If any one requires proof of this statement he will find ample evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on Industrial Biography, where facts and dates are adduced to show that steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised roads, coal gas, photography, anæsthesia, and even telegraphy are inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their success has been based, are of very much older origin than the world generally supposes. The author, therefore, submits that he is justified in referring inventions to the century in which they produce successful results, not to that in which they may have been first vaguely thought of. And in this view it is obvious that many of those patents and suggestions which have been published in current literature during the nineteenth century, but which, although pregnant with mighty industrial influences, have not yet reached fruition, are essentially inventions of the twentieth century. More than this, it is extremely probable that the great majority of those ideas which will move the industrial world during the next ensuing hundred years have already been indicated, more or less clearly, by the inventive thought of the nineteenth century.
George Sutherland.
December, 1900.
CHAPTER I.
INVENTIVE PROGRESS.
The year 1801, the first of the nineteenth century, was annus mirabilis in the industrial history of mankind. It was in that year that the railway locomotive was invented by Richard Trevithick, who had studied the steam engine under a friend and assistant of James Watt. His patent, which was secured during the ensuing year, makes distinct mention of the use of his locomotive driven by steam upon tramways; and in 1803 he actually had an engine running on the Pen-y-Darran mining tramway in Cornwall. From that small beginning has grown a system of railway communication which has brought the farthest inland regions of mighty continents within easy reach of the seaboard and of the world's great markets; which has made social and friendly intercourse possible in millions of homes which otherwise would have been almost destitute of it; which has been the means of spreading a knowledge of literature, science and religion over the face of the civilised world; and which, at the present moment, constitutes the outward and visible sign of the difference between Western civilisation and that of the Asiatic, as seen in China.
In another corner of the globe, during the year 1801, Volta was constructing his first apparatus demonstrating the material and physical nature of those mysterious electric currents which his friend Professor Galvani of Bologna, who died just two years earlier, had at first ascribed to a physiological source. The researches of the latter, it will be remembered, were begun in an observation of the way in which the legs of a dead frog twitched under certain conditions. The voltaic pile was the first electric battery, and, therefore, the parent of the existing marvellous telegraphic and telephonic systems, while less immediately it led to the development of the dynamo and its work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both for industry and for science.
At the Exposition of National Industry, held in Paris during the year 1801, a working model of the Jacquard loom was exhibited—the prototype of those remarkable pieces of mechanism by which the most elaborately figured designs are worked upon fabrics during the process of weaving by means of sets of perforated cardboards. This was the crowning achievement of the inventions relating to textile fabrics, which had rendered the latter half of the eighteenth century so noteworthy in an industrial sense. It brought artistic designs in articles of common use within the reach of even poor people, and has been the means of unconsciously improving the public taste, in matters of applied art, more rapidly than could have been accomplished by an army of trained artists. The riots in which the mob nearly drowned Jacquard at Lyons for attempting to set up some of his looms were very nearly a counterpart of those which had occurred in England in connection with the introduction of spinning, weaving and knitting machinery.
In Paris, during the first year of the nineteenth century, Robert Fulton, an American, and friend of the United States representative in France, was making trials on the Seine with his first steam-boat—a little vessel imitated by him later on in the first successful steamers which plied on the river Hudson, carrying passengers from New York. At the same time, William Symongton launched the Charlotte Dundas, the steam tug-boat which, on the Scottish canals, did the first actually useful work in the conveyance of goods by steam power on the water. These small experiments have initiated a movement in maritime transport which is fully comparable to that brought about on land by the invention of the railway locomotive.
Again, in 1801, Sir Humphry Davy gave his first lecture at the Royal Institution in London, where he had just been installed as a professor, and began that long series of investigations into the chemistry of common things which, taken up by his successor Faraday, gave to the United Kingdom the first start in some of those industries depending upon a knowledge of organic chemistry and the use of certain essential oils.
Public attention at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, was directed anywhere but towards these small commencements of mighty forces which were to revolutionise the industrial world, and through it also the social and political. If in those days Cornwall was ever referred to, it was not by any means in connection with Trevithick and his steam-engine which would run on rails, but by way of reference to the relations of the Prince of Wales to the Duchy, and the proportion of its revenues which belonged to him from birth.
Glancing over the pages of any history compiled in the early half of the century, the eye will trace hardly the barest allusions to forces, the discoveries in which were, in the year 1801, still in the incipient stage. Canon Hughes, for instance, in his continuation of the histories of Hume and Smollett, devoted some forty pages to the record of that year. The space which he could spare from the demands made upon his attention by the wars in Spain and Egypt, and the naval conflict with France, was mainly occupied with such matters as the election of the Rev. Horne Tooke for Old Sarum, and the burning question as to whether that gentleman had not rendered himself permanently ineligible for Parliamentary honours through taking Holy Orders, and with a miscellaneous mass of topics relating to the merely evanescent politics of the day.
The whole of the effects of invention and discovery in making history during the first year of the century were dismissed by this writer with a casual reference to the augmentation of the productive power of the labouring population through the use of machinery, and a footnote stating that "this was more particularly the case in the cotton manufacture".
Time corrects the historical perspective of the past, but it does not very materially alter the power of the historical vision to adjust itself to an examination of the present day forces which are likely to grow to importance in the making of future history. When we ask what are the inventions and discoveries which are really destined to grow from seeds of the nineteenth into trees of the twentieth century, we are at once confronted with the same kind of difficulty which would present itself to one who, standing in the midst of an ancient