Pushing to the Front Part 31

"Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions?" asked a reporter of Thomas A. Edison. "Do they come to you while you are lying awake nights?"

"I never did anything worth doing by accident," was the reply, "nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes. I have always kept strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders, valuable simply as novelties to catch the popular fancy. _I like it_,"

continued the great inventor. "I don't know any other reason.

Anything I have begun is always on my mind, and I am not easy while away from it until it is finished."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Thomas Alva Edison]

A man who thus gives himself wholly to his work is certain to accomplish something; and if he have ability and common sense, his success will be great.

How Bulwer wrestled with the fates to change his apparent destiny! His first novel was a failure; his early poems were failures; and his youthful speeches provoked the ridicule of his opponents. But he fought his way to eminence through ridicule and defeat.

Gibbon worked twenty years on his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Noah Webster spent thirty-six years on his dictionary. What a sublime patience he showed in devoting a life to the collection and definition of words! George Bancroft spent twenty-six years on his "History of the United States." Newton rewrote his "Chronology of Ancient Nations" fifteen times. t.i.tian wrote to Charles V.: "I send your majesty the Last Supper, after working on it almost daily for seven years." He worked on his Pietro Martyn eight years. George Stephenson was fifteen years perfecting his locomotive; Watt, twenty years on his condensing engine. Harvey labored eight long years before he published his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He was then called a crack-brained impostor by his fellow physicians. Amid abuse and ridicule he waited twenty-five years before his great discovery was recognized by the profession.

Newton discovered the law of gravitation before he was twenty-one, but one slight error in a measurement of the earth's circ.u.mference interfered with a demonstration of the correctness of his theory.

Twenty years later he corrected the error, and showed that the planets roll in their orbits as a result of the same law which brings an apple to the ground.

Sothern, the great actor, said that the early part of his theatrical career was spent in getting dismissed for incompetency.

"Never depend upon your genius," said John Ruskin, in the words of Joshua Reynolds; "if you have talent, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply the deficiency."

Savages believe that when they conquer an enemy, his spirit enters into them, and fights for them ever afterwards. So the spirit of our conquests enters us, and helps us to win the next victory.

Blucher may have been routed at Ligny yesterday, but to-day you hear the thunder of his guns at Waterloo hurling dismay and death among his former conquerors.

Opposing circ.u.mstances create strength. Opposition gives us greater power of resistance. To overcome one barrier gives us greater ability to overcome the next.

In February, 1492, a poor gray-haired man, his head bowed with discouragement almost to the back of his mule, rode slowly out through the beautiful gateway of the Alhambra. From boyhood he had been haunted with the idea that the earth is round. He believed that the piece of carved wood picked up four hundred miles at sea and the bodies of two men unlike any other human beings known, found on the sh.o.r.es of Portugal, had drifted from unknown lands in the west. But his last hope of obtaining aid for a voyage of discovery had failed. King John of Portugal, while pretending to think of helping him, had sent out secretly an expedition of his own.

He had begged bread, drawn maps and charts to keep from starving; he had lost his wife; his friends had called him crazy, and forsaken him.

The council of wise men called by Ferdinand and Isabella ridiculed his theory of reaching the east by sailing west.

"But the sun and moon are round," said Columbus, "why not the earth?"

"If the earth is a ball, what holds it up?" asked the wise men.

"What holds the sun and moon up?" inquired Columbus.

"But how can men walk with their heads hanging down, and their feet up, like flies on a ceiling?" asked a learned doctor; "how can trees grow with their roots in the air?"

"The water would run out of the ponds and we should fall off," said another philosopher.

"This doctrine is contrary to the Bible, which says, 'The heavens are stretched out like a tent:'--of course it is flat; it is rank heresy to say it is round," said a priest.

Columbus left the Alhambra in despair, intending to offer his services to Charles VII., but he heard a voice calling his name. An old friend had told Isabella that it would add great renown to her reign at a trifling expense if what the sailor believed should prove true. "It shall be done," said Isabella, "I will pledge my jewels to raise the money. Call him back."

Columbus turned and with him turned the world. Not a sailor would go voluntarily; so the king and queen compelled them. Three days out, in his vessels scarcely larger than fis.h.i.+ng-schooners, the _Pinta_ floated a signal of distress for a broken rudder. Terror seized the sailors, but Columbus calmed their fears with pictures of gold and precious stones from India. Two hundred miles west of the Canaries, the compa.s.s ceased to point to the North Star. The sailors are ready to mutiny, but he tells them the North Star is not exactly north. Twenty-three hundred miles from home, though he tells them it is but seventeen hundred, a bush with berries floats by, land birds fly near, and they pick up a piece of wood curiously carved. On October 12, Columbus raised the banner of Castile over the western world.

"How hard I worked at that tremendous shorthand, and all improvement appertaining to it," said d.i.c.kens. "I will only add to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured."

Cyrus W. Field had retired from business with a large fortune when he became possessed with the idea that by means of a cable laid upon the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, telegraphic communication could be established between Europe and America. He plunged into the undertaking with all the force of his being. The preliminary work included the construction of a telegraph line one thousand miles long, from New York to St. John's, Newfoundland. Through four hundred miles of almost unbroken forest they had to build a road as well as a telegraph line across Newfoundland. Another stretch of one hundred and forty miles across the island of Cape Breton involved a great deal of labor, as did the laying of a cable across the St. Lawrence.

