Inventions in the Century Part 4

It is so arranged also that the cotton may be rolled into clean, uniform dense layers, so that the same may be unwound at the mill and directly applied to the machines for its manufacture into fabrics, without the usual tedious and expensive preliminary operations of combing and re-rolling.

It has also remained for the developed machine of the century to convert hay into an export commodity to distant countries by the baling process.

Bale ties themselves have received great attention from inventors, and the most successful have won fortunes for their owners.

Most ingenious machines have been devised for picking cotton in the fields, but none have yet reached that stage of perfection sufficient to supplant the human fingers.

_Fruits and Foods._--To prepare and transport fruits in their natural state to far distant points, while preserving them from decay for long times, is, in the large way demanded by the world's great appet.i.tes, altogether a success of modern invention.

To gather the fruit without bruising by mechanical pickers, and then to place the fruit, oranges for instance, in the hands of an intelligent machine which will automatically, but delicately and effectually, wrap the same in a paper covering, and discharge them without harm, are among the recent inventive wonders. In the United States alone 67 patents had been granted up to 1895 for fruit wrapping machines.

Inventions relating to drying and evaporating fruit, and having for their main object to preserve as much as possible the natural taste and colour of the fruit, have been numerous. Spreading the fruit in the air and letting the sun and air do the rest is now a crude process.

These are the general types of drying and evaporating machines:

First, those in which trays of fruit are placed upon stationary ledges within a heated chamber; second, those in which the trays are raised and lowered by mechanical means toward or farther from the source of heat as the drying progresses; third, those in which the fruit is placed in imperforate steam jacketed pans. Many improvements, of course, have been made in detail of form, in ventilation, the supplying and regulating of heat and the moving of trays.

The hermetically sealed gla.s.s or earthenware fruit jar, the lids of which can be screwed or locked down upon a rubber band, after the jar is filled and the small remainder of air drawn out by a convenient steam heater, now used by the million, is an ill.u.s.tration of the many useful modern contrivances in this line.

_Sterilisation._--In preserving, the desirability of preventing disease and keeping foods in a pure state has developed in the last quarter of a century many devices by which the food is subjected to a steam heat in chambers, and, by devices operated from the outside, the cans or bottles are opened and shut while still within the steam-filled chamber.

_Diastase._--By heating starchy matters with substances containing diastase, a partial transformation is effected, which will materially shorten and aid its digestion, and this fact has been largely made use of in the preparation of soluble foods, especially those designed for infants and invalids, such as malted milk and lactated food.

_Milkers._--Invention has not only been exercised in the preservation and transportation of milk, but in the task of milking itself. Since 1860 inventors have been seeking patents for milkers, some having tubes operated by air-pumps, others on the same principle in which the vacuum is made to increase and decrease or pulsate, and others for machines in which the tubes are mechanically contracted by pressure plates.

_Slaughtering._--Great improvements have been made in the slaughtering of animals, by which a great amount of its repulsiveness and the unhealthfulness of its surroundings have been removed. These improvements relate to the construction of proper buildings and appliances for the handling of the animals, the means for slaughtering, and modes of taking care of the meat and transporting the same.

Villages, towns, and even many cities, are now relieved of the formerly unsavoury slaughter-houses, and the work is done from great centres of supply, where meats in every shape are prepared for food and s.h.i.+pment.

It would be impossible in a bulky volume, much less in a single chapter, to satisfactorily enumerate those thousands of inventions which, taking hold of the food products of the earth, have spread them as a feast before the tribes of men.

_Tobacco._--Some of the best inventive genius of the century has been exercised in providing for man's comfort, not a food, but what he believes to be a solace.

"Sublime Tobacco! which from East to West Cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest."

In the United States alone, in the year 1885, there were 752,520 acres of land devoted to the production of tobacco, the amount in pounds grown being 562,736,000, and the value of which was estimated as $43,265,598.

