Inventions in the Century Part 27

_Speed Indicators._--Many munic.i.p.alities having adopted ordinances limiting the rate of speed for street and steam cars, bicycles, automobiles, and other vehicles, a want was created, which has been met, for devices to indicate to the pa.s.sengers, drivers or conductors the rate at which the vehicle is travelling, and to sound an alarm in case of excess of speed, so that brakes can be applied and the speed reduced.

Or to relieve persons of anxiety and trouble in this respect, ingenious devices have been contrived which automatically reduce the speed when the prescribed limit has been exceeded.

_Weighing Scales and Machines._--"Just balances and just weights" have been required from the day of the declaration, "a false weight is an abomination unto the Lord." And therefore strict accuracy must always be the measure of merit of a weighing machine. To this standard the inventions of the century in weighing scales have come. Until this century the ordinary balance with equal even arms suspended from a central point, and each carrying means for suspending articles to be weighed, or compared in weights, and the later steelyard with its unequal arms, with its graduated long arms and a sliding weight and holding pan, were the princ.i.p.al forms of weighing machines. Platform scales were described in an English patent to one Salman in 1796, but their use is not recorded. The compound lever scale on the principle of the steelyard, but arranged to be used with a platform, was invented and came into use in the United States about 1831. Thaddeus and Erastus Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, were the inventors, and it was found to meet the want of farmers in weighing hemp, hay, etc., by more convenient means than the ordinary steelyard. They converted the steelyard into platform scales. The leading characteristics of such machines are, first, a convenient platform nicely balanced on knife edges of steel levers, and second, a graduated horizontal beam, a sliding weight thereon connected by an upright rod at one end to the beam, and at its opposite end to the balance frame beneath the platform.

The modification in size and adaptation of this machine for the weighing of different commodities amounted to some 400 different varieties--running from the delicately-constructed apparatus for weighing the fraction of a grain, to the ponderous machines for weighing and recording the loaded freight car of fifty or sixty tons, or the ca.n.a.l-boat or other vessel with its load of five or six hundred tons.

The adaptation of a balance platform on which to place a light load, or to drive thereon with heavy loads, whether of horses, steam, or water vehicles, was a great blessing to mankind. No wonder that they were soon sold all over the world, and that monarchs and people hastened to heap honors on the inventors.

Spring weighing scales have recently been invented, which will accurately and automatically show not only the weight but the total price of the goods weighed, the price per unit being known and fixed.

In the weighing of large ma.s.ses of coa.r.s.e material, such as grain, coal, cotton seed, and the like, machines have been constructed which automatically weigh such materials and at the same time register the weight.

Previous to this century no method was known, except the exercise of good judgment in the light of experience, of accurately testing the strength of materials. Wood and metals were used in unnecessarily c.u.mbrous forms for the purpose to which they were put, in order to ensure safety, or else the strength of the parts failed where it was most needed.

The idea of testing the tensile, transverse, and cubical resisting strength of materials has been applied to many other objects than beams and bars of wood and metals; to belts, cloths, cables, wires, fibres, paper, twine, yarn, cement, and to liquids. Kiraldy, Kennedy, and others of England, Thoma.s.set of France, Riehle of Germany, and Fairbanks, Thurston and Emery of the United States, are among the noted inventors of such machines.

In the Emery system of machines, consisting of scales, gages, and dynamometers, the power exerted on the material tested is transmitted from the load to an indicating device by means of liquid acting on diaphragms. The same principle is employed in his weighing machines.

By one of these hydraulic testing machines the tensile strength of forged links has been ascertained by the exertion of a power amounting to over 700,000 pounds before breaking a link, the chain breaking with a loud report.

The most delicate materials are tested by the same machine--the tensile strength of a horsehair, some of which are found to stand the strain of one and two pounds. Eggs and nuts are cracked without being crushed, and the power exerted and the strain endured automatically recorded. Steel beams and rods have been subjected to a strain of a million pounds before breaking.

Governments, munic.i.p.alities, and the people generally are thus provided with means by which they can proceed with the greatest confidence in the safe and economical construction and completion of their buildings and public works.

CHAPTER XXVI.

MUSIC, ACOUSTICS, OPTICS, FINE ARTS.

Neither the historic nor prehistoric records find man without musical instruments of some sort. They are as old as religion, and have been found wherever evidence of religious rites of any description have been found, as they const.i.tuted part of the instrumentalities of such rites.

