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+Project Gutenberg's Boys' Second Book of Inventions, by Ray Stannard Baker
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Boys' Second Book of Inventions
+
+Author: Ray Stannard Baker
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2013 [EBook #44188]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Underscores are used as delimiter for _italics_.
+
+Small capitals have been transcribed as all capitals.]
+
+
+
+
+BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+
+[Illustration: G. Marconi]
+
+
+
+
+  BOYS' SECOND BOOK
+  OF INVENTIONS
+
+  BY RAY STANNARD BAKER
+
+  _Author of
+  Boys' Book of Inventions, Seen in
+  Germany_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  FULLY ILLUSTRATED
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
+  MCMIX
+
+  _Copyright, 1903, by_
+  McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
+
+  Published, November, 1903, N
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+                                                         PAGE
+  THE MIRACLE OF RADIUM                                     3
+
+    Story of the Marvels and Dangers of the New Element
+    Discovered by Professor and Madame Curie.
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  FLYING MACHINES                                          27
+
+    Santos-Dumont's Steerable Balloons.
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  THE EARTHQUAKE MEASURER                                  79
+
+    Professor John Milne's Seismograph.
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  ELECTRICAL FURNACES                                     113
+
+    How the Hottest Heat is Produced--Making Diamonds.
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  HARNESSING THE SUN                                      153
+
+    The Solar Motor.
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  THE INVENTOR AND THE FOOD PROBLEM                       173
+
+    Fixing of Nitrogen--Experiments of Professor Nobbe.
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  MARCONI AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS                      207
+
+    New Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy.
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+
+  SEA-BUILDERS                                            255
+
+    The Story of Lighthouse Building--Stone-Tower
+    Lighthouses, Iron Pile Lighthouses, and Steel
+    Cylinder Lighthouses.
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX
+
+  THE NEWEST ELECTRIC LIGHT                               293
+
+    Peter Cooper Hewitt and his Three Great Inventions
+    --The Mercury Arc Light--The New Electrical
+    Converter--The Hewitt Interrupter.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                         Page
+  Guglielmo Marconi                  _Frontispiece_
+
+
+  M. Curie Explaining the Wonders of Radium at
+  the Sorbonne                                              5
+
+
+  Dr. Danlos Treating a Lupus Patient with Radium
+  at the St. Louis Hospital, Paris                         13
+
+
+  Radium as a Test for Real Diamonds                       19
+
+    _At the approach of Radium pure gems are thrown
+    into great brilliancy, while imitations remain
+    dull._
+
+
+  M. and Mme. Curie Finishing the Preparation of
+  some Radium                                              25
+
+
+  M. Alberto Santos-Dumont                                 29
+
+
+  Severo's Balloon, the "Pax," which on its First
+  Ascent at a Height of about 2,000 feet,
+  Burst and Exploded, Sending to a Terrible
+  Death both M. Severo and his Assistant                   33
+
+
+  The Trial of Count Zeppelin's Air-Ship, July 2,
+  1900                                                     37
+
+
+  M. Santos-Dumont at Nineteen                             41
+
+
+  M. Santos-Dumont's First Balloon (Spherical)             43
+
+
+  M. Santos-Dumont's Workshop                              45
+
+
+  "Santos-Dumont No. 1"                                    49
+
+
+  Basket of "Santos-Dumont No. 1"                          52
+
+    _Showing propeller and motor._
+
+
+  "Santos-Dumont No. 1"                                    54
+
+    _Showing how it began to fold up in the middle._
+
+
+  "Santos-Dumont No. 5" Rounding Eiffel Tower,
+  July 13, 1901                                            57
+
+
+  The Interior of the Aerodrome                            61
+
+    _Showing its construction, the inflated balloon,
+    and the pennant with its mystic letters._
+
+
+  The Fall into the Courtyard of the Trocadero Hotel       65
+
+    "_Santos-Dumont No. 5._"
+
+
+  "Santos-Dumont No. 6"--The Prize Winner                  69
+
+
+  Air-Ship Pointing almost Vertically Upward               73
+
+
+  Falling to the Sea                                       73
+
+
+  Just Before the Air-Ship Lost all its Gas                74
+
+
+  Losing its Gas and Sinking                               74
+
+
+  The Balloon Falling to the Waves                         75
+
+
+  Boats Around the Ruined Air-Ship                         75
+
+
+  Manoeuvring Above the Bay at Monte Carlo                 77
+
+
+  Professor John Milne                                     80
+
+    _From a photograph by S. Suzuki, Kudanzaka, Tokio._
+
+
+  Professor Milne's Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph,
+  as it Appears Enclosed in its Protecting Box             81
+
+
+  The Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it
+  Appears with the Protecting Box Removed                  81
+
+
+  Gifu, Japan, after the Earthquake of 1891                85
+
+    _This and the pictures following on pages 89, 101,
+    111, are from Japanese photographs reproduced in
+    "The Great Earthquake in Japan, 1891," by John
+    Milne and W. K. Burton._
+
+
+  The Work of the Great Earthquake of 1891 in
+  Neo Valley, Japan                                        89
+
+
+  Diagram Showing Vertical and Horizontal Sections
+  of the More Sensitive of Professor
+  Milne's Two Pendulums, or Seismographs                   93
+
+
+  Seismogram of a Borneo Earthquake that Occurred
+  September 20, 1897                                       94
+
+
+  Effect of the Great Earthquake of 1891 on the
+  Nagara Gawa Railway Bridge, Japan                       101
+
+
+  Pieces of a Submarine Cable Picked Up in the
+  Gulf of Mexico in 1888                                  108
+
+    _The kinks are caused by seismic disturbances,
+    and they show how much distortion a cable can
+    suffer and still remain in good electrical
+    condition, as this was found to be._
+
+
+  Record made on a Stationary Surface by the
+  Vibrations of the Japanese Earthquake of
+  July 19, 1891                                           111
+
+    _Showing the complicated character of the motion
+    (common to most earthquakes), and also the course
+    of a point at the centre of disturbance._
+
+
+  Table of Temperatures                                   115
+
+
+  Mr. E. G. Acheson, One of the Pioneers in the
+  Investigation of High Temperatures                      125
+
+
+  The Furnace-Room, where Carborundum is Made             131
+
+    "_A great, dingy brick building, open at the
+    sides like a shed._"
+
+
+  Taking Off a Crust of the Furnace at Night              135
+
+    _The light is so intense that you cannot look at
+    it without hurting the eyes._
+
+
+  The Interior of a Furnace as it Appears after the
+  Carborundum has been Taken Out                          143
+
+
+  Blowing Off                                             147
+
+    "_Not infrequently gas collects, forming a
+    miniature mountain, with a crater at its summit,
+    and blowing a magnificent fountain of flame,
+    lava, and dense white vapour high into the air,
+    and roaring all the while in a most terrifying
+    manner._"
+
+
+  Side View of the Solar Motor                            155
+
+
+  Front View of the Los Angeles Solar Motor               159
+
+
+  The Brilliant Steam Boiler Glistens in the Centre       163
+
+
+  The Rear Machinery for Operating the Reflector          167
+
+
+  Trees Growing in Water at Professor Nobbe's
+  Laboratory                                              187
+
+
+  Experimenting with Nitrogen in Professor Nobbe's
+  Laboratory                                              191
+
+
+  Mr. Charles S. Bradley                                  198
+
+
+  Mr. D. R. Lovejoy                                       199
+
+
+  Eight-Inch 10,000-Volt Arcs Burning the Air for
+  Fixing Nitrogen                                         200
+
+
+  Machine for Burning the Air with Electric Arcs
+  so as to Produce Nitrates                               201
+
+
+  Marconi. The Sending of an Epoch-Making Message         206
+
+    _January 18, 1903, marks the beginning of a new
+    era in telegraphic communication. On that day
+    there was sent by Marconi himself from the
+    wireless station at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod,
+    Mass., to the station at Poldhu, Cornwall,
+    England, a distance of 3,000 miles, the
+    message--destined soon to be historic--from the
+    President of the United States to the King of
+    England._
+
+
+  Preparing to Fly the Kite which Supported the
+  Receiving Wire                                          213
+
+    _Marconi on the extreme left._
+
+
+  Mr. Marconi and his Assistants in Newfoundland:
+  Mr. Kemp on the Left, Mr. Paget on the Right            217
+
+    _They are sitting on a balloon basket, with one
+    of the Baden-Powell kites in the background._
+
+
+  Marconi Transatlantic Station at Wellfleet, Cape
+  Cod, Mass.                                              229
+
+
+  At Poole, England                                       231
+
+
+  Nearer View, South Foreland Station                     235
+
+
+  Alum Bay Station, Isle of Wight                         237
+
+
+  Marconi Room, S.S. Philadelphia                         241
+
+
+  Transatlantic High Power, Marconi Station at
+  Glace Bay, Nova Scotia                                  247
+
+
+  Work on the Smith Point Lighthouse Stopped by
+  a Violent Storm                                         254
+
+    _Just after the cylinder had been set in place,
+    and while the workmen were hurrying to stow
+    sufficient ballast to secure it against a heavy
+    sea, a storm forced the attending steamer to draw
+    away. One of the barges was almost overturned,
+    and a lifeboat was driven against the cylinder
+    and crushed to pieces._
+
+
+  Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell
+  Rock Lighthouse, and Author of Important
+  Inventions and Improvements in the System
+  of Sea Lighting                                         256
+
+    _From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of
+    Bell Rock Lighthouse._
+
+
+  The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast
+  of Scotland                                             257
+
+    _From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock
+    Lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson,
+    grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the
+    Inchcape Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee,
+    Scotland, in 1807-1810._
+
+
+  The Present Lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, near
+  the Entrance of Massachusetts Bay, Fifteen
+  Miles Southeast of Boston                               260
+
+    "_Rising sheer out of the sea, like a huge stone
+    cannon, mouth upward._"--Longfellow.
+
+
+  The Lighthouse on Stannard Rock, Lake Superior          261
+
+    _This is a stone-tower lighthouse, similar in
+    construction to the one built with such difficulty
+    on Spectacle Reef, Lake Huron._
+
+
+  The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida                     264
+
+
+  Fourteen-Foot Bank Light Station, Delaware
+  Bay, Del.                                               268
+
+
+  The Great Beds Light Station, Raritan Bay,
+  N. J.                                                   270
+
+    _A specimen of iron cylinder construction._
+
+
+  A Storm at the Tillamook Lighthouse, in the
+  Pacific, one mile out from Tillamook Head,
+  Oregon                                                  275
+
+
+  Saving the Cylinder of the Lighthouse at Smith
+  Point, Chesapeake Bay, from being Swamped
+  in a High Sea                                           279
+
+    _When the builders were towing the unwieldy
+    cylinder out to set it in position, the water
+    became suddenly rough and began to fill it.
+    Workmen, at the risk of their lives, boarded
+    the cylinder, and by desperate labours succeeded
+    in spreading sail canvas over it, and so saved a
+    structure that had cost months of labour and
+    thousands of dollars._
+
+
+  Great Waves Dashed Entirely Over Them, so that
+  They had to Cling for Their Lives to the
+  Air-Pipes                                               285
+
+    _In erecting the Smith Point lighthouse, after
+    the cylinder was set up, it had to be forced down
+    fifteen and a half feet into the sand. The lives
+    of the men who did this, working in the caisson
+    at the bottom of the sea, were absolutely in the
+    hands of the men who managed the engine and the
+    air-compressor at the surface; and twice these
+    latter were entirely deluged by the sea, but
+    still maintained steam and kept everything
+    running as if no sea was playing over them._
+
+
+  Peter Cooper Hewitt                                     292
+
+    _With his interrupter._
+
+
+  Watching a Test of the Hewitt Converter                 299
+
+    _Lord Kelvin in the centre._
+
+
+  The Hewitt Mercury Vapour Light                         305
+
+    _The circular piece just above the switch button
+    is one form of "boosting coil" which operates for
+    a fraction of a second when the current is first
+    turned on. The tube shown here is about an inch
+    in diameter and several feet long. Various shapes
+    may be used. Unless broken, the tubes never need
+    renewal._
+
+
+  Testing a Hewitt Converter                              311
+
+    _The row of incandescent lights is used, together
+    with a voltmeter and ammeter, to measure strength
+    of current, resistance, and loss in converting._
+
+
+
+
+BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE MIRACLE OF RADIUM
+
+_Story of the Marvels and Dangers of the New Element Discovered by
+Professor and Madame Curie_
+
+
+No substance ever discovered better deserves the term "Miracle of
+Science," given it by a famous English experimenter, than radium. Here
+is a little pinch of white powder that looks much like common table
+salt. It is one of many similar pinches sealed in little glass tubes
+and owned by Professor Curie, of Paris. If you should find one of these
+little tubes in the street you would think it hardly worth carrying
+away, and yet many a one of them could not be bought for a small
+fortune. For all the radium in the world to-day could be heaped on
+a single table-spoon; a pound of it would be worth nearly a million
+dollars, or more than three thousand times its weight in pure gold.
+
+Professor and Madame Curie, who discovered radium, now possess the
+largest amount of any one, but there are small quantities in the hands
+of English and German scientists, and perhaps a dozen specimens in
+America, one owned by the American Museum of Natural History and
+several by Mr. W. J. Hammer, of New York, who was the first American to
+experiment with the rare and precious substance.
+
+[Illustration: M. Curie Explaining the Wonders of Radium at the
+Sorbonne.]
+
+And perhaps it is just as well, at first, not to have too much radium,
+for besides being wonderful it is also dangerous. If a pound or two
+could be gathered in a mass it would kill every one who came within its
+influence. People might go up and even handle the white powder without
+at the moment feeling any ill-effects, but in a week or two the
+mysterious and dreadful radium influence would begin to take effect.
+Slowly the victim's skin would peel off, his body would become one great
+sore, he would fall blind, and finally die of paralysis and congestion
+of the spinal cord. Even the small quantities now in hand have severely
+burned the experimenters. Professor Curie himself has a number of bad
+scars on his hands and arms due to ulcers caused by handling radium. And
+Professor Becquerel, in journeying to London, carried in his waistcoat
+pocket a small tube of radium to be used in a lecture there. Nothing
+happened at the time, but about two weeks later Professor Becquerel
+observed that the skin under his pocket was beginning to redden and fall
+away, and finally a deep and painful sore formed there and remained for
+weeks before healing.
+
+It is just as well, therefore, that scientists learn more about radium
+and how to handle and control it before too much is manufactured.
+
+But the cost and danger of radium are only two of its least
+extraordinary features. Seen in the daylight radium is a commonplace
+white powder, but in the dark it glows like live fire, and the purer
+it is the more it glows. I held for a moment one of Mr. Hammer's radium
+tubes, and, the lights being turned off, it seemed like a live coal
+burning there in my hand, and yet I felt no sensation of heat. But
+radium really does give off heat as well as light--and gives it off
+continually _without losing appreciable weight_. And that is what seems
+to scientists a miracle. Imagine a coal which should burn day in and
+day out for hundreds of years, always bright, always giving off heat and
+light, and yet not growing any smaller, not turning to ashes. That
+is the almost unbelievable property of radium. Professor Curie has
+specimens which have thus been radiating light and heat for several
+years, with practically no loss of weight; and no small amount of light
+and heat either. Professor Curie has found that a given quantity of
+radium will melt its own weight of ice every hour, and continue doing so
+practically for ever. One of his associates has calculated that a fixed
+quantity of radium, after throwing out heat for 1,000,000,000 years,
+would have lost only one-millionth part of its bulk.
+
+What is the reason for these extraordinary properties? Is it not
+"perpetual motion"? All the great scientists of the world have been
+trying in vain to answer these questions. Several theories have been
+advanced, of which I shall speak later, but none seems a satisfactory
+explanation. When we know more of radium perhaps we shall be better
+prepared to say what it really is, and we may have to unlearn many
+of the great principles of physics and chemistry which were seemingly
+settled for all time. Radium would seem, indeed, to defy the very law of
+the conservation of energy.
+
+The practical mind at once sees radium in use as a new source of heat
+and light for mankind, a furnace that would never have to be fed or
+cleaned, a lamp that would glow perpetually--and the time may really
+come, the inventor having taken hold of the wonder that the scientist
+has produced, when many practical applications of the new element may be
+devised. At present, however, the scarcity and cost and danger of radium
+will keep it in the hands of the experimenter.
+
+Another astonishing property of radium is its power of communicating
+some of its strange qualities to certain substances brought within its
+influence. Mr. Hammer kept his radium tubes for a time in a pasteboard
+box. This being broken, he removed the tubes and threw the pasteboard
+aside. Several days later, having occasion to turn off the lights in
+the laboratory, he found that the discarded box was glowing there
+in the dark. It had taken up some of the rays from the radium.
+Nearly everything that comes in contact with radium thus becomes
+"radio-active"--even the experimenter's clothes and hands, so that
+delicate instruments are disturbed by the invisible shine of the
+experimenter. Photographs can be taken with radium; it also makes
+the air around it a better conductor of electricity. And still more
+marvellous, besides being an agency for the destruction of life, as I
+shall show later, it can actually be used in other ways to prolong life,
+and the future may show many wonderful uses for it in the treatment of
+disease. Already, in Paris, several cases of lupus have been cured with
+it, and there is evidence that it will help to restore sight in certain
+cases of blindness. I held a tube of radium to my closed eye and was
+conscious of the sensation of light; the same sensation was present
+when the tube was held to my temple, thus showing that the radium has
+an effect on the optic nerve. A little blind girl in New York, who
+had never had the sensation of light, began to see a little after
+one treatment with radium, and experiments are still going on, but
+cautiously, for fear that injuries may result.
+
+We now come to the fascinating story of the discovery and manufacture
+of radium. It has long been known that certain substances are
+phosphorescent; that is, under the proper conditions they glow without
+apparent heat. Everybody has seen "fox-fire" in the damp and decaying
+woods--a cold light which scientists have never been able to explain.
+
+To M. Henri Becquerel of the French Institute is generally given the
+credit for having begun the real study of radio-activity, although,
+as in every great discovery and invention, many other scientists and
+practical electricians had paved the way by their investigations.
+In 1896 M. Becquerel was conducting some experiments with various
+phosphorescent substances. He exposed some salts of the metal uranium
+to the sunlight until they became phosphorescent, and then tried their
+effect upon a photographic plate.
+
+It rained, and he put the plate away in a drawer for several days.
+When he developed it he was surprised to find on it a better image than
+sunlight would have made. And thus, by a sort of accident, he led up to
+the discovery of the Becquerel rays, so called.
+
+Uranium is extracted from a metal or ore called uranite by mineralogists,
+and popularly known as pitch-blende. Every young college student who
+has studied geology or chemistry has heard of pitch-blende.
+
+Two years after Becquerel's discovery of the radio-activity of uranium
+Professor Pierre Curie and Madame Curie, of Paris, made the discovery
+that some of the samples of pitch-blende which they had were much more
+powerful than any uranium that they had used.
+
+Was there, then, something more powerful than uranium within the
+pitch-blende? They began to "boil down" the waste rock left at the
+uranium mines, and found a strange new element, related to uranium
+but different, to which Madame Curie gave the name polonium, after her
+native land, Poland.
+
+[Illustration: Dr. Danlos Treating a Lupus Patient with Radium at the
+St. Louis Hospital, Paris.]
+
+Then they did some more boiling down, and succeeded in isolating
+an entirely new substance, and the most radio-active yet
+discovered--radium. Shortly after that Debierne discovered still another
+radio-active substance, to which he gave the name actinium.
+
+Thus three new elements were added to the list of the world's
+substances, and the most wonderful of these is radium. In a day, almost,
+the Curies became famous in the scientific world, and many of the
+greatest investigators in the world--Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes,
+and others--took up the study of radium.
+
+Very rarely have a man and woman worked together so perfectly as
+Professor Curie and his wife. Madame Curie was a Polish girl; she
+came to Paris to study, very poor, but possessed of rare talents. Her
+marriage with M. Curie was such a union as _must_ have produced some
+fine result. Without his scientific learning and vivid imagination it
+is doubtful if radium would ever have been dreamed of, and without her
+determination and patience against detail it is likely the dream would
+never have been realised.
+
+One of the chief problems to be met in finding the secrets of radium is
+the great difficulty and expense, in the first place, of getting any of
+the substance to experiment with. The Curies have had to manufacture
+all they themselves have used. In the first place, pitch-blende, which
+closely resembles iron in appearance, is not plentiful. The best of it
+comes from Bohemia, but it is also found in Saxony, Norway, Egypt, and
+in North Carolina, Colorado, and Utah. It appears in small lumps in
+veins of gold, silver, and mica, and sometimes in granite.
+
+Comparatively speaking, it is easy to get uranium from pitch-blende.
+But to get the radium from the residues is a much more complicated task.
+According to Professor Curie, it is necessary to refine about 5,000 tons
+of uranium residues to get a kilogramme--or about 2.2 pounds--of radium.
+
+It is hardly surprising, therefore, considering the enormous amount of
+raw material which must be handled, that the cost of this rare mineral
+should be high. It has been said that there is more gold in sea-water
+than radium in the earth. Professor Curie has an extensive plant at
+Ivry, near Paris, where the refuse dust brought from the uranium mines
+is treated by complicated processes, which finally yield a powder or
+crystals containing a small amount of radium. These crystals are sent
+to the laboratory of the Curies where the final delicate processes of
+extraction are carried on by the professor and his wife.
+
+And, after all, pure metallic radium is not obtained. It could be
+obtained, and Professor Curie has actually made a very small quantity of
+it, but it is unstable, immediately oxidised by the air and destroyed.
+So it is manufactured only in the form of chloride and bromide of
+radium. The "strength" of radium is measured in radio-activity, in the
+power of emitting rays. So we hear of radium of an intensity of 45 or
+7,000 or 300,000. This method of measurement is thus explained. Taking
+the radio-activity of uranium as the unit, as one, then a certain
+specimen of radium is said to be 45 or 7,000 or 300,000 times as
+intense, to have so many times as much radio-activity. The radium of
+highest intensity in this country now is 300,000, but the Curies have
+succeeded in producing a specimen of 1,500,000 intensity. This is so
+powerful and dangerous that it must be kept wrapped in lead, which has
+the effect of stopping some of the rays. Rock-salt is another substance
+which hinders the passage of the rays.
