Invention

no arts of any sort; were ignorant to a degree that we cannot imagine, and were little above the brutes in their mode of living. Today, a considerable fra

eries of inventions can be seen, starting fro

cities, by prehistoric utensils of many kinds, and by inscriptions carved on monuments and tablets. The sharp dividing line between prehistoric times and historic

erations indicate a beginning so indefinitely and exceedingly remote that the imagination may lose itself in speculations as to his mode of living during those forever-hidden centu

man to defend himself against wild beasts must have been extremely bitter (for many were larger and stronger than he), and inasmuch as man eventually achieved the mastery o

. They were rough and crude, and indicate a rough and crude but nevertheless actual stage of civilization. Some call this the Old Stone Age and others call it the Early Stone Age. Besides stone and flint, bones, horns and tusks were used. Among the implements made were daggers, fish-hooks, needles, awl

n Stone of Cavern Walls (2), made b

rasped in his hand. At some time during the centuries of the Old Stone Age, someone invented a much finer weapon, that continued to be one of the most important that was known, until the invention of the gun, and is used even now in savage lands-the bow and arrow. What a tremendous advantage this weapon was in fighting wild beasts (a

rpening a straight branch of wood into a fine point at the end, in order that penetration through the skin might be facilitated, must have come as an inspiration. No such thing as a spear exists as a spear in nature, and therefore the making of a spear was a creative act. To us, the use of the spear as a proj

for the bow was not a bow until the string had been fastened to each end, and drawn so tight that the bar of wood was forced into a bent shape, and held there at great tension. When one realizes this, and realizes in addition the countless centuries during which the bow and arrow held its sway, the milli

stones are accidentally struck together, or the falling of an apple from a tree, requires no special effort, and of itself brings forth no benefit; but to reason from the appearance of the sparks to the production of an apparatus for making fire at will; or to reason from the falling of an apple to the enunciation of Newton's Law of Gravitation, is the kind of successful mental effort that has produced the effects which it is the endeavor of this humble book to indicate. These effects have combined as progress has advanced, to put civilized

ow great a student of all phenomena he might be, no matter how good a memory he might have, he might nevertheless live for many years and never invent anything. In fact, we see men at the present day who possess great knowledge, splendid energy, keen powers of analysis, h

ge, so slight in appearance and yet so tremendous in results, of cutting only one letter on a block, and arranging and securing the blocks in such a way as to enable him to print any word or words desired. This did not occur until about the year 1434 A. D. Why had not someone done this in all the long centuries? Surely it was not because men of great reasoning faculties had not lived; for in the long interval the civilization of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome had flourished; and Plato, Aristotle, C?sar and the great inventor Archimedes had lived! Similarly, men continued to use in wood the same

ion cannot, of course, be answered convincingly; but it may be pointed out that there is a small class of men to whom original ideas

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the poets, the novelists, the musical composers, the artists, the strategists, the explorers, the statesmen, the philosophers, the founders of religions and the initiators of

ye in a fine

en to earth, from

gination b

hings unknown,

hapes, and give

bitation a

ed and dim but actual, is made by the imagination on the mental retina; and that, after that, the construc

es a statue, the painter sees a new combination of objects and colors producing a new effect, and the poet feels the stirring in him of vague, but beautiful, or powerful or inspiring thoughts. If now the picture is allowed to fade, or if the constructive faculty is not able to make it int

tious, then the art of making fire at will is born, or Bonaparte's suggestion at Toulon is made, or the strains of Beethoven's music inspire the world, or th

declared that their work is characterized by quite so much of originality and invention, because of the restrictions by which the practice of their arts is bound. It is, in fact, hard to conceive of a bridge very different in principle or design from bridges that had been built before; and while it is not difficult to conceive of an engine different in principle and design from

failed-or have been slow in achieving success-because of lack of engineering skill in construction or design. These facts show that the work of the inventor is very different from that of the engineer, and that the inventor and the engineer are very different people, though an engineer and an inventor sometim

ade; and it is somewhat analogous to the way in which authors and p

n of genius, may not the inventive faculty be needed in other fields and be required in other kinds of work? If an instrument is produced by the joint exercise of imaginatio

ess as to what constitutes invention in our own minds; and it must be admitted that the dividing line is not immediately obvious between invention an

olves any problem whatever that is presented to him from outside, simply accomplishes a task that is given to him to accomplish; whereas, while the inventor accomplishes a similar task, he does it as a second step in a task that was not given him to accomplish, but that he hims

neous and unbidden. The subsequent work of developing the conception into material and practical shape was probably one of long duration, consisti

