Part 4

After a brilliant peroration in which he dilated on the fidelity of the accused, who, he asserted, never left the Hotel Belvedere except in company with some of the guests, Rick's advocate wound up with these words: "Behold at my feet the Tiger Hund!" But, alas! Rick was not at his feet, nor could he be found in any of his usual haunts, though eager searchers beat the precincts for him. And so, through Rick's own fault, his case was lost and his friends put to open shame. Sentence of death was passed in the absence of the culprit, and things for a time looked black for Rick. Strenuous efforts, however, were made to secure a pardon; and finally, after the presentation of a petition pleading for mercy, numerously signed by the foreign and native residents, the magistrate was induced to commute the sentence to muzzlement for life. I cannot myself believe that Rick had the courage to attack a sheep, even in company. I know that his first meeting with a donkey threw him into such fits of terror that his reason was despaired of for days.

THE EDGE OF THE FUTURE.

UNSOLVED PROBLEMS THAT EDISON IS STUDYING.

BY E. J. EDWARDS.

I.

Thomas A. Edison, when he was congratulated upon his forty-sixth birthday, declared that he did not measure his life by years, but by achievements or by campaigns; and he then confessed that he had planned ahead many campaigns, and that he looks forward to no period of rest, believing that for him, at least, the happiest life is a life of work. In speaking of his campaigns Mr. Edison said: "I do not regard myself as a pure scientist, as so many persons have insisted that I am. I do not search for the laws of nature, and have made no great discoveries of such laws. I do not study science as Newton and Kepler and Faraday and Henry studied it, simply for the purpose of learning truth. I am only a professional inventor. My studies and experiments have been conducted entirely with the object of inventing that which will have commercial utility. I suppose I might be called a scientific inventor, as distinguished from a mechanical inventor, although really there is no distinction."

When Mr. Edison was asked about his campaigns and those achievements by which he measured his life, he said that in the past there had been first the stock-ticker and the telephone, upon the latter of which he worked very hard. But he regarded the greatest of his achievements, in the early part of his career, as the invention of the phonograph. "That," said he, "was an invention pure and simple. No suggestion of it, so far as I know, had ever been made; and it was a discovery made by accident, while experimenting upon another invention, that led to the development of the phonograph.

"My second campaign was that which resulted in the invention of the incandescent lamp. Of course, an incandescent lamp had been suggested before. There had been abortive attempts to make them, even before I knew anything about telegraphing. The work which I did was to make an incandescent lamp which was commercially valuable, and the courts have recently sustained my claim to priority of invention of this lamp. I worked about three years upon that. Some of the experiments were very delicate and very difficult; some of them needed help which was very costly. That so far has been, I suppose, my chief achievement. It certainly was the first one which made me independent, and left me free to begin other campaigns without the necessity of calling for outside capital, or of finding my invention subjected to the mysteries of Wall Street manipulation."

The hint contained in Mr. Edison's reference to Wall Street, and the mysteries of financiering which prevail there, led naturally enough to a question as to Mr. Edison's future purpose with regard to capitalists, and he said:

"In my future campaigns I expect myself to control absolutely such inventions as I make. I am now fortunate enough to have capital of my own, and that I shall use in these campaigns. The most important of the campaigns I have in mind is one in which I have now been engaged for several years. I have long been satisfied that it was possible to invent an ore-concentrator which would vastly simplify the prevailing methods of extracting iron from earth and rock, and which would do it so much cheaper than those processes as to command the market. Of course I refer to magnetic iron ore. Some of the New Jersey mountains contain practically inexhaustible stores of this magnetic ore, but it has been expensive to mine. I was able to secure mining options upon nearly all these properties, and then I began the campaign of developing an ore-concentrator which would make these deposits profitably available. This iron is unlike any other iron ore. It takes four tons of the ore to produce one ton of pure iron, and yet I saw, some years ago, that if some method of extracting this ore could be devised, and the mines controlled, an enormously profitable business would be developed, and yet a cheaper iron ore--cheaper in its first cost--would be put upon the market. I worked very hard upon this problem, and in one sense successfully, for I have been able by my methods to extract this magnetic ore at comparatively small cost, and deliver from my mills pure iron bricklets. Yet I have not been satisfied with the methods; and some months ago I decided to abandon the old methods and to undertake to do this work by an entirely new system. I had some ten important details to master before I could get a perfect machine, and I have already mastered eight of them. Only two remain to be solved; and when this work is complete, I shall have, I think, a plant and mining privileges which will outrank the incandescent lamp as a commercial venture, certainly so far as I am myself concerned. Whatever the profits are, I shall myself control them, as I have taken no capitalists in with me in this scheme."

