Part 19

Although the neighbors had laughed at his father for being so foolish as to wish to invent a labor-saving machine for harvesting, and in spite of his father’s warnings that such a thing could never be made, the idea of a reaper haunted the young man’s mind. He began to work at it as a boy and kept it up until he was a grown man. He had improved the cradle and his two ploughs without much difficulty, but the reaping machine was a hard problem. It was more difficult because the grain is often lodged, or matted down, and it is necessary not only to cut it but to lay it in even rows, so that it can be bound in sheaves ready for threshing.

But in 1831, the same year in which he made his double-furrow plough, McCormick built a machine that would reap quite well. He had made every part of it by hand. This machine had vibrating blades which cut against each other in about the same manner as shears. It also had a reel to draw the standing grain within reach of the moving blades, and a platform to catch the grain as fast as it was cut. He first tried the machine by reaping several acres of oats. The next year he harvested seventy-five acres of wheat, to the great astonishment of the neighboring farmers, and his father’s pride.

Cyrus McCormick was not satisfied to let well enough alone. He spent nine more years in making his reaper do everything just right before he was willing to sell it. The farmers admired the clever machine, but they were not ready to buy it, because they thought it would take work from many laborers. The money panic of 1837 occurred during this time, and young McCormick went into the iron-smelting business to make a living during the hard times.

In 1840 he had put his reaper into more perfect shape and now began to manufacture it, first in Cincinnati, then in Chicago. The farmers in the western prairies could not hire laborers enough to harvest their great fields of grain by hand. So the McCormick reaper began to be used in that part of the country. Cyrus H. McCormick, unlike most inventors, was a successful business man. He had to enlarge his factories. To his harvester he kept adding devices until it gathered the grain into sheaves, bound the sheaves with twine, and tossed them out sideways on the ground. He made them so that they would mow grass also.

After his reapers and mowers became well known in America, the successful inventor and manufacturer went abroad to introduce them in Europe. He showed the machine at the first World’s Fair in London, in 1851. People in England laughed, and the London _Times_ reported that the reaper was a “cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine.”

But when the object of their laughter was taken out harvesting in England, the joke was on the men who had made fun of a machine they could not understand. The newspapers then began to praise the inventor they had ridiculed, and Cyrus H. McCormick awoke one morning and found himself famous. He not only received the Great Medal from the World’s Fair, but was elected an officer of the Legion of Honor in Paris, and received the high honor of being made a member of the French Academy of Science.

So the McCormick boy, who did not mind being laughed at and was never content with doing less than his very best, became not only one of the wealthiest men in America, but added many hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealth of his country, and gave an immense benefit to the world.

ELIAS HOWE AND HIS SEWING MACHINE

Elias Howe was the son of a poor miller. He had to go to work when he was six years old. He was a lame, sickly boy and could never do heavy work. When he was old enough he went away to work in the mills. But as he grew up, his health was still so poor that he had to go back and live with his father.

Elias married when he was twenty-one and, within a few years, he had a wife and three children to support. Once when he was ill, his wife took in sewing to support their little family. As the young father lay on the bed watching his wife slowly plying her needle, he thought what a blessing it would be if a machine could be invented to sew much faster and better than by hand. The idea seemed to fill his mind, for he was an ingenious man. He said to himself, “I can’t do heavy work, but perhaps I can invent that machine.” At first he said nothing about it to his wife, but he watched her taking stitch after stitch for hours at a stretch.

When he was out of bed he made a model of the machine which he had been planning. In this rude affair he first had the needle with an eye in the middle. This needle was pointed at both ends, and worked sideways through the cloth, which was held upright. The stitches on this first machine were made like a chain, and the thread raveled out too easily.

Howe kept patiently at work until he hit upon the idea of laying the cloth to be sewed on a small table, and making the needle go up and down through it. He thought of a way to have the cloth pulled along as it was sewn. But the trouble was to get a stitch that would not rip or pull out. At last he tried a shuttle, which looped another thread with that in the needle so that the two made a lock-stitch. When he had done this, he had invented the sewing machine.

Like most inventors, Elias Howe was poor. He found a coal dealer named Fisher, who agreed to keep Howe and his family, and furnish five hundred dollars to pay for the first machines and have them patented. For this Fisher was to receive a half interest in the patents, and the sewing machine business afterward.

At first no one would buy the machine. Tailors thought it would throw too many men out of work. Mr. Fisher grew tired of his bargain and the Howes had to leave his house. There seemed to be a better chance to sell sewing machines in England; so the family went across the sea to London. But the inventor was again disappointed. He was glad to come back to his father’s house in America with his sick wife and his small children.