+
+English scientists have devised a curious little instrument, called the
+spinthariscope, which allows one actually to _see_ the emanations
+from radium and to realise as never before the extraordinary atomic
+disintegration that is going on ceaselessly in this strange metal. The
+spinthariscope is a small microscope that allows one to look at a tiny
+fragment of radium supported on a little wire over a screen.
+
+[Illustration: Radium as a Test for Real Diamonds.
+
+_At the approach of Radium pure gems are thrown into great brilliancy,
+while imitations remain dull._]
+
+The experiment must be made in a darkened room after the eye has
+gradually acquired its greatest sensitiveness to light. Looking intently
+through the lenses the screen appears like a heaven of flashing meteors
+among which stars shine forth suddenly and die away. Near the central
+radium speck the fire-shower is most brilliant, while toward the rim of
+the circle it grows fainter. And this goes on continuously as the metal
+throws off its rays like myriads of bursting, blazing stars. M. Curie
+has spoken of this vision, really contained within the area of a
+two-cent piece, as one of the most beautiful and impressive he ever
+witnessed; it was as if he had been allowed to assist at the birth of a
+universe. Radium emits radiations, that is, it shoots off particles of
+itself into space at such terrific speed that 92,500 miles a second is
+considered a small estimate. Yet, in spite of the fact that this
+waste goes on eternally and at such enormous velocity, the actual loss
+sustained by the radium is, as I have said, infinitesimal.
+
+We now come to one of the most interesting phases of the whole subject
+of radium--that is, the influence which its strange rays have upon
+animal life. Mr. Cleveland Moffett, to whom I am indebted for the facts
+of the following experiments, recently visited M. Danysz, of the Pasteur
+Institute in Paris, who has made some wonderful investigations in this
+branch of science. M. Danysz has tried the effect of radium on mice,
+rabbits, guinea-pigs, and other animals, and on plants, and he found
+that if exposed long enough they all died, often first losing their fur
+and becoming blind.
+
+But the most startling experiment performed thus far at the Pasteur
+Institute is one undertaken by M. Danysz, February 3, 1903, when he
+placed three or four dozen little larvae that live in flour in a glass
+flask, where they were exposed for a few hours to the rays of radium.
+He placed a like number of larvae in a control-flask, where there was
+no radium, and he left enough flour in each flask for the larvae to live
+upon. After several weeks it was found that most of the larvae in the
+radium flask had been killed, but that a few of them had escaped the
+destructive action of the rays by crawling away to distant corners of
+the flask, where they were still living. But _they were living as larvae,
+not as moths_, whereas in the natural course they should have become
+moths long before, as was seen by the control-flask, where the larvae
+had all changed into moths, and these had hatched their eggs into other
+larvae, and these had produced other moths. All of which made it clear
+that the radium rays had arrested the development of these little worms.
+
+More weeks passed, and still three or four of the larvae lived, and four
+full months after the original exposure one larva was still alive and
+wriggling, while its contemporary larvae in the other jar had long since
+passed away as aged moths, leaving generations of moths' eggs and larvae
+to witness this miracle, for here was a larva, venerable among his kind,
+that had actually lived through _three times the span of life accorded
+to his fellows_ and that still showed no sign of changing into a
+moth. It was very much as if a young man of twenty-one should keep the
+appearance of twenty-one for two hundred and fifty years!
+
+Not less remarkable than these are some recent experiments made by M.
+Bohn at the biological laboratories of the Sorbonne, his conclusions
+being that radium may so far modify various lower forms of life as to
+actually produce new species of "monsters," abnormal deviations from
+the original type of the species. Furthermore, he has been able to
+accomplish with radium what Professor Loeb did with salt solutions--that
+is, to cause the growth of unfecundated eggs of the sea-urchin, and
+to advance these through several stages of their development. In other
+words, he has used radium _to create life_ where there would have been
+no life but for this strange stimulation.
+
+So much for the wonders of radium. We seem, indeed, to be on the
+border-land of still more wonderful discoveries. Perhaps these radium
+investigations will lead to some explanation of that great question in
+science, "What is electricity?"--and that, who can say, may solve that
+profounder problem, "What is life?"
+
+At present there are two theories as to the source of energy in radium,
+thus stated by Professor Curie:
+
+"Where is the source of this energy? Both Madame Curie and myself are
+unable to go beyond hypotheses; one of these consists in supposing the
+atoms of radium evolving and transforming into another simple body, and,
+despite the extreme slowness of that transformation, which cannot
+be located during a year, the amount of energy involved in that
+transformation is tremendous.
+
+[Illustration: M. and Mme. Curie Finishing the Preparation of some
+Radium.]
+
+"The second hypothesis consists in the supposition that radium is
+capable of capturing and utilising some radiations of unknown nature
+which cross space without our knowledge."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FLYING MACHINES[A]
+
+_Santos-Dumont's Steerable Balloons_
+
+
+Among the inventors engaged in building flying machines the most famous,
+perhaps, is M. Santos-Dumont, whose thrilling adventures and noteworthy
+successes have given him world-wide fame. He was the first, indeed, to
+build a balloon that was really steerable with any degree of certainty,
+winning a prize of $20,000 for driving his great air-ship over a certain
+specified course in Paris and bringing it back to the starting-point
+within a specified time. Another experimenter who has had some degree of
+success is the German, Count Zeppelin, who guided a huge air-ship over
+Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1901.
+
+[A] In the first "Boys' Book of Inventions," the author devoted a
+chapter entitled "Through the Air" to the interesting work of the
+inventors of flying machines who have experimented with aeroplanes; that
+is, soaring machines modelled after the wings of a bird. The work of
+Professor S. P. Langley with his marvellous Aerodrome, and that of Hiram
+Maxim and of Otto Lilienthal, were given especial consideration. In the
+present chapter attention is directed to an entirely different class of
+flying machines--the steerable balloons.
+
+Carl E. Myers, an American, an expert balloonist, has also built
+balloons of small size which he has been able to steer. And mention must
+also be made of M. Severo, the Frenchman, whose ship, Pax, exploded
+in the air on its first trip, dropping the inventor and his assistant
+hundreds of feet downward to their death on the pavements of Paris.
+
+It will be most interesting and instructive to consider especially the
+work of Santos-Dumont, for he has been not only the most successful in
+making actual flights of any of the inventors who have taken up this
+great problem of air navigation, but his adventures have been most
+romantic and thrilling. In five years' time he has built and operated no
+fewer than ten great air-ships which he has sailed in various parts of
+Europe and in America. He has even crowned his experiences with more
+than one shipwreck in the air, an adventure by the side of which an
+ordinary sea-wreck is tame indeed, and he has escaped with his life as a
+result not only of good fortune but of real daring and presence of mind
+in the face of danger.
+
+[Illustration: M. Alberto Santos-Dumont.]
+
+For an inventor, M. Santos-Dumont is a rather extraordinary character.
+The typical inventor--at least so we think--is poor, starts poor at
+least, and has a struggle to rise. M. Santos-Dumont has always had
+plenty of means. The inventor is always first a dreamer, we think. M.
+Santos-Dumont is first a thoroughly practical man, an engineer with
+a good knowledge of science, to which he adds the imagination of the
+inventor and the keen love and daring of the sportsman and adventurer,
+without which his experiments could never have been carried through.
+
+It would seem, indeed, that nature had especially equipped M.
+Santos-Dumont for his work in aerial navigation. Supposing an inventor,
+having all the mental equipment of Santos-Dumont, the ideas, the energy,
+the means--supposing such a man had weighed two hundred pounds! He would
+have had to build a very large ship to carry his own weight, and all
+his problems would have been more complex, more difficult. Nature made
+Santos-Dumont a very small, slim, slight man, weighing hardly more than
+one hundred pounds, but very active and muscular. The first time I ever
+saw him, in Crystal Palace, London, where he was setting up one of his
+air-ships in a huge gallery, I thought him at first glance to be some
+boy, a possible spectator, who was interested in flying machines. His
+face, bare and shaven, looked youthful; he wore a narrow-brimmed straw
+hat and was dressed in the height of fashion. One would not have guessed
+him to be the inventor. A moment later he had his coat off and was
+showing his men how to put up the great fan-like rudder of the ship
+which loomed above us like some enormous Rugby football, and then one
+saw the power that was in him. Brazilian by nationality, he has a dark
+face, large dark eyes, an alertness of step and an energetic way
+of talking. His boyhood was spent on his father's extensive coffee
+plantation in Brazil; his later years mostly in Paris, though he has
+been a frequent visitor to England and America. He speaks Spanish,
+French, and English with equal fluency. Indeed, hearing his English
+one would say that he must certainly have had his training in an
+English-speaking country, though no one would mistake him in appearance
+for either English or American, for he is very much a Latin in face and
+form. One finds him most unpretentious, modest, speaking freely of his
+inventions, and yet never taking to himself any undue credit.
+
+[Illustration: Severo's Balloon, the "Pax," which, on its First Ascent
+at a Height of about 2,000 feet, Burst and Exploded, Sending to a
+Terrible Death both M. Severo and his Assistant.]
+
+Santos-Dumont is still a very young man to have accomplished so much.
+He was born in Brazil, July 20, 1873. From his earliest boyhood he was
+interested in kites and dreamed of being able to fly. He says:
+
+"I cannot say at what age I made my first kites; but I remember how
+my comrades used to tease me at our game of 'Pigeon flies'! All the
+children gather round a table, and the leader calls out: 'Pigeon flies!
+Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!' and so on; and at each call we were
+supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out:
+'Dog flies! Fox flies!' or some other like impossibility, to catch us.
+If any one should raise a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my
+playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of
+them called 'Man flies!' For at the word I would always lift my finger
+very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy
+to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was."
+
+Of course he read Jules Verne's stories and was carried away in
+imagination in that author's wonderful balloons and flying machines.
+He also devoured the history of aerial navigation which he found in the
+works of Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. He says, further:
+
+"At an early age I was taught the principles of mechanics by my father,
+an engineer of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris.
+From childhood I had a passion for making calculations and inventing;
+and from my tenth year I was accustomed to handle the powerful and heavy
+machines of our factories, and drive the compound locomotives on our
+plantation railroads. I was constantly taken up with the desire to
+lighten their parts; and I dreamed of air-ships and flying machines.
+The fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century those who occupied
+themselves with aerial navigation passed for crazy, rather pleased than
+offended me. It is incredible and yet true that in the kingdom of the
+wise, to which all of us flatter ourselves we belong, it is always the
+fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfiere was
+thought a fool until the day when he stopped his insulters' mouths by
+launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens."
+
+[Illustration: The Trial of Count Zeppelin's Air-Ship, July 2, 1900.]
+
+Upon going to Paris Santos-Dumont at once took up the work of making
+himself familiar with ballooning in all of its practical aspects. He saw
+that if he were ever to build an air-ship he must first know all there
+was to know about balloon-making, methods of filling with gas, lifting
+capacities, the action of balloons in the air, and all the thousand and
+one things connected with ordinary ballooning. And Paris has always been
+the centre of this information. He regards this preliminary knowledge as
+indispensable to every air-ship builder. He says:
+
+"Before launching out into the construction of air-ships I took pains to
+make myself familiar with the handling of spherical balloons. I did not
+hasten, but took plenty of time. In all, I made something like thirty
+ascensions; at first as a passenger, then as my own captain, and at
+last alone. Some of these spherical balloons I rented, others I had
+constructed for me. Of such I have owned at least six or eight. And I
+do not believe that without such previous study and experience a man is
+capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is
+so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is
+necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the
+atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the
+wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the
+difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of
+starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the
+trip. To go up in an ordinary balloon, at least a dozen times, seems
+to me an indispensable preliminary for acquiring an exact notion of the
+requisites for the construction and handling of an elongated balloon,
+furnished with its motor and propeller."
+
+[Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont at Nineteen.]
+
+[Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont's First Balloon (Spherical).]
+
+His first ascent in a balloon was made in 1897, when he was 24 years
+old, as a passenger with M. Machuron, who had then just returned from
+the Arctic regions, where he had helped to start Andree on his ill-fated
+voyage in search of the North Pole. He found the sensations delightful,
+being so pleased with the experience that he subsequently secured a
+small balloon of his own, in which he made several ascents. He also
+climbed the Alps in order to learn more of the condition of the air at
+high altitudes.
+
+In 1898 he set about experimentation in the building of a real air-ship
+or steerable balloon. Efforts had been made in this direction by former
+inventors, but with small success. As far back as 1852 Henri Gifford
+made the first of the familiar cigar-shaped balloons, trying steam as a
+motive power, but he soon found that an engine strong enough to propel
+the balloon was too heavy for the balloon to lift. That simple failure
+discouraged experimenters for a long time. In 1877 Dupuy de Lome tried
+steering a balloon by man power, but the man was not strong enough. In
+1883 another Frenchman, Tissandier, experimented with electricity, but,
+as his batteries had to be light enough to be taken up in the balloon,
+they proved effective only in helping to weigh it down to earth again.
+Krebs and Renard, military aeronauts, succeeded better with electricity,
+for they could make a small circuit with their air-ship, provided only
+that no air was stirring. Enthusiasts cried out that the problem was
+solved, but the two aeronauts themselves, as good mathematicians,
+figured out that they would have to have a motor eight times more
+powerful than their own, and that without any increase in weight, which
+was an impossibility at that time.
+
+[Illustration: M. Santos-Dumont's Workshop.]
+
+Santos-Dumont saw plainly that none of these methods would work. What
+then was he to try? Why, simple enough: the petroleum motor from his
+automobile. The recent development of the motor-vehicle had produced a
+light, strong, durable motor. It was Santos-Dumont's first great claim
+to originality that he should have applied this to the balloon. He
+discovered no new principles, invented nothing that could be patented.
+The cigar-shaped balloon had long been used, so had the petroleum motor,
+but he put them together. And he did very much more than that. The very
+essence of success in aerial navigation is to secure _light weight
+with great strength and power_. The inventor who can build the lightest
+machine, which is also strong, will, other things being equal, have the
+greatest success. It is to Santos-Dumont's great credit that he was able
+to build a very light motor, that also gave a good horse-power, and a
+light balloon that was also very strong. The one great source of danger
+in using the petroleum motor in connection with a balloon is that the
+sparking of the motor will set fire to the inflammable hydrogen gas with
+which the balloon is filled, causing a terrible explosion. This, indeed,
+is what is thought to have caused the mortal mishap to Severo and his
+balloon. But Santos-Dumont was able to surmount this and many other
+difficulties of construction.
+
+The inventor finally succeeded in making a motor--remarkable at that
+time--which, weighing only 66 pounds, would produce 3-1/2 horse-power.
+It is easy to understand why a petroleum motor is such a power-producer
+for its size. The greater part of its fuel is in the air itself, and the
+air is all around the balloon, ready for use. The aeronaut does not have
+to take it up with him. That proportion of his fuel that he must carry,
+the petroleum, is comparatively insignificant in weight. A few figures
+will prove interesting. Two and one-half gallons of gasoline, weighing
+15 pounds, will drive a 2-1/2 horse-power autocycle 94 miles in four
+hours. Santos-Dumont's balloon needs less than 5-1/3 gallons for a
+three hours' trip. This weighs but 37 pounds, and occupies a small
+cigar-shaped brass reservoir near the motor of his machine. An electric
+battery of the same horse-power would weigh 2,695 pounds.
+
+[Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 1."]
+
+Santos-Dumont tested his new motor very thoroughly by attaching it to a
+tricycle with which he made some record runs in and around Paris. Having
+satisfied himself that it was thoroughly serviceable he set about making
+the balloon, cigar-shaped, 82 feet long.
+
+"To keep within the limit of weight," he says, "I first gave up the
+network and the outer cover of the ordinary balloon. I considered this
+sort of second envelope, holding the first within it, to be superfluous,
+and even harmful, if not dangerous. To the envelope proper I attached
+the suspension-cords of my basket directly, by means of small wooden
+rods introduced into horizontal hems, sewed on both sides along the
+stuff of the balloon for a great part of its length. Again, in order not
+to pass the 66 pounds weight, including varnish, I was obliged to choose
+Japan silk that was extremely fine, but fairly resisting. Up to this
+time no one had ever thought of using this for balloons intended to
+carry up an aeronaut, but only for little balloons carrying light
+registering apparatus for investigations in the upper air.
+
+[Illustration: Basket of "Santos-Dumont No. 1."
+
+_Showing propeller and motor._]
+
+"I gave the order for this balloon to M. Lachambre. At first he refused
+to take it, saying that such a thing had never been made, and that he
+would not be responsible for my rashness. I answered that I would not
+change a thing in the plan of the balloon, if I had to sew it with
+my own hands. At last he agreed to sew and varnish the balloon as I
+desired."
+
+After repeated trials of his motor in the basket--which he suspended
+in his workshop--and the making of a rudder of silk he was able, in
+September, 1898, to attempt real flying. But, after rising successfully
+in the air, the weight of the machinery and his own body swung
+beneath the fragile balloon was so great that while descending from a
+considerable height the balloon suddenly sagged down in the middle and
+began to shut up like a portfolio.
+
+"At that moment," he said, "I thought that all was over, the more so as
+the descent, which had already become rapid, could no longer be checked
+by any of the usual means on board, where nothing worked.
+
+[Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 1."
+
+_Showing how it began to fold up in the middle._]
+
+"The descent became a rapid fall. Luckily, I was falling in the
+neighborhood of the soft, grassy _pelouse_ of the Longchamps
+race-course, where some big boys were flying kites. A sudden idea struck
+me. I cried to them to grasp the end of my 100-meter guide-rope, which
+had already touched the ground, and to run as fast as they could with it
+_against the wind_! They were bright young fellows, and they grasped the
+idea and the guide-rope at the same lucky instant. The effect of this
+help _in extremis_ was immediate, and such as I had expected. By this
+manoeuvre we lessened the velocity of the fall, and so avoided what
+would otherwise have been a terribly rough shaking up, to say the least.
+I was saved for the first time. Thanking the brave boys, who continued
+to aid me to pack everything into the air-ship's basket, I finally
+secured a cab and took the relic back to Paris."
+
+His life was thus saved almost miraculously; but the accident did not
+deter him from going forward immediately with other experiments. The
+next year, 1899, he built a new air-ship called Santos-Dumont II., and
+made an ascension with it, but it dissatisfied him and he at once began
+with Santos-Dumont III., with which he made the first trip around the
+Eiffel Tower.
+
+He now made ready to compete for the Deutsch prize of $20,000. The
+winning of this prize demanded that the trip from Saint-Cloud to the
+Eiffel Tower, around it and back to the starting place, a distance of
+some eight miles, should be made in half an hour. For this purpose he
+finished a much larger air-ship, Santos-Dumont V., in 1901. After a
+trial, made on July 12, which was attended by several accidents, the
+inventor decided to make a start early on the following morning, July
+13. As early as four o'clock he was ready, and a crowd had begun to
+gather in the park.
+
+At 6.20 the great sliding doors of the balloon-house were pushed open,
+and the massive inflated occupant was towed out into the open space of
+the park. The big pointed nose of the balloon and its fish-like belly
+resembled a shark gliding with lazy craft from a shadow into light
+waters. In the basket of the car stood the coatless aeronaut, who
+laughed and chatted like a boy with the crowd around him.
+
+[Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 5" Rounding Eiffel Tower, July 13,
+1901.]
+
+From the very first the conditions did not show themselves favourable
+for the attempt. The wind was blowing at the rate of six or seven yards
+a second. The change of temperature from the balloon-house to the cool
+morning air had somewhat condensed the hydrogen gas of the balloon, so
+that one end flapped about in a flabby manner. Air was pumped into the
+air reservoir, inside the balloon, but still the desired rigidity was
+not attained. But, more discouraging yet, when the motor was started,
+its continuous explosions gave to the practised ear signs of mechanical
+discord.
+
+Nevertheless, Santos-Dumont, with his sleeves rolled up, fixed himself
+in his basket. His eye took a careful survey of the entire air-ship lest
+some preliminary had been overlooked. He counted the ballast bags under
+his feet in the basket, he looked to the canvas pocket of loose sand at
+either hand, then saw to his guide-rope.
+
+There is a very great deal to look after in managing such a ship, and it
+requires a calm head and a steady hand to do it.
+
+"Near the saddle on which I sat," he writes, "were the ends of the
+cords and other means for controlling the different parts of the
+mechanism--the electric sparking of the motor, the regulation of the
+carburetter, the handling of the rudder, ballast, and the shifting
+weights (consisting of the guide-rope and bags of sand), the managing
+of the balloon's valves, and the emergency rope for tearing open
+the balloon. It may easily be gathered from this enumeration that an
+air-ship, even as simple as my own, is a very complex organism; and the
+work incumbent on the aeronaut is no sinecure."
+
+Several friends shook his hand, among them Mr. Deutsch. The place was
+very still as the man holding the guide-rope awaited the signal to let
+go. Then the little man in the basket above them raised his hands and
+shouted.
+
+[Illustration: The Interior of the Aerodrome.
+
+_Showing its construction, the inflated balloon, and the pennant with
+its mystic letters._]
+
+At first it did not look like a race against time. The balloon rose
+sluggishly, and Santos-Dumont had to dump out bag after bag of sand,
+till finally the guide-rope was clear of the trees. All this gave him
+no opportunity to think of his direction, and he was drifting toward
+Versailles; but while yet over the Seine he pulled his rudder ropes
+taut. Then slowly, gracefully, the enormous spindle veered round and
+pointed its nose toward the Eiffel Tower. The fans spun energetically,
+and the air-ship settled down to business-like travelling. It marked a
+straight, decided line for its goal, then followed the chosen route with
+a considerable speed. Soon the chug-chugging of the motor could be heard
+no longer by the spectators, and the balloon and car grew smaller and
+smaller in its halo of light smoke. Those in the park saw only the screw
+and the rear of the balloon, like the stern of a steamer in dry dock.