By hard work he secured aid for his company from the British government, but in Congress he encountered such bitter opposition from a powerful lobby that his measure only had a majority of one in the Senate. The cable was loaded upon the _Agamemnon_, the flag s.h.i.+p of the British fleet at Sebastopol, and upon the _Niagara_, a magnificent new frigate of the United States Navy; but, when five miles of cable had been paid out, it caught in the machinery and parted. On the second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously as it had disappeared. The following night, when the s.h.i.+p was moving but four miles an hour and the cable running out at the rate of six miles, the brakes were applied too suddenly just as the steamer gave a heavy lurch, breaking the cable.

Field was not the man to give up. Seven hundred miles more of cable were ordered, and a man of great skill was set to work to devise a better machine for paying out the long line. American and British inventors united in making a machine. At length in mid-ocean the two halves of the cable were spliced and the steamers began to separate, the one headed for Ireland, the other for Newfoundland, each running out the precious thread, which, it was hoped, would bind two continents together. Before the vessels were three miles apart, the cable parted.

Again it was spliced, but when the s.h.i.+ps were eighty miles apart, the current was lost. A third time the cable was spliced and about two hundred miles paid out, when it parted some twenty feet from the _Agamemnon_, and the vessels returned to the coast of Ireland.

Directors were disheartened, the public skeptical, capitalists were shy, and but for the indomitable energy and persuasiveness of Mr.

Field, who worked day and night almost without food or sleep, the whole project would have been abandoned. Finally a third attempt was made, with such success that the whole cable was laid without a break, and several messages were flashed through nearly seven hundred leagues of ocean, when suddenly the current ceased.

Faith now seemed dead except in the breast of Cyrus W. Field, and one or two friends, yet with such persistence did they work that they persuaded men to furnish capital for yet another trial even against what seemed their better judgment. A new and superior cable was loaded upon the _Great Eastern_, which steamed slowly out to sea, paying out as she advanced. Everything worked to a charm until within six hundred miles of Newfoundland, when the cable snapped and sank. After several attempts to raise it, the enterprise was abandoned for a year.

Not discouraged by all these difficulties, Mr. Field went to work with a will, organized a new company, and made a new cable far superior to anything before used, and on July 13, 1866, was begun the trial which ended with the following message sent to New York:--

"HEART'S CONTENT, July 27.

"We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank G.o.d!

the cable is laid and is in perfect working order.

"CYRUS W. FIELD."

The old cable was picked up, spliced, and continued to Newfoundland, and the two are still working, with good prospects for usefulness for many years.

In Revelation we read: "He that overcometh, I will give him to sit down with me on my throne."

Successful men, it is said, owe more to their perseverance than to their natural powers, their friends, or the favorable circ.u.mstances around them. Genius will falter by the side of labor, great powers will yield to great industry. Talent is desirable, but perseverance is more so.

"How long did it take you to learn to play?" asked a young man of Geradini. "Twelve hours a day for twenty years," replied the great violinist. Lyman Beecher when asked how long it took him to write his celebrated sermon on the "Government of G.o.d," replied, "About forty years."

A Chinese student, discouraged by repeated failures, had thrown away his book in despair, when he saw a poor woman rubbing an iron bar on a stone to make a needle. This example of patience sent him back to his studies with a new determination, and he became one of the three greatest scholars of China.

Malibran said: "If I neglect my practice a day, I see the difference in my execution; if for two days, my friends see it; and if for a week, all the world knows my failure." Constant, persistent struggle she found to be the price of her marvelous power.

When an East India boy is learning archery, he is compelled to practise three months drawing the string to his ear before he is allowed to touch an arrow.

Benjamin Franklin had this tenacity of purpose in a wonderful degree.

When he started in the printing business in Philadelphia, he carried his material through the streets on a wheelbarrow. He hired one room for his office, work-room, and sleeping-room. He found a formidable rival in the city and invited him to his room. Pointing to a piece of bread from which he had just eaten his dinner, he said: "Unless you can live cheaper than I can you can not starve me out."

All are familiar with the misfortune of Carlyle while writing his "History of the French Revolution." After the first volume was ready for the press, he loaned the ma.n.u.script to a neighbor who left it lying on the floor, and the servant girl took it to kindle the fire. It was a bitter disappointment, but Carlyle was not the man to give up. After many months of poring over hundreds of volumes of authorities and scores of ma.n.u.scripts, he reproduced that which had burned in a few minutes.

Audubon, the naturalist, had spent two years with his gun and note-book in the forests of America, making drawings of birds. He nailed them all up securely in a box and went off on a vacation. When he returned he opened the box only to find a nest of Norwegian rats in his beautiful drawings. Every one was ruined. It was a terrible disappointment, but Audubon took his gun and note-book and started for the forest. He reproduced his drawings, and they were even better than the first.

When d.i.c.kens was asked to read one of his selections in public he replied that he had not time, for he was in the habit of reading the same piece every day for six months before reading it in public. "My own invention," he says, "such as it is, I a.s.sure you, would never have served me as it has but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, toiling attention."

Addison ama.s.sed three volumes of ma.n.u.script before he began the "Spectator."

Everyone admires a determined, persistent man. Marcus Morton ran sixteen times for governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. At last his opponents voted for him from admiration of his pluck, and he was elected by a majority of one! Such persistence always triumphs.