Part 7

Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly--then quickened his pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and then to sharpen a pencil between.

By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get "a rise" out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Then he stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.

"Say, young man," he said, in his dry humorous way, "change off and send with your other foot."

But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and "the jay from the woolly west" was regarded ever after with enormous respect.

After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great, strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life held out to him swept over him.

"Adams," he said to a friend, "I've got so much to do, and life is so short, that I'm going to hustle."

And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we must allow he has indeed "hustled" to some purpose. As we briefly glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph wire.

But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery, what "ups and downs"--what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him! Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly, relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or rather more than £10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.

And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.

His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely reluctant to help him.

"Now, you fellows!" he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in a room on the top flat, "I've locked the door, and you'll have to stay here until this job is completed."

During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food, while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours at a stretch.

And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to which he removed--some twenty-four miles from New York--began to look upon him as a wizard--a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful powers spread over the country.

"If people track me here," he said (he had been besieged at Newark), "I shall simply have to take to the woods."

Child after child was the offspring of the inventor's brain. At one time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.

There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures--as many as forty-six a second--seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the lines of that toy of our childhood, "The Wheel of Life." And there was the grand king of inventions--the Phonograph--that overtops all the rest.

We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great singer.

In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison himself were in the room talking to him!

Great men all over the world recorded their astonishment and their praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it--to the French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak--to tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway "talk"; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!

What a strange thing that in this world of passing-away and change we should be able to preserve from destruction such treasures sheltered in a wax cylinder--some great man's words of wisdom, or the silver tones of a sweet musician!

The more Edison's brain accomplished the more did it seem able to do. As a man he showed himself untiring as when a boy. He went on discovering. He invented a way of telegraphing from a moving train. He invented an Electric Railroad, that drew delighted thousands at the Chicago Exhibition.

In 1879 his attention turned to lighting, and he bent all his energies on inventing an Incandescent lamp for electric light. He spent days working at a sort of white heat. He began on the 16th October, but mishaps and accidents seemed to threaten his invention.

"Let us," he cried to his partner in a ferment of excitement--"let us make a lamp before we sleep, or die in the attempt." On the morning of the 21st it was done!

It astonished the world. It opened up possibilities for miners and divers, and for men everywhere.

On the occasion of its exhibition people flocked from all parts of the United States. Special trains were run. The same furore over the marvel reigned at the Paris Exposition, and at every other exhibition. And through it all--a fame, a popularity enough to turn the head of most mortals--the man remained the same--modest, simple, unpretentious.

From Menlo Park he went to Orange. His laboratory there was fitted up with everything conceivable that an inventor red-hot and eager might want at a moment's notice. And yet often the workrooms presented the strangest appearance of disorder. Workmen sometimes stretched on benches or floor after a heavy strain, the great master himself thrown down--a stick under his head, a coat wound round it for a pillow, and so snatching a short interval of sleep! He will not be interrupted by visitors. In this great world of his own he seems at times to live a sort of separate existence.

We are amazed, dazzled, astonished by the tremendous results one man in his lifetime has achieved. He has not been content to take some thing and modify and improve it and set it to a new purpose as men whom we call inventors have done in all ages. But he seems to have called upon the very forces of nature to do his bidding. It is almost as if he had harnessed the winds, the air, sound, electricity, for his purposes.

A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life. This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of what he has done. He lives sometimes in his northern home, in New Jersey, sometimes at Orange.

As a man he shows the same genial, kindly sympathy which, as a boy, never failed to win the hearts of his fellow-clerks, the same modesty that disarmed their jealousy. These things chain his workmen to him to-day with links of love. Now that men praise and laud him all over the world he shows the same good-natured indifference to name and fame he has shown all through. And he has lost nothing of the tireless energy that used to support him through hard work and long night-sittings as a boy--this man who, as someone has it, "has kept the path to the patent office red-hot with his footsteps--this wonder-worker of the modern world."

JAMES WATT.

There is perhaps no inventor's name with which the British boy is more familiar than with that of James Watt. In every college of mechanics or engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.

It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before James Watt came into it--before, as it were, steam took its place and while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what steam now does with such apparent ease.

On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving, seaport town of Greenock--the birthplace of James Watt. But in 1736, more than 150 years ago, it was little more than a picturesque fishing-village, looking out on a peaceful, smiling bay, where a few modest fishing-craft were to be seen, and beyond to the hills of Argyllshire, before smoke and funnels blotted the fairness of the landscape.

In an unpretentious little house in a Greenock by-street James Watt first saw the light. His father was by trade a carpenter, an undertaker, a general "merchant," for there was little competition in those simple days, and men often "professed" more than one trade. In the course of a few years little James was left the sole surviving child of five, and perhaps on that account was specially precious to his parents. Neither as the years went on did he grow into a sturdy, lusty country boy, but rather struggled up slowly, anxiously overlooked by a mother's care, a prey to ill-health and headache, even in his baby years. So that most of his early education fell to his parents, his mother opening up to him the beginnings of reading, his father those of writing and arithmetic.