+Before long only a dot remained against the sky. Gradually he came
+nearer again, almost returning to the park, but the wind drove him
+back across the river Seine. Suddenly the motor stopped, and the whole
+air-ship was seen to fall heavily toward the earth. The crowd raced away
+expecting to find Santos-Dumont dead and his air-ship a wreck. But
+they found him on his feet, with his hands in his pockets, reflectively
+looking up at his air-ship among the top branches of some chestnut trees
+in the grounds of Baron Edmund de Rothschild, Boulevard de Boulogne.
+
+"This," he says, "was near the _hotel_ of Princesse Ysabel, Comtesse
+d'Eu, who sent up to me in my tree a champagne lunch, with an invitation
+to come and tell her the story of my trip.
+
+"When my story was over, she said to me:
+
+"'Your evolutions in the air made me think of the flight of our great
+birds of Brazil. I hope that you will succeed for the glory of our
+common country.'"
+
+And an examination showed that the air-ship was practically uninjured.
+
+So he escaped death a second time. Less than a month later he had a
+still more terrible mishap, best related in his own words. He says:
+
+"And now I come to a terrible day--August 8, 1901. At 6.30 A.M., I
+started for the Eiffel Tower again, in the presence of the committee,
+duly convoked. I turned the goal at the end of nine minutes, and took my
+way back to Saint-Cloud; but my balloon was losing hydrogen through the
+automatic valves, the spring of which had been accidentally weakened;
+and it shrank visibly. All at once, while over the fortifications
+of Paris, near La Muette, the screw-propeller touched and cut the
+suspension-cords, which were sagging behind. I was obliged to stop the
+motor instantly; and at once I saw my air-ship drift straight back to
+the Eiffel Tower. I had no means of avoiding the terrible danger,
+except to wreck myself on the roofs of the Trocadero quarter. Without
+hesitation I opened the manoeuvre-valve, and sent my balloon downward.
+
+[Illustration: The Fall into the Courtyard of the Trocadero Hotel.
+
+"_Santos-Dumont No. 5._"]
+
+"At 32 metres (106 feet) above the ground, and with the noise of
+an explosion, it struck the roof of the Trocadero Hotels. The
+balloon-envelope was torn to rags, and fell into the courtyard of the
+hotels, while I remained hanging 15 metres (50 feet) above the ground in
+my wicker basket, which had been turned almost over, but was supported
+by the keel. The keel of the Santos-Dumont V. saved my life that day.
+
+"After some minutes a rope was thrown down to me; and, helping myself
+with feet and hands up the wall (the few narrow windows of which were
+grated like those of a prison), I was hauled up to the roof. The firemen
+from Passy had watched the fall of the air-ship from their observatory.
+They, too, hastened to the rescue. It was impossible to disengage the
+remains of the balloon-envelope and suspension apparatus except in
+strips and pieces.
+
+"My escape was narrow; but it was not from the particular danger always
+present to my mind during this period of my experiments. The position
+of the Eiffel Tower as a central landmark, visible to everybody from
+considerable distances, makes it a unique winning-post for an aerial
+race. Yet this does not alter the other fact that the feat of rounding
+the Eiffel Tower possesses a unique element of danger. What I feared
+when on the ground--I had no time to fear while in the air--was that, by
+some mistake of steering, or by the influence of some side-wind, I might
+be dashed against the Tower. The impact would burst my balloon, and I
+should fall to the ground like a stone. Though I never seek to fly at a
+great height--on the contrary, I hold the record for low altitude in a
+free balloon--in passing over Paris I must necessarily move above all
+its chimney-pots and steeples. The Eiffel Tower was my one danger--yet
+it was my winning-post!
+
+[Illustration: "Santos-Dumont No. 6"--The Prize Winner.]
+
+"But in the air I have no time to fear. I have always kept a cool head.
+Alone in the air-ship, I am always very busy. I must not let go the
+rudder for a single instant. Then there is the strong joy of commanding.
+What does it feel like to sail in a dirigible balloon? While the wind
+was carrying me back to the Eiffel Tower I realised that I might be
+killed; but I did not feel fear. I was in no personal inconvenience. I
+knew my resources. I was excessively occupied. I have felt fear while
+in the air, yes, miserable fear joined to pain; but never in a dirigible
+balloon."
+
+Even this did not daunt him. That very night he ordered a new air-ship,
+Santos-Dumont VI., and it was ready in twenty-two days. The new balloon
+had the shape of an elongated ellipsoid, 32 metres (105 feet) on its
+great axis, and 6 metres (20 feet) on its short axis, terminated fore
+and aft by cones. Its capacity was 605 cubic metres (21,362 cubic feet),
+giving it a lifting power of 620 kilos (1,362 pounds). Of this, 1,100
+pounds were represented by keel, machinery, and his own weight, leaving
+a net lifting-power of 120 kilos (261 pounds).
+
+On October 19, 1901, he made another attempt to round the Eiffel Tower,
+and was at last successful in winning the $20,000 prize. Following this
+great feat, Santos-Dumont continued his experiments at Monte Carlo,
+where he was wrecked over the Mediterranean Sea and escaped only by
+presence of mind, and he is still continuing his work.
+
+The future of the dirigible balloon is open to debate. Santos-Dumont
+himself does not think there is much likelihood that it will ever have
+much commercial use. A balloon to carry many passengers would have to be
+so enormous that it could not support the machinery necessary to propel
+it, especially against a strong wind. But he does believe that the
+steerable balloon will have great importance in war time. He says:
+
+"I have often been asked what present utility is to be expected of the
+dirigible balloon when it becomes thoroughly practicable. I have never
+pretended that its commercial possibilities could go far. The question
+of the air-ship in war, however, is otherwise. Mr. Hiram Maxim has
+declared that a flying machine in South Africa would have been worth
+four times its weight in gold. Henri Rochefort has said: 'The day when
+it is established that a man can direct an air-ship in a given direction
+and cause it to manoeuvre as he wills ... there will remain little for
+the nations to do but to lay down their arms.'"
+
+[Illustration: Air-Ship Pointing almost Vertically Upward.]
+
+[Illustration: Falling to the Sea.]
+
+[Illustration: Just Before the Air-Ship Lost all its Gas.]
+
+[Illustration: Losing its Gas and Sinking.]
+
+[Illustration: The Balloon Falling to the Waves.]
+
+[Illustration: Boats Around the Ruined Air-Ship.]
+
+But such experiments as Santos-Dumont's, whether they result immediately
+in producing an air-ship of practical utility in commerce or not,
+have great value for the facts which they are establishing as to the
+possibility of balloons, of motors, of light construction, of air
+currents, and moreover they add to the world's sum total of experiences
+a fine, clean sport in which men of daring and scientific knowledge show
+what men can do.
+
+[Illustration: Manoeuvering Above the Bay at Monte Carlo.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE EARTHQUAKE MEASURER
+
+_Professor John Milne's Seismograph_
+
+
+Of all strange inventions, the earthquake recorder is certainly one of
+the most remarkable and interesting. A terrible earthquake shakes down
+cities in Japan, and sixteen minutes later the professor of earthquakes,
+in his quiet little observatory in England, measures its extent--almost,
+indeed, takes a picture of it. Actual waves, not unlike the waves of the
+sea blown up by a hurricane, have travelled through or around half the
+earth in this brief time; vast mountain ranges, cities, plains, and
+oceans have been heaved to their crests and then allowed to sink back
+again into their former positions. And some of these earthquake waves
+which sweep over the solid earth are three feet high, so that the whole
+of New York, perhaps, rises bodily to that height and then slides over
+the crest like a skiff on an ocean swell.
+
+[Illustration: Professor John Milne.
+
+_From a photograph by S. Suzuki, Kudanzaka, Tokio._]
+
+At first glance this seems almost too strange and wonderful to believe,
+and yet this is only the beginning of the wonders which the earthquake
+camera--or the seismograph (earthquake writer, as the scientists call
+it)--has been disclosing.
+
+[Illustration: Professor Milne's Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as
+it Appears Enclosed in its Protecting Box.]
+
+[Illustration: The Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears
+with the Protecting Box Removed.]
+
+The earthquake professor who has worked such scientific magic is John
+Milne. He lives in a quaint old house in the little Isle of Wight, not
+far from Osborne Castle, where Queen Victoria made her home part of
+the year. Not long ago he was a resident of Japan and professor of
+seismology (the science of earthquakes) at the University of Tokio,
+where he made his first discoveries about earthquakes, and invented
+marvellously delicate machines for measuring and photographing them
+thousands of miles away. Professor Milne is an Englishman by birth,
+but, like many another of his countrymen, he has visited some of the
+strangest nooks and corners of the earth. He has looked for coal in
+Newfoundland; he has crossed the rugged hills of Iceland; he has been
+up and down the length of the United States; he has hunted wild pigs
+in Borneo; and he has been in India and China and a hundred other
+out-of-the-way places, to say nothing of measuring earthquakes in Japan.
+Professor Milne laid the foundation of his unusual career in a thorough
+education at King's College, London, and at the School of Mines. By
+fortunate chance, soon after his graduation, he met Cyrus Field, the
+famous American, to whom the world owes the beginnings of its present
+ocean cable system. He was then just twenty-one, young and raw, but
+plucky. He thought he was prepared for anything the world might
+bring him; but when Field asked him one Friday if he could sail for
+Newfoundland the next Tuesday, he was so taken with astonishment that
+he hesitated, whereupon Field leaned forward and looked at him in a way
+that Milne has never forgotten.
+
+"My young friend, I suppose you have read that the world was made in six
+days. Now, do you mean to tell me that, if this whole world was made in
+six days, you can't get together the few things you need in four?"
+
+[Illustration: Gifu, Japan, after the Earthquake of 1891.
+
+_This and the pictures following on pages 89, 101, 111, are from
+Japanese photographs reproduced in "The Great Earthquake in Japan,
+1891," by John Milne and W. K. Burton._]
+
+And Milne sailed the next Tuesday to begin his lifework among the rough
+hills of Newfoundland. Then came an offer from the Japanese Government,
+and he went to the land of earthquakes, little dreaming that he would
+one day be the greatest authority in the world on the subject of seismic
+disturbances. His first experiments--and they were made as a pastime
+rather than a serious undertaking--were curiously simple. He set up
+rows of pins in a certain way, so that in falling they would give some
+indication as to the wave movements in the earth. He also made pendulums
+made of strings with weights tied at the end, and from his discoveries
+made with these elementary instruments, he planned earthquake-proof
+houses, and showed the engineers of Japan how to build bridges which
+would not fall down when they were shaken. So highly was his work
+regarded that the Japanese made him an earthquake professor at Tokio and
+supplied him with the means for making more extended experiments. And
+presently we find him producing artificial earthquakes by the score.
+He buried dynamite deep in the ground and exploded it by means of an
+electric button. The miniature earthquake thus produced was carefully
+measured with curious instruments of Professor Milne's invention. At
+first one earthquake was enough at any one time, but as the experiments
+continued, Professor Milne sometimes had five or six earthquakes all
+quaking together; and once so interested did he become that he forgot
+all about the destructive nature of earthquakes, and ventured too near.
+A ton or more of earth came crashing down around him, half burying him
+and smashing his instruments flat. All this made the Japanese rub their
+eyes with astonishment, and by and by the Emperor heard of it. Of course
+he was deeply interested in earthquakes, because there was no telling
+when one might come along and shake down his palace over his head. So
+he sent for Professor Milne, and, after assuring himself that these
+experimental earthquakes really had no serious intentions, he commanded
+that one be produced on the spot. So Professor Milne laid out a number
+of toy towns and villages and hills in the palace yard with a tremendous
+toy earthquake underneath. The Emperor and his gayly dressed followers
+stood well off to one side, and when Professor Milne gave the word the
+Emperor solemnly pressed a button, and watched with the greatest delight
+the curious way in which the toy cities were quaked to earth. And after
+that, this surprising Englishman, who could make earthquakes as easily
+as a Japanese makes a lacquered basket, was held in high esteem in
+Japan, and for more than twenty years he studied earthquakes and
+invented machines for recording them. Then he returned to his home in
+England, where he is at work establishing earthquake stations in various
+parts of the world, by means of which he expects to reduce earthquake
+measurement to an exact science, an accomplishment which will have the
+greatest practical value to the commercial interests of the world, as I
+shall soon explain.
+
+[Illustration: The Work of the Great Earthquake of 1891 in Neo Valley,
+Japan.]
+
+But first for a glimpse at the curious earthquake measurer itself. To
+begin with, there are two kinds of instruments--one to measure near-by
+disturbances, and the second to measure waves which come from great
+distances. The former instrument was used by Professor Milne in Japan,
+where earthquakes are frequent; the latter is used in England. The
+technical name for the machine which measures distant disturbances
+is the horizontal pendulum seismograph, and, like most wonderful
+inventions, it is exceedingly simple in principle, yet doing its work
+with marvellous delicacy and accuracy.
+
+In brief, the central feature of the seismograph is a very finely poised
+pendulum, which is jarred by the slightest disturbance of the earth, the
+end of it being so arranged that a photograph is taken of every quiver.
+Set a pendulum clock on the dining-table, jar the table, and the
+pendulum will swing, indicating exactly with what force you have
+disturbed the table. In exactly the same way the delicate pendulum of
+the earthquake measurer indicates the shaking of the earth.
+
+[Illustration: Diagram Showing Vertical and Horizontal Sections of the
+More Sensitive of Professor Milne's Two Pendulums, or Seismographs.]
+
+The accompanying diagram gives a very clear idea of the arrangement of
+the apparatus. The "boom" is the pendulum. It is customary to think of a
+pendulum as hanging down like that of a clock, but this is a horizontal
+pendulum. Professor Milne has built a very solid masonry column,
+reaching deep into the earth, and so firmly placed that nothing but a
+tremor of the hard earth itself will disturb it. Upon this is perched
+a firm metal stand, from the top of which the boom or pendulum, about
+thirty inches long, is swung by means of a "tie" or stay. The end of the
+boom rests against a fine, sharp pivot of steel (as shown in the little
+diagram to the right), so that it will swing back and forth without
+the least friction. The sensitive end of the pendulum, where all the
+quakings and quiverings are shown most distinctly, rests exactly over
+a narrow roll of photographic film, which is constantly turned by
+clockwork, and above this, on an outside stand, there is a little lamp
+which is kept burning night and day, year in and year out. The light
+from this lamp is reflected downward by means of a mirror through a
+little slit in the metal case which covers the entire apparatus. Of
+course this light affects the sensitive film, and takes a continuous
+photograph of the end of the boom. If the boom remains perfectly still,
+the picture will be merely a straight line, as shown at the extreme
+right and left ends of the earthquake picture on this page. But if an
+earthquake wave comes along and sets the boom to quivering, the picture
+becomes at once blurred and full of little loops and indentations,
+slight at first, but becoming more violent as the greater waves arrive,
+and then gradually subsiding. In the picture of the Borneo earthquake of
+September 20, 1897, taken by Professor Milne in his English laboratory,
+it will be seen that the quakings were so severe at the height of the
+disturbance that nothing is left in the photograph but a blur. On the
+edge of the picture can be seen the markings of the hours, 7.30, 8.30,
+and 9.30. Usually this time is marked automatically on the film by means
+of the long hand of a watch which crosses the slit beneath the mirror
+(as shown in the lower diagram with figure 3). The Borneo earthquake
+waves lasted in England, as will be seen, two hours fifty-six minutes
+and fifteen seconds, with about forty minutes of what are known
+as preliminary tremors. Professor Milne removes the film from his
+seismograph once a week--a strip about twenty-six feet long--develops
+it, and studies the photographs for earthquake signs.
+
+[Illustration: Seismogram of a Borneo Earthquake that Occurred
+September 20, 1897.]
+
+Besides this very sensitive photographic seismograph Professor Milne has
+a simpler machine, not covered up and without lamp or mirror. In this
+instrument a fine silver needle at the end of the boom makes a steady
+mark on a band of smoked paper, which is kept turning under it by means
+of clockwork. A glance at this smoked-paper record will tell instantly
+at any time of day or night whether the earth is behaving itself. If the
+white line on the dark paper shows disturbances, Professor Milne at once
+examines his more sensitive photographic record for the details.
+
+It is difficult to realise how very sensitive these earthquake pendulums
+really are. They will indicate the very minutest changes in the earth's
+level--as slight as one inch in ten miles. A pair of these pendulums
+placed on two buildings at opposite sides of a city street would show
+that the buildings literally lean toward each other during the heavy
+traffic period of the day, dragged over from their level by the load of
+vehicles and people pressing down upon the pavement between them. The
+earth is so elastic that a comparatively small impetus will set it
+vibrating. Why, even two hills tip together when there is a heavy
+load of moisture in a valley between them. And then when the moisture
+evaporates in a hot sun they tip away from each other. These pendulums
+show that.
+
+Nor are these the most extraordinary things which the pendulums will do.
+G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, argues that the
+whole region of the great lakes is being slowly tipped to the southwest,
+so that some day Chicago will sink and the water outlet of the great
+fresh-water seas will be up the Chicago River toward the Mississippi,
+instead of down the St. Lawrence. Of course this movement is as slow
+as time itself--thousands of years must elapse before it is hardly
+appreciable; and yet Professor Milne's instruments will show the
+changing balance--a marvel that is almost beyond belief. Strangely
+enough, sensitive as this special instrument is to distant disturbances,
+it does not swerve nor quiver for near-by shocks. Thus, the blasting of
+powder, the heavy rumbling of wagons, the firing of artillery has little
+or no effect in producing a movement of the boom. The vibrations are too
+short; it requires the long, heavy swells of the earth to make a record.
+
+Professor Milne tells some odd stories of his early experiences with the
+earthquake measurer. At one time his films showed evidences of the most
+horrible earthquakes, and he was afraid for the moment that all
+Japan had been shaken to pieces and possibly engulfed by the sea. But
+investigation showed that a little grey spider had been up to pranks in
+the box. The spider wasn't particularly interested in earthquakes, but
+he took the greatest pleasure in the swinging of the boom, and soon
+began to join in the game himself. He would catch the end of the boom
+with his feelers and tug it over to one side as far as ever he could.
+Then he would anchor himself there and hold on like grim death until the
+boom slipped away. Then he would run after it, and tug it over to the
+other side, and hold it there until his strength failed again. And so he
+would keep on for an hour or two until quite exhausted, enjoying the
+fun immensely, and never dreaming that he was manufacturing wonderful
+seismograms to upset the scientific world, since they seemed to indicate
+shocking earthquake disasters in all directions.
+
+Mr. Cleveland Moffett, to whom I am indebted for much of the information
+contained in this chapter, tells how the reporters for the London papers
+rush off to see Professor Milne every time there is news of a great
+earthquake, and how he usually corrects their information. In June,
+1896, for instance, the little observatory was fairly besieged with
+these searchers for news.
+
+"This earthquake happened on the 17th," said they, "and the whole
+eastern coast of Japan was overwhelmed with tidal waves, and 30,000
+lives were lost."
+
+"That last is probable," answered Professor Milne, "but the earthquake
+happened on the 15th, not the 17th;" and then he gave them the exact
+hour and minute when the shocks began and ended.
+
+"But our cables put it on the 17th."
+
+"Your cables are mistaken."
+
+And, sure enough, later despatches came with information that the
+destructive earthquake had occurred on the 15th, within half a minute
+of the time Professor Milne had specified. There had been some error of
+transmission in the earlier newspaper despatches.
+
+Again, a few months later, the newspapers published cablegrams to the
+effect that there had been a severe earthquake at Kobe, with great
+injury to life and property.
+
+"That is not true," said Professor Milne. "There may have been a slight
+earthquake at Kobe, but nothing that need cause alarm."
+
+And the mail reports a few weeks later confirmed his reassuring
+statement, and showed that the previous sensational despatches had been
+grossly exaggerated.
+
+Professor Milne is also the man to whose words cable companies lend
+anxious ear, for what he says often means thousands of dollars to them.
+Early in January, 1898, it was officially reported that two West Indian
+cables had broken on December 31, 1897.
+
+"That is very unlikely," said Professor Milne; "but I have a seismogram
+showing that these cables may have broken at 11.30 A.M. on December 29,
+1897." And then he located the break at so many miles off the coast of
+Haiti.
+
+This sort of thing, which is constantly happening, would look very much
+like magic if Professor Milne had kept his secrets to himself; but he
+has given them freely to all the world.
+
+[Illustration: Effect of the Great Earthquake of 1891 on the Nagara Gawa
+Railway Bridge, Japan.]
+
+Professor Milne has learned from his experiments that the solid earth is
+full of movements, and tremors, and even tides, like the sea. We do
+not notice them, because they are so slow and because the crests of the
+waves are so far apart. Professor Milne likes to tell, fancifully, how
+the earth "breathes." He has found that nearly all earthquake waves,
+whether the disturbance is in Borneo or South America, reach his
+laboratory in sixteen minutes, and he thinks that the waves come through
+the earth instead of around it. If they came around, he says, there
+would be two records--one from waves coming the short way and one from
+waves coming the long way round. But there is never more than a single
+record, so he concludes that the waves quiver straight through the solid
+earth itself, and he believes that this fact will lead to some important
+discoveries about the centre of our globe. Professor Milne was once
+asked how, if earthquake waves from every part of the earth reached
+his observatory in the same number of minutes, he could tell where the
+earthquake really was.
+
+"I may say, in a general way," he replied, "that we know them by their
+signatures, just as you know the handwriting of your friends; that is,
+an earthquake wave which has travelled 3,000 miles makes a different
+record in the instruments from one that has travelled 5,000 miles; and
+that, again, a different record from one that has travelled 7,000 miles,
+and so on. Each one writes its name in its own way. It's a fine thing,
+isn't it, to have the earth's crust harnessed up so that it is forced to
+mark down for us on paper a diagram of its own movements?"
+
+He took pencil and paper again, and dashed off an earthquake wave like
+this:
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"There you have the signature of an earthquake wave which has travelled
+only a short distance, say 2,000 miles; but here is the signature of the
+very same wave after travelling, say, 6,000 miles:"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You see the difference at a glance; the second seismogram (that is what
+we call these records) is very much more stretched out than the first,
+and a seismogram taken at 8,000 miles from the start would be more
+stretched out still. This is because the waves of transmission grow
+longer and longer, and slower and slower, the farther they spread
+from the source of disturbance. In both figures the point A, where the
+straight line begins to waver, marks the beginning of the earthquake;
+the rippling line AB shows the preliminary tremors which always precede
+the heavy shocks, marked C; and D shows the dying away of the earthquake
+in tremors similar to AB.
