the face of the sun, which he called sun-spots, and later that there were mountains on the moon. He also visited Rome, where he was received with the greatest good-will by Pope Paul V and his cardinals, and where he met the leading scientists of the capital.

But Galileo’s course was no less flecked with light and shade than were the sun and moon he studied. The envy of rivals soon spread false reports about him, and the professors at Pisa refused to accept the results of his studies. Then one of the latter stirred the religious scruples of the Dowager Grand Duchess by telling her that Galileo’s conclusion that the earth had a double motion must be wrong, since it was opposed to the statements of the Bible. Galileo heard of this, and wrote a letter in reply, in which he said that in studying the laws of nature men must start with what they could prove by experiments instead of relying wholly on the Scriptures. This was enough to set the machinery of his enemies in motion. Galileo’s teachings were pointed out as dangerous to the teachings of the Church, and the officers of the Inquisition began to consider how they might best deal with him. Certain of his writings were declared false and prohibited, and he was admonished that he must follow certain lines in his teachings. He went to Rome himself, and saw the Pope again, but found that his friends were fewer and his enemies growing more powerful.

The theory of Copernicus that the earth and planets are in constant motion was the very foundation of Galileo’s scientific studies, and yet the order of the Church now forbade him to use this theory. He went back to Florence out of health and despondent. His old students were falling away from him through fear of the Pope’s displeasure, and he was left much alone. But his thirst for knowledge would not let him rest. He took up his residence in the fine old Torre del Gallo, which looks down on Florence and the river Arno, and went on with his work. He wrote out the results of his discoveries, and made a microscope from a model he had seen. Soon he had greatly improved upon his model, and had an instrument, which, as he said, “magnifies things as much as 50,000 times, so that one sees a fly as large as a hen.” He sent copies to some friends, and shortly his microscopes were as much in demand as his telescopes had been.

In 1632 he published what he called “The Dialogues of Galileo Galilei.” This divided the world of Italy into two camps, the one those who believed in Aristotle and the old learning, the other those who followed Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. The Jesuits took up the gage he had thrown down, and Galileo found the Church of Rome arrayed against him. The sale of his book was forbidden, a commission was appointed to bring charges against him, and he was ordered to go to Rome for trial. The commission reported that Galileo had disobeyed the Church’s orders by maintaining that the earth moves and that the sun is stationary, that he had wrongly declared that the movements of the tides were due to the sun’s stability and the motion of the earth, and that he had failed to give up his old beliefs in regard to the sun and the earth as he had been commanded.

Galileo, although he was ill, went to Rome, and was placed on trial before the Inquisition. After weeks of weary waiting and long examinations he was ordered to take a solemn oath, forswearing his belief in his own writings and rejecting the conclusion that the sun was stationary and that the earth moved. Rather than suffer the pains of the Inquisition he agreed, and made his solemn declaration. According to an old story, now discredited, as he rose from his knees after the ceremony he whispered to a friend “Eppur si muove” (It does move, nevertheless). Whether he said this or not there can be no doubt but that the great astronomer knew the performance was a farce, and that the world did move in spite of all the Inquisition could declare.

The Inquisition did its work ruthlessly. Notices of the sentence prohibiting the reading of Galileo’s book and ordering all copies of it to be surrendered, and copies of the declaration he had made denying his former teachings, were sent to all the courts of Europe and to many of the universities. In Padua the documents were read to teachers and students at the university where for so many years Galileo had been the greatest glory of learning, and in Florence the Inquisitor read the sentence publicly in the church of Santa Croce, notices having been sent to all who were known to be friends or followers of Galileo, ordering them to attend. Thus his humiliation was spread broadcast, and in addition he was ordered to be held at Rome as a prisoner.

After a time he was permitted to go on parole to the city of Siena, which was at least nearer his home outside Florence. There he stayed until the Grand Duke Cosimo, who had stood by him, persuaded the Church that Galileo’s health required that he be allowed to join his friends. At last he reached his home, and again took up his studies. His eyesight was failing, and eventually he became entirely blind, but meanwhile his speculations covered the widest fields of science, he studied the laws of motion and equilibrium, the velocity of light, the problems of the vacuum, of the flight of projectiles, and the mathematical theory of the parabola. He wrote another book, dealing with two new sciences, and was busy with designs for a pendulum clock at the time of his death in 1642. He was buried in the church of Santa Croce, the Pantheon of Florence, under the same roof with his great fellow countryman, Michael Angelo.