They are found as relics of wors.h.i.+p and the dance, ages after the wors.h.i.+ppers and the dancers have become part of the earth's strata. They have been found wherever the earliest civilisations have been discovered; and they appear to have been regarded as desirable and necessary as the weapons and the labour implements of those civilisations. They abounded in China, in India, and in Egypt before the lyre of Apollo was invented, or the charming harp of Orpheus was conceived.

There was little melody according to modern standards, but the musical instruments, like all other inventions, the fruit of the brain of man, were slowly evolved as he wanted them, and to meet the conditions surrounding him.

There were the conch sh.e.l.l trumpet, the stone, bone, wood and metal dance rattles, the beaks of birds, and the horns and teeth of beasts, for the same rattling purpose. The simple reed pipes, the hollow wooden drums, the skin drum-heads, the stretched strings of fibre and of tendons, the flutes, the harps, the guitars, the psalteries, and hundreds of other forms of musical instruments, varied as the skill and fancy of man varied, and in accordance with their taste and wants, along the entire gamut of noises and rude melodies. The ancient races had the instruments, but their voices, except as they existed in the traditions of their G.o.ds, were not harmonious.

As modern wants and tastes developed and music became a science the demands of the nineteenth century were met by a Helmholtz, who discovered and explained the laws of harmony, and by many ingenious manufacturers, who so revolutionised the pianoforte action, and the action of musical instruments constructed on these principles, that their predecessors would hardly be recognised as prototypes.

The story of the piano, that queen of musical instruments, involves the whole history of the art of music. Its evolution from the ancient harp, gleaned by man from the wind, "that grand old harper, who smote his thunder harp of pines," is too long a story to here recite in detail. It must suffice to say, it started with the harp, in its simplest form, composed of a frame with animal tendons stretched tight thereon and tw.a.n.ged by the fingers. Then followed strings of varied length, size, and tension, to obtain different tones, soon accompanied by an instrument called the plectrum--a bone or ivory stick with which to vibrate the strings, to save the fingers. This was the harp of the Egyptians, and of Jubal, "the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ," and half-brother of Tubal Cain, the great teacher "of every artificer in bra.s.s and iron." Then the harp was laid prostrate, its strings stretched over a sounding board, and each held and adapted to be tightened by pegs, and played upon by little hammers having soft pellets or corks at their ends. This was the psaltery and the dulcimer of the a.s.syrians and the Hebrews.

The Greeks derived their musical instruments from the Egyptians, and the Romans borrowed theirs from the Greeks, but neither the Greeks nor the Romans invented any.

Then, after fourteen or fifteen centuries, we find the harp, both in a horizontal and an upright position, with its strings played upon by keys. This was the _clavicitherium_. In the sixteenth century came the virginal, and the spinet, those soft, tinkling instruments favoured by Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, and which, recently brought from obscurity, have been made to revive the ancient Elizabethan melodies, to the delight of modern hearers. These were followed in the seventeenth century by the clavichord, the favourite instrument of Bach. Then appeared the harpsichord, a still nearer approach to the piano, having a hand or knee-worked pedal, and on which Mozart and Handel and Haydn brought out their grand productions. The ancient Italian cembello was another spinet.

Thus, through the centuries these instruments had slowly grown. By 1711 in Italy, under the inventive genius of Bartolommeo Cristofori of Florence, they had culminated in the modern piano. The piano as devised by him differed from the instruments preceding it chiefly in this, that in the latter the strings were vibrated by striking and pulling on them by pieces of quills attached to levers and operated by keys, whereas, in the piano there were applied hammers in place of quills.

In the 1876 exhibition at Philadelphia, a piano The Greeks derived their musical instruments from the Egyptians, and the Romans borrowed theirs from the Greeks, but neither the Greeks nor the Romans invented any.

Then, after fourteen or fifteen centuries, we find the harp, both in a horizontal and an upright position, with its strings played upon by keys. This was the clavicitherium. In the sixteenth century came the virginal, and the spinet, those soft, tinkling instruments favoured by Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, and which, recently brought from obscurity, have been made to revive the ancient Elizabethan melodies, to the delight of modern hearers. These were followed in the seventeenth century by the clavichord, the favourite instrument of Bach. Then appeared the harpsichord, a still nearer approach to the piano, having a hand or knee-worked pedal, and on which Mozart and Handel and Haydn brought out their grand productions. The ancient Italian cembello was another spinet.

Thus, through the centuries these instruments had slowly grown. By 1711 in Italy, under the inventive genius of Bartolommeo Cristofori of Florence, they had culminated in the modern piano. The piano as devised by him differed from the instruments preceding it chiefly in this, that in the latter the strings were vibrated by striking and pulling on them by pieces of quills attached to levers and operated by keys, whereas, in the piano there were applied hammers in place of quills.