+
+"Now, it is chiefly in the preliminary tremors that the various
+earthquakes reveal their identity. The more slowly the waves come, the
+longer it takes to record them, and the more stretched out they
+become in the seismograms. And by carefully noting these differences,
+especially those in time, we get our information. Suppose we have an
+earthquake in Japan. If you were there in person you would feel the
+preliminary tremors very fast, five or ten in a second, and their whole
+duration before the heavy shocks would not exceed ten or twenty seconds.
+But these preliminary tremors, transmitted to England, would keep the
+pendulums swinging from thirty to thirty-two minutes before the heavy
+shocks, and each vibration would occupy five seconds.
+
+"There would be similar differences in the duration of the heavy
+vibrations; in Japan they would come at the rate of about one a second:
+here, at the rate of about one in twenty or forty seconds. It is the
+time, then, occupied by the preliminary tremors that tells us the
+distance of the earthquake. Earthquakes in Borneo, for instance, give
+preliminary tremors occupying about forty-one minutes, in Japan about
+half an hour, in the earthquake region east of Newfoundland about eight
+minutes, in the disturbed region of the West Indies about nineteen or
+twenty minutes, and so on. Thus the earthquake is located with absolute
+precision."
+
+Most earthquakes occur in the deep bed of the ocean, in the vast valleys
+between ocean mountains, and the dangerous localities are now almost as
+well known as the principal mountain ranges of North America. There
+is one of these valleys, or ocean holes, off the west coast of South
+America from Ecuador down; there is one in the mid-Atlantic, about the
+equator, between twenty degrees and forty degrees west longitude:
+there is one at the Grecian end of the Mediterranean; one in the Bay
+of Bengal, and one bordering the Alps; there is the famous "Tuscarora
+Deep," from the Philippine Islands down to Java; and there is the North
+Atlantic region, about 300 miles east of Newfoundland. In the "Tuscarora
+Deep" the slope increases 1,000 fathoms in twenty-five miles, until it
+reaches a depth of 4,000 fathoms.
+
+[Illustration: Pieces of a Submarine Cable Picked Up in the Gulf of
+Mexico in 1888.
+
+_The kinks are caused by seismic disturbances, and they show how much
+distortion a cable can suffer and still remain in good electrical
+condition, as this was found to be._]
+
+And this brings us to the consideration of one of the greatest practical
+advantages of the seismograph--in the exact location of cable
+breaks. Indeed, a large proportion of these breaks are the result of
+earthquakes. In a recent report Professor Milne says that there are now
+about twenty-seven breaks a year for 10,000 miles of cable in active
+use. Most of these are very costly, fifteen breaks in the Atlantic
+cable between 1884 and 1894 having cost the companies $3,000,000, to say
+nothing of loss of time. And twice it has happened in Australia (in
+1880 and 1888) that the whole island has been thrown into excitement and
+alarm, the reserves being called out, and other measures taken, because
+the sudden breaking of cable connections with the outside world has
+led to the belief that military operations against the country were
+preparing by some foreign power. A Milne pendulum at Sydney or Adelaide
+would have made it plain in a moment that the whole trouble was due to
+a submarine earthquake occurring at such a time and such a place. As it
+was, Australia had to wait in a fever of suspense (in one case there
+was a delay of nineteen days) until steamers arriving brought assurances
+that neither Russia nor any other possibly unfriendly power had begun
+hostilities by tearing up the cables.
+
+There have been submarine earthquakes in the Tuscarora, like that of
+June 15, 1896, that have shaken the earth from pole to pole; and more
+than once different cables from Java have been broken simultaneously, as
+in 1890, when the three cables to Australia snapped in a moment. And the
+great majority of breaks in the North Atlantic cables have occurred in
+the Newfoundland hollow, where there are two slopes, one dropping from
+708 to 2,400 fathoms in a distance of sixty miles, and the other from
+275 to 1,946 fathoms within thirty miles. On October 4, 1884, three
+cables, lying about ten miles apart, broke simultaneously at the spot.
+The significance of such breaks is greater when the fact is borne in
+mind that cables frequently lie uninjured for many years on the
+great level plains of the ocean bed, where seismic disturbances are
+infrequent.
+
+The two chief causes of submarine earthquakes are landslides, where
+enormous masses of earth plunge from a higher to a lower level, and in
+so doing crush down upon the cable, and "faults," that is, subsidences
+of great areas, which occur on land as well as at the bottom of the sea,
+and which in the latter case may drag down imbedded cables with them.
+
+It is in establishing the place and times of these breaks that Professor
+Milne's instruments have their greatest practical value; scientifically
+no one can yet calculate their value.
+
+[Illustration: Record Made on a Stationary Surface by the Vibrations of
+the Japanese Earthquake of July 19, 1891.
+
+_Showing the complicated character of the motion (common to most
+earthquakes), and also the course of a point at the centre of
+disturbance._]
+
+In addition to the first instrument set up by Professor Milne in
+Tokio in 1883, which is still recording earthquakes, there are now in
+operation about twenty other seismographs in various parts of the world,
+so that earthquake information is becoming very accurate and complete,
+and there is even an attempt being made to predict earthquakes just
+as the weather bureau predicts storms. In any event Professor Milne's
+invention must within a few years add greatly to our knowledge of the
+wonders of the planet on which we live.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ELECTRICAL FURNACES
+
+_How the Hottest Heat is Produced--Making Diamonds_
+
+
+No feats of discovery, not even the search for the North Pole or
+Stanley's expeditions in the heart of Africa, present more points of
+fascinating interest than the attempts now being made by scientists to
+explore the extreme limits of temperature. We live in a very narrow zone
+in what may be called the great world of heat. The cut on the opposite
+page represents an imaginary thermometer showing a few of the important
+temperature points between the depths of the coldest cold and the
+heights of the hottest heat--a stretch of some 10,461 degrees. We exist
+in a narrow space, as you will see, varying from 100 deg. or a little more
+above the zero point to a possible 50 deg. below; that is, we can withstand
+these narrow extremes of temperature. If some terrible world catastrophe
+should raise the temperature of our summers or lower that of our winters
+by a very few degrees, human life would perish off the earth.
+
+But though we live in such narrow limits, science has found ways
+of exploring the great heights of heat above us and of reaching and
+measuring the depths of cold below us, with the result of making many
+important and interesting discoveries.
+
+I have written in the former "Boys' Book of Inventions" of that
+wonderful product of science, liquid air--air submitted to such a degree
+of cold that it ceases to be a gas and becomes a liquid. This change
+occurs at a temperature 312 deg. below zero. Professor John Dewar, of
+England, who has made some of the most interesting of discoveries in
+the region of great cold, not only reached a temperature low enough to
+produce liquid air, but he succeeded in going on down until he could
+freeze this marvellous liquid into a solid--a sort of air ice. Not
+content even with this astonishing degree of cold, Professor Dewar
+continued his experiments until he could reduce hydrogen--that very
+light gas--to a liquid, at 440 deg. below zero, and then, strange as it may
+seem, he also froze liquid hydrogen into a solid. From his experiments
+he finally concluded that the "absolute zero"--that is, the place where
+there is no heat--was at a point 461 deg. below zero. And he has been able
+to produce a temperature, artificially, within a very few degrees of
+this utmost limit of cold.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+          | |
+  DEGREES | |
+          | |
+  10000 --+ +-- Conjectural heat
+          | |   of the sun.
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+   7000 --+ +-- Highest heat
+          | |   yet obtained
+          | |   artificially.
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+   3500 --+ +-- Steel boils.
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+          | |
+    212 --+ +-- Water boils.
+      0 --+=+-- Zero.
+    461 --+=+-- Prof. Dewar's
+          |=|   absolute zero.
+         {===}
+
+           |
+  DEGREES  |
+           |
+       0 --+-- Zero.
+           |
+      40 --+-- Mercury freezes.
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+     202 --+-- Alcohol freezes.
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+     300 --+-- Oxygen boils.
+     312 --+-- Liquid air boils.
+     320 --+-- Nitrogen boils.
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+           |
+     440 --+-- Hydrogen boils.
+     461 --+-- Prof. Dewar's
+               absolute zero.]
+
+Think what this absolute zero means. Heat, we know, like electricity and
+light, is a vibratory or wave motion in the ether. The greater the heat,
+the faster the vibrations. We think of all the substances around us
+as solids, liquids, and gases, but these are only comparative terms. A
+change of temperature changes the solid into the liquid, or the gas
+into the solid. Take water, for instance. In the ordinary temperature
+of summer it is a liquid, in winter it is a hard crystalline substance
+called ice; apply the heat of a stove and it becomes steam, a gas. So
+with all other substances. Air to us is an invisible gas, but if the
+earth should suddenly drop in temperature to 312 deg. below zero all the air
+would fall in liquid drops like rain and fill the valleys of the earth
+with lakes and oceans. Still a little colder and these lakes and oceans
+would freeze into solids. Similarly, steel seems to us a very hard and
+solid substance, but apply enough heat and it boils like water, and
+finally, if the heat be increased, it becomes a gas.
+
+Imagine, if you can, a condition in which all substances are solids;
+where the vibrations known as heat have been stilled to silence; where
+nothing lives or moves; where, indeed, there is an awful nothingness;
+and you can form an idea of the region of the coldest cold--in other
+words, the region where heat does not exist. Our frozen moon gives
+something of an idea of this condition, though probably, cold and barren
+as it is, the moon is still a good many degrees in temperature above the
+absolute zero.
+
+Some of the methods of exploring these depths of cold are treated in the
+chapter on liquid air already referred to. Our interest here centres
+in the other extreme of temperature, where the heat vibrations are
+inconceivably rapid; where nearly all substances known to man become
+liquids and gases; where, in short, if the experimenter could go high
+enough, he could reach the awful degree of heat of the burning sun
+itself, estimated at over 10,000 degrees. It is in the work of exploring
+these regions of great heat that such men as Moissan, Siemens, Faure,
+and others have made such remarkable discoveries, reaching temperatures
+as high as 7,000, or over twice the heat of boiling steel. Their
+accomplishments seem the more wonderful when we consider that a
+temperature of this degree burns up or vaporises every known substance.
+How, then, could these men have made a furnace in which to produce this
+heat? Iron in such a heat would burn like paper, and so would brick
+and mortar. It seems inconceivable that even science should be able to
+produce a degree of heat capable of consuming the tools and everything
+else with which it is produced.
+
+The heat vibrations at 7,000 deg. are so intense that nickel and platinum,
+the most refractory, the most unmeltable of metals, burn like so much
+bee's-wax; the best fire-brick used in lining furnaces is consumed by
+it like lumps of rosin, leaving no trace behind. It works, in short, the
+most marvellous, the most incredible transformations in the substances
+of the earth.
+
+Indeed, we have to remember that the earth itself was created in a
+condition of great heat--first a swirling, burning gas, something like
+the sun of to-day, gradually cooling, contracting, rounding, until we
+have our beautiful world, with its perfect balance of gases, liquids,
+solids, its splendid life. A dying volcano here and there gives faint
+evidence of the heat which once prevailed over all the earth.
+
+It was in the time of great heat that the most beautiful and wonderful
+things in the world were wrought. It was fierce heat that made the
+diamond, the sapphire, and the ruby; it fashioned all of the most
+beautiful forms of crystals and spars; and it ran the gold and silver
+of the earth in veins, and tossed up mountains, and made hollows for the
+seas. It is, in short, the temperature at which worlds were born.
+
+More wonderful, if possible, than the miracles wrought by such heat is
+the fact that men can now produce it artificially; and not only produce,
+but confine and direct it, and make it do their daily service. One asks
+himself, indeed, if this can really be; and it was under the impulse of
+some such incredulity that I lately made a visit to Niagara Falls, where
+the hottest furnaces in the world are operated. Here clay is melted in
+vast quantities to form aluminium, a metal as precious a few years ago
+as gold. Here lime and carbon, the most infusible of all the elements,
+are joined by intense heat in the curious new compound, calcium carbide,
+a bit of which dropped in water decomposes almost explosively, producing
+the new illuminating gas, acetylene. Here, also, pure phosphorus and
+the phosphates are made in large quantities; and here is made
+carborundum--gem-crystals as hard as the diamond and as beautiful as the
+ruby.
+
+An extensive plant has also been built to produce the heat necessary to
+make graphite such as is used in your lead-pencils, and for lubricants,
+stove-blacking, and so on. Graphite has been mined from the earth for
+thousands of years; it is pure carbon, first cousin to the diamond. Ten
+years ago the possibility of its manufacture would have been scouted as
+ridiculous; and yet in these wonderful furnaces, which repeat so nearly
+the processes of creation, graphite is as easily made as soap.
+The marvel-workers at Niagara Falls have not yet been able to make
+diamonds--in quantities. The distinguished French chemist Moissan has
+produced them in his laboratory furnaces--small ones, it is true, but
+diamonds; and one day they may be shipped in peck boxes from the
+great furnaces at Niagara Falls. This is no mere dream; the commercial
+manufacture of diamonds has already had the serious consideration
+of level-headed, far-seeing business men, and it may be accounted a
+distinct probability. What revolution the achievement of it would work
+in the diamond trade as now constituted and conducted no one can say.
+
+These marvellous new things in science and invention have been made
+possible by the chaining of Niagara to the wheels of industry. The power
+of the falling water is transformed into electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both vibratory motions of the ether; science has found that the
+vibrations known as electricity can be changed into the vibrations known
+as heat. Accordingly, a thousand horse-power from the mighty river is
+conveyed as electricity over a copper wire, changed into heat and light
+between the tips of carbon electrodes, and there works its wonders. In
+principle the electrical furnace is identical with the electric light.
+It is scarcely twenty years since the first electrical furnaces of
+real practical utility were constructed; but if the electrical furnaces
+to-day in operation at Niagara Falls alone were combined into one, they
+would, as one scientist speculates, make a glow so bright that it could
+be seen distinctly from the moon--a hint for the astronomers who are
+seeking methods for communicating with the inhabitants of Mars. One
+furnace has been built in which an amount of heat energy equivalent to
+700 horse-power is produced in an arc cavity not larger than an ordinary
+water tumbler.
+
+On reaching Niagara Falls, I called on Mr. E. G. Acheson, whose name
+stands with that of Moissan as a pioneer in the investigation of high
+temperatures. Mr. Acheson is still a young man--not more than forty-five
+at most--and clean-cut, clear-eyed, and genial, with something of the
+studious air of a college professor. He is pre-eminently a self-made
+man. At twenty-four he found a place in Edison's laboratory--"Edison's
+college of inventions," he calls it--and, at twenty-five, he was one
+of the seven pioneers in electricity who (in 1881-82) introduced the
+incandescent lamp in Europe. He installed the first electric-light
+plants in the cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Amsterdam, and during
+this time was one of Edison's representatives in Paris.
+
+[Illustration: Mr. E. G. Acheson, One of the Pioneers in the
+Investigation of High Temperatures.]
+
+"I think the possibility of manufacturing genuine diamonds," he said to
+me, "has dazzled more than one young experimenter. My first efforts in
+this direction were made in 1880. It was before we had command of the
+tremendous electric energy now furnished by the modern dynamo, and when
+the highest heat attainable for practical purposes was obtained by
+the oxy-hydrogen flame. Even this was at the service of only a few
+experimenters, and certainly not at mine. My first experiments were made
+in what I might term the 'wet way'; that is, by the process of chemical
+decomposition by means of an electric current. Very interesting results
+were obtained, which even now give promise of value; but the diamond did
+not materialise.
+
+"I did not take up the subject again until the dynamo had attained high
+perfection and I was able to procure currents of great power. Calling in
+the aid of the 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit or more of temperature produced
+by these electric currents, I once more set myself to the solution of
+the problem. I now had, however, two distinct objects in view: first,
+the making of a diamond; and, second, the production of a hard substance
+for abrasive purposes. My experiments in 1880 had resulted in producing
+a substance of extreme hardness, hard enough, indeed, to scratch the
+sapphire--the next hardest thing to the diamond--and I saw that such a
+material, cheaply made, would have great value.
+
+"My first experiment in this new series was of a kind that would have
+been denounced as absurd by any of the old-school book-chemists, and had
+I had a similar training, the probability is that I should not have made
+such an investigation. But 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread,'
+and the experiment was made."
+
+This experiment by Mr. Acheson, extremely simple in execution, was
+the first act in rolling the stone from the entrance to a veritable
+Aladdin's cave, into which a multitude of experimenters have passed in
+their search for nature's secrets; for, while the use of the electrical
+furnace in the reduction of metals--in the breaking down of nature's
+compounds--was not new, its use for synthetic chemistry--for the putting
+together, the building up, the formation of compounds--was entirely
+new. It has enabled the chemist not only to reproduce the compounds of
+nature, but to go further and produce valuable compounds that are wholly
+new and were heretofore unknown to man. Mr. Acheson conjectured that
+carbon, if made to combine with clay, would produce an extremely hard
+substance; and that, having been combined with the clay, if it should
+in the cooling separate again from the clay, it would issue out of the
+operation as diamond. He therefore mixed a little clay and coke
+dust together, placed them in a crucible, inserted the ends of two
+electric-light carbons into the mixture, and connected the carbons with
+a dynamo. The fierce heat generated at the points of the carbons fused
+the clay, and caused portions of the carbon to dissolve. After cooling,
+a careful examination was made of the mass, and a few small purple
+crystals were found. They sparkled with something of the brightness
+of diamonds, and were so hard that they scratched glass. Mr. Acheson
+decided at once that they could not be diamonds; but he thought they
+might be rubies or sapphires. A little later, though, when he had made
+similar crystals of a larger size, he found that they were harder than
+rubies, even scratching the diamond itself. He showed them to a number
+of expert jewellers, chemists, and geologists. They had so much the
+appearance of natural gems that many experts to whom they were submitted
+without explanation decided that they must certainly be of natural
+production. Even so eminent an authority as Geikie, the Scotch
+geologist, on being told, after he had examined them, that the crystals
+were manufactured in America, responded testily: "These Americans! What
+won't they claim next? Why, man, those crystals have been in the earth a
+million years."
+
+Mr. Acheson decided at first that his crystals were a combination of
+carbon and aluminium, and gave them the name carborundum. He at once
+set to work to manufacture them in large quantities for use in making
+abrasive wheels, whetstones, and sandpaper, and for other purposes for
+which emery and corundum were formerly used. He soon found by chemical
+analysis, however, that carborundum was not composed of carbon and
+aluminium, but of carbon and silica, or sand, and that he had, in fact,
+created a new substance; so far as human knowledge now extends, no such
+combination occurs anywhere in nature. And it was made possible only
+by the electrical furnace, with its power of producing heat of untold
+intensity.
+
+[Illustration: The Furnace-Room, where Carborundum is Made.
+
+"_A great, dingy brick building, open at the sides like a shed._"]
+
+In order to get a clear understanding of the actual workings of
+the electrical furnace, I visited the plant where Mr. Acheson makes
+carborundum. The furnace-room is a great, dingy brick building, open at
+the sides like a shed. It is located only a few hundred yards from the
+banks of the Niagara River and well within the sound of the great falls.
+Just below it, and nearer the city, stands the handsome building of
+the Power Company, in which the mightiest dynamos in the world whir
+ceaselessly, day and night, while the waters of Niagara churn in the
+water-wheel pits below. Heavy copper wires carrying a current of 2,200
+volts lead from the power-house to Mr. Acheson's furnaces, where the
+electrical energy is transformed into heat.
+
+There are ten furnaces in all, built loosely of fire-brick, and fitted
+at each end with electrical connections. And strange they look to
+one who is familiar with the ordinary fuel furnace, for they have no
+chimneys, no doors, no drafts, no ash-pits, no blinding glow of heat
+and light. The room in which they stand is comfortably cool. Each time
+a furnace is charged it is built up anew; for the heat produced is so
+fierce that it frequently melts the bricks together, and new ones must
+be supplied. There were furnaces in many stages of development. One had
+been in full blast for nearly thirty hours, and a weird sight it was.
+The top gave one the instant impression of the seamy side of a volcano.
+The heaped coke was cracked in every direction, and from out of the
+crevices and depressions and from between the joints of the loosely
+built brick walls gushed flames of pale green and blue, rising upward,
+and burning now high, now low, but without noise beyond a certain low
+humming. Within the furnace--which was oblong in shape, about the height
+of a man, and sixteen feet long by six wide--there was a channel, or
+core, of white-hot carbon in a nearly vaporised state. It represented
+graphically in its seething activity what the burning surface of the sun
+might be--and it was almost as hot. Yet the heat was scarcely manifest a
+dozen feet from the furnace, and but for the blue flames rising from
+the cracks in the envelope, or wall, one might have laid his hand almost
+anywhere on the bricks without danger of burning it.
+
+[Illustration: Taking Off a Crust of the Furnace at Night.
+
+_The light is so intense that you cannot look at it without hurting the
+eyes._]
+
+In the best modern blast-furnaces, in which the coal is supplied with
+special artificial draft to make it burn the more fiercely, the heat may
+reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This is less than half of that produced
+in the electrical furnace. In porcelain kilns, the potters, after hours
+of firing, have been able to produce a cumulative temperature of as much
+as 3,300 degrees Fahrenheit; and this, with the oxy-hydrogen flame (in
+which hydrogen gas is spurred to greater heat by an excess of oxygen),
+is the very extreme of heat obtainable by any artificial means except
+by the electrical furnace. Thus the electrical furnace has fully doubled
+the practical possibilities in the artificial production of heat.
+
+Mr. Fitzgerald, the chemist of the Acheson Company, pointed out to me a
+curious glassy cavity in one of the half-dismantled furnaces. "Here the
+heat was only a fraction of that in the core," he said. But still
+the fire-brick--and they were the most refractory produced in this
+country--had been melted down like butter. The floors under the furnace
+were all made of fire-brick, and yet the brick had run together until
+they were one solid mass of glassy stone. "We once tried putting a
+fire-brick in the centre of the core," said Mr. Fitzgerald, "just to
+test the heat. Later, when we came to open the furnace, we couldn't find
+a vestige of it. The fire had totally consumed it, actually driving it
+all off in vapour."