What is known as the modern refracting telescope is based upon a different combination of lenses than that used by Galileo. Kepler studied Galileo’s instrument, and then designed one consisting of two convex lenses. The modern telescope follows Kepler’s arrangement, but Galileo’s adjustment is still suitable where only low magnifying powers are needed, and is used to-day in the ordinary field- and opera-glass.

Galileo knew nothing of what we call the reflecting telescope. He found that by using a convex-lens as an object-glass he could bring the rays of light from any distant object to a focus, and it did not apparently occur to him that he could achieve the same end by the use of a concave mirror. James Gregory, a Scotchman, designed the first reflector in 1663, and described it in a book, but he was too poor to construct it. Nine years later Sir Isaac Newton, having studied Gregory’s plans, built the first reflecting telescope, which is now to be seen in the hall of the Royal Society in London. But invention has gone yet farther in perfecting these instruments with which to study the skies, and the great telescopes of modern times have in most instances discarded Newton’s reflector for the refracting instrument. And these are built on a tremendous scale. The Yerkes telescope at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, has a refractor of forty inches, and the one built for the Paris Exposition of 1900, one of fifty inches. In numerous other details they have changed, and yet each is chiefly indebted to that simple spy-glass of Galileo, by which he was able to show the nobles and senators of Venice full-rigged ships, which without it were barely distant specks on the horizon. Or, going still farther back, the men who make our present telescopes are following the trail that was first blazed on the day when the Dutch apprentice of Middleburg chanced to pick up two spectacle lenses and look through the two of them at once.

Galileo made many great discoveries and inventions; there was hardly a field of science that he did not enter and explore; but his greatest work was to open a new world to men’s attention. It was this that brought him before the Inquisition and that branded him as a dangerous heretic, and it was this that placed him in the forefront of the world’s discoverers. Men might say that the earth stood still, because it suited them best to believe so, but Galileo gave the world an instrument by which it could study the matter for itself, and the world has gone on using that instrument and that method ever since.

IV
WATT AND THE STEAM-ENGINE
1736-1819

It was no pressing need that drove John Gutenberg to the invention of his printing press, nor was it necessity that led to Galileo’s discovery of the telescope, but it was a very urgent demand that led to the building of a steam-engine by James Watt. England and Scotland found that men and women, even with the aid of horses, could not work the coal mines as they must be worked if the countries were to be kept supplied with fuel. The small mines were used up, the larger ones must be deepened, and in that event it would be too long and arduous a task for men and women to raise the coal in small baskets, or for horses to draw it out by the windlass. A machine must be constructed that would do the work more quickly, more easily, and more cheaply.

A Frenchman named Denys Papin had built the first steam-engine with a piston. He had seen certain experiments that showed him how much strength there was in compressed air. He had noticed that air pressure could lift several men off their feet. His problem therefore was how best to compress the air, or, as it appeared to him, how to secure a vacuum. His experiments proved that he could do this by the use of steam. He took a simple cylinder and fitted a piston into it. Water was put in the cylinder under the piston, a fire was lighted beneath it, and as the water came to the boiling point the piston was forced upward by the steam. Then the fire was taken away, and as the steam in the cylinder condensed, the piston was forced down by the air pressure above. He fastened the upper end of the piston to a rope, which passed over two pulleys. If a weight were hung to the other end of the rope it would be raised as the piston was forced down. In that way the air pressure did the work of lifting the weight, and the necessary vacuum was obtained by forming steam and then condensing it in the cylinder. This was a very primitive device, requiring several minutes for the engine to make one stroke, but it was the beginning of the practical use of steam as a motive power.