The wife died soon after their return and the inventor had to do something to support his motherless children. He hired out to help an engineer on one of the first railroads in the United States. While he was working at that, a friend offered to see what he could do in selling sewing-machines in New York City. They found that others were making and selling machines very much like Howe’s.

Money was furnished to sue those dealers. Howe’s rights to his patents were confirmed by the courts in 1846, and all other makers of sewing machines were made to pay him a certain amount, called a royalty, on every machine they sold. In this way Elias Howe soon became a very wealthy man.

After the Civil War broke out, Howe enlisted as a private, and when the government was slow in paying the soldiers’ wages, he lent the money himself for the men in his company. He died before he was fifty years old with medals and honors from many countries. He had brought a great blessing to the women of the world, just as he had wished to do when he lay on his bed watching his tired wife sewing, hour after hour, to support him and their three little children.

EDISON, THE WIZARD OF MANY INVENTIONS

Thomas Alva Edison was born in the little village of Milan, Ohio. His father was a mechanic, who could turn his hand to anything. While Alva, as they called him at home, was a small boy, the family moved to Port Huron. Here the lad was sent to school, but he asked so many questions that the teacher sent him home.

Then Alva’s mother, who had been a school teacher, tried to educate him. She had great patience with his questions, but there were so many that neither she nor his father could answer that he took to reading books. He had the same desire to “know the why” of everything that other great men have shown when they were boys.

Though the Edison boy had no taste for school, he was fond of reading. When he learned how much he could find out from books, he started in, boy-like, to read all the books in a public library. He had worried through several great sets of volumes when he discovered that not all books were of interest to him. After that he chose only those on subjects he liked to read about.

His father was a poor man, and as Alva was not in school he wanted to do his part toward making a living for the family. He began by selling papers around home. Then he had a chance to be train boy on the old Grand Trunk railroad between Port Huron and Detroit. His mother was afraid to have him run on trains and be away from home, but he showed that he could take care of himself. It was during this time that he began taking books from the Detroit Public Library.

He was such a wide-awake, good-natured lad that the trainmen liked him. He found that he had a good deal of time to spare; so he got some old type from a printer and, in a corner of the baggage car, began to print a four-page newspaper about the size of a small handkerchief, which he named _The Grand Trunk Herald_. The trainmen and their families and friends liked this young Edison’s news. Soon he had about five hundred subscribers, so he made about ten dollars a week from his little paper.

Meanwhile he attended strictly to business. During the Civil War he would find out when there had been a battle and have the telegraph operator send word of the event ahead of the train to the towns where the trains would stop. This brought hundreds of people down to the stations at

train-time to learn the news of the battle. Young Edison would sell hundreds--once he sold a thousand--newspapers at ten to twenty-five cents apiece.

He was always trying to do something new. After his little paper became well known, he began to buy chemicals and keep them in bottles in his printing office in the car. One day the phosphorus jar fell off the shelf and broke. This set fire to the floor of the car. While Alva was putting out the fire the conductor came through. It made him so angry to have a boy around who might burn up the train with his experiments, that he threw out bottles, printing-press, and type, and pushed the boy after them.

Alva did not hold a grudge against that conductor. He only wondered that the trainmen had stood that sort of thing so long. He saved all he could out of the ruins and set up his printing plant in the cellar of his father’s house. He went back to work as though nothing had happened, and attended only to selling papers. One day while waiting on the platform of a station he saw the station agent’s child on the tracks and an express train coming. Throwing down his newspapers he jumped, seized the child, and sprang across the track just in time to save its life and his own.

The station man wept as he seized the heroic newsboy’s hand. “I am a poor man,” he said, “so I can’t repay you for saving my child’s life; but I can teach you telegraphy.”

Edison was delighted. He stopped at that station several times a week and learned very soon to send and receive messages. It is harder to take than to send telegraph dispatches. Young Edison invented a machine which would run more slowly than the telegraph and which gave him time to write out the words while the “dots and dashes” of the telegraph alphabet were clicking away. But sometimes it is impossible to attach this appliance; so young Edison practised till he could receive the fastest news story.