+
+Indeed, so hot is the core that there is really no accurate means of
+measuring its temperature, although science has been enabled by various
+curious devices to form a fairly correct estimate. The furnace has a
+provoking way of burning up all of the thermometers and heat-measuring
+devices which are applied to it. A number of years ago a clever German,
+named Segar, invented a series of little cones composed of various
+infusible earths like clay and feldspar. He so fashioned them that one
+in the series would melt at 1,620 degrees Fahrenheit, another at 1,800
+degrees, and so on up. If the cones are placed in a pottery kiln, the
+potter can tell just what degree of temperature he has reached by the
+melting of the cones one after another. But in Mr. Acheson's electrical
+furnaces all the cones would burn up and disappear in two minutes. The
+method employed for coming at the heat of the electrical furnace,
+in some measure, is this: a thin filament of platinum is heated red
+hot--1,800 degrees Fahrenheit--by a certain current of electricity. A
+delicate thermometer is set three feet away, and the reading is taken.
+Then, by a stronger current, the filament is made white hot--3,400
+degrees Fahrenheit--and the thermometer moved away until it reads the
+same as it read before. Two points in a distance-scale are thus
+obtained as a basis of calculation. The thermometer is then tried by
+an electrical furnace. To be kept at the same marking it must be placed
+much farther away than in either of the other instances. A simple
+computation of the comparative distances with relation to the two
+well-ascertained temperatures gives approximately, at least, the
+temperature of the electrical furnace. Some other methods are also
+employed. None is regarded as perfectly exact; but they are near enough
+to have yielded some very interesting and valuable statistics regarding
+the power of various temperatures. For instance, it has been found
+that aluminium becomes a limpid liquid at from 4,050 to 4,320 degrees
+Fahrenheit, and that lime melts at from 4,940 to 5,400 degrees, and
+magnesia at 4,680 degrees.
+
+There are two kinds of electrical furnaces, as there are two kinds of
+electric lights--arc and incandescent. Moissan has used the arc furnace
+in all of his experiments, but Mr. Acheson's furnaces follow rather the
+principle of the incandescent lamp. "The incandescent light," said
+Mr. Fitzgerald, "is produced by the resistance of a platinum wire or a
+carbon filament to the passage of a current of electricity. Both light
+and heat are given off. In our furnace, the heat is produced by the
+resistance of a solid cylinder or core of pulverised coke to the passage
+of a strong current of electricity. When the core becomes white hot it
+causes the materials surrounding it to unite chemically, producing the
+carborundum crystals."
+
+The materials used are of the commonest--pure white sand, coke, sawdust,
+and salt. The sand and coke are mixed in the proportions of sixty to
+forty, the sawdust is added to keep the mixture loose and open, and the
+salt to assist the chemical combination of the ingredients. The furnace
+is half filled with this mixture, and then the core of coke, twenty-one
+inches in diameter, is carefully moulded in place. This core is sixteen
+feet long, reaching the length of the furnace, and connecting at
+each end with an immense carbon terminal, consisting of no fewer than
+twenty-five rods of carbon, each four inches square and nearly three
+feet long. These terminals carry the current into the core from huge
+insulated copper bars connected from above. When the core is complete,
+more of the carborundum mixture is shovelled in and tramped down until
+the furnace is heaping full.
+
+Everything is now ready for the electric current. The wires from the
+Niagara Falls power-plant come through an adjoining building, where one
+is confronted, upon entering, with this suggestive sign:
+
+    DANGER
+  2,200 Volts.
+
+Tesla produces immensely higher voltages than this for laboratory
+experiments, but there are few more powerful currents in use in this
+country for practical purposes. Only about 2,000 volts are required for
+executing criminals under the electric method employed in New York; 400
+volts will run a trolley-car. It is hardly comfortable to know that a
+single touch of one of the wires or switches in this room means almost
+certain death. Mr. Fitzgerald gave me a vivid demonstration of the
+terrific destructive force of the Niagara Falls current. He showed me
+how the circuit was broken. For ordinary currents, the breaking of a
+circuit simply means a twist of the wrist and the opening of a brass
+switch. Here, however, the current is carried into a huge iron tank full
+of salt water. The attendant, pulling on a rope, lifts an iron plate
+from the tank. The moment it leaves the water, there follow a rumbling
+crash like a thunder-clap, a blinding burst of flame, and thick clouds
+of steam and spray. The sight and sound of it make you feel delicate
+about interfering with a 2,200-volt current.
+
+[Illustration: The Interior of a Furnace as it Appears after the
+Carborundum has been Taken Out.]
+
+This current is, indeed, too strong in voltage for the furnaces, and
+it is cut down, by means of what were until recently the largest
+transformers in the world, to about 100 volts, or one-fourth the
+pressure used on the average trolley line. It is now, however, a current
+of great intensity--7,500 amperes, as compared with the one-half ampere
+used in an incandescent lamp; and it requires eight square inches of
+copper and 400 square inches of carbon to carry it.
+
+Within the furnace, when the current is turned on, a thousand
+horse-power of energy is continuously transformed into heat. Think of
+it! Is it any wonder that the temperature goes up? And this is continued
+for thirty-six hours steadily, until 36,000 "horse-power hours" are used
+up and 7,000 pounds of the crystals have been formed. Remembering that
+36,000 horse-power hours, when converted into heat, will raise 72,000
+gallons of water to the boiling point, or will bring 350 tons of iron up
+to a red heat, one can at least have a sort of idea of the heat evolved
+in a carborundum furnace.
+
+When the coke core glows white, chemical action begins in the mixture
+around it. The top of the furnace now slowly settles, and cracks in
+long, irregular fissures, sending out a pungent gas which, when lighted,
+burns lambent blue. This gas is carbon monoxide, and during the process
+nearly six tons of it are thrown off and wasted. It seems, indeed, a
+somewhat extravagant process, for fifty-six pounds of gas are produced
+for every forty of carborundum.
+
+"It is very distinctly a geological condition," said Mr. Fitzgerald;
+"crystals are not only formed exactly as they are in the earth, but we
+have our own little earthquakes and volcanoes." Not infrequently gas
+collects, forming a miniature mountain, with a crater at its summit, and
+blowing a magnificent fountain of flame, lava, and dense white vapour
+high into the air, and roaring all the while in a most terrifying
+manner. The workmen call it "blowing off."
+
+[Illustration: Blowing Off.
+
+"_Not infrequently gas collects, forming a miniature mountain, with a
+crater at its summit, and blowing a magnificent fountain of flame, lava,
+and dense white vapour high into the air, and roaring all the while in a
+most terrifying manner._"]
+
+At the end of thirty-six hours the current is cut off, and the furnace
+is allowed to cool, the workmen pulling down the brick as rapidly as
+they dare. At the centre of the furnace, surrounding the core, there
+remains a solid mass of carborundum as large in diameter as a hogshead.
+Portions of this mass are sometimes found to be composed of pure,
+beautifully crystalline graphite. This in itself is a surprising
+and significant product, and it has opened the way directly to
+graphite-making on a large scale. An important and interesting feature
+of the new graphite industry is the utilisation it has effected of
+a product from the coke regions of Pennsylvania which was formerly
+absolute waste.
+
+To return to carborundum: when the furnace has been cooled and the walls
+torn away, the core of carborundum is broken open, and the beautiful
+purple and blue crystals are laid bare, still hot. The sand and the coke
+have united in a compound nearly as hard as the diamond and even more
+indestructible, being less inflammable and wholly indissoluble in even
+the strongest acids. After being taken out, the crystals are crushed to
+powder and combined in various forms convenient for the various uses for
+which it is designed.
+
+I asked Mr. Acheson if he could make diamonds in his furnaces.
+"Possibly," he answered, "with certain modifications." Diamonds, as he
+explained, are formed by great heat and great pressure. The great heat
+is now easily obtained, but science has not yet learned nature's secret
+of great pressure. Moissan's method of making diamonds is to dissolve
+coke dust in molten iron, using a carbon crucible into which the
+electrodes are inserted. When the whole mass is fluid, the crucible and
+its contents are suddenly dashed into cold water or melted lead. This
+instantaneous cooling of the iron produces enormous pressure, so that
+the carbon is crystallised in the form of diamond.
+
+But whatever it may or may not yet be able to do in the matter of
+diamond-making, there can be no doubt that the possibilities of the
+electrical furnace are beyond all present conjecture. With American
+inventors busy in its further development, and with electricity as cheap
+as the mighty power of Niagara can make it, there is no telling what
+new and wonderful products, now perhaps wholly unthought-of by the human
+race, it may become possible to manufacture, and manufacture cheaply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HARNESSING THE SUN
+
+_The Solar Motor_
+
+
+It seems daring and wonderful enough, the idea of setting the sun itself
+to the heavy work of men, producing the power which will help to turn
+the wheels of this age of machinery.
+
+At Los Angeles, Cal., I went out to see the sun at work pumping water.
+The solar motor, as it is called, was set up at one end of a great
+enclosure where ostriches are raised. I don't know which interested me
+more at first, the sight of these tall birds striding with dignity about
+their roomy pens or sitting on their big yellow eggs--just as we imagine
+them wild in the desert--or the huge, strange creation of man by which
+the sun is made to toil. I do not believe I could have guessed the
+purpose of this unique invention if I had not known what to expect.
+I might have hazarded the opinion that it was some new and monstrous
+searchlight: beyond that I think my imagination would have failed me.
+It resembled a huge inverted lamp-shade, or possibly a tremendous
+iron-ribbed colander, bottomless, set on its edge and supported by a
+steel framework. Near by there was a little wooden building which served
+as a shop or engine-house. A trough full of running water led away
+on one side, and from within came the steady chug-chug, chug-chug of
+machinery, apparently a pump. So this was the sun-subduer! A little
+closer inspection, with an audience of ostriches, very sober, looking
+over the fence behind me and wondering, I suppose, if I had a cracker in
+my pocket, I made out some other very interesting particulars in regard
+to this strange invention. The colander-like device was in reality, I
+discovered, made up of hundreds and hundreds (nearly 1,800 in all) of
+small mirrors, the reflecting side turned inward, set in rows on the
+strong steel framework which composed the body of the great colander.
+By looking up through the hole in the bottom of the colander I was
+astonished by the sight of an object of such brightness that it dazzled
+my eyes. It looked, indeed, like a miniature sun, or at least like a
+huge arc light or a white-hot column of metal. And, indeed, it was white
+hot, glowing, burning hot--a slim cylinder of copper set in the exact
+centre of the colander. At the top there was a jet of white steam like a
+plume, for this was the boiler of this extraordinary engine.
+
+[Illustration: Side View of the Solar Motor.]
+
+"It is all very simple when you come to see it," the manager was saying
+to me. "Every boy has tried the experiment of flashing the sunshine into
+his chum's window with a mirror. Well, we simply utilise that principle.
+By means of these hundreds of mirrors we reflect the light and heat of
+the sun on a single point at the centre of what you have described as a
+colander. Here we have the cylinder of steel containing the water which
+we wish heated for steam. This cylinder is thirteen and one-half feet
+long and will hold one hundred gallons of water. If you could see it
+cold, instead of glowing with heat, you would find it jet black, for
+we cover it with a peculiar heat-absorbing substance made partly of
+lampblack, for if we left it shiny it would re-reflect some of the heat
+which comes from the mirrors. The cold water runs in at one end through
+this flexible metallic hose, and the steam goes out at the other through
+a similar hose to the engine in the house."
+
+Though this colander, or "reflector," as it is called, is thirty-three
+and one-half feet in diameter at the outer edge and weighs over four
+tons, it is yet balanced perfectly on its tall standards. It is, indeed,
+mounted very much like a telescope, in meridian, and a common little
+clock in the engine-room operates it so that it always faces the sun,
+like a sunflower, looking east in the morning and west in the evening,
+gathering up the burning rays of the sun and throwing them upon the
+boiler at the centre. In the engine-house I found a pump at work,
+chug-chugging like any pump run by steam-power, and the water raised by
+sun-power flowing merrily away. The manager told me that he could easily
+get ten horse-power; that, if the sun was shining brightly, he could
+heat cold water in an hour to produce 150 pounds of steam.
+
+[Illustration: Front View of the Los Angeles Solar Motor.]
+
+The wind sometimes blows a gale in Southern California, and I asked the
+manager what provision had been made for keeping this huge reflector
+from blowing away.
+
+"Provision is made for varying wind-pressures," he said, "so that the
+machine is always locked in any position, and may only be moved by
+the operating mechanism, unless, indeed, the whole structure should be
+carried away. It is designed to withstand a wind-pressure of 100 miles
+an hour. It went through the high gales of the November storm without
+a particle of damage. One of the peculiar characteristics of its
+construction is that it avoids wind-pressure as much as possible."
+
+The operation of the motor is so simple that it requires very little
+human labour. When power is desired, the reflector must be swung into
+focus--that is, pointed exactly toward the sun--which is done by turning
+a crank. This is not beyond the power of a good-sized boy. There is an
+indicator which readily shows when a true focus is obtained. This done,
+the reflector follows the sun closely all day. In about an hour the
+engine can be started by a turn of the throttle-valve. As the engine is
+automatic and self-oiling, it runs without further attention. The
+supply of water to the boiler is also automatic, and is maintained at
+a constant height without any danger of either too much or too little
+water. Steam-pressure is controlled by means of a safety-valve, so that
+it may never reach a dangerous point. The steam passes from the engine
+to the condenser and thence to the boiler, and the process is repeated
+indefinitely.
+
+Having now the solar motor, let us see what it is good for, what is
+expected of it. Of course when the sun does not shine the motor does not
+work, so that its usefulness would be much curtailed in a very cloudy
+country like England, for instance; but here in Southern California and
+in all the desert region of the United States and Mexico, to say nothing
+of the Sahara in Africa, where the sun shines almost continuously, the
+solar motor has its greatest sphere of usefulness, and, indeed, its
+greatest need; for these lands of long sunshine, the deserts, are
+also the lands of parched fruitlessness, of little water, so that
+the invention of a motor which will utilise the abundant sunshine for
+pumping the much-needed water has a peculiar value here.
+
+[Illustration: The Brilliant Steam Boiler Glistens in the Centre.]
+
+The solar motor is expected to operate at all seasons of the year,
+regardless of all climatic conditions, with the single exception of
+cloudy skies. Cold makes no difference whatever. The best results from
+the first model used in experimental work at Denver were obtained at a
+time when the pond from which the water was pumped was covered with a
+thick coating of ice. But, of course, the length of the solar day is
+longer in the summer, giving more heat and more power. The motor may be
+depended upon for work from about one hour and a half after sunrise to
+within half an hour of sunset. In the summer time this would mean about
+twelve hours' constant pumping.
+
+Think what such an invention means, if practically successful, to the
+vast stretches of our arid Western land, valueless without water. Spread
+all over this country of Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and
+other States are thousands of miles of canals to bring in water from
+the rivers for irrigating the deserts, and there are untold numbers of
+wind-mills, steam and gasoline pumps which accomplish the same purpose
+more laboriously. Think what a new source of cheap power will do--making
+valuable hundreds of acres of desert land, providing homes for thousands
+of busy Americans. Indeed, a practical solar motor might make habitable
+even the Sahara Desert. And it can be used in many other ways besides
+for pumping water. Threshing machines might be run by this power, and,
+converted into electricity and saved up in storage batteries, it might
+be used for lighting houses, even for cooking dinners, or in fact for
+any purpose requiring power.
+
+These solar motors can be built at no great expense. I was told that
+ten-horse-power plants would cost about $200 per horse-power, and
+one-hundred-horse-power plants about $100 per horse-power. This would
+include the entire plant, with engine and pump complete. When it is
+considered that the annual rental of electric power is frequently $50
+per horse-power, whether it is used or not, it will be seen that the
+solar motor means a great deal, especially in connection with irrigation
+enterprises.
+
+[Illustration: The Rear Machinery for Operating the Reflector.]
+
+And the time is coming--long-headed inventors saw it many years
+ago--when some device for the direct utilisation of the sun's heat will
+be a necessity. The world is now using its coal at a very rapid rate;
+its wood, for fuel purposes, has already nearly disappeared, so that,
+within a century or two, new ways of furnishing heat and power must be
+devised or the human race will perish of cold and hunger. Fortunately
+there are other sources of power at hand; the waterfalls, the Niagaras,
+which, converted into electricity, may yet heat our sitting-rooms and
+cook our dinners. There is also wind-power, now used to a limited extent
+by means of wind-mills. But greater than either of these sources is the
+unlimited potentiality of the tides of the sea, which men have sought in
+vain to harness, and the direct heat of the sun itself. Some time in
+the future these will be subdued to the purpose of men, perhaps our main
+dependence for heat and power.
+
+When we come to think of it, the harnessing of the sun is not so very
+strange. In fact, we have had the sun harnessed since the dawn of man
+on the earth, only indirectly. Without the sun there would be nothing
+here--no men, no life. Coal is nothing but stored-up, bottled sunshine.
+The sunlight of a million years ago produced forests, which, falling,
+were buried in the earth and changed into coal. So when we put coal in
+the cook-stove we may truthfully say that we are boiling the kettle with
+million-year-old sunshine. Similarly there would be no waterfalls for
+us to chain and convert into electricity, as we have chained Niagara, if
+the sun did not evaporate the waters of the sea, take it up in clouds,
+and afterward empty the clouds in rain on the mountain-tops from whence
+the water tumbles down again to the sea. So no wind would blow without
+the sun to work changes in the air.
+
+In short, therefore, we have been using the sunlight all these years,
+hardly knowing it, but not directly. And think of the tremendous amount
+of heat which comes to the earth from the sun. Every boy has tried using
+a burning-glass, which, focusing a few inches of the sun's rays, will
+set fire to paper or cloth.
+
+Professor Langley says that "the heat which the sun, when near the
+zenith, radiates upon the deck of a steamship would suffice, could it be
+turned into work without loss, to drive her at a fair rate of speed."
+
+The knowledge of this enormous power going to waste daily and hourly has
+inspired many inventors to work on the problem of the solar motor. Among
+the greatest of these was the famous Swedish engineer, John Ericsson,
+who invented the iron-clad Monitor. He constructed a really workable
+solar motor, different in construction but similar in principle to the
+one in California which I have described. In 1876 Ericsson said:
+
+"Upon one square mile, using only one-half of the surface and devoting
+the rest to buildings, roads, etc., we can drive 64,800 steam-engines,
+each of 100 horse-power, simply by the heat radiating from the sun.
+Archimedes, having completed his calculation of the force of a lever,
+said that he could move the earth. I affirm that the concentration of
+the heat radiated by the sun would produce a force capable of stopping
+the earth in its course."
+
+A firm believer in the truth of his theories, he devoted the last
+fifteen years of his life and $100,000 to experimental work on his solar
+engine. For various reasons Ericsson's invention was not a practical
+success; but now that modern inventors, with their advancing knowledge
+of mechanics, have turned their attention to the problem, and now that
+the need of the solar motor is greater than ever before, especially
+in the world's deserts, we may look to see a practical and successful
+machine. Perhaps the California motor may prove the solution of the
+problem; perhaps it will need improvements, which use and experience
+will indicate; perhaps it may be left for a reader of these words to
+discover the great secret and make his fortune.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE INVENTOR AND THE FOOD PROBLEM
+
+_Fixing of Nitrogen--Experiments of Professor Nobbe_
+
+
+No lad of to-day, ambitious to become a scientist or inventor, reading
+of all the wonderful and revolutionising discoveries and inventions
+of recent years, need fear for plenty of new problems to solve in the
+future. No, the great problems have not all been solved. We have the
+steam-engine, the electric motor, the telegraph, the telephone, the
+air-ship, but not one of them is perfect, not one that does not bring to
+the attention of inventors scores of entirely new problems for solution.
+The further we advance in science and mechanics the further we see into
+the marvels of our wonderful earth and of our life, and the more there
+is for us to do.
+
+As population increases and people become more intelligent there is
+a constant demand for new things, new machinery which will enable the
+human race to move more rapidly and crowd more work and more pleasure
+into our short human life. One man working to-day with machinery can
+accomplish as much as many men of a hundred years ago; he can live in a
+house that would then have been a palace; enjoy advantages of education,
+amusement, luxury, that would then have been possible only to kings and
+princes.
+
+And the very greatest of all the problems which the inventors and
+scientists of coming generations must solve is the question--seemingly
+commonplace--of food.
+
+We who live in this age of plenty can hardly realise that food could
+ever be a problem. But far-sighted scientists have already begun to look
+forward to the time when there will be so many people on the earth
+that the farms and fields will not supply food for every one. It is
+a well-known fact that the population of the world is increasing
+enormously. Think how America has been expanding; a whole continent
+overrun and settled almost within a century and a half! Nearly all the
+land that can be successfully farmed has already been taken up, and the
+land in some of the older settled localities, like Virginia and the
+New England States, has been so steadily cropped that it is failing in
+fertility, so that it will not raise as much as it would years ago. In
+Europe no crop at all can be raised without quantities of fertiliser.
+
+While there was yet new country to open up, while America and Australia
+were yet virgin soil, there was no immediate cause for alarm; but, as no
+less an authority than Sir William Crookes pointed out a few years ago
+in a lecture before the British Association, the new land has now
+for the most part been opened and tamed to the plough or utilised
+for grazing purposes. And already we are hearing of worn-out land in
+Dakota--the paradise of the wheat producer. The problem, therefore, is
+simple enough: the world is reaching the limits of its capacity for food
+production, while the population continues to increase enormously:
+how soon will starvation begin? Sir William Crookes has prophesied, I
+believe, that the acute stage of the problem will be reached within the
+next fifty years, a time when the call of the world for food cannot
+be supplied. If it were not for our coming inventors and scientists it
+would certainly be a gloomy outlook for the human race.