These amounts have been somewhat less in years since then, but the appet.i.te continues, and any deficiency in the supply is made up by enormous importation. Thus, in 1896, there were imported into the United States, 32,924,966 pounds of tobacco, of various kinds, valued at $16,503,130. There are no reliable statistics showing that, man for man, the people of that country are greater lovers of the weed than the people of other countries, but the annual value of tobacco raised and imported by them being thus about $60,000,000, it indicates the strength of the habit and the interest in the nurture of the plant throughout the world. Neither the "Counterblaste to Tobacco" of King James I., and the condemnations of kings, popes, priests and sultans, that followed its early introduction into Europe, served to choke the weed in its infancy or check its after growth. Now it is attended from the day of its planting until it reaches the lips of the consumer by contrivances of consummate skill to fit it for its destined purpose. Besides the ploughs, the cultivators and the weeders of especial forms used to cultivate the plant, there are, after the grown plant is cut in the field, houses of various designs for drying it, machines for rolling the leaves out smoothly in sheets; machines for removing the stems from the leaves and for crus.h.i.+ng the stem; machines for pressing it into shape, and for pressing it, whether solid or in granular form, into boxes, tubs and bags; machines for granulating it and for grinding it into snuff; machines for twisting it into cords; machines for flavouring the leaf with saccharine and other matters; machines for making cigars, and machines of a great variety and of the most ingenious construction for making cigarettes and putting them in packages.

Samples of pipes made by different ages and by different peoples would form a collection of wonderful art and ingenuity, second only to an exhibition of the means and methods of making them.

CHAPTER VI.

CHEMISTRY.

Chemistry, having for its field the properties and changes of matter, has excited more or less attention ever since men had the power to observe, to think, and to experiment.

Some knowledge of chemistry must have existed among the ancients to have enabled the Egyptians to smelt ores and work metals, to dye their cloths, to make gla.s.s, and to preserve their dead from decomposition; so, too, to this extent among the Ph[oe]nicians, the Israelites, the Greeks and the Romans; and perhaps to a greater extent among the Chinese, who added powder to the above named and other chemical products. Aristotle speculated, and the alchemists of the middle ages busied themselves in magic and guess-work. It reached the dignity of a science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the labours of such men, in the former century, as Libavius, Van Helmont, Glauber, Tachenius, Boyle, Lemery and Becher; Stahl, Boerhaave and Hamberg in both; and of Black, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Priestley and others in the eighteenth.

But so great have been the discoveries and inventions in this science during the nineteenth century that any chemist of any previous age, if permitted to look forward upon them, would have felt

"Like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken."

Indeed, the chemistry of this century is a new world, of which all the previous discoveries in that line were but floating nebulae.

So vast and astonis.h.i.+ngly fast has been the growth and development of this science that before the century was two-thirds through its course Watts published his _Dictionary of Chemistry_ in five volumes, averaging a thousand closely printed pages, followed soon by a thousand-page supplement; and it would have required such a volume every year since to adequately report the progress of the science. Nomenclatures, formulas, apparatuses and processes have all changed. It was deemed necessary to publish works on _The New Chemistry_, and Professor J. P. Cooke is the author of an admirable volume under that t.i.tle.

We can, therefore, in this chapter only step from one to another of some of the peaks that rise above the vast surrounding country, and note some of the lesser objects as they appear in the vales below.

The leading discoveries of the century which have done so much to aid Chemistry in its giant strides are the atomic and molecular theories, the mechanics of light, heat, and electricity, the correlation and conservation of forces, their invariable quant.i.ty, and their indestructibility, spectrum a.n.a.lysis and the laws of chemical changes.

John Dalton, that humble child of English north-country Quaker stock, self-taught and a teacher all his life, in 1803 gave to the world his atomic theory of chemistry, whereby the existence of matter in ultimate atoms was removed from the region of the speculation of certain ancient philosophers, and established on a sure foundation.

The question asked and answered by Dalton was, what is the relative weight of the atoms composing the elementary bodies?