He knocked about the country, hiring out as telegraph operator, but he was always trying to make new machines and improvements. This was more interesting to him than telegraphing. After living in several western cities the young telegrapher and inventor applied for a job in the Western Union office in Boston. Here is Mr. Edison’s own account of his first experience there:

“I had been four days and nights on the road, and, having had very little sleep, I did not present a very fresh or stylish appearance. The manager asked me when I was ready to go to work. ‘Now,’ I replied. I was then told to return at 5.30 P.M., and punctually at that hour I entered the main room and was introduced to the night manager. My appearance caused much mirth, and, as I afterwards learned, the night operators consulted together how they might put up a job on the jay from the woolly West. I was assigned to New York No. 1 wire.

“After waiting upwards of one hour I was told to come over to a certain table and take a special report for the _Boston Herald_, the conspirators having arranged to have one of the fastest senders in New York send the dispatch and ‘salt’ the new man. I sat down without suspecting and the New York man started slowly. I had perfected myself in a simple and rapid style of handwriting, without flourishes, which could be increased from forty-five to fifty-four words a minute by reducing the size of the lettering. This was several words faster than any other operator in the United States could write.

“Soon the New York man increased his speed and I easily adapted my pace to his. This put my rival on his mettle, and he was soon doing his fastest work. At this point I happened to look up, and saw the operators all looking over my shoulder with their faces shining with fun and excitement. I knew then that they were trying to put a job on me, but I kept my own counsel and went on placidly with my work--even sharpening a pencil now and then, as an extra aggravation.

“The New York man then commenced to slur over his words, running them together, and sticking the signals; but I had been used to this style of telegraphy in taking reports and was not in the least discomfited. At last, when I thought the fun had gone far enough, I opened the key and clicked back to him: ‘Say, young man, change off and send with the other foot!’ This broke the New York man all up, and he turned the job over to another man to finish.”

Young Edison got the greatest benefit he could from the Boston Public Library. The following year he went to New York and found work with the Gold Reporting Telegraph Company, where he invented the “ticker” now so common in stockbrokers’ offices. He was employed at a salary of three hundred dollars a month. He now began to devote all his time to inventing. In a short time he had devised and constructed several machines and improvements for which he was offered forty thousand dollars. This enabled him to begin inventing and manufacturing on a large scale. He built a factory and employed three hundred men to carry out his fast-increasing ideas and make the necessary machines and drawings for securing his patents.

He improved the telegraph so that six messages could be sent at once over the same wire. He made improvements in electric and other motor cars, as well as in the telephone. He also made a delicate instrument to measure the heat of the stars, which he called the tasimeter. Out of more than fourteen hundred different inventions, any one of which would have made him famous, the best known are the incandescent electric light, the phonograph and the moving-picture machine.

Thomas A. Edison is the greatest inventor that ever lived. He has done more for the world’s wealth, comfort, and happiness than any other man save, perhaps, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Yet he is one of the most modest of men. When he was invited to a dinner at which several distinguished men wished to pay him some of the high honors due him, he said:

“I would not sit and listen to an hour of such talk for a hundred thousand dollars!”

When asked how he gained his great success, Mr. Edison replied:

“By not looking at the clock.”

THE GREATEST AMERICANS

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE BOY WHO WAS DILIGENT IN BUSINESS

When Benjamin Franklin was a little boy he lived in Boston, where his father was a maker of soap and candles. Little Ben was only ten years old when his father took him out of school and set him at work in his shop. Dipping candles all day long is hard, disagreeable work and Ben, who loved books, often wished that he was back in school. His uncle Benjamin sometimes tried to cheer the lad at his tiresome toil by telling him: “It is not so much what you do in life as how you do it.”

One day Ben’s uncle brought a Bible into the smoky soapfat room and read from it: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.”

Ben Franklin was a thoughtful boy. While he was bending over the little vat of hot tallow all that long day, he could not help thinking of what his uncle had read to him. Half smothered by the burning grease he whispered to himself: “‘Stand before kings?’ I’m so tired, and my back is so lame when night comes that I can hardly stand at all!”

After Ben had worked at home for two long years, his father said to him,

“My son, you have been so faithful that I cannot bear to let you dip candles all your life. You are fit for something better. What trade would you like to learn?”

Ben was delighted. He was so fond of books that he felt sure he would like to learn how to make them. He answered his father’s question by saying, “I would like to be a printer.”

When a boy went to learn a trade in those days, he had to serve as an apprentice. That is, he was bound out by law to work for a master until he was twenty-one. At first he received nothing for his work but his board and clothes, and when he was nineteen or twenty he was given very small wages. At that time James Franklin, Ben’s older brother, had a printing office in Boston. It was soon arranged that Ben should be his brother James’s apprentice, and work for nine years to learn the printing business.