+
+But science has already foreseen this problem. When Sir William Crookes
+gave his address he based his arguments on modern agricultural methods;
+he did not look forward into the future, he did not show any faith in
+the scientists and inventors who are to come, who are now boys, perhaps.
+He did not even take cognisance of the work that had already been done.
+For inventors and scientists are already grappling with this problem of
+food.
+
+In a nutshell, the question of food production is a question of
+nitrogen.
+
+This must be explained. A crop of wheat, for instance, takes from the
+soil certain elements to help make up the wheat berry, the straw, the
+roots. And the most important of all the elements it takes is nitrogen.
+When we eat bread we take this nitrogen that the wheat has gathered from
+the soil into our own bodies to build up our bones, muscles, brains.
+Each wheat crop takes more nitrogen from the soil, and finally, if
+this nitrogen is not given back to the earth in some way, wheat will
+no longer grow in the fields. In other words, we say the farm is
+"worn out," "cropped to death." The soil is there, but the precious
+life-giving nitrogen is gone. And so it becomes necessary every year to
+put back the nitrogen and the other elements which the crop takes
+from the soil. This purpose is accomplished by the use of fertilisers.
+Manure, ground bone, nitrates, guano, are put in fields to restore the
+nitrogen and other plant foods. In short, we are compelled to feed the
+soil that the soil may feed the wheat, that the wheat may feed us. You
+will see that it is a complete circle--like all life.
+
+Now, the trouble, the great problem, lies right here: in the difficulty
+of obtaining a sufficient amount of fertiliser--in other words, in
+getting food enough to keep the soil from nitrogen starvation. Already
+we ship guano--the droppings of sea-birds--from South America and the
+far islands of the sea to put on our lands, and we mine nitrates (which
+contain nitrogen) at large expense and in great quantities for the same
+purpose. And while we go to such lengths to get nitrogen we are wasting
+it every year in enormous quantities. Gunpowder and explosives are most
+made up of nitrogen--saltpetre and nitro-glycerin--so that every war
+wastes vast quantities of this precious substance. Every discharge of
+a 13-inch gun liberates enough nitrogen to raise many bushels of wheat.
+Thus we see another reason for the disarmament of the nations.
+
+A prediction has been made that barely thirty years hence the wheat
+required to feed the world will be 3,260,000,000 bushels annually, and
+that to raise this about 12,000,000 tons of nitrate of soda yearly for
+the area under cultivation will be needed over and above the 1,250,000
+tons now used by mankind. But the nitrates now in sight and available
+are estimated good for only another fifty years, even at the present low
+rate of consumption. Hence, even if famine does not immediately impend,
+the food problem is far more serious than is generally supposed.
+
+Now nitrogen, it will be seen, is one of the most precious and necessary
+of all substances to human life, and it is one of the most common. If
+the world ever starves for the lack of nitrogen it will starve in a very
+world of nitrogen. For there is not one of the elements more common than
+nitrogen, not one present around us in larger quantities. Four-fifths of
+every breath of air we breathe is pure nitrogen--four-fifths of all the
+earth's atmosphere is nitrogen.
+
+But, unfortunately, most plants are unable to take up nitrogen in its
+gaseous form as it appears in the air. It must be combined with hydrogen
+in the form of ammonia or in some nitrate. Ammonia and the nitrates are,
+therefore, the basis of all fertilisers.
+
+Now, the problem for the scientist and inventor takes this form: Here
+is the vast store-house of life-giving nitrogen in the air; how can it
+be caught, fixed, reduced to the purpose of men, spread on the hungry
+wheat-fields? The problem, therefore, is that of "fixing" the nitrogen,
+taking the gas out of the air and reducing it to a form in which it can
+be handled and used.
+
+Two principal methods for doing this have already been devised, both of
+which are of fascinating interest. One of these ways, that of a clever
+American inventor, is purely a machinery process, the utilisation of
+power by means of which the nitrogen is literally sucked out of the air
+and combined with soda so that it produces nitrate of soda, a high-class
+fertiliser. The water power of Niagara Falls is used to do this work--it
+seems odd enough that Niagara should be used for food production!
+
+The other method, that of a hard-working German professor, is the
+cunning utilisation of one of nature's marvellous processes of taking
+the nitrogen from the air and depositing it in the soil--for nature has
+its own beautiful way of doing it. I will describe the second method
+first because it will help to clear up the whole subject and lead up to
+the work of the American inventor and his extraordinary machinery.
+
+Nearly every farmer, without knowing it, employs nature's method of
+fixing nitrogen every year. It is a simple process which he has learned
+from experience. He knows that when land is worn out by overcropping
+with wheat or other products which draw heavily on the earth's nitrogen
+supply certain crops will still grow luxuriantly upon the worn-out land,
+and that if these crops are left and ploughed in, the fertility of the
+soil will be restored, and it will again produce large yields of wheat
+and other nitrogen-demanding plants. These restorative crops are clover,
+lupin, and other leguminous plants, including beans and peas. Every one
+who is at all familiar with farming operations has heard of seeding down
+an old field to clover and then ploughing in the crop, usually in the
+second year.
+
+The great importance of this bit of the wisdom of experience was not
+appreciated by science for many years. Then several German experimenters
+began to ask why clover and lupin and beans should flourish on worn-out
+land when other crops failed. All of these plants are especially rich
+in nitrogen, and yet they grew well on soil which had been robbed of its
+nitrogen. Why was this so?
+
+It was a hard problem to solve, but science was undaunted. Botanists
+had already discovered that the roots of the leguminous plants--that is,
+clover, lupin, beans, peas, and so on--were usually covered with small
+round swellings, or tumors, to which were given the name nodules. The
+exact purpose of these swellings being unknown, they were set down as
+a condition, possibly, of disease, and no further attention was paid to
+them until Professor Hellriegel, of Burnburg, in Anhalt, Germany, took
+up the work. After much experimenting, he made the important discovery
+that lupins which had nodules would grow in soil devoid of nitrogen, and
+that lupins which had no nodules would not grow in the same soil. It
+was plain, therefore, that the nodules must play an important, though
+mysterious, part in enabling the plant to utilise the free nitrogen of
+the air. That was early in the '80s. His discovery at once started
+other investigators to work, and it was not long before the announcement
+came--and it came, curiously enough, at a time when Dr. Koch was making
+his greatest contributions to the world's knowledge of the germ theory
+of disease--that these nodules were the result of minute bacteria found
+in the soil. Professor Beyerinck, of Muenster, gave the bacteria the name
+Radiocola.
+
+It was at this time that Professor Nobbe took up the work with vigour.
+If these nodules were produced by bacteria, he argued that the bacteria
+must be present in the soil; and if they were not present, would it not
+be possible to supply them by artificial means? In other words, if soil,
+say worn-out farm-soil or, indeed, pure sand like that of the sea-shore
+could thus be inoculated, as a physician inoculates a guinea-pig with
+diphtheria germs, would not beans and peas planted there form nodules
+and draw their nourishment from the air? It was a somewhat startling
+idea, but all radically new ideas are startling; and, after thinking
+it over, Professor Nobbe began, in 1888, a series of most remarkable
+experiments, having as their purpose the discovery of a practical method
+of soil inoculation. He gathered the nodule-covered roots of beans and
+peas, dried and crushed them, and made an extract of them in water. Then
+he prepared a gelatine solution with a little sugar, asparagine, and
+other materials, and added the nodule-extract. In this medium colonies
+of bacteria at once began to grow--bacteria of many kinds. Professor
+Nobbe separated the Radiocola--which are oblong in shape--and made
+what is known as a "clear culture," that is, a culture in gelatine,
+consisting of billions of these particular germs, and no others. When
+he had succeeded in producing these clear cultures he was ready for his
+actual experiments in growing plants. He took a quantity of pure sand,
+and, in order to be sure that it contained no nitrogen or bacteria in
+any form, he heated it at a high temperature three different times for
+six hours, thereby completely sterilising it. This sand he placed
+in three jars. To each of these he added a small quantity of mineral
+food--the required phosphorus, potassium, iron, sulphur, and so on.
+To the first he supplied no nitrogen at all in any form; the second he
+fertilised with saltpetre, which is largely composed of nitrogen in
+a form in which plants may readily absorb it through their roots; the
+third of the jars he inoculated with some of his bacteria culture. Then
+he planted beans in all three jars, and awaited the results, as may
+be imagined, somewhat anxiously. Perfectly pure sterilised water was
+supplied to each jar in equal amounts and the seeds sprouted, and for
+a week the young shoots in the three jars were almost identical in
+appearance. But soon after that there was a gradual but striking change.
+The beans in the first jar, having no nitrogen and no inoculation,
+turned pale and refused to grow, finally dying down completely, starved
+for want of nitrogenous food, exactly as a man would starve for the lack
+of the same kind of nourishment. The beans in the second jar, with the
+fertilised soil, grew about as they would in the garden, all of the
+nourishment having been artificially supplied. But the third jar, which
+had been jealously watched, showed really a miracle of growth. It
+must be remembered that the soil in this jar was as absolutely free
+of nitrogen as the soil in the first jar, and yet the beans flourished
+greatly, and when some of the plants were analysed they were found to
+be rich in nitrogen. Nodules had formed on the roots of the beans in
+the third or inoculated jar only, thereby proving beyond the hope of the
+experimenter that soil inoculation was a possibility, at least in the
+laboratory.
+
+With this favourable beginning Professor Nobbe went forward with his
+experiments with renewed vigour. He tried inoculating the soil for peas,
+clover, lupin, vetch, acacia, robinia, and so on, and in every case the
+roots formed nodules, and although there was absolutely no nitrogen in
+the soil, the plants invariably flourished. Then Professor Nobbe tried
+great numbers of difficult test experiments, such as inoculating the
+soil with clover bacteria and then planting it with beans or peas, or
+vice versa, to see whether the bacteria from the nodules of any one
+leguminous plant could be used for all or any of the others. He also
+tried successive cultures; that is, bean bacteria for beans for several
+years, to see if better results could be obtained by continued use. Even
+an outline description of all the experiments which Professor Nobbe made
+in the course of these investigations would fill a small volume, and it
+will be best to set down here only his general conclusions.
+
+[Illustration: Trees Growing in Water at Professor Nobbe's Laboratory.]
+
+These wonderful nitrogen-absorbing bacteria do not appear in all soil,
+although they are very widely distributed. So far as known they form
+nodules only on the roots of a few species of plants. In their original
+form in the soil they are neutral--that is, not especially adapted to
+beans, or peas, or any one particular kind of crop. But if clover,
+for instance, is planted, they straightway form nodules and become
+especially adapted to the clover plant, so that, as every farmer knows,
+the second crop of clover on worn-out land is much better than the
+first. And, curiously enough, when once the bacteria have become
+thoroughly adapted to one of the crops, say beans, they will not affect
+peas or clover, or only feebly.
+
+Another strange feature of the life of these little creatures, which has
+a marvellous suggestion of intelligence, is their activities in various
+kinds of soil. When the ground is very rich--that is, when it contains
+plenty of nitrogenous matter--they are what Professor Nobbe calls
+"lazy." They do not readily form nodules on the roots of the plants,
+seeming almost to know that there is no necessity for it. But when once
+the nitrogenous matter in the soil begins to fail, then they work more
+sharply, and when it has gone altogether they are at the very height of
+activity. Consequently, unless the soil is really worn out, or very
+poor to begin with, there is no use in inoculating it--it would be like
+"taking owls to Athens," as Professor Nobbe says.
+
+[Illustration: Experimenting with Nitrogen in Professor Nobbe's
+Laboratory.]
+
+Having thus proved the remarkable efficacy of soil inoculation in his
+laboratory and greenhouses, where I saw great numbers of experiments
+still going forward, Professor Nobbe set himself to make his discoveries
+of practical value. He gave to his bacteria cultures the name
+"Nitragen"--spelled with an "a"--and he produced separate cultures for
+each of the important crops--peas, beans, vetch, lupin, and clover. In
+1894 the first of these were placed on the market, and they have had a
+steadily increasing sale, although such a radical innovation as this,
+so far out of the ordinary run of agricultural operation, and so almost
+unbelievably wonderful, cannot be expected to spread very rapidly. The
+cultures are now manufactured at one of the great commercial chemical
+laboratories on the river Main. I saw some of them in Professor Nobbe's
+laboratory. They come in small glass bottles, each marked with the name
+of the crop for which it is especially adapted. The bottle is partly
+filled with the yellow gelatinous substance in which the bacteria grow.
+On the surface of this there is a mossy-like growth, resembling mould.
+This consists of innumerable millions of the little oblong bacteria.
+A bottle costs about fifty cents and contains enough bacteria for
+inoculating half an acre of land. It must be used within a certain
+number of weeks after it is obtained, while it is still fresh. The
+method of applying it is very simple. The contents of the bottle are
+diluted with warm water. Then the seeds of the beans, clover, or peas,
+which have previously been mixed with a little soil, are treated with
+this solution and thoroughly mixed with the soil. After that the mass is
+partially dried so that the seeds may be readily sown. The bacteria at
+once begin to propagate in the soil, which is their natural home, and by
+the time the beans or peas have put out roots they are present in vast
+numbers and ready to begin the active work of forming nodules. It is not
+known exactly how the bacteria absorb the free nitrogen from the air,
+but they do it successfully, and that is the main thing. Many German
+farmers have tried Nitragen. One, who was sceptical of its virtues,
+wrote to Professor Nobbe that he sowed the bacteria-inoculated seeds in
+the form of a huge letter N in the midst of his field, planting the rest
+in the ordinary way. Before a month had passed that N showed up green
+and big over all the field, the plants composing it being so much larger
+and healthier than those around it.
+
+The United States Government has recently been experimenting along
+the same lines and has produced a new form of dry preparation of the
+bacteria in some cakes somewhat resembling a yeast-cake.
+
+The possibilities of such a discovery as this seem almost limitless.
+Science predicts the exhaustion of nitrogen and consequent failure of
+the food supply, and science promptly finds a way of making plants draw
+nitrogen from the boundless supplies of the air. The time may come when
+every farmer will send for his bottles or cakes of bacteria culture
+every spring as regularly as he sends for his seed, and when the work
+of inoculating the soil will be a familiar agricultural process, with
+discussions in the farmers' papers as to whether two bottles or one is
+best for a field of sandy loam with a southern exposure. Stranger things
+have happened. But it must be remembered, also, that the work is in
+its infancy as yet, and that there are vast unexplored fields and
+innumerable possibilities yet to fathom.
+
+Wonderful as this discovery is, and much as it promises in the future,
+its efficacy, as soon as it becomes generally known, is certain to be
+overestimated, as all new discoveries are. Professor Nobbe himself says
+that it has its own limited serviceability. It will produce a bounteous
+crop of beans in the pure sand of the sea-shore if (and this is
+an important if) that sand also contains enough of the mineral
+substances--phosphorus, potassium, and so on--and if it is kept
+properly watered. A man with a worn-out farm cannot go ahead blindly and
+inoculate his soil and expect certain results. He must know the exact
+disease from which his land is suffering before he applies the remedy.
+If it is deficient in the phosphates, bacteria cultures will not help
+it, whereas if it is deficient in nitrogen, bacteria are just what
+it needs. And so agricultural education must go hand in hand with the
+introduction of these future preservers of the human race. It is safe to
+say that by the time there is a serious failure of the earth's soil
+for lack of nitrogen, science, with this wonderful beginning, will have
+ready a new system of cultivation, which will gradually, easily, and
+perfectly take the place of the old.
+
+Before leaving this wonderful subject of soil inoculation, a word
+about Professor Nobbe himself will surely be of interest. I visited his
+laboratory and saw his experiments.
+
+Tharandt, in Saxony, where Professor Nobbe has carried on his
+investigations for over thirty years, is a little village set
+picturesquely among the Saxon hills, about half an hour's ride by
+railroad from the city of Dresden. Here is located the Forest Academy
+of the Kingdom, with which Professor Nobbe is prominently connected,
+and here also is the agricultural experiment station of which he is
+director. He has been for more than forty years the editor of one of the
+most important scientific publications in Germany; he is chairman of the
+Imperial Society of Agricultural Station Directors, and he has been the
+recipient of many honours.
+
+We now come to a consideration of the other method--the fixing of
+nitrogen by machinery: a practical problem for the inventor.
+
+Every one has noticed the peculiar fresh smell of the air which follows
+a thunderstorm; the same pungent odour appears in the vicinity of a
+frictional electric machine when in operation. This smell has been
+attributed to ozone, but it is now thought that it may be due to oxides
+of nitrogen; in other words, the electric discharges of lightning or
+of the frictional machine have burned the air--that is, combined the
+nitrogen and oxygen of the air, forming oxides of nitrogen.
+
+[Illustration: Mr. Charles S. Bradley.]
+
+[Illustration: Mr. D. R. Lovejoy.]
+
+The fact that an electric spark will thus form an oxide of nitrogen has
+long been known, but it remained for two American inventors, Mr. Charles
+S. Bradley and Mr. D. R. Lovejoy, of Niagara Falls, N. Y., to work out a
+way by inventive genius for applying this scientific fact to a practical
+purpose, thereby originating a great new industry. I shall not attempt
+here to describe the long process of experimentation which led up to the
+success of their enterprise. Here was their raw material all around
+them in the air; their problem was to produce a large number of very hot
+electric flames in a confined space or box so that air could be passed
+through, rapidly burned, and converted into oxides of nitrogen (nitric
+oxides and peroxides), which could afterward be collected. They took the
+power supplied by the great turbine wheels at Niagara Falls and produced
+a current of 10,000 volts, a pressure far above anything ever used
+before for practical purposes in this country. This was led into a box
+or chamber of metal six feet high and three feet in diameter--the box
+having openings to admit the air. By means of a revolving cylinder
+the electric current is made to produce a rapid continuance of very
+brilliant arcs, exactly like the glaring white arc of the arc-lamp, only
+much more intense, a great deal hotter. The air driven in through
+and around these hot arcs is at once burned, combining the oxygen and
+nitrogen of which it is composed and producing the desired oxides of
+nitrogen. These are led along to a chamber where they are combined with
+water, producing nitric or nitrous acid; or if the gases are brought
+into contact with caustic potash, saltpetre is the result; if
+with caustic soda, nitrate of soda is the product--a very valuable
+fertiliser. And the inventors have been able to produce these various
+results at an expense so low that they can sell their output at a profit
+in competition with nitrates from other sources, thus giving the world a
+new source of fertiliser at a moderate price.
+
+[Illustration: Eight-Inch 10,000-Volt Arcs Burning the Air for Fixing
+Nitrogen.]
+
+[Illustration: Machine for Burning the Air with Electric Arcs so as to
+Produce Nitrates.]
+
+In this way the power of Niagara has become a factor in the food
+question, a defence against the ultimate hunger of the human race. And
+when we think of the hundreds of other great waterfalls to be utilised,
+and with our growing knowledge of electricity this utilisation will
+become steadily cheaper, easier, it would seem that the inventor had
+already found a way to help the farmer. Then there is the boundless
+power of the tides going to waste, of the direct rays of the sun
+utilised by some such sun motor as that described in another chapter
+of this book, which in time may be called to operate upon the boundless
+reservoir of nitrogen in the air for helping to produce the future food
+for the human race.
+
+
+[Illustration: MARCONI.
+
+The Sending of an Epoch-Making Message.
+
+_January 18, 1903, marks the beginning of a new era in telegraphic
+communication. On that day there was sent by Marconi himself from the
+wireless station at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., to the station
+at Poldhu, Cornwall, England, a distance of 3,000 miles, the
+message--destined soon to be historic--from the President of the United
+States to the King of England._]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MARCONI AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS
+
+_New Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy_
+
+
+No invention of modern times, perhaps, comes so near to being what we
+call a miracle as the new system of telegraphy without wires. The very
+thought of communicating across the hundreds of miles of blue ocean
+between Europe and America with no connection, no wires, nothing but
+air, sunshine, space, is almost inconceivably wonderful. A few years
+ago the mere suggestion of such a thing would have been set down as the
+wildest flight of imagination, unbelievable, perfectly impossible. And
+yet it has come to pass!
+
+Think for a moment of sitting here on the shore of America and quietly
+listening to words sent _through space_ across some 3,000 miles of ocean
+from the edge of Europe! A cable, marvellous as it is, maintains a real
+connection between speaker and hearer. We feel that it is a road
+along which our speech can travel; we can grasp its meaning. But in
+telegraphing without wires we have nothing but space, poles with pendent
+wires on one side of the broad, curving ocean, and similar poles and
+wires (or perhaps only a kite struggling in the air) on the other--and
+thought passing between!
+
+I have told in the first "Boys' Book of Inventions" of Guglielmo
+Marconi's early experiments. That was a chapter of uncertain beginnings,
+of great hopes, of prophecy. This is the sequel, a chapter of
+achievement and success. What was only a scientific and inventive
+novelty a few years ago has become a great practical enterprise, giving
+promise of changing the whole world of men, drawing nations more closely
+together, making us near neighbours to the English and the Germans and
+the French--in short, shrinking our earth. There may come a time when
+we will think no more of sending a Marconigram, or an etheragram, or
+whatever is to be the name of the message by wireless telegraphy, to an
+acquaintance in England than we now think of calling up our neighbour on
+the telephone.
+
+Every one will recall the astonishment that swept over the country in
+December, 1901, when there came the first meagre reports of Marconi's
+success in telegraphing across the Atlantic Ocean between England and
+Newfoundland. At first few would believe the reports, but when Thomas
+A. Edison, Graham Bell, and other great inventors and scientists had
+expressed their confidence in Marconi's achievement, the whole country,
+was ready to hail the young inventor with honours. And his successes
+since those December days have been so pronounced--for he had now
+sent messages both ways across the Atlantic and at much greater
+distances--have more than borne out the promise then made. Wireless
+telegrams can now be sent directly from the shore of Massachusetts
+to England, and ocean-going ships are being rapidly equipped with the
+Marconi apparatus so that they can keep in direct communication with
+both continents during every day of the voyage. On some of the great
+ships a little newspaper is published, giving the world's news as
+received from day to day.
