THE AGE OF THE ENGINE
BUT WHILE THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE WERE

FIGHTING FOR THEIR NATIONAL
INDEPENDENCE, THE WORLD IN WHICH THEY

LIVED HAD BEEN ENTIRELY CHANGED
BY A SERIES OF INVENTIONS, WHICH HAD

MADE THE CLUMSY OLD STEAM ENGINE
OF THE 18TH CENTURY THE MOST FAITHFUL

AND EFFICIENT SLAVE OF MAN
THE greatest benefactor of the human race died more than

half a million years ago. He was a hairy creature with a low
brow and sunken eyes, a heavy jaw and strong tiger-like teeth.

He would not have looked well in a gathering of modern scientists,
but they would have honoured him as their master. For

he had used a stone to break a nut and a stick to lift up a heavy
boulder. He was the inventor of the hammer and the lever, our

first tools, and he did more than any human being who came
after him to give man his enormousadvantage over the other

animals with whom he shares this planet.
Ever since, man has tried to make his life easier by the use

of a greater number of tools. The first wheel (a round disc
made out of an old tree) created as much stir in the communities

of 100,000 B.C. as the flying machine did only a few years
ago.

In Washington, the story is told of a director of the Patent
Office who in the early thirties of the last century suggested

that the Patent Office be abolished, because ``everything that
possibly could be invented had been invented.'' A similar

feeling must have spread through the prehistoric world when
the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able

to move from place to place without rowing or punting or
pulling from the shore.

Indeed one of the most interesting chapters of history is
the effort of man to let some one else or something else do his

work for him, while he enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun
or painting pictures on rocks, or training young wolves and

little tigers to behave like peacefuldomestic animals.
Of course in the very olden days; it was always possible

to enslave a weaker neighbour and force him to do the unpleasant
tasks of life. One of the reasons why the Greeks and

Romans, who were quite as intelligent as we are, failed to
devise more interesting machinery, was to be found in the wide-

spread existence of slavery. Why should a great mathematician
waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill

the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the marketplace
and buy all the slaves he needed at a very small expense?

And during the middle-ages, although slavery had been
abolished and only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds

discouraged the idea of using machinery because they thought
this would throw a large number of their brethren out of

work. Besides, the Middle-Ages were not at all interested
in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and butchers

and carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small
community in which they lived and had no desire to compete

with their neighbours, or to produce more than was strictly
necessary.

During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church
against scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as

rigidly as before, a large number of men began to devote their
lives to mathematics and astronomy and physics and chemistry.

Two years before the beginning of the Thirty Years War,
John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his little book which

described the new invention of logarithms. During the war it-
self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system of

infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of Westphalia,
Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was

born, and in that same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer,
died. Meanwhile the Thirty Years War had destroyed the prosperity

of central Europe and there was a sudden but very general
interest in ``alchemy,'' the strange pseudo-science of the

middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base metals into
gold. This proved to be impossible but the alchemists in their

laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped
the work of the chemists who were their successors.

The work of all these men provided the world with a solid
scientificfoundation upon which it was possible to build even

the most complicated of engines, and a number of practical
men made good use of it. The Middle-Ages had used wood for

the few bits of necessary machinery. But wood wore out
easily. Iron was a much better material but iron was scarce

except in England. In England therefore most of the smelting
was done. To smelt iron, huge fires were needed. In the

beginning, these fires had been made of wood, but gradually
the forests had been used up. Then ``stone coal'' (the petrified

trees of prehistoric times) was used. But coal as you
know has to be dug out of the ground and it has to be transported

to the smelting ovens and the mines have to be kept
dry from the ever invading waters.

These were two problems which had to be solved at once.
For the time being, horses could still be used to haul the coal-

wagons, but the pumping question demanded the application
of special machinery. Several inventors were busy trying to

solve the difficulty. They all knew that steam would have to
be used in their new engine. The idea of the steam engine was

very old. Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century
before Christ, has described to us several bits of machinery

which were driven by steam. The people of the Renaissance
had played with the notion of steam-driven war chariots. The

Marquis of Worcester, a contemporary of Newton, in his book
of inventions, tells of a steam engine. A little later, in the year

1698, Thomas Savery of London applied for a patent for a
pumping engine. At the same time, a Hollander, Christian

Huygens, was trying to perfect an engine in which gun-powder
was used to cause regular explosions in much the same way as

we use gasoline in our motors.
All over Europe, people were busy with the idea. Denis

Papin, a Frenchman, friend and assistant of Huygens, was
making experiments with steam engines in several countries.

He invented a little wagon that was driven by steam, and a
paddle-wheel boat. But when he tried to take a trip in his

vessel, it was confiscated by the authorities on a complaint of
the boatmen's union, who feared that such a craft would deprive

them of their livelihood. Papin finally died in London in
great poverty, having wasted all his money on his inventions.

But at the time of his death, another mechanical enthusiast,
Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a new

steam-pump. Fifty years later his engine was improved upon
by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year

1777, he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of
real practical value.

But during the centuries of experiments with a ``heat-engine,''
the political world had greatly changed. The British

people had succeeded the Dutch as the common-carriers of the
world's trade. They had opened up new colonies. They took

the raw materials which the colonies produced to England,
and there they turned them into finished products, and then

they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the
world. During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia

and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave
a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called ``cotton wool.''

After this had been plucked, it was sent to England and there
the people of Lancastershire wove it into cloth. This weaving

was done by hand and in the homes of the workman的复数">workmen. Very soon
a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving.

In the year 1730, John Kay invented the ``fly shuttle.''
In 1770, James Hargreaves got a patent on his ``spinning

jenny.'' Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton-gin,
which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had

previously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day.
Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cartwright

invented large weaving machines, which were driven by
water power. And then, in the eighties of the eighteenth

century, just when the Estates General of France had begun
those famous meetings which were to revolutionise the political

system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such
a way that they could drive the weaving machines of Arkwright,

and this created an economic and social revolution
which has changed human relationship in almost every part

of the world.
As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the

inventors turned their attention to the problem of propelling
boats and carts with the help of a mechanical contrivance.

Watt himself designed plans for a ``steam locomotive,'' but
ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804, a locomotive

made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at
Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.

At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter
by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince

Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the
``Nautilus,'' and his ``steam-boat,'' the French might be able to

destroy the naval supremacy of England.
Fulton's idea of a steamboat was not original. He had

undoubtedly copied it from John Fitch, a mechanicalgenius of
Connecticut whose cleverly constructed steamer had first navigated

the Delaware river as early as the year 1787. But Napoleon
and his scientific advisers did not believe in the practical