In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of thebest. Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of industry where iron only was formerly used.
The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A 'BLOOM'
All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which make contrasts startling.
We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that. There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do, even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle. All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know, were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [5]
5.The Mound Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.
Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze. This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy, requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores, and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as accounts for the first glass, [6] some camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the process has upon steel.
6.The story is told by Pliny. Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them. When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known asFulmenites, found in museums and not very uncommon.
Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic time--the modern power printing-press.
It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes, and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable, product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is "tool" steel. [7]
7.It must not be understood that tool steel was always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.
And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL
Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"-- celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII, was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown, the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would seem that among the lost arts [8]--a subject that it is easy to make too much of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their secrets.
8.Modern science dates from three discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause, from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics, and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated, oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that which I have stated is the highest development of modern science, chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date of these chapters.
The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the uses to which no other metal can be put, ishomogeneity due to fusion. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and often as much carbon, islaminated in structure. Structural qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron. [9] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality. The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes; as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the applications of long experience and experiment.
9.It should be understood that the shapes of structural and other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal remains.
Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results incrystalline, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The definition of steel now is that it isa compound of iron which has been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass.
The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is iron.
The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood; the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown, in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore, sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and in connection three hundred persons were killed.
EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA
Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries. Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine known as a"trompe"in which water running through a wooden pipe was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB
In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now, reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune them.
The first iron works built in the present United States that were commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of manufacture under grant for ten years. [10] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing, which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times, how much the production of iron at home has to do with that independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and regulated by law.
10.Some quaint records exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute, common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June, 1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron, so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of "case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics as a recipe.
The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker & Wyllys "the sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was extended.
The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA
The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early. There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [11] They became very necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence could not have been won, and even thefeelingand desire of independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
11.It is now easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.
The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since, because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in sand. [12]
12.When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."
MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A 'SOWE.'
Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or "tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron. Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
THE STEAM HAMMER
Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler, but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the "strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an anvil. [13]
13.About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home. The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H. Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so doing.
Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity, that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817 near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail; unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad, and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be operated because of foreign competition.
SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON
During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects, and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention, were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used for what are known as "structural shapes."
HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS, CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET
I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages. Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874, forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine years after it had been used to boil salt.
Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine, and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of American progress that have now been successful for so long that the date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told, in that general outline which is all that is possible without an extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is included, of necessity, a resumé of the progress, from the earliest times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in structural work of every class. The differences between this structural steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted ifpowerful blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal. This is the basic principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe, through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal. He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a "converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with. It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment, he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures; the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks, [14] the fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the old iron articles were for the same purposes.
14.In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson, in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea,the machine for making themwould still remain the actual and practical invention, since it would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this country produced overeight hundred million poundsof iron, steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of overtwelve poundsfor each individual inhabitant of the United States.
SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER 'CONVERTER.'
The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to students of applied science, but itisdetail, the key to which is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel, hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time, which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that makefive hundred tonsof steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process. And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process, superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar playthings; yet they are but men.
The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each, and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons, and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at about the same date.
ROLLING INGOTS
Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million tons.
In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of manufactures.
We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS
There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has become the servant of man.
But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross, material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible. The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since 1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart, a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man, docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible, dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call "electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted, and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods. He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter. But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself. The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity. Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "De Magnete," to Franklin's Kite.
During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When, finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge, so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying; "conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current;i.e., that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds, but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin gave them; thepositiveandnegativecurrents; one always present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical science.
Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string back and forth alternately.
THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE
The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs, rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass, sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us. Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump, made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first. Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the science, but without any understanding of their results as we now understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to Réaumur, and lacks language to express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water, and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not known it. [15]
15.The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called "Storage" Battery.
Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe, claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind, though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more. He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that electricity is notcreated, produced, manufactured, by any human means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
B. FRANKLIN
Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers, yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning. It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man. He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily, as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn from heaven.
It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade. The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS." [16]
16."He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the sceptre from tyrants."
THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan. 17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of theSpectator, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers. Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723, being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a skill in the business not usual at the time.
The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands. A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity now known as "cranks." [17] He read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of "biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough to buy a new book.
17.Most people, then and now, can point to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.
This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one, had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked, and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her, and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the end of the service.
Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom. In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of, or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man, and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among the most successful of all American publications, was continued for twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher of a newspaper,The Pennsylvania Gazette, which was successful and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally brought about a separation from the mother country.
Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever, met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined, ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name as the author of its principle. [18] He organized the postal system of the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered, philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard, even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician, mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
18.The stove was not used in Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a room; to be both fireplace and stove.
THE FRANKLIN STOVE
After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results, confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until 1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year the key to theutilityof electricity was found by one Galvani. He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience, designatedynamicelectricity. He knew only ofanimalelectricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely unimportant circumstances that led toGalvanismand theGalvanic Battery. Volta actually made this battery, then known as the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to this.
In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern "battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc, and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery. The two metals, theelectrodes, are not necessarily zinc and copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body, connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract, as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric qualityin the tissues of thefrog. Volta came to see them as producedby chemical action upon two dissimilar metals. The first could not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements and discoveries of modern civilization.