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s distinguished from its predecessor mainly by the fact that the principal weapons and utensils were formed into regular shapes, polished into smoothness, and in many cases grou

uired, and that of an order not very original or high; for the improvements were rather in detail than principle. Perh

the imagination on the mind. In such a case, the act of improving belongs rather in the category of engineering than of invention, for the reason that it involves only a slight use of the imagination. It may als

ments besides those relating to articles of stone, and was a period far in advance of its predecessor on the march to civilization. It was marked by the domestication of animals and plants, the tilling of the soil, and a gradual change from a purely savage and nomadic mode of life. This change was first to a pastoral life, in which men lived in fixed h

es, those principally characteristic seem to have been mental; and among those faculties, invention, reason, construction and memory seem to have been the most important. It would be unreasonable to declare any one of those faculties to have been more important than the others; but it can hard

But, equally, certain tribes of men have not been domesticated. It may be that in both the undomesticated men and the undomesticated brutes, th

ever, that the development of language must have been a continuing act from the first, inferring it from the fact that it has been a continuing act from the dawn of recorded history until now, and if we suppose that it had a rise and a growth like those of other arts, we may reasonably conclude that some man invented the plan of making his wants known by the use of vocal sounds, uttered in accordance w

essity of defense against wild beasts and other men. Following the defense by individual men of their individual lives, it seems logical to suppose that a man and his wife, a man and his brother, and then groups of men, banded together in their common defense against com

been invented primarily to further man's first aim, the preservation of his life, and have afterwards been empl

een upon the ground, or when some copper ore was subjected to fire. The metal, by reason of its great durability, ductility, elasticity and strength, came

any primeval man could have imagined a metal made from them much harder than either, and then proceeded to make it by mixing about seven parts of copper with one part of tin. The gradual improvement made in bronze implements, and the different kinds of bronze that later appeared (made by altering the proportions of tin and copp

ation of something different from everything else whatever, like the telephone or phonograph, does not debar the achievement from being classed as an invention. The pointed screw was merely an improvement over previous forms of screw, and yet it was

, that "there is nothing new under the sun," and that therefore every so-called inv

n made the speaking telephone to exist. The speaking telephone did not exist before Bell invented it, and it did exist after he invented it. To say that Bell did or did not create the telephone conveys a meaning dependent wholly on the meaning in which the word "create" is

certain weapons, implements and utensils, that gave the men who used them such mastery over wild beast

based upon them. No other basis that civilization could have proceeded from can even be imagined; for the ac

besides inventors; for it is obvious that we owe it to all the facts of our history, and to such of our ancestors as did anything to advance it. We owe it in part, for instance, to the men who framed the laws that made living in villages and cities possible, to the men who executed the laws, and to all the men and w

ngs as a class see the benefits of morality and good living throughout society as a whole. For this reason, and for the still more important reason that most individuals are not very different in their characteristics and abilities from the average of all individuals, the tendency of society is to reduce men to a common level; so t

gnition; and as the only records that have come down to us indicate that the most important acts were the inventing of certain implements, we seem

orgotten as wholly as those of many beasts. But maybe other achievements like those that have exposed the history of certain Oriental kings and wise men

and song singers, the names of the original inventors will be forever hid. For inventors have ever been depreciated in their day; even at the present time, despite the known facts as to what inventions and inventors have done for every one of us, the inventor as

f copper, followed the act of heating stones with fire. The coming of iron seems due therefore to discovery rather than to invention; but yet the mere discovery that a very hard substance had been accidentally produced would of itself have brought forth no fruit. One is almost forced to infer from probability that t

for making iron in quantities. But prehistoric man had no knowledge whatever save that coming from his own observation and the oral teachings of the wise men; mathematics and logic did not exist; and the only training given him was in those simple arts of hunting, fishing, field tilling, etc., by which he earned his livelihood. For a mind so untrained and ignorant to

ruction than one of invention. In fact, when we realize that imagination is almost wholly a pure gift (like beauty, or artistic genius or a singing voice) while the reasoning and constructive

heir liability to error and forgetfulness, into a condition in which the facts and experiences of life, and the reasons for fail

a man, was led to invent writing we can only imagine, for we cannot ascertain. When we realize, however, how entirely novel an undertaking the production of writing was, and that there is no process of mere reasoning by which a man could arrive at a d

to have been founded seem to have come unbidden to certain men as inspirations from On High, he must realize how similar are the conceptions that come to inventors

ifferent lengths of time among different peoples, as have all other characteristics of any stage of civilization; and it is practiced in some degree by some peoples even now. In fact, one might with reasonableness declare that many of the illust

quired many characters and necessitated long and tedious study to master it. It was gradually replaced among most peoples by an improved phonetic system, in which each character represented a syllable instead of a word; though the Chinese have never wholly abandoned it. The syllabic system needed, of course, fewer characters, and was much more easily learned, much m

l that we have. The gift of life itself came to us through him; and so did not only our physical faculties, but our mental, moral and spiritual faculties as well. It was prehistoric man who invented the appliances without which the wild beasts would not have been overcome, and the man, wilder than himself, been kept at bay; by means of which the soil was tilled, and boats were made to move upon the water, and villages and towns were built. It