In the 1876 exhibition at Philadelphia, a piano was displayed which had been made by Johannes Christian Schreiber of Germany in 1741.

Then in the latter part of the eighteenth century Broadwood and Clementi of London and Erard of Strasburg and Petzold of Paris commenced the manufacture of their fine instruments. Erard particularly made many improvements in that and in the nineteenth century in the piano, its hammers and keys, and Southwell of Dublin in the dampers.

By them and the Collards of London, Bechstein of Berlin, and Chickering, Steinway, Weber, Schomacher, Decker and Knabe of America, was the piano "ripened after the lapse of more than 2,000 years into the perfectness of the magnificent instruments of modern times, with their better materials, more exact appliances, finer adjustments, greater strength of parts, increase of compa.s.s and power, elastic responsiveness of touch, enlarged sonority, satisfying delicacy, and singing character in tone."

A piano comprises five princ.i.p.al parts: first, the framing; second, the sounding board; third, the stringing; fourth, the key mechanism, or action, and fifth, the ornamental case. To supply these several parts separate cla.s.ses of skilled artisans have arisen, the forests have been ransacked for their choicest woods, the mines have been made to yield their choicest stores, and the forge to weld its finest work. Science has given to music the ardent devotion of a lover, and resolved a confused ma.s.s of more or less pleasant noises into liquid harmonies. In 1862 appeared Helmholtz's great work on the "Law and Tones and the Theory of Music." He it was who invented the method of a.n.a.lysing sound.

By the use of hollow bodies called _resonators_ he found that every sound as it generally occurs in nature and as it is produced by most of our musical instruments, or the human voice, is not a single simple sound, but a compound of several tones of different intensity and pitch; all of which different tones combined are heard as one; and that the difference of quality or _timbre_ of the sounds of different musical instruments resides in the different composition of these sounds; that different compound sounds contain the same fundamental tone but differently mixed with other tones. He explained how these fundamental and compound tones might be fully developed to produce either harmonious or dissonant sensations. His researches were carried farther and added to by Prof. Mayer of New Jersey. These theories were practically applied in the pianos produced by the celebrated firm of Steinway and Sons of New York; and their inventions and improvements in the iron framing, in laying of strings in relation to the centre of the sounding-board, in "resonators" in upright frames, and in other features, from 1866 to 1876, produced a revolution in the art of piano making.

If the piano is properly the queen of musical instruments, the organ may be rightly regarded, as it has been named, "King in the realm of music."

It is an instrument, the notes of which are produced by the rush of air through pipes of different lengths, the air being supplied by bellows or other means, and controlled by valves which are operated by keys, and by which the supply of air is admitted or cut off.

The earliest description appears to be that in the "Spiritalia" of Hero of Alexandria (150-200 B. C.) and Ctesibius of Alexandria was the inventor. A series of pipes of varying lengths were filled by an air-pump which was operated by a wind-mill. Organs were again originated in the early Christian centuries; and a Greek epigram of the fourth century refers to one as provided with "reeds of a new species agitated by blasts of wind that rush from a leathern cavern beneath their roots, while a robust mortal, running with swift fingers over the concordant keys, makes them smoothly dance and emit harmonious sounds."

The same in principle to-day, but more complicated in structure, "yet of easy control under the hands of experts, fertile in varied symphonious effects, giving with equal and satisfying success the gentlest and most sympathetic tones as well as complete and sublimely full utterances of musical inspiration."

The improvements of the century have consisted in adding a great variety of stops; in connections and couplers of the great keyboard and pipes; in the pedal part; in the construction of the pipes and wind chests; and princ.i.p.ally in the adaptation of steam, water, air, and electricity, in place of the muscles of men, as powers in furnis.h.i.+ng the supply of air.

Some of the great organs of the century, having three or four thousand pipes, with all the modern improvements, and combining great power with the utmost brilliancy and delicacy of utterance, and with a blended effect which is grand, solemn and most impressive, render indeed this n.o.ble instrument the "king" in the realm of music.

In the report of 1895 of the United States Commissioner of patents it is stated that "the _autoharp_ has been developed within the past few years, having bars arranged transversely across the strings and provided with dampers which, when depressed, silence all the strings except those producing the desired chords.

"An ingenious musical instrument of the cla.s.s having keyboards like the piano or organ has been recently invented. All keyboard instruments in ordinary use produce tones that are only approximately correct in pitch, because these must be limited in number to twelve, to the octave, while the tones of the violin are absolute or untempered. The improved instrument produces untempered tones without requiring extraordinary variations from the usual arrangement of the keys."