Mr. Edison was asked if he was willing to be more explicit respecting this invention, but he declined to be, further than to say: "When the machinery is done as I expect to develop it, it will be capable of handling twenty thousand tons of ore a day with two shifts of men, five in a shift. That is to say, ten workmen, working twenty hours a day in the aggregate, will be able to take this ore, crush it, reduce the iron to cement-like proportions, extract it from the rock and earth, and make it into bricklets of pure iron, and do it so cheaply that it will command the market for magnetic iron."

Mr. Edison, in speaking of this campaign, referred to it as though it was practically finished; and it was evident in the conversation that already his mind turns to a new campaign, which he will take up as soon as his iron-ore concentrator is complete and its work can be left to competent subordinates.

He was asked if he would be willing to say what he had in mind for the next campaign, and he replied: "Well, I think as soon as the ore concentrating business is developed and can take care of itself, I shall turn my attention to one of the greatest problems that I have ever thought of solving, and that is, the direct control of the energy which is stored up in coal, so that it may be employed without waste and at a very small margin of cost. Ninety per cent. of the energy that exists in coal is now lost in converting it into power. It goes off in heat through the chimneys of boiler-rooms. You perceive it when you step into a room where there is a furnace and boiler; it is also greatly wasted in the development of the latent heat which is created by the change from water to steam. Now that is an awful waste, and even a child can see that if this wastage can be saved, it will result in vastly cheapening the cost of everything which is manufactured by electric or steam power. In fact, it will vastly cheapen the cost of all the necessaries and luxuries of life, and I suppose the results would be of mightier influence upon civilization than the development of the steam-engine and electricity have been. It will, in fact, do away with steam-engines and boilers, and make the use of steam power as much of a tradition as the stage-coach now is.

"It would enable an ocean steamship of twenty thousand horse-power to cross the ocean faster than any of the crack vessels now do, and require the burning of only two hundred and fifty tons of coal instead of three thousand, which are now required; so that, of course, the charges for freight and passenger fares would be greatly reduced. It would enormously lessen the cost of manufacturing and of traffic. It would develop the electric current directly from coal, so that the cost of steam-engines and boilers would be eliminated. I have thought of this problem very much, and I have already my theory of the experiments, or some of them, which may be necessary to develop this direct use of all the power that is stored in coal. I can only say now, that the coal would be put into a receptacle, the agencies then applied which would develop its energy and save it all, and through this energy electric power of any degree desired could be furnished. Yes, it can be done; I am sure of that. Some of the details I have already mastered, I think; at least, I am sure that I know the way to go to work to master them. I believe that I shall make this my next campaign. It may be years before it is finished, and it may not be a very long time."

Mr. Edison looks farther ahead than this campaign, for he said: "I think it quite likely that I may try to develop a plan for marine signalling. I have the idea already pretty well formulated in my mind. I should use the well-known principle that water is a more perfect medium for carrying vibrations than air, and should develop instruments which may be carried upon sea-going vessels, by which they can transmit or receive, through an international code of signals, reports within a radius of say ten miles."

Mr. Edison believes that Chicago is to become the London of America early in the next century, while New York will be its Liverpool, and he is of opinion that very likely a ship canal may connect Chicago with tide water, so that it will itself become a great seaport.

There is a common impression that Mr. Edison is an agnostic, but he denies it; and he said, in closing the conversation, "I tell you that no person can be brought into close contact with the mysteries of nature, or make a study of chemistry, without being convinced that behind it all there is supreme intelligence. I am convinced of that, and I think that I could, perhaps I may some time, demonstrate the existence of such intelligence through the operation of these mysterious laws with the certainty of a demonstration in mathematics."

AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL.

BY CLEVELAND MOFFETT.

II.

Professor Graham Bell is not like some pedantic wise men who talk as if they believed that the end of knowledge in their particular line had been already reached. On the contrary, this distinguished inventor is convinced that the discovery and inventions of the past will seem but trivial things when compared with those which are to come. Nor does he think that the day of man's greater knowledge is so very far distant.

THE AIR-SHIP OF THE NEAR FUTURE.

