CHAPTER X

CERTAIN IMPORTANT CREATIONS OF INVENTION, AND THEIR BENEFICENT INFLUENCE

In 1843 Charles Thurber invented the typewriter. Few inventions are more typical. In 1843, the conditions of life were such that the first stage in inventing the typewriter must have been the conception of an extremely brilliant and original idea. After that, the difficulties of embodying the idea in a concrete form must have been very great; for it was not until about 1875 that instruments of practical usefulness were in general use. Since then, typewriters have penetrated into virtually every office in the civilized world.

Though the typewriter is a very simple apparatus in both principle and construction, yet few machines stand out more clearly as great inventions. Few inventions also have exerted a greater influence--though the influence of the typewriter has been auxiliary, rather than dominant; it has merely enabled a greater amount of business to be transacted than could be transacted before. If anyone will go into any business office whatever, and note the amount of work performed in that office by means of one typewriter that could not be performed without it, and will then multiply that amount by the number of typewriters in the world, he will come to a confused but startling realization of the amount of executive work that is being done in a single day through the agency of the typewriter, that otherwise would not be done. If he will then go a step further, and multiply the number of days that have gone by since the typewriter was first employed, by one-half, or even one-tenth, of the amount accomplished by means of all the typewriters in a single day, he may then be able to appreciate in a measure the enormous influence on progress which the invention of the typewriter has already had. One would not make an exaggerated statement if he should declare that if the typewriter had not been invented, every great business organization in the world today would be much smaller than it is; the great industries would not exist in their present vastness; and all the arts of manufacture, transportation and navigation would be far behind the stage they now have reached.

The electric telegraph was patented by Morse in 1837, but the first telegram was not sent till 1844, along a wire stretched from Washington to Baltimore. It is said that the first official message was "What hath God wrought!" This message shows a realization of a fact which some people fail to realize: the people who say, "God made the country, but man made the city." The message showed a realization that God inspires the thoughts of men, as truly as He provides them with things to eat. It is inconceivable that it was intended to call attention to the fact that God wrought the wire along which the message ran, or the wooden poles that carried the wire, or the material zinc and copper of the battery. The only new thing evidenced in the telegraph so far as anyone could know, was the invention itself. God had wrought that through the agency of Morse. It is a known fact that no human mind, no matter how fine it may be, or how brilliant and correct its imagination, can have any images or ideas that are not based in some way on the evidence of the senses. We can imagine things, and even create things, that have never existed before; but those things must be composed of parts whose existence we know of through the evidence of our senses. So Morse, although he invented a thing that was wholly new, although he created something--did not create any of the parts that composed it. He used such well-known things as wire, iron, zinc and copper. Even in the creation of man, the Almighty himself used common materials: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." (Genesis,