Self-playing musical instruments have been known for more than forty years, but it is within the past twenty-five years that devices have been invented for controlling tones by pneumatic or electrical appliances to produce expressions. Examples of the later of these three kinds of musical instruments may be found in the United States patents of Zimmermann in 1882, Tanaka, 1890, and Gally, 1879.

The science of _acoustics_ and its practical applications have greatly advanced, chiefly due to the researches of Helmholtz, referred to above.

When the nature and laws of the waves of sound became fully known a great field of inventions was opened. Then came the telephone, phonograph, graphophone and gramophone.

The telephone depends upon a combination of electricity and the waves of the human voice. The phonograph and its modifications depend alone on sound waves--the recording of the waves from one vibrating membrane and their exact reproduction on another vibrating membrane.

The acoustic properties of churches and other buildings were improved by the adaptation of banks of fine wires to prevent the re-echoing of sounds. _Auricular tubes_ adapted to be applied to the ears and concealed by the hair, and other forms of aural instruments, were devised.

The _Megaphone_ of Edison appeared, consisting of two large funnels having elastic conducting tubes from their apices to the aural orifice.

Conversation in moderate tones has been heard and understood by their use at a distance of one and a half miles. The megaphone has been found very useful in speaking to large outdoor crowds.

But let us go back a little: In 1845, Chas. Bourseuil of France published the idea that the vibrations of speech uttered against a diaphragm might break or make an electric contact, and the electric pulsations thereby produced might set another diaphragm vibrating which should produce the transmitted sound waves. In 1857, another Frenchman, Leon Scott, patented in France his _Phonautograph_--an instrument consisting of a large barrel-like mouth-piece into which words were spoken, a membrane therein against which the voice vibrations were received, a stylus attached to this vibrating membrane, and a rotating cylinder covered with blackened paper, against which the stylus bore and on which it recorded the sound waves in exact form received on the vibrating diaphragm. Then came the researches and publications of Helmholtz and Konig on acoustic science, 1862-1866. Then young Philip Reis of Frankfort, Germany, attempted to put all these theories into an apparatus to reproduce speech, but did not quite succeed. Then in 1874-1875, Bell took up the matter, and at the Philadelphia exhibition, 1876, astonished the world by the revelations of the telephone. In April, 1877, Charles Cros, a Frenchman, in a communication to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, after describing an apparatus like the Scott phonautograph, set forth how traced undulating lines of voice vibrations might be reproduced in intaglio or in relief, and reproduced upon a vibrating membrane by a pointed stylus attached thereto and following the line of the original pulsations. The communication seems to have been pigeon-holed, and not read in open session until December, 1877, and until after Thomas A. Edison had actually completed and used his phonograph in the United States. Cros rested on the suggestion.

Edison, without knowing of Cros' suggestion, was first to make and actually use the same invention. Edison's cylinder, on which the sounds were recorded and from which they were reproduced, was covered by tin foil. A great advance was made by Dr Chichester A. Bell and Mr. C. S.

Tainter, who in 1886 patented in the United States means of cutting or engraving the sound waves in a solid body. The solid body they employed was a thin pasteboard cylinder covered with wax. This apparatus they called the _graphophone_. Two years thereafter, Mr. Emile Berliner of Was.h.i.+ngton had invented the _gramophone_, which consists in etching on a metallic plate the record of voice waves. He has termed his invention, "the art of etching the human voice." He prepares a polished metal plate, generally zinc, with an extremely thin coating of film or fatty milk, which dries upon and adheres to the plate. The stylus penetrates this film, meeting from it the slightest possible resistance, and traces thereon the message. The record plate is then subjected to a particularly const.i.tuted acid bath, which, entering the groove or grooves formed by the stylus, cuts or etches the same into the plate.

The groove thus formed may be deepened by another acid solution. When thus produced, as many copies of the record as desired may be made by the electrotyper or print plater.

The public is now familiar with the different forms of this wonderful instrument, and like the telephone, they no longer seem marvellous. Yet it is only within the age of a youth or a maiden when the allegations or predictions that the human voice would soon be carried over the land, and reproduced across a continent, or be preserved or engraven on tablets and reproduced at pleasure anywhere, in this or any subsequent generation, were themselves regarded as strange messages of dreamers and madmen.

_Optical Instruments._--There were practical inventions in optical instruments long before this century. Achromatic and other lenses were known, and the microscope, the telescope and spectacles.