Ben was clever and willing. The work of a printing office boy was very hard. More than this, James Franklin was a hard master. He sometimes boxed Ben’s ears and treated him very unkindly. The more the young brother tried to please, the crosser James seemed to be.

Ben bore this abuse for five years. He soon learned to set type well, and to run the “hand”--or foot--press, which was hard even for a man to do. James was so mean to him at home that the boy asked for just half the money it cost his brother to feed him, so that he might board himself. Of course, James was pleased with such a bargain.

The boy was so eager to learn that he saved half of that small sum to buy books. He ate no meat--only bread and a few plain vegetables. Instead of going out, as the men and the other apprentices did, to get a good dinner, he stayed in the shop at noon to eat his dry bread and read. Benjamin Franklin liked books, which other boys thought too dry, even better than good things to eat.

Besides being studious, Ben was ingenious. He had the knack of finding out what was wrong with things and making them right. When the printing press would not work, he fixed it and set it going again. He soon wrote pieces for his brother’s newspaper. He was so bright, willing, and useful that every one praised him--except his brother, who, instead of being proud of Ben, was jealous, and treated him worse than ever.

So Ben had to run away--not to sea, but to Philadelphia, where he could get printing work to do. He quickly found a place there and worked with a royal will. If ever a young man was “diligent in his business,” it was Benjamin Franklin. When he was about twenty-one, he became the owner of the largest printing business in America. He was soon editing and publishing the best newspaper in the country. Before long he also started “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” a sort of yearly magazine containing Franklin’s maxims, or short, wise sayings. These have been translated into many languages and are quoted all over the world.

Franklin founded the first library in Philadelphia, and started the University of Pennsylvania. He kept on improving and inventing useful things. He made printers’ type and presses better than they were before. One night his whale-oil lamp smoked. He went to work to fix it. To do this he had to find out what made it smoke like that. Before he finished he had invented the best lamp in the world. With his new knowledge of the action of drafts, he went on and invented a stove, to take the place of the fireplace, which before this time was generally used for heating and cooking.

Many people thought the most striking thing that Franklin did was to make a silk kite with a steel wire projecting from the end of the long cross-stick to fly in the clouds during a thunderstorm. When the lightning struck the steel wire, it ran down the kite string to a big iron key which Franklin had hung there for that purpose. He then put the key into a big, wide-mouthed glass jar. This was like catching the lightning in a trap. In this simple way, Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is nothing but electricity flashing up in the clouds.

Thus, by studying into things every chance he had, Benjamin Franklin became not only one of the most learned men in the world, but the greatest inventor of his time. He was honored with the title of Doctor of Philosophy by the greatest universities in Europe. Better than this, he was known and loved by the people all over the world.

While the War for Independence was under way, the leaders of the new nation, called the United States of America, came to Doctor Franklin and urged him to go to France and persuade the king and the people to help the United States. Doctor Franklin said he would see what could be done. When he reached Paris he received a more wonderful welcome than was ever given to a king. “The good Doctor Franklin’s” portrait and his stove were seen in nearly every home in France. He became “the fashion” in Paris, “the city of fashion.” Storekeepers were selling “Franklin” hats, “Franklin” canes, “Franklin” snuffboxes and so on. While he was entertained by the king of France, the kings of four other nations came to see him. Not only did he “stand before kings,” but he sat at table with the rulers of five great nations of Europe. The French government supplied him with money, men, and ships to help to win the independence of the United States. Then he stayed in France and signed the treaty of peace, which he brought home to America.

He arrived at the old wharf in Philadelphia where he had landed many years before--a poor, hungry lad of seventeen, running away from his cruel brother. This time he was welcomed by thousands of people, cheering. Cannon were booming. The bells of the city were ringing. Above them all tolled the great Liberty Bell of Independence Hall. The happy people shouted to one another--

“Hurrah for Doctor Franklin! Hurrah for peace!”

And Benjamin Franklin told some of them about the words his uncle had read to him when he was a boy:

“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.”

GEORGE WASHINGTON AND HIS MOTHER

When George Washington was a little boy there was no such country as the United States. The part of America where he was born was called Virginia, but it was not a state then. It was a colony, or new country, settled by people from England.

These colonists lived along the eastern shore. Back from the sea coast were beautiful valleys and high hills covered with woods. That region was called a “howling wilderness,” because there were tribes of Indians roaming through its forests, hunting bears and wolves, war-whooping, and killing and scalping one another. Sometimes they stole up to a lone cabin or settlement to murder a few white people who were brave enough to try to live there, and set fire to their little home.