"I have not the shadow of a doubt"--these are his own words, spoken to me quite recently at Washington--"that the problem of aerial navigation will be solved within ten years. That means an entire revolution in the world's methods of transportation and of making war. I am able to speak with more authority on this subject from the fact of being actively associated with Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution in his researches and experiments. I am not at liberty to speak in detail of these experiments, but will say that the calculations of scientific men in regard to the amount of power necessary to maintain an air-ship above the earth have been strangely erroneous; I may say ridiculously so. According to these, Nature would have given the birds and insects a muscular force vastly greater and superior in its qualities to that bestowed upon man. That seems unreasonable in the first place, when one reflects that man is at the head of creation, and we have found practically that such is not the case. The power required to lift and propel an air-ship is very much less than has been supposed; indeed, Professor Langley concludes that when the air-ship has once been lifted above the earth to the proper height, it will be possible to maintain it there with proportionately no greater effort than that expended by hawks and eagles in sailing about with extended wings. The air strata will do the bulk of the lifting, if a small propelling power is provided. Of course, a greater power will be necessary to lift the air-ship originally, and it may be some time before the art of managing an air-ship is discovered; but the final result, I am convinced, will allow men to sail about in the air as easily and as safely as the birds do. I predict that we will see the beginning of this modern miracle by the end of the nineteenth century.

"Of course the air-ship of the future will be constructed without any balloon attachment. The discovery of the balloon undoubtedly retarded the solution of the flying problem for over a hundred years. Ever since the Montgolfiers taught the world how to rise in the air by means of inflated gas-bags, the inventors working at the problem of aerial navigation have been thrown on the wrong track. Scientific men have been wasting their time trying to steer balloons, a thing which in the nature of the case is impossible to any great extent, inasmuch as balloons, being lighter than the resisting air, can never make headway against it. The fundamental principle of aerial navigation is that the air-ship must be heavier than the air. It is only of recent years that men capable of studying the problem seriously have accepted this as an axiom. Electricity in one form or another will undoubtedly be the motive power for air-ships, and every advance in electrical knowledge brings us one step nearer to the day when we shall fly. It would be perfectly possible, to-day, to direct a flying machine by means of pendant electric wires which would transmit the necessary current without increasing the load to be borne. Perhaps a feasible means of propelling such an air-ship would be by a kind of trolley system where the rod would hang down from the car to the stretched wire, instead of extending upward. This is an idea which I would recommend to inventors."

It is most interesting to watch Professor Bell as he talks about the great inventions which he sees with prophetic eye in store for the world. He has the happy faculty of expressing great ideas in simple words, and there is nothing ponderous in his speech. He is as enthusiastic as a school-boy thinking of the kite he will make as big as a barn-door. His black eyes flash, and they seem all the blacker contrasted with his white hair; the words tumble out quickly, and those who have the good fortune to listen are carried away by the magnetism of this great inventor.

SEEING BY ELECTRICITY.

The mention of electricity brought up new possibilities for future discovery, some of them so amazing as to almost pass the bounds of credibility. He said:

"Morse taught the world years ago to write at a distance by electricity; the telephone enables us to talk at a distance by electricity; and now scientists are agreed that there is no theoretical reason why the well-known principles of light should not be applied in the same way that the principles of sound have been applied in the telephone, and thus allow us to see at a distance by electricity. It is some ten years since the scientific papers of the world were greatly exercised over a report that I had filed at the Smithsonian Institution a sealed packet supposed to contain a method of doing this very thing; that is, transmit the vision of persons and things from one point on the earth to another. As a matter of fact, there was no truth in the report, but it resulted in stirring up a dozen scientific men of eminence to come out with statements to the effect that they too had discovered various methods of seeing by electricity. That shows what I know to be the case, that men are working at this great problem in many laboratories, and I firmly believe it will be solved one day.

"Of course, while the principle of seeing by electricity at a distance is precisely that applied in the telephone, yet it will be very much more difficult to construct such an apparatus, owing to the immensely greater rapidity with which the vibrations of light take place when compared with the vibrations of sound. It is merely a question, however, of finding a diaphragm which will be sufficiently sensitive to receive these vibrations and produce the corresponding electrical variations."

THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE BY ELECTRICITY.

After he had spoken of this idea for some time, Professor Bell stopped suddenly, and, with an amused twinkle in his eyes, exclaimed: "But while we are talking of all this, what is to prevent some one from discovering a way of thinking at a distance by electricity?"

Having said this, the genial professor threw himself back and laughed heartily at the amazement his words awakened. Was he joking? Apparently not, for he proceeded seriously to discuss one of the most astounding conceptions that ever entered an inventor's mind. Thinking by electricity! Imagine two persons, one thousand or ten thousand miles apart, placed in communication electrically, in such a way that, without any spoken word, without sounding-board, key, or any bodily movement, the one receives instantly the thoughts of the other, and instantly sends back his own thoughts. The wife in New York knows what is passing in the brain of her husband in Paris. The husband has the same knowledge. What boundless possibilities, to be sure, this arrangement offers for business men, lovers, humorous writers, and the police authorities!