He discovered that one chemical element or compound can combine with another chemical element, to form a new compound, in two different proportions by weight, which stand to each other in the simple ratio of one to two; and at the same time he published a table of the _Relative weight of the ultimate particles of Gaseous and other Bodies_. Although the details of this table have since been changed, the principles of his discovery remain unchanged. Says Professor Roscoe:

"Chemistry could hardly be said to exist as a science before the establishment of the laws of combination in multiple proportions, and the subsequent progress of chemical science materially depended upon the determination of these combined proportions or atomic weights of the elements first set up by Dalton. So that among the founders of our science, next to the name of the great French Philosopher, Lavoisier, will stand in future ages the name of John Dalton, of Manchester."

Less conspicuous but still eminently useful were his discoveries and labours in other directions, in the expansion of gases, evaporation, steam, etc.

Wollaston and Gay-Lussac, both great chemists, applied Dalton's discovery to wide and most important fields in the chemical arts.

Also contemporaneous with Dalton was the great German chemist, Berzelius, who confirmed and extended the discoveries of Dalton. More than this, it has been said of Berzelius:

"In him were united all the different impulses which have advanced the science since the beginning of the present epoch. The fruit of his labors is scattered throughout the entire domain of the science.

Hardly a substance exists to the knowledge of which he has not in some way contributed. A direct descendant of the school of his countryman, Bergman, he was especially renowned as an a.n.a.lyst. No chemist has determined by direct experiment the composition of a greater number of substances. No one has exerted a greater influence in extending the field of a.n.a.lytical chemistry."

As to light, the great Huygens, the astronomer and mathematician, the improver of differential calculus and of telescopes, the inventor of the pendulum clock, chronometers, and the balance wheel to the watch, and discoverer of the laws of the double refraction of light and of polarisation, had in the 17th century clearly advanced the idea that light was propagated from luminous bodies, not as a stream of particles through the air but in waves or vibrations of ether, which is a universal medium extending through all s.p.a.ce and into all bodies. This fundamental principle now enters into the explanation of all the phenomena of light.

Newton in the next century, with the prism, decomposed light, and in a darkened chamber reproduced all the colours and tints of the rainbow.

But there were dark lines in that beam of broken sunlight which Newton did not notice.

It was left to Joseph von Fraunhofer, a German optician, and to the 19th century, and nearly one hundred years after Newton's experiments with the prism, to discover, with finer prisms that he had made, some 590 of these black lines crossing the solar spectrum. What they were he did not know, but conjectured that they were caused by something which existed in the sun and stars and not in our air. But from that time they were called Fraunhofer's dark lines.

From the vantage ground of these developments we are now enabled to step to that mountain peak of discovery from which the sun and stars were looked into, their elements portrayed, their very motions determined, and their brotherhood with the earth, in substance, ascertained.

The great discovery of the cause of Fraunhofer's dark bands in the broken sunlight was made by Gustave Robert Kirchoff, a German physician, in his laboratory in Heidelberg, in 1860, in conjunction with his fellow worker, Robert Bunsen.

Kirchoff happened to let a solar ray pa.s.s through a flame coloured with sodium, and through a prism, so that the spectrum of the sun and the flame fell one upon another. It was expected that the well known yellow line of sodium would come out in the solar spectrum, but it was just the opposite that took place. Where the bright yellow line should have fallen appeared a dark line.

With this observation was coupled the reflection that heat pa.s.ses from a body of a higher temperature to one of a lower, and not inversely.

Experiments followed: iron, sodium, copper, etc., were heated to incandescence and their colours prismatically separated. These were transversed with the same colours of other heated bodies, and the latter were absorbed and rendered black. Kirchoff then announced his law that all bodies absorb chiefly those colours which they themselves emit.

Therefore these vapours of the sun which were rendered in black lines were so produced by crossing terrestrial vapors of the same nature.

Thus by the prism and the blowpipe were the same substances found in the sun, the stars, and the earth. The elements of every substance submitted to the process were a.n.a.lysed, and many secrets in the universe of matter were revealed.

Young, of America, invented a splendid combination of spectroscope and telescope, and Huggins of England was the first to establish by spectrum a.n.a.lysis the approach and retreat of the stars.