+
+It was the good fortune of the writer to arrive in St. John's,
+Newfoundland, during Mr. Marconi's experiments in December, 1901, only
+a short time after the famous first message across the Atlantic had been
+received. Three months later it was also the writer's privilege to visit
+the Marconi station at Poldhu, in Cornwall, England, from which the
+message had been sent, Mr. Marconi being then planning his greater work
+of placing his invention on a practical basis so that his company could
+enter the field of commercial telegraphy. It was the writer's fortune to
+have many talks with Mr. Marconi, both in America and in England, to see
+him at his experiments, and to write some of the earliest accounts of
+his successes. The story here told is the result of these talks.
+
+Mr. Marconi kept his own counsel regarding his plans in coming to
+Newfoundland in December, 1901. He told nobody, except his assistants,
+that he was going to attempt the great feat of communicating across the
+Atlantic Ocean. Though feeling very certain of success, he knew that
+the world would not believe him, would perhaps only laugh at him for
+his great plans. The project was entirely too daring for public
+announcement. Something might happen, some accident to the apparatus,
+that would cause a delay; people would call this failure, and it would
+be more difficult another time to get any one to put confidence in the
+work. So Marconi very wisely held his peace, only announcing what he had
+done when success was assured.
+
+Mr. Marconi landed at St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 6, 1901,
+with his two assistants, Mr. Kemp and Mr. Paget.
+
+He set up his instruments in a low room of the old barracks on Signal
+Hill, which stands sentinel at the harbour mouth half a mile from the
+city of St. John's. So simple and easily arranged is the apparatus that
+in three days' time the inventor was prepared to begin his experiments.
+On Wednesday, the 11th, as a preliminary test of the wind velocity, he
+sent up one of his kites, a huge hexagonal affair of bamboo and silk
+nine feet high, built on the Baden-Powell model: the wind promptly
+snapped the wire and blew the kite out to sea. He then filled a 14-foot
+hydrogen balloon, and sent it upward through a thick fog bank. Hardly
+had it reached the limit of its tetherings, however, when the aerial
+wire on which he had depended for receiving his messages fell to the
+earth, the balloon broke away, and was never seen again. On Thursday,
+the 12th, a day destined to be important in the annals of invention,
+Marconi tried another kite, and though the weather was so blustery that
+it required the combined strength of the inventor and his assistants
+to manage the tetherings, they succeeded in holding the kite at an
+elevation of about 400 feet. Marconi was now prepared for the crucial
+test. Before leaving England he had given detailed instructions to
+his assistants for the transmission of a certain signal, the Morse
+telegraphic S, represented by three dots (...), at a fixed time each
+day, beginning as soon as they received word that everything at St.
+John's was in readiness. This signal was to be clicked out on the
+transmitting instruments near Poldhu, Cornwall, the southwestern tip of
+England, and radiated from a number of aerial wires pendent from
+masts 210 feet high. If the inventor could receive on his kite-wire in
+Newfoundland some of the electrical waves thus produced, he knew that he
+held the solution of the problem of transoceanic wireless telegraphy. He
+had cabled his assistants to begin sending the signals at three o'clock
+in the afternoon, English time, continuing until six o'clock; that is,
+from about 11.30 to 2.30 o'clock in St. John's.
+
+[Illustration: Preparing to Fly the Kite which Supported the Receiving
+Wire.
+
+_Marconi on the extreme left._]
+
+At noon on Thursday (December 12, 1901) Marconi sat waiting, a telephone
+receiver at his ear, in a room of the old barracks on Signal Hill.
+To him it must have been a moment of painful stress and expectation.
+Arranged on the table before him, all its parts within easy reach of
+his hand, was the delicate receiving instrument, the supreme product of
+years of the inventor's life, now to be submitted to a decisive test. A
+wire ran out through the window, thence to a pole, thence upward to the
+kite which could be seen swaying high overhead. It was a bluff, raw day;
+at the base of the cliff 300 feet below thundered a cold sea; oceanward
+through the mist rose dimly the rude outlines of Cape Spear, the
+easternmost reach of the North American Continent. Beyond that rolled
+the unbroken ocean, nearly 2,000 miles to the coast of the British
+Isles. Across the harbour the city of St. John's lay on its hillside
+wrapped in fog: no one had taken enough interest in the experiments
+to come up here through the snow to Signal Hill. Even the ubiquitous
+reporter was absent. In Cabot Tower, near at hand, the old signalman
+stood looking out to sea, watching for ships, and little dreaming of the
+mysterious messages coming that way from England. Standing on that bleak
+hill and gazing out over the waste of water to the eastward, one finds
+it difficult indeed to realise that this wonder could have become a
+reality. The faith of the inventor in his creation, in the kite-wire,
+and in the instruments which had grown under his hand, was unshaken.
+
+[Illustration: Mr. Marconi and his Assistants in Newfoundland: Mr. Kemp
+on the Left, Mr. Paget on the Right.
+
+_They are sitting on a balloon basket, with one of the Baden-Powell
+kites in the background._]
+
+"I believed from the first," he told me, "that I would be successful in
+getting signals across the Atlantic."
+
+Only two persons were present that Thursday noon in the room where the
+instruments were set up--Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp. Everything had
+been done that could be done. The receiving apparatus was of unusual
+sensitiveness, so that it would catch even the faintest evidence of
+the signals. A telephone receiver, which is no part of the ordinary
+instrument, had been supplied, so that the slightest clicking of the
+dots might be conveyed to the inventor's ear. For nearly half an hour
+not a sound broke the silence of the room. Then quite suddenly Mr. Kemp
+heard the sharp click of the tapper as it struck against the coherer;
+this, of course, was not the signal, yet it was an indication that
+something was coming. The inventor's face showed no evidence of
+excitement. Presently he said:
+
+"See if you can hear anything, Kemp."
+
+Mr. Kemp took the receiver, and a moment later, faintly and yet
+distinctly and unmistakably, came the three little clicks--the dots of
+the letter S, tapped out an instant before in England. At ten minutes
+past one, more signals came, and both Mr. Marconi and Mr. Kemp assured
+themselves again and again that there could be no mistake. During this
+time the kite gyrated so wildly in the air that the receiving wire was
+not maintained at the same height, as it should have been; but again, at
+twenty minutes after two, other repetitions of the signal were received.
+
+Thus the problem was solved. One of the great wonders of science had
+been wrought. But the inventor went down the hill toward the city, now
+bright with lights, feeling depressed and disheartened--the rebound from
+the stress of the preceding days. On the following afternoon, Friday, he
+succeeded in getting other repetitions of the signal from England, but
+on Saturday, though he made an effort, he was unable to hear anything.
+The signals were, of course, sent continuously, but the inventor was
+unable to obtain continuous results, owing, as he explains, to the
+fluctuations of the height of the kite as it was blown about by the
+wind, and to the extreme delicacy of his instruments, which required
+constant adjustment during the experiments.
+
+Even now that he had been successful, the inventor hesitated to make his
+achievement public, lest it seem too extraordinary for belief. Finally,
+after withholding the great news for two days, certainly an evidence
+of self-restraint, he gave out a statement to the press, and on Sunday
+morning the world knew and doubted; on Monday it knew more and believed.
+Many, like Mr. Edison, awaited the inventor's signed announcement
+before they would credit the news. Sir Cavendish Boyle, the Governor
+of Newfoundland, reported at once to King Edward; and the cable company
+which has exclusive rights in Newfoundland, alarmed at an achievement
+which threatened the very existence of its business, demanded that he
+desist from further experiments within its territory, truly an evidence
+of the belief of practical men in the future commercial importance
+of the invention. It is not a little significant of the increased
+willingness of the world, born of expanding knowledge, to accept a new
+scientific wonder, that Mr. Marconi's announcement should have been
+so eagerly and so generally believed, and that the popular imagination
+should have been so fired with its possibilities. One cannot but recall
+the struggle against doubt, prejudice, and disbelief in which the
+promoters of the first transatlantic cable were forced to engage. Even
+after the first cable was laid (in 1858), and messages had actually
+been transmitted, there were many who denied that it had ever been
+successfully operated, and would hardly be convinced even by the
+affidavits of those concerned in the work. But in the years since then,
+Edison, Bell, Roentgen, and many other famous inventors and scientists
+have taught the world to be chary of its disbelief. Outside of this
+general disposition to friendliness, however, Marconi on his own part
+had well earned the credit of the careful and conservative scientist;
+his previous successes made it the more easy to credit his new
+achievement. For, as an Englishman (Mr. Flood Page), in defending Mr.
+Marconi's announcement, has pointed out, the inventor has never made any
+statement in public until he has been absolutely certain of the fact;
+he has never had to withdraw any statement that he has made as to his
+progress in the past. And these facts unquestionably carried great
+weight in convincing Mr. Edison, Mr. Graham Bell, and others of
+equal note of the literal truth of his report. It was astonishing how
+overwhelmingly credit came from every quarter of the world, from high
+and low alike, from inventors, scientists, statesmen, royalty. Before
+Marconi left St. John's he was already in receipt of a large mail--the
+inevitable letters of those who would offer congratulations, give
+advice, or ask favours. He received offers to lecture, to write
+articles, to visit this, that, and the other place--and all within a
+week after the news of his success. The people of the "ancient colony"
+of Newfoundland, famed for their hospitality, crowned him with every
+honour in their power. I accompanied Mr. Marconi across the island on
+his way to Nova Scotia, and it seemed as if every fisher and farmer in
+that wild country had heard of him, for when the train stopped they
+came crowding to look in at the window. From the comments I heard, they
+wondered most at the inventor's youthful appearance. Though he was
+only twenty-seven years old, his experience as an inventor covered many
+years, for he began experimenting in wireless telegraphy before he
+was twenty. At twenty-two he came to London from his Italian home, and
+convinced the British Post-Office Department that he had an important
+idea; at twenty-three he was famous the world over.
+
+Following this epoch-making success Mr. Marconi returned to England,
+where he continued most vigorously the work of perfecting his invention,
+installing more powerful transmitters, devising new receivers, all the
+time with the intention of following up his Newfoundland experiments
+with the inauguration of a complete system of wireless transmission
+between America and Europe. In the latter part of the year 1902 he
+succeeded in opening regular communication between Nova Scotia and
+England, and January 18, 1903, marked another epoch in his work. On that
+day there was sent by Marconi himself from the wireless station at South
+Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., to the station at Poldhu, Cornwall, England,
+a distance of 3,000 miles, the message--destined to be historic--from
+the President of the United States to the King of England.
+
+It will be interesting to know something of the inventor himself. He
+is somewhat above medium height, and, though of a highly strung
+temperament, he is deliberate in his movements. Unlike the inventor of
+tradition, he dresses with scrupulous neatness, and, in spite of being
+a prodigious worker, he finds time to enjoy a limited amount of club
+and social life. The portrait published with this chapter, taken at St.
+John's a few days after the experiments, gives a very good idea of the
+inventor's face, though it cannot convey the peculiar lustre of his eyes
+when he is interested or excited--and perhaps it makes him look older
+than he really is. One of the first and strongest impressions that the
+man conveys is that of intense nervous activity and mental absorption;
+he has a way of pouncing upon a knotty question as if he could not
+wait to solve it. He talks little, is straightforward and unassuming,
+submitting good-naturedly, although with evident unwillingness, to being
+lionised. In his public addresses he has been clear and sensible; he
+has never written for any publication; nor has he engaged in scientific
+disputes, and even when violently attacked he has let his work prove his
+point. And he has accepted his success with calmness, almost unconcern;
+he certainly expected it. The only elation I saw him express was over
+the attack of the cable monopoly in Newfoundland, which he regarded as
+the greatest tribute that could have been paid his achievement. During
+all his life, opposition has been his keenest spur to greater effort.
+
+Though he was born and educated in Italy, his mother was of British
+birth, and he speaks English as perfectly as he does Italian. Indeed,
+his blue eyes, light hair, and fair complexion give him decidedly the
+appearance of an Englishman, so that a stranger meeting him for the
+first time would never suspect his Italian parentage. His parents are
+still living, spending part of their time on their estate in Italy and
+part of the time in London. One of the first messages conveying the news
+of his success at St. John's went to them. He embarked in experimental
+research because he loved it, and no amount of honour or money tempts
+him from the pursuit of the great things in electricity which he sees
+before him. Besides being an inventor, he is also a shrewd business man,
+with a clear appreciation of the value of his inventions and of their
+possibilities when generally introduced. What is more, he knows how to
+go about the task of introducing them.
+
+No sooner had Marconi announced the success of his Newfoundland
+experiments than critics began to raise objections. Might not the
+signals which he received have been sent from some passing ship fitted
+with wireless-telegraphy apparatus? Or, might they not have been the
+result of electrical disturbances in the atmosphere? Or, granting his
+ability to communicate across seas, how could he preserve the secrecy
+of his messages? If they were transmitted into space, why was it not
+possible for any one with a receiving instrument to take them? And was
+not his system of transmission too slow to make it useful, or was it not
+rendered uncertain by storms? And so on indefinitely. An acquaintance
+with some of the principles which Marconi considers fundamental, and on
+which his work has been based, will help to clear away these objections
+and give some conception of the real meaning and importance of the
+work at St. John's and of the plans for the future development of the
+inventor's system.
+
+In the first place, Mr. Marconi makes no claim to being the first to
+experiment along the lines which led to wireless telegraphy, or the
+first to signal for short distances without wires. He is prompt with
+his acknowledgment to other workers in his field, and to his assistants.
+Professor S. F. B. Morse, the inventor of telegraphy; Dr. Oliver Lodge
+and Sir William Preece, of England; Edison, Tesla, and Professors
+Trowbridge and Dolbear, of America, and others had experimented along
+these lines, but it remained for Marconi to perfect a system and put
+it into practical working order. He took the coherer of Branley and
+Calzecchi, the oscillator of Righi, he used the discoveries of Henry and
+Hertz, but his creation, like that of the poet who gathers the words of
+men in a perfect lyric, was none the less brilliant and original.
+
+[Illustration: _MARCONI TRANSATLANTIC STATION AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, CAPE
+COD, MASS._]
+
+In its bare outlines, Marconi's system of telegraphy consists in setting
+in motion, by means of his transmitter, certain electric waves which,
+passing through the ether, are received on a distant wire suspended from
+a kite or mast, and registered on his receiving apparatus. The ether
+is a mysterious, unseen, colourless, odourless, inconceivably rarefied
+something which is supposed to fill all space. It has been compared to a
+jelly in which the stars and planets are set like cherries. About all we
+know of it is that it has waves--that the jelly may be made to vibrate
+in various ways. Etheric vibrations of certain kinds give light; other
+kinds give heat; others electricity. Experiments have shown that if the
+ether vibrates at the inconceivable swiftness of 400 billions of waves
+a second we see the colour red, if twice as fast we see violet, if more
+slowly--perhaps 230 millions to the second, and less--we have the Hertz
+waves used by Marconi in his wireless-telegraphy experiments. Ether
+waves should not be confounded with air waves. Sound is a result of the
+vibration of the air; if we had ether and no air, we should still see
+light, feel heat, and have electrical phenomena, but no sound would ever
+come to our ears. Air is sluggish beside ether, and sound waves are
+very slow compared with ether waves. During a storm the ether brings the
+flash of the lightning before the air brings the sound of thunder, as
+every one knows.
+
+[Illustration: AT POOLE,
+
+_ENGLAND_.]
+
+Electricity is, indeed, only another name for certain vibrations in the
+ether. We say that electricity "flows" in a wire, but nothing really
+passes except an etheric wave, for the atoms composing the wire, as
+well as the air and the earth, and even the hardest substances, are all
+afloat in ether. Vibrations, therefore, started at one end of the wire
+travel to the other. Throw a stone into a quiet pond. Instantly waves
+are formed which spread out in every direction; the water does not move,
+except up and down, yet the wave passes onward indefinitely. Electric
+waves cannot be seen, but electricians have learned how to incite
+them, to a certain extent how to control them, and have devised cunning
+instruments which register their presence.
+
+Electrical waves have long been harnessed by the use of wires for
+sending communications; in other words, we have had wire telegraphy.
+But the ether exists outside of the wire as well as within; therefore,
+having the ether everywhere, it must be possible to produce waves in it
+which will pass anywhere, as well through mountains as over seas, and
+if these waves can be controlled they will evidently convey messages
+as easily and as certainly as the ether within wires. So argued Mr.
+Marconi. The difficulty lay in making an instrument which would produce
+a peculiar kind of wave, and in receiving and registering this wave in
+a second apparatus located at a distance from the first. It was,
+therefore, a practical mechanical problem which Marconi had to meet.
+Beginning with crude tin boxes set up on poles on the grounds of his
+father's estate in Italy, he finally devised an apparatus from which a
+current generated by a battery and passing in brilliant sparks between
+two brass balls was radiated from a wire suspended on a tall pole. By
+shutting off and turning on this peculiar current, by means of a device
+similar to the familiar telegrapher's key, the waves could be so divided
+as to represent dashes and dots, and spell out letters in the Morse
+alphabet. This was the transmitter. It was, indeed, simple enough to
+start these waves travelling through space, to jar the etheric jelly,
+so to speak; but it was far more difficult to devise an apparatus to
+receive and register them. For this purpose Marconi adopted a device
+invented by an Italian, Calzecchi, and improved by a Frenchman, M.
+Branley, called the coherer, and the very crux of the system, without
+which there could be no wireless telegraphy. This coherer, which he
+greatly improved, is merely a little tube of glass as big around as a
+lead-pencil, and perhaps two inches long. It is plugged at each end
+with silver, the plugs nearly meeting within the tube. The narrow space
+between them is filled with finely powdered fragments of nickel and
+silver, which possess the strange property of being alternately very
+good and very bad conductors of electrical waves. The waves which
+come from the transmitter, perhaps 2,000 miles away, are received on
+a suspended kite-wire, exactly similar to the wire used in the
+transmitter, but they are so weak that they could not of themselves
+operate an ordinary telegraph instrument. They do, however, possess
+strength enough to draw the little particles of silver and nickel in the
+coherer together in a continuous metal path. In other words, they make
+these particles "cohere," and the moment they cohere they become a good
+conductor for electricity, and a current from a battery near at hand
+rushes through, operates the Morse instrument, and causes it to print
+a dot or a dash; then a little tapper, actuated by the same current,
+strikes against the coherer, the particles of metal are jarred apart or
+"decohered," becoming instantly a poor conductor, and thus stopping the
+strong current from the home battery. Another wave comes through space,
+down the suspended kite-wire, into the coherer, there drawing the
+particles again together, and another dot or dash is printed. All these
+processes are continued rapidly, until a complete message is ticked
+out on the tape. Thus Mr. Kemp knew when he heard the tapper strike the
+coherer that a signal was coming, though he could not hear the click
+of the receiver itself. And this is in bare outline Mr. Marconi's
+invention--this is the combination of devices which has made wireless
+telegraphy possible, the invention on which he has taken out more than
+132 patents in every civilised country of the world. Of course his
+instruments contain much of intricate detail, of marvellously ingenious
+adaptation to the needs of the work, but these are interesting chiefly
+to expert technicians.
+
+[Illustration: NEARER VIEW OF
+
+_SOUTH FORELAND STATION_.]
+
+[Illustration: ALUM BAY STATION
+
+_ISLE OF WIGHT_.]
+
+In his actual transoceanic experiments of December, 1901, Mr. Marconi's
+transmitting station in England was fitted with twenty masts 210 feet
+high, each with its suspended wire, though not all of them were used. A
+current of electricity sufficient to operate some 300 incandescent lamps
+was used, the resulting spark being so brilliant that one could not have
+looked at it with the unshaded eye. The wave which was thus generated
+had a length of about a fifth of a mile, and the rate of vibration was
+about 800,000 to the second. Following the analogy of the stone cast in
+the pond with the ripples circling outward, these waves spread from the
+suspended wires in England in every direction, not only westward toward
+the cliff where Marconi was flying his kite, but eastward, northward,
+and southward, so that if some of Mr. Marconi's assistants had been
+flying kites, say on the shore of Africa, or South America, or in St.
+Petersburg, they might possibly, with a corresponding receiver,
+have heard the identical signals at the same instant. In his early
+experiments Marconi believed that great distances could not be obtained
+without very high masts and long, suspended wires, the greater the
+distance the taller the mast, on the theory that the waves were hindered
+by the curvature of the earth; but his later theory, substantiated by
+his Newfoundland experiments, is that the waves somehow follow around
+the earth, conforming to its curve, and the next station he establishes
+in America will not be set high on a cliff, as at St. John's, but down
+close to the water on level land. His Newfoundland experiments have
+also convinced him that one of the secrets of successful long-distance
+transmission is the use of a more powerful current in his transmitter,
+and this he will test in his next trials between the continents.
+
+And now we come to the most important part of Mr. Marconi's work, the
+part least known even to science, and the field of almost illimitable
+future development. This is the system of "tuning," as the inventor
+calls it, the construction of a certain receiver so that it will respond
+only to the message sent by a certain transmitter. When Marconi's
+discoveries were first announced in 1896, there existed no method
+of tuning, though the inventor had its necessity clearly in mind.
+Accordingly the public inquired, "How are you going to keep your
+messages secret? Supposing a warship wishes to communicate with another
+of the fleet, what is to prevent the enemy from reading your message?
+How are private business despatches to be secured against publicity?"
+Here, indeed, was a problem. Without secrecy no system of wireless
+telegraphy could ever reach great commercial importance, or compete
+with the present cable communication. The inventor first tried using
+a parabolic copper reflector, by means of which he could radiate the
+electric waves exactly as light--which, it will be borne in mind,
+is only another kind of etheric wave--is reflected by a mirror. This
+reflector could be faced in any desired direction, and only a receiver
+located in that direction would respond to the message. But there were
+grave objections to the reflector; an enemy might still creep in between
+the sending and receiving stations, and, moreover, it was found that
+the curvature of the earth interfered with the transmission of reflected
+messages, thereby limiting their usefulness to short distances.
+
+[Illustration: MARCONI ROOM
+
+_SS PHILADELPHIA_.]