School, to which he went by-and-by, proved a failure. Shy and shrinking, he cared little for the play of other children. He was slow at games, perhaps dull in class, and the boys and girls laughed at him. Ill-health, too, made it hard for him to get on. He liked best to be at home. For amusement he would draw in chalk on the kitchen floor, and for playthings he would choose his father's instruments. One day a neighbour remarked on the child's drawing.

"He should be at school," she said, "and not trifling away his time."

"Look first," said the father, pointing to the floor, "before you blame him. He is solving a problem in geometry."

The child was then six years old!

We are familiar with the story handed down to us through the centuries of how the dreamy-eyed boy was engaged in watching the steam hiss from the kettle-spout, the while holding a teaspoon below to count and catch the drops of water. Tradition likes to see in this the tiny seedlings of that mighty tree--the Condensing Steam Engine, but we fear that common sense in the shape of his robust-minded aunt was nearer the mark when she exclaimed--

"James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy as you are. For the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into."

For change of air the boy was sometimes sent to Glasgow, the great commercial capital being then no larger than a country market-town. Mightily astonished were his relatives, and, according to their own account, not a little scared, when of an evening his tongue was loosed, and he would launch into tales, wonderful things that held them entranced for hours, and sent them wakeful to bed. Was this time prophetic of those later years when he would hold men and women fascinated by the charm of his conversation?

And now young James was sent to the Greenock Grammar School, but he made no great mark there, except in mathematics, in which he easily headed the class. But Latin and Greek are not a boy's only education. At home he was learning other things, from his parents' talk, from the pages of books. And then there were the long golden hours when he put on a leather apron like his father, and installed himself in his father's workshop with a small forge and a small bench all his own, and with his boyish fingers handled the tools so deftly and so cleverly that the workmen watching him exclaimed--

"Little Jamie has gotten a fortune at his fingers' ends."

But while he worked his mind was not idle. He read eagerly and precociously, as a delicate child sometimes does, devouring all such books as he could lay hands on. Solid enough reading they will seem to boys to-day.

_The Cloud of Witnesses_, Henry the Rymer's _Life of Wallace_, Boston, Bunyan.

Added to this was his parents' talk, that fell on his young ears and stamped itself on his young mind, and the picturesque surroundings of his home, for he loved nature's beauties--the hills, the stars, the trees. The mountains and the plains about his home were made romantic by memories and associations of Covenanting times, told him by his father, and his boyish rambles were made beautiful by wild flowers, and again there were long delightful days of fishing to add to these.

But in the midst of all this struggling in the boy's mind was that strong leaning to mechanical invention longing for an outlet. It peeped out here and there--for instance, in being unable to see an instrument without wishing to discover all its uses. And so well did he show himself able even then to fashion delicate things like compasses and quadrants--an instrument in shape like the fourth of a circle--that his father, after much thought, made up his mind that James should learn the trade of a mathematical instrument maker.

So in 1754 James came out from the shelter of home and launched himself on the great world, rather more of an ordeal to the shy, timid boy than it would have been to one more robust and enterprising. This was practically the last of Greenock. The peaceful fishing-village was never again to be his home. Naturally he turned his steps to Glasgow. We can picture the great event in the quiet household. The boy getting ready, his modest baggage, his clothes (his mother's tender care), a leather apron, some carpenter's tools, and a quadrant.

But he was destined to go yet farther afield. No mathematical instrument-maker was to be found in Glasgow. A professor to whom James was introduced advised him to go to London. "To London" is an easy enough journey to-day--then it was a mighty undertaking. No trains--no steamers. One could only go by slow coach or on horseback. James chose the latter. His trunk was sent by sea from Leith, and he along with a friend set off on his long journey. He left on the 7th day of June, and travelling by Coldstream and Newcastle, he arrived in the great metropolis after a ride of twelve days!

Most likely, although there might have been fear in the boyish heart, it also beat high with hope. Again and again has London made fair promises to boys such as he. But disappointment was to meet him on the very threshold. He found that apprentices who intended to serve a term of seven years were only accepted. This was very far from James's thoughts. What he wanted was to learn the trade, start off home again, and set up in Glasgow for himself as soon as possible. After many failures, however, he at last found a man willing to take him on for a year on his promise to pay twenty guineas with the results of his work during that time.

And now began a time of stern work and self-denial. He took poor lodgings. He scrimped himself in everything but the bare necessaries of life. He spent on himself exactly eight shillings a week. He could not, he wrote, do with less. He scraped and pinched, remembering how ill his father could afford his keep.