Thomas Newcomen, an English blacksmith by trade, first put Papin’s idea to use. Instead of the rope and pulleys Newcomen fastened a walking-beam to the end of the piston, and attached a pump-rod to the other end of the walking-beam. He used the steam in the cylinder only to balance the pressure of the air on the piston, and let the pump-rod descend by its own weight. As the steam condensed the piston fell, and the pump-rod rose again. By this means he could pump water from a mine, or lift coal. His first engine was able to lift fifty gallons of water fifty yards at each stroke, and could make twelve strokes a minute. At first he condensed his steam by throwing cold water on the outside of the cylinder, but one day he discovered that the engine suddenly increased its speed, and he found that a hole had been worn in the cylinder, and that the water with which he had covered the top of the piston was entering through this hole. This condensed the steam more rapidly, and he adopted it as an improvement in his next engine. A little later a boy named Humphrey Potter, who had charge of turning the cocks that let the water and steam into the cylinder, found a way of tying strings to the cocks so that the engine would turn them itself, and so originated what came to be known as valve-gear.

Newcomen’s engine was a great help to the coal mines of England and Scotland, but it was very expensive to run, a large engine consuming no less than twenty-eight pounds of coal per hour per horse-power. Then it happened that in 1764 a small Newcomen engine that belonged to the University of Glasgow was given to James Watt, an instrument-maker at the university, to be repaired. To do this properly he made a study of all that had been discovered in regard to engines, and then set about to construct one for himself.

There are many stories told of the boyhood of James Watt. He lived at Greenock on the River Clyde in Scotland, and was of a quiet, almost shy disposition, and delicate in health. He was fond of drawing and of studying mechanical problems, but rarely had much to say about his studies. The story goes that as he sat one evening at the tea-table with his aunt, Mrs. Muirhead, she said reprovingly to him, “James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy: take a book or employ yourself usefully; for the last hour you haven’t spoken a word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding a cup or a silver spoon over the steam, watching it rise from the spout, and catching the drops it falls into. Aren’t you ashamed of spending your time in this way?” And history goes on to presume that as the boy watched the bubbling kettle he was studying the laws of steam and making ready to put them to good use some day.

Watt First Tests the Power of Steam

He picked out the trade of a maker of mathematical instruments, and went to London to fit himself for it. He was apprenticed to a good master and made rapid progress, but the climate of London was bad for his health, and as soon as his term of instruction was finished he went back to Scotland. There he found it difficult to get employment, but at last he obtained permission to open a small shop in the grounds of the University of Glasgow, and to call himself “Mathematical-instrument-maker to the University.”

When the Newcomen engine was given to Watt to repair he studied it closely, and soon reached an important conclusion. A great amount of heat was lost whenever the cold water was let into the cylinder to condense the steam, and this loss vastly increased the expense of running the engine, and cut down its power. He saw that to prevent this loss the cylinder must be kept as hot as the steam that entered it. This led him to study the nature of steam, and he had soon made some remarkable discoveries in regard to it. He found that water had a high capacity for storing up heat, without a corresponding effect on the thermometer. This hidden heat became known as latent heat.

It was of course a matter of common knowledge that heat could be obtained by the combustion of coal or wood. Watt found that heat lay also in water, to be drawn out and used in what is called steam. If you change the temperature of water you find that it exists in three different states, that of a liquid, or water, that of a solid, or ice, and that of a gas, or steam. If water were turned into steam, and two pounds of this steam passed into ten pounds of water at the freezing point the steam would become liquid, or water, again, at 212° of temperature, but at the same time the ten pounds of freezing water into which the steam had been passed would also have been raised to 212° by the process. This shows that the latent heat of the two pounds of steam was sufficient to convert the ten pounds of freezing water into boiling water. That is the latent heat which is set free to work when the steam coming in contact with the cold changes the vapor from its gaseous to a liquid state. The heat, however, is only latent, or in other words of no use, until the temperature of the water is raised to 212°, and the vapor rises.

