Inventions

new contrivances, methods, and improvements. In the United States inventors are invited to make known their inventions at the Patent Office in Washington. A monopoly for seventeen years, known as a patent, is granted the inventor. The application must be accompanied by a model, if possible, and by a description, including drawings. Printed rules may be had on application. All civilized countries have a similar system. An international arrangement, embracing nearly all countries of the Postal Union, enables an inventor to protect his rights abroad. The first patent issued by the United States was granted in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins, of Vermont, for a process of making pearl ashes. It was signed by George Washington and looked like a college diploma. During the succeeding forty-six years 9,957 patents were granted by the United States. In 1904 over 30,266 were issued. The total number up to 1905 is nearly 800,000. The patent office is a branch of the department of the interior. The Commissioner has a force of nearly 500 examiners and assistant examiners and a large number of clerks, bringing the total up to 700 or 800. Fees are charged. In 1904 over $2,000,000 was collected. The department is more than self-sustaining. Some of the principal inventions of the world are given in the following table:

Agriculture was the chief occupation in the United States at the achievement of independence. . . . The men who tilled the soil here were the same kind of men precisely as those who filled the professions or were engaged in commercial or mechanical pursuits. Of two sons of the same mother, one became a lawyer, perhaps a judge, or went down to the city and became a merchant, or gave himself to political affairs and became a governor or a member of Congress. The other stayed upon the ancestral homestead, or made a new one for himself and his children out of the public domain further west, remaining through his life a plain, hardworking farmer. This state of things made American to differ from European agriculture by a wide interval. There was then no other country in the world, there is now no other considerable country, where equal mental activity and alertness have been applied to the soil as to trade and industry.

But more even than the total effect of the fortunate conditions which have been indicated American agriculture in those days owed its really remarkable productive power to a special, almost a technical, quality of our people, namely, mechanical insight and invention. It is difficult to write of this subject without producing the impression of exaggeration. There is only one nation in the world to the mass of whose population this form of genius can be attributed. That nation is our own. In other countries it is only picked men, a select few, who possess mechanical insight and aptitude, the power of instantaneously, because instinctively, seizing upon mechanical relations, together with a high degree of native efficiency in the use of tools. With us the rule is the other way: there are few Americans of American stock, at least throughout the Northern states, who have not mechanical insight and aptitude in a measure which elsewhere would make them marked men. As a great organ of English opinion has said, "Invention is a normal function of the American brain. The American invents as the Greek chiseled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian sings."

In inquiring into the genesis of this truly national trait we note, first, that the country was settled predominantly by men of the great inventive Teutonic race; and that, of this race, it was the most ingenious branch, the English, which furnished by far the largest part of the population of the Atlantic coast. Secondly, the early settlers constituted, in the main, a picked population. . . To make shifts; to save time; to shorten labor; to search out substitutes for what was inaccessible or costly; to cut corners and break through barriers in reaching an object; to force one tool to serve three or four uses, and to compel refractory or inappropriate material to answer urgent needs--this was the constant occupation of our ancestors. Life was no routine, work was no routine, to them, as it is to the peasantry of every country of Europe, as it is fast coming to be among us.

The mechanical genius of the whole people secured the progressive improvement of all the known tools and implements of husbandry, so that the American axe, the American spade and shovel, the American plough, and the American farm-wagon early became the best of their kind in the world, being little less than marvels of combined lightness, efficiency, and strength. . .

The way in which the pioneer, stopping his cattle in the wilderness and tumbling axe and spade, bundles, and barrels out upon the unbroken ground, set about the task of providing shelter for his children and his animals, clearing the ground and getting a first crop out of the soil, was not admirable merely as an exhibition of courage, faith, and enterprise, but, if we look at the results accomplished for the time and labor expended, it constitutes a triumph of mechanical, we might fairly say, of engineering genius.--Walker. The Making of the Nation.

In the timber business twelve laborers with a Bucker machine will dress 12,000 staves. The same number of men by hand labor would have dressed in the same time only 2,500. In the manufacture of paper a machine now used for drying and cutting, run by four men and six girls, will do the work formerly done by 100 persons, and do it much better. In the manufacture of wall-paper the best evidence puts the displacement in the proportion of 100 to one. In a phosphate mine in South Carolina ten men accomplish with machinery what 100 men handle without it in the same time. There has been a displacement of fifty per cent in the manufacture of rubber boots and shoes. In South Carolina pottery the product is ten times greater by machine processes than by muscular labor. In the manufacture of saws, experienced men consider that there has been a displacement of three men out of five. In the weaving of silk the displacement has been 95 per cent, and in the winding of silk 90 per cent. A large soap manufacturing concern carefully estimates the displacement of labor in its works at 50 per cent. In making wine in California a crushing machine has been introduced with which one man can crush and stem 80 tons of grapes in a day, representing an amount of work formerly requiring eight men. In woolen goods modern machinery has reduced muscular labor 33 per cent in the carding department, 50 per cent in the spinning, and 25 per cent in the weaving. In some kinds of spinning 100 to one represents the displacement. In the whole United States in 1886 the machinery was equal to 3,500,000 horse-power. If men only had been employed, it would have required 21,000,000 to turn out the actual total product; the real number was 4,000,000. To do the work accomplished in 1886 in the United States by power machinery and on the railways would have required men representing a population of 172,-500,000. The actual population of the United States in 1886 was something under 60,000,000, or a little more than one-third.--Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor for 1886.