When he could get extra work he took it home at nights to his poor rooms and sat up late over it, often ill and weary. In a month he could make a quadrant better than any of the other apprentices. And so he struggled on against loneliness and headache and depression. It was rarely safe to venture out at night at that time in London, for sailor press-gangs were abroad. No able-bodied man was spared. In one night they took as many as 1,000 men. Sitting as he did close to the shop door when at work, he was often exposed to cold, and caught rheumatic pains which did not leave him for many a day. After a year of this he went home to Greenock, in his possession some tools and instruments, and in his hands and brain a mighty store of skill and knowledge.

Revived by his native air he set out again to seek his fortune--again to Glasgow. Again to be met with disappointment! He had not learned his trade in Glasgow, and therefore Glasgow would have none of him. Not so much as a workshop would it give him. It seemed almost as if there were no place open for the boy.

But his friend the professor came to the front again. If Watt could find no place in the city, then the University should shelter him. And so they gave him a workshop twenty feet square in the old College grounds, and a room in which to sell his instruments, and he was at last fairly launched.

But business progressed but slowly. He lived, to be sure, in an atmosphere that must have delighted him. The professors and the students found him out. They came and came again. He seemed always to have something original to say. He was a man who read much and thought much--humble as a child about his own attainments--eager with the generosity of the great man to give others their due--yes, even more than their due. They found out that he knew all about engineering, and not a little about natural history, art, languages--and then the trick of observation was so strong with him that nothing escaped him. In time it came to be the general opinion that the young instrument-maker was one of the ablest men about the University. But gratifying as was the making of these friends, they did not bring Watt in any money. Somehow his instruments did not sell well. He was too far from the town. Indeed, his business was so poor he sometimes thought of giving it up. It may have been there was a want of practical "push" in him, a quality he never gained all through his life. Somewhat discouraged he took to making fiddles and flutes and guitars and even organs,--but he was yet very far from making that fortune he had come out to seek.

There are crises, turning-points in the lives of most people. They are seldom noisy. Sometimes, indeed, they come so quietly as to be hardly noticed. And now Watt was gradually nearing his.

About this time his thoughts began to turn to steam. It may be that had he been busy and successful as an organ-maker, his great invention might never have seen the light.

People had, of course, known for long that there was a power in water exposed to heat. Now in 1759, when Watt was twenty-three, his attention was drawn to the Steam Engine. He pondered it. After he had pondered it he set to work. His first model was a failure. But the idea had silently and firmly lodged in his brain. He went on with his everyday business, but ever in his leisure back sprang his mind to that subject that was to be his all-absorbing life-work. He read eagerly what other men had done. He got a model of another man's engine and he studied it. He found what he thought defects. He groped steadily on--now seeing a light--again thrown into darkness--now following what turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp--again getting hold of an idea that seemed to him a gem.

There came to him gradually dawning thoughts. First, that of Latent Heat. Again, that a small quantity of water in the shape of steam heats a large quantity of cold water. Yet, again, that at 212° water is elastic, and that steam heats six times the weight of cold water to a temperature of 212°, the temperature of steam.

And so he went on step by step, till one day the thing burst on him, full-fledged, as it were--complete, dazzling, a perfect inspiration.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1765. He was taking a stroll in a quiet part of Glasgow, now a paved and busy thoroughfare called the Green. A Sunday calm brooded over what was on weekdays a scene of busy life--of washing and drying clothes. His thoughts, as usual, hovered about his beloved theme. It inspired him with a very passion as a child of his own. The key to his engine--long sought--suddenly flashed before his mind's eye. The thing had been waiting incomplete for want of it. It came to him then--the idea of a Separate Condenser.

A great uprising of his mind followed. In his solitary walk the flashing thought filled the man with rapture.

Two drawbacks--waste of steam and waste of fuel--had been the ruin of former inventions.

"Ye need not fash yourself about that, man," Watt said to a friend, answering some objection that he had made, "I have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam."

And so, though it was but the beginning, though years of weary labour and disappointment and discouragement waited him before the end was reached, the Condensing Steam Engine, as we have it now, first sprang into being that spring afternoon on the Green in Glasgow.

And now the young inventor set himself with eager enthusiasm to make a model. There were no skilled workmen to be had, no self-acting tools, as in our day, and so the first model was only partly successful. But not a whit discouraged, he went on.

"My whole thoughts are bent on this machine," he said. "I can think of nothing else."

And now there remains but to tell in a few words--for it is the record of his manhood--the "ups and downs" just beginning, the disappointments, the failures, the hopes and fears that waited on this offspring of his brain. He was poor, and money was the first thing that was needed. Who would risk thousands on such a vague and shadowy thing?

Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread and butter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying, though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still ill-health to struggle against. "I am still plagued with headaches," he wrote about this time, "and sometimes heartaches."

But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his partial failure.

"It was," he said, "a clumsy job." Watt grew depressed.

In 1770 he wrote: "I enter on my thirty-fifth year, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world."