Mr. Lauder, a pupil of Lord Kelvin, writing of Watt’s “Discoveries of the Properties of Steam,” describes his results in this way: “Suppose you take a flask, such as olive oil is often sold in, and fill it with cold water. Set it over a lighted lamp, put a thermometer in the water, and the temperature will be observed to rise steadily till it reaches 212°, where it remains, the water boils, and steam is produced freely. Now draw the thermometer out of the water, but leaving it still in the steam. It remains steady at the same point—212°. Now it requires quite a long time and a large amount of heat to convert all the water into steam. As the steam goes off at the same temperature as the water, it is evident a quantity of heat has escaped in the steam, of which the thermometer gives us no account. This is latent heat.

“Now, if you blow the steam into cold water instead of allowing it to pass into the air, you will find that it heats the water six times more than what is due to its indicated temperature. To fix your idea: suppose you take 100 lbs. of water at 60°, and blow one pound of steam into it, making 101 lbs., its temperature will now be about 72°, a rise of 12°. Return to your 100 lbs. of water at 60° and add one pound of water at 212° the same temperature as the steam you added, and the temperature will only be raised about 2°. The one pound of steam heats six times more than the one pound of water, both being at the same temperature. This is the quantity of latent heat, which means simply hidden heat, in steam.

“Proceeding further with the experiment, if, instead of allowing the steam to blow into the water, you confine it until it gets to some pressure, then blow it into the water, it takes the same weight to raise the temperature to the same degree. This means that the total heat remains practically the same, no matter at what pressure.

“This is James Watt’s discovery, and it led him to the use of high-pressure steam, used expansively.”

Newcomen, in making his steam-engine, had simply made additions to Papin’s model. Watt had already done much more, for in trying to find how the engine might be made of greater service he had discovered at the outset the principle of the latent heat of steam. He knew that in Newcomen’s engine four-fifths of all the steam used was lost in heating the cold cylinder, and that only one-fifth was actually used in moving the piston. It was easy to see how this loss occurred. The cylinder was cooled at the top because it was open to the air, and was cooled at the bottom in condensing the steam that had driven the piston up so as to create a vacuum which would lower the piston for another stroke. Watt knew that what he wanted was a plan by which the cylinder could always be kept as hot as the steam that went into it. How was he to obtain this? He solved it by the invention of the “separate condenser.” This is how he tells of his discovery. “I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon, early in 1765. I had entered the green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street and had passed the old washing-house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and injection-water if I used a jet as in Newcomen’s engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an offlet could be got at the depth of thirty-five or thirty-six feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air.... I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.”

This was the discovery that gave us practically the modern steam-engine, with its countless uses in unnumbered fields. Newcomen’s engine was limited to the pressure of the atmosphere, Watt’s could use the tremendous force of steam under higher and higher pressure. He led the steam out of the cylinder and condensed it in a separate vessel, thereby leaving the cylinder hot. He closed the cylinder top, and prevented the loss of steam. The invention may seem simple enough as we study it, but as a matter of fact it was the attainment of this result of keeping the cylinder as hot as the steam that enters it that has given us our steam-engine.

The morning following that Sunday afternoon on which the idea of the condenser had occurred to Watt he borrowed a brass syringe from a college friend, and using this as a cylinder and a tin can as a condenser tried his experiment. The scheme worked, albeit in a primitive way, and Watt saw that he was on the track of an engine that would revolutionize the labor of men. But he saw also that it would take both time and money to bring his invention to its most efficient form.

His instrument-making business had prospered, he had taken in a partner, and the firm now employed sixteen workmen. About the same time he married, and rented a house outside the university grounds. Soon he was busily at work building a working model of his steam-engine.

A working model was very hard to make. Watt himself was a skilful mechanician, but the men who helped him were not. The making of the cylinder and the piston gave him the chief trouble. The cylinder would leak. It took him months to devise the tools that would enable him to make a perfect-fitting cylinder, and when he had accomplished that he still found that in one way or another a certain amount of steam would escape. Yet, although imperfect, his model was already many times more powerful than the Newcomen engine he had started with.

But before very long Watt found that this work was leading him into debt. He told his good friend Professor Black, who had discovered the latent heat of steam before Watt had, that he needed a partner to help him in his business of building engines. Black suggested Dr. Roebuck, who had opened the well-known Carron Iron Works near Glasgow. The two men met, and, after some negotiations, formed a partnership. Roebuck agreed to pay Watt’s debts to the sum of a thousand pounds, to provide the money for further experiments, and to obtain a patent for the steam-engine. In return for this he was to become the owner of a two-third interest in the invention.