Preposterous as such an idea appears in its first conception, it certainly assumes an increasing plausibility when one listens to Professor Bell's reasoning.

"After all," he says, "what would there be in such a system more mysterious than in the processes of the mind reader? You substitute a wire and batteries for a strange-eyed man in a dress suit, that is all."

The logical basis of Professor Bell's scheme is clear, and its details quite beautiful in their simplicity, when you admit his major premise. That premise is that the human brain is merely a kind of electrical reservoir, and that thinking is nothing more than an electrical disturbance, like the aurora borealis or the sparks from a Holtz machine. The nerves are the wires leading from the central battery in the head. The reasonableness of this assumption is increased when one remembers that electricity may be made to act upon the nerves, even in a lifeless body, so as to produce the same muscular contractions which are produced by the brain force, whatever that may be. We talk of animal magnetism. What if it were the same as any other kind of magnetism? If these two forces are identical in one respect, why may they not be so in all respects? So Professor Bell reasons, and granting that the human brain is merely a store-house of electricity for our bodily needs, of electricity not essentially different from that which we know elsewhere, it must be possible to apply the same electrical laws to the brain as to any other electric apparatus and to get similar results.

"Do you begin to see my idea?" said Professor Bell, growing more and more enthusiastic as he proceeded. Then he gave a rapid outline of what might be a system of thinking by electricity.

Everyone knows, who knows anything about the subject, that an electric current passing inside of a coil of wire induces an electric current in that wire. Now, if the human brain be taken as a battery, then currents are constantly passing from it to various parts of the body, and the head may be considered in a state of constant electrical excitement, the intensity varying with the character of the thought processes. Now, suppose a coil of wire properly prepared in the shape of a helmet, and fitted about the head of one person, with wires attached and connected with a helmet similarly fitted upon the head of another person at any convenient distance. Every electric current in the one human battery must induce a current in the coil around the head, which current must be transmitted to the other coil. This other coil must then, by the reversed process, induce a current in the brain within helmet No. 2, and that person must receive some cerebral sensation. This cerebral sensation might be a thought, and probably would be, if it turns out to be true that brain force is identical with electricity. In that case, the thought of the one person would have produced a thought in the other person, and there is, if we go as far as this, every reason to believe that it would be the same thought. Thus the problem of thinking at a distance by electricity would be solved.

So much for a curious theory of what might be, if so and so were true; but Professor Bell has not stopped with theories, but has actually begun to put them to the test. Not that he is over-sanguine as to the result, but he believes the experiment worth the making, and that seriously. He has actually had two helmets, such as those described, constructed, and has begun a series of experiments in his laboratory. Thus far, the results have been for the most part negative, but not so much so as to prevent him hoping that more perfect appliances may lead to something more conclusive. It is true that the thought in one brain has produced a sensation in the other, through the two helmets, but what the relation was between the thought and the sensation could not be determined.

MAKING THE DEAF HEAR BY THE USE OF ELECTRICITY.

By quick stages the conversation ran into another channel with new wonders possible in the future. Professor Bell has conceived of a method of making the deaf hear, which is certainly startling. He proposes to do away with ears entirely, and produce the sensations of hearing by direct communication with the brain, through the bones of the head. As a matter of fact, the brains of deaf people are usually in a perfectly healthy condition, and the only thing which prevents them from hearing is some defect in communication with the vibrating air. If their brains could be excited artificially in the same way that the brains of ordinary persons are excited by vibrations communicated through the various chambers and passages of the ear, then the deaf would hear in the same way that other persons do.

It is, of course, a fact, that hearing in every instance is merely an illusion of the senses, a sort of tickling of the brain. This tickling of the brain is ordinarily accomplished by the nerve force passing from the third chamber of the ear to the brain itself. If this nerve force is nothing more or less than ordinary electricity, and if science can train electricity to tickle the brain artificially in the same way and at the same points that the nerves from the ear usually do, then the ordinary sensations of hearing must result, whether the person has ears or not. The problem here is to discover the proper way of tickling the brain. The gentlemen who seat themselves in electrocution chairs have their brains tickled in a way which would not be generally satisfactory.

THERE IS DANGER IN SUCH EXPERIMENTS.