It was more difficult to secure a patent in those days than in later times, for both the courts and the public considered that the right to make use of any new invention should belong to the whole world, and not alone to one man or to a few men. Watt’s models had to be very carefully made, and his designs very accurately drawn if he was to secure any real protection, and the preparation of these took a vast amount of time. But Roebuck continued to encourage him, and on January 5, 1769, he was granted his first patent, the very same day on which another great English inventor, Arkwright, obtained a patent for his spinning-frame. This first patent covered Watt’s invention of the condenser, but not his next invention, which was the double-acting engine, or in other words, a method by which the steam should do work on the downward as well as on the upward stroke.

With his patent secured Watt spent six months building a huge new engine, which he had ready for use in September, 1769. In spite of all his painstaking it was only a partial success. The cylinder had been badly cast, the pipe-condenser did not work properly, and there was still the old leakage of steam at the piston. Men began to doubt whether the new engine could ever be made to accomplish what Watt claimed for it, but although he realized the difficulties the inventor would not allow himself to doubt. Unfortunately his way was no longer clear. Dr. Roebuck met with reverses and had to end the partnership agreement, and Watt had to borrow money from his old friend Professor Black to secure his patent. To add to his distress his wife, who had been his best counselor, died.

Dr. Roebuck had owed money to a celebrated merchant of Birmingham named Matthew Boulton. Boulton had heard a great deal about Watt’s engine, and now consented to take Roebuck’s interest in Watt’s invention in payment of the debt. At the same time the firm of Boulton and Watt was formed, and in May, 1774, Watt shipped his trial engine south, and set out himself for Birmingham.

Boulton was a business genius, and Watt now found that he could leave financial matters entirely to his care, and busy himself solely with his engine. He had better workmen, better appliances, and better material in Birmingham than he had had in Glasgow, and the engine was soon beginning to justify his hopes. But the original patent had only been granted for fourteen years, and six of these had already passed. Boulton was not willing to put money into the building of a great factory until he was sure that the engines would be secured to the firm. Therefore more time had to be spent in obtaining an extension of the patent. This was finally done, and Watt was granted a term of twenty-four years. At once Boulton set to work, the first engine factory rose, and hundreds of men in England turned to Birmingham to see how much truth there was in the wonderful stories that had been spread abroad of the new invention.

Men soon learned that the stories were true. Orders began to flow in, and Watt had his hands full in traveling about the country superintending the erection of his steam-engines. The mines of Cornwall had become unworkable, and as a great deal depended on the success of the engine in such work, he traveled to Cornwall to make sure that there should be no faults. The miners, the engineers, and the owners had gathered to see the new engine. It stood the test splendidly, making eleven eight-foot strokes per minute, which broke the record. After that the other mines of Great Britain discarded the old expensive Newcomen engine, and sent in orders for Watt’s. The firm prospered, and the inventor began to feel some of the material comforts of success. He had married a second time, and made a home for his wife and children in Birmingham. Now, when he could spare the time from superintending the workmen and traveling over the country, he gave his thoughts to further inventive schemes.

Watt had not only invented the condenser and the double-acting engine, he had produced an indicator for measuring the pressure of steam in the cylinder, and also what was called the fly-ball governor, which took the place of the throttle-valve he had first used to regulate the speed of his engines. These improvements had so increased the uses of the engine that scores of rival inventors were abroad, and therefore he decided to secure a second patent. This he did in 1781, the patent being issued “for certain new methods of producing a continued rotative motion around an axis or centre, and thereby to give motion to the wheels of mills or other machines.” The next year he secured still another patent, and now he had so perfected his double-acting engine that it had a regular and easily controlled motion, in consequence of which, as he said in his specifications, “in most of our great manufactories these engines now supply the place of water, wind and horse mills, and instead of carrying the work to the power, the prime agent is placed wherever it is most convenient to the manufacturer.” This meant that the steam-engine had now reached the point where it could be made to serve for almost any purpose and placed in almost any position that might be required.