+
+In passing, however, it may be interesting to note one extraordinary use
+for this reflecting system which the inventor now has in mind. This
+is in connection with lighthouse work. Ships are to be provided with
+reflecting instruments which in dense fog or storms can be used exactly
+as a searchlight is now employed on a dark night to discover the
+location of the lighthouses or lightships. For instance, the lighthouse,
+say, on some rocky point on the New England coast would continually
+radiate a warning from its suspended wire. These waves pass as readily
+through fog and darkness and storm as in daylight. A ship out at sea,
+hidden in fog, has lost its bearings; the sound of the warning horn,
+if warning there is, seems to come first from one direction, then from
+another, as sounds do in a fog, luring the ship to destruction. If now
+the mariner is provided with a wireless reflector, this instrument can
+be slowly turned until it receives the lighthouse warning, the
+captain thus learning his exact location; if in distress, he can even
+communicate with the lighthouse. Think also what an advantage such an
+equipment would be to vessels entering a dangerous harbour in thick
+weather. This is one of the developments of the near future.
+
+The reflector system being impracticable for long-distance work, Mr.
+Marconi experimented with tuning. He so constructed a receiver that it
+responds only to a certain transmitter. That is, if the transmitter is
+radiating 800,000 vibrations a second, the corresponding receiver will
+take only 800,000 vibrations. In exactly the same way a familiar tuning
+fork will respond only to another tuning fork having exactly the same
+"tune," or number of vibrations per second. And Mr. Marconi has now
+succeeded in bringing this tuning system to some degree of perfection,
+though very much work yet remains to be done. For instance, in one
+of his English experiments, at Poole in England, he had two receivers
+connected with the same wire, and tuned to different transmitters
+located at St. Catherine's Point. Two messages were sent, one in English
+and one in French. Both were received at the same time on the same wire
+at Poole, but one receiver rolled off its message in English, the other
+in French, without the least interference. And so when critics suggested
+that the inventor may have been deceived at St. John's by messages
+transmitted from ocean liners, he was able to respond promptly:
+
+"Impossible. My instrument was tuned to receive only from my station in
+Cornwall."
+
+Indeed, the only wireless-telegraph apparatus that could possibly
+have been within hundreds of miles of Newfoundland would be one of the
+Marconi-fitted steamers, and the "call" of a steamer is not the letter
+"S," but "U."
+
+The importance of the new system of tuning can hardly be overestimated.
+By it all the ships of a fleet can be provided with instruments tuned
+alike, so that they may communicate freely with one another, and have no
+fear that the enemy will read the messages. The spy of the future must
+be an electrical expert who can slip in somehow and steal the secret
+of the enemy's tunes. Great telegraph companies will each have its own
+tuned instruments, to receive only its own messages, and there may be
+special tunes for each of the important governments of the world. Or
+perhaps (for the system can be operated very cheaply) the time will even
+come when the great banking and business houses, or even families and
+friends, will each have its own wireless system, with its own secret
+tune. Having variations of millions of different vibrations, there will
+be no lack of tunes. For instance, the British navy may be tuned to
+receive only messages of 700,000 vibrations to the second, the German
+navy 1,500,000, the United States Government 1,000,000, and so on
+indefinitely.
+
+[Illustration: _TRANSATLANTIC HIGH POWER MARCONI STATION AT GLACE BAY,
+NOVA SCOTIA_]
+
+Tuning also makes multiplex wireless telegraphy a possibility; that
+is, many messages may be sent or received on the same suspended wire.
+Supposing, for instance, the operator was sending a hurry press despatch
+to a newspaper. He has two transmitters, tuned differently, connected
+with his wire. He cuts the despatch in two, sends the first half on one
+transmitter, and the second on the other, thereby reducing by half the
+time of transmission.
+
+A sort of impression prevails that wireless telegraphy is still largely
+in the uncertain experimental stage; but, as a matter of fact, it has
+long since passed from the laboratory to a wide commercial use. Its
+development since Mr. Marconi's first paper was read, in 1896, and
+especially since the first message was sent from England to France
+across the Channel in March, 1899, has been astonishingly rapid. Most
+of the ships of the great navies of Europe and all the important ocean
+liners are now fitted with the "wireless" instruments. The system has
+been recently adopted by the Lloyds of England, the greatest of shipping
+exchanges. It is being used on many lightships, and the New York
+_Herald_ receives daily reports from vessels at sea, communicated from
+a ship station off Nantucket. Were there space to be spared, many
+incidents might be told showing in what curious and wonderful ways the
+use of the "wireless" instruments has saved life and property, to say
+nothing of facilitating business.
+
+And it cannot now be long before a regular telegraph business will be
+conducted between Massachusetts and England, through the new stations.
+Mr. Marconi informed me that he would be able to build and equip
+stations on both sides of the Atlantic for less than $150,000, the
+subsequent charge for maintenance being very small. A cable across the
+Atlantic costs between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000, and it is a constant
+source of expenditure for repairs. The inventor will be able to transmit
+with single instruments about twenty words a minute, and at a cost
+ridiculously small compared with the present cable tolls. He said in
+a speech delivered at a dinner given him by the Governor at St. John's
+that messages which now go by cable at twenty-five cents a word might
+be sent profitably at a cent a word or less, which is even much cheaper
+than the very cheapest present rates in America for messages by land
+wires. It is estimated that about $400,000,000 is invested in cable
+systems in various parts of the world. If Marconi succeeds as he hopes
+to succeed, much of the vast network of wires at the bottom of
+the world's oceans, represented by this investment, will lose its
+usefulness. It is now the inventor's purpose to push the work of
+installation between the continents as rapidly as possible, and no
+one need be surprised if the year 1902 sees his system in practical
+operation. Along with this transatlantic work he intends to extend his
+system of transmission between ships at sea and the ports on land, with
+a view to enabling the shore stations to maintain constant communication
+with vessels all the way across the Atlantic. If he succeeds in doing
+this, there will at last be no escape for the weary from the daily news
+of the world, so long one of the advantages of an ocean voyage. For
+every morning each ship, though in mid-ocean, will get its bulletin
+of news, the ship's printing-press will strike it off, and it will be
+served hot with the coffee. Yet think what such a system will mean to
+ships in distress, and how often it will relieve the anxiety of friends
+awaiting the delayed voyager.
+
+Mr. Marconi's faith in his invention is boundless. He told me that
+one of the projects which he hoped soon to attempt was to communicate
+between England and New Zealand. If the electric waves follow the
+curvature of the earth, as the Newfoundland experiments indicate, he
+sees no reason why he should not send signals 6,000 or 10,000 miles as
+easily as 2,000.
+
+Then there is the whole question of the use of wireless telegraphy on
+land, a subject hardly studied, though messages have already been sent
+upward of sixty miles overland. The new system will certainly prove an
+important adjunct on land in war-time, for it will enable generals
+to signal, as they have done in South Africa, over comparatively
+long distances in fog and storm, and over stretches where it might be
+impossible for the telegraph corps to string wires or for couriers to
+pass on account of the presence of the enemy.
+
+
+[Illustration: Work on the Smith Point Lighthouse Stopped by a Violent
+Storm.
+
+_Just after the cylinder had been set in place, and while the workmen
+were hurrying to stow sufficient ballast to secure it against a heavy
+sea, a storm forced the attending steamer to draw away. One of the
+barges was almost overturned, and a lifeboat was driven against the
+cylinder and crushed to pieces._]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SEA-BUILDERS
+
+_The Story of Lighthouse Building--Stone-tower Lighthouses, Iron Pile
+Lighthouses, and Steel Cylinder Lighthouses_
+
+
+A sturdy English oak furnished the model for the first of the great
+modern lighthouses. A little more than one hundred and forty years ago
+John Smeaton, maker of odd and intricate philosophical instruments and
+dabbler in mechanical engineering, was called upon to place a light upon
+the bold and dangerous reefs of Eddystone, near Plymouth, England.
+John Smeaton never had built a lighthouse; but he was a man of great
+ingenuity and courage, and he knew the kind of lighthouse _not_ to
+build; for twice before the rocks of Eddystone had been marked, and
+twice the mighty waves of the Atlantic had bowled over the work of the
+builders as easily as they would have overturned a skiff. Winstanley,
+he of song and story, designed the first of these structures, and he and
+all his keepers lost their lives when the light went down; the other,
+the work of John Rudyerd, was burned to the water's edge, and one of the
+keepers, strangely enough, died from the effects of melting lead which
+fell from the roof and entered his open mouth as he gazed upward.
+Both of these lighthouses were of wood, and both were ornamented with
+balconies and bay-windows, which furnished ready holds for the rough
+handling of the wind.
+
+[Illustration: Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell Rock
+Lighthouse, and Author of Important Inventions and Improvements in the
+System of Sea Lighting.
+
+_From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of Bell Rock Lighthouse._]
+
+[Illustration: The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast of
+Scotland.
+
+_From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by
+Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Inchcape
+Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee, Scotland, in 1807-1810._]
+
+John Smeaton walked in the woods and thought of all these problems. He
+tells quaintly in his memoirs how he observed the strength with which an
+oak-tree bore its great weight of leaves and branches; and when he built
+his lighthouse, it was wide and flaring at the base, like the oak, and
+deeply rooted into the sea-rock with wedges of wood and iron. The
+waist was tapering and cylindrical, bearing the weight of the keeper's
+quarters and the lantern as firmly and jauntily as the oak bears its
+branches. Moreover, he built of stone, to avoid the possibility of fire,
+and he dovetailed each stone into its neighbour, so that the whole
+tower would face the wind and the waves as if it were one solid mass
+of granite. For years Smeaton's Eddystone blinked a friendly warning to
+English mariners, serving its purpose perfectly, until the Brothers of
+Trinity saw fit to build a larger tower in its place.
+
+In England the famous lighthouses of Bell Rock, built by Robert
+Stevenson, Skerryvore, and Wolf Rock are all stone towers; and in
+our own country, Minot's Ledge, off Boston Harbour, more difficult of
+construction than any of them, Spectacle Reef light in Lake Huron, and
+Stannard Rock light in Lake Superior are good examples of Smeaton's
+method of building.
+
+[Illustration: The Present Lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, near the
+Entrance of Massachusetts Bay, Fifteen Miles Southeast of Boston.
+
+"_Rising sheer out of the sea, like a huge stone cannon, mouth
+upward._"--Longfellow.]
+
+The mighty stone tower still remains for many purposes the most
+effective method of lighting the pathways of the sea, but it is both
+exceedingly difficult to build, and it is very expensive. Within
+comparatively recent years busy inventors have thought out several new
+plans for lighthouses, which are quite as wonderful and important in
+their way as wireless telegraphy and the telephone are in the realm of
+electricity.
+
+[Illustration: The Lighthouse on Stannard Rock, Lake Superior.
+
+_This is a stone-tower lighthouse, similar in construction to the one
+built with such difficulty on Spectacle Reef, Lake Huron._]
+
+One of these inventions is the iron-pile or screw-pile lighthouse, and
+the other is the iron cylinder lighthouse. I will tell the story of each
+of them separately.
+
+The skeleton-built iron-pile lighthouse bears much the same relation
+to the heavy stone tower lighthouse that a willow twig bears to a great
+oak. The latter meets the fury of wind and wave with stern resistance,
+opposing force to force; the former conquers its difficulties by
+avoiding them.
+
+A completed screw-pile lighthouse has the odd appearance of a huge, ugly
+spider standing knee-deep in the sea. Its squat body is the home of
+the keeper, with a single bright eye of light at the top, and its long
+spindly legs are the iron piles on which the structure rests. Thirty
+years ago lighthouse builders were much pleased with the ease and
+apparent durability of the pile light. An Englishman named Mitchell
+had invented an iron pile having at the end a screw not unlike a large
+auger. By boring a number of these piles deep into the sand of the
+sea-bottom, and using them as the foundation for a small but
+durable iron building, he was enabled to construct a lighthouse in a
+considerable depth of water at small expense. Later builders have used
+ordinary iron piles, which are driven into the sand with heavy sledges.
+Waves and tides pass readily through the open-work of the foundation,
+the legs of the spider, without disturbing the building overhead.
+For Southern waters, where there is no danger of moving ice-packs,
+lighthouses of this type have been found very useful, although the
+action of the salt water on the iron piling necessitates frequent
+repairs. More than eighty lights of this description dot the shoals of
+Florida and adjoining States. Some of the oldest ones still remain in
+use in the North, notably the one on Brandywine shoal in Delaware Bay;
+but it has been found necessary to surround them with strongly built
+ice-breakers.
+
+Two magnificent iron-pile lights are found on Fowey Rocks and American
+Shoals, off the coast of Florida, the first of which was built with so
+much difficulty that its story is most interesting.
+
+[Illustration: The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida.]
+
+Fowey Reef lies five miles from the low coral island of Soldier Key.
+Northern storms, sweeping down the Atlantic, brush in wild breakers over
+the reef and out upon the little key, often burying it entirely under a
+torrent of water. Even in calm weather the sea is rarely quiet enough to
+make it safe for a vessel of any size to approach the reef. The builders
+erected a stout elevated wharf and store-house on the key, and brought
+their men and tools to await the opportunity to dart out when the sea
+was at rest and begin the work of marking the reef. Before shipment,
+the lighthouse, which was built in the North, was set up, complete from
+foundation to pinnacle, and thoroughly tested.
+
+At length the workmen were able to remain on the reef long enough to
+build a strong working platform twelve feet above the surface of the
+water, and set on iron-shod mangrove piles. Having established this base
+of operations in the enemy's domain, a heavy iron disk was lowered to
+the reef, and the first pile was driven through the hole at its centre.
+Elaborate tests were made after each blow of the sledge, and the
+slightest deviation from the vertical was promptly rectified with block
+and tackle. In two months' time nine piles were driven ten feet into the
+coral rock, the workmen toiling long hours under a blistering sun. When
+the time came to erect the superstructure, the sea suddenly awakened and
+storm followed storm, so that for weeks together no one dared venture
+out to the reef. The men rusted and grumbled on the narrow docks of the
+key, and work was finally suspended for an entire winter. At the very
+first attempt to make a landing in the spring, a tornado drove the
+vessels far out of their course. But a crew was finally placed on the
+working platform, with enough food to last them several weeks, and there
+they stayed, suspended between the sea and the sky, until the structure
+was complete. This lighthouse cost $175,000.
+
+The famous Bug Light of Boston and Thimble Light of Hampton Roads, Va.,
+are both good examples of the iron-pile lighthouse.
+
+Now we come to a consideration of iron cylinder lighthouses, which are
+even more wonderful, perhaps, than the screw-piles, and in constructing
+them the sea-builder touches the pinnacle of his art.
+
+Imagine a sandy shoal marked only by a white-fringed breaker. The water
+rushes over it in swift and constantly varying currents, and if there
+is a capful of wind anywhere on the sea, it becomes an instant menace
+to the mariner. The shore may be ten or twenty miles away, so far that a
+land-light would only lure the seaman into peril, instead of guiding
+him safely on his way. A lightship is always uncertain; the first great
+storm may drive it from its moorings and leave the coast unprotected
+when protection is most necessary. Upon such a shoal, often covered from
+ten to twenty feet with water, the builder is called upon to construct a
+lighthouse, laying his foundation in shifting sand, and placing upon it
+a building strong enough to withstand any storm or the crushing weight
+of wrecks or ice-packs.
+
+It was less than twenty years ago that sea-builders first ventured to
+grapple with the difficulties presented by these off-shore shoals. In
+1881 Germany built the first iron cylinder lighthouse at Rothersand,
+near the mouth of the Weser River, and three years later the Lighthouse
+Establishment of the United States planted a similar tower on
+Fourteen-Foot Banks, over three miles from the shores of Delaware Bay,
+in twenty feet of water. Since then many hitherto dangerous shoals have
+been marked by new lighthouses of this type.
+
+[Illustration: Fourteen-Foot Bank Light Station, Delaware Bay, Del.]
+
+When a builder begins a stone tower light on some lonely sea-rock, he
+says to the sea, "Do your worst. I'm going to stick right here until
+this light is built, if it takes a hundred years." And his men are
+always on hand in fair weather or foul, dropping one stone to-day and
+another to-morrow, and succeeding by virtue of steady grit and patience.
+The builder of the iron cylinder light pursues an exactly opposite
+course. His warfare is more spirited, more modern. He stakes his whole
+success on a single desperate throw. If he fails, he loses everything:
+if he wins, he may throw again. His lighthouse is built, from foundation
+caisson to lantern, a hundred or a thousand miles away from the reef
+where it is finally to rest. It is simply an enormous cast-iron tube
+made in sections or courses, each about six feet high, not unlike the
+standpipe of a village water-works. The builder must set up this tube on
+the shoal, sink it deep into the sand bottom, and fill it with rocks
+and concrete mortar, so that it will not tip over. At first such a
+feat would seem absolutely impossible; but the sea-builder has his own
+methods of fighting. With all the material necessary to his work, he
+creeps up on the shoal and lies quietly in some secluded harbour until
+the sea is calmly at rest, suspecting no attack. Then he darts out with
+his whole fleet, plants his foundation, and before the waves and the
+wind wake up he has established his outworks on the shoal. The story of
+the construction of one of these lighthouses will give a good idea of
+the terrible difficulties which their builders must overcome.
+
+Not long ago W. H. Flaherty, of New York, built such a lighthouse at
+Smith's Point, in Chesapeake Bay. At the mouth of the Potomac River the
+opposing tides and currents have built up shoals of sand extending eight
+or ten miles out into the bay. Here the waves, sweeping in from the open
+Atlantic, sometimes drown the side-lights of the big Boston steamers.
+The point has a grim story of wrecks and loss of life; in 1897 alone,
+four sea-craft were driven in and swamped on the shoals. The Lighthouse
+Establishment planned to set up the light just at the edge of the
+channel, and 120 miles south of Baltimore.
+
+[Illustration: The Great Beds Light Station, Raritan Bay, N. J.
+
+_A specimen of iron cylinder construction._]
+
+Eighty thousand dollars was appropriated for doing the work. In August,
+1896, the contractors formally agreed to build the lighthouse for
+$56,000, and, more than that, to have the lantern burning within a
+single year.
+
+By the last of September a huge, unwieldy foundation caisson was framing
+in a Baltimore shipyard. This caisson was a bottomless wooden box, 32
+feet square and 12 feet high, with the top nearly as thick as the height
+of a man, so that it would easily sustain the weight of the great iron
+cylinder soon to be placed upon it. It was lined and caulked, painted
+inside and out to make it air-tight and water-tight, and then dragged
+out into the bay, together with half an acre of mud and dock timbers.
+Here the workmen crowned it with the first two courses of the iron
+cylinder--a collar 30 feet in diameter and about 12 feet high. Inside of
+this a second cylinder, a steel air-shaft, five feet in diameter, rose
+from a hole in the centre of the caisson, this providing a means of
+entrance and exit when the structure should reach the shoal.
+
+Upon the addition of this vast weight of iron and steel, the wooden
+caisson, although it weighed nearly a hundred tons, disappeared
+completely under the water, leaving in view only the great black rim of
+the iron cylinder and the top of the air-shaft.
+
+On April 7th of the next year the fleet was ready to start on its
+voyage of conquest. The whole country had contributed to the expedition.
+Cleveland, O., furnished the iron plates for the tower; Pittsburg sent
+steel and machinery; South Carolina supplied the enormous yellow-pine
+timbers for the caisson; Washington provided two great barge-loads of
+stone; and New York City contributed hundreds of tons of Portland cement
+and sand and gravel, it being cheaper to bring even such supplies from
+the North than to gather them on the shores of the bay.
+
+Everything necessary to the completion of the lighthouse and the
+maintenance of the eighty-eight men was loaded aboard ship. And quite a
+fleet it made as it lay out on the bay in the warm spring sunshine. The
+flagship was a big, double-deck steamer, 200 feet over all, once used in
+the coastwise trade. She was loaded close down to her white lines, and
+men lay over her rails in double rows. She led the fleet down the bay,
+and two tugs and seven barges followed in her wake like a flock of
+ducklings. The steamer towed the caisson at the end of a long hawser.
+
+In three days the fleet reached the lighthouse site. During all of this
+time the sea had been calm, with only occasional puffs of wind, and the
+builders planned, somewhat exultantly, to drop the caisson the moment
+they arrived.
+
+But before they were well in sight of the point, the sea awakened
+suddenly, as if conscious of the planned surprise. A storm blew up in
+the north, and at sunset on the tenth of April the waves were washing
+over the top of the iron cylinder and slapping it about like a boy's
+raft. A few tons of water inside the structure would sink it entirely,
+and the builder would lose months of work and thousands of dollars.
+
+From a rude platform on top of the cylinder two men were working at the
+pumps to keep the water out. When the edge of the great iron rim heaved
+up with the waves, they pumped and shouted; and when it went down, they
+strangled and clung for their lives.
+
+The builder saw the necessity of immediate assistance. Twelve men
+scrambled into a life-boat, and three waves later they were dashed
+against the rim of the cylinder. Here half of the number, clinging like
+cats to the iron plates, spread out a sail canvas and drew it over the
+windward half of the cylinder, while the other men pulled it down with
+their hands and teeth and lashed it firmly into place. In this way the
+cylinder shed most of the wash, although the larger waves still scuttled
+down within its iron sides. Half of the crew was now hurried down the
+rope-ladders inside the cylinder, where the water was nearly three feet
+deep and swashing about like a whirlpool. They all knew that one more
+than ordinarily large wave would send the whole structure to the bottom;
+but they dipped swiftly, and passed up the water without a word. It was
+nothing short of a battle for life. They must keep the water down, or
+drown like rats in a hole. They began work at sunset, and at sunrise the
+next morning, when the fury of the storm was somewhat abated, they were
+still at work, and the cylinder was saved.
+
+[Illustration: A Storm at the Tillamook Lighthouse, in the Pacific, one
+mile out from Tillamook Head, Oregon.]
+
+The swells were now too high to think of planting the caisson, and the
+fleet ran into the mouth of the Great Wicomico River to await a more
+favourable opportunity. Here the builders lay for a week. To keep the
+men busy some of them were employed in mixing concrete, adding another
+course of iron to the cylinder, and in other tasks of preparation.
+The crew was composed largely of Americans and Irishmen, with a few
+Norwegians, the ordinary Italian or Bohemian labourer not taking kindly
+to the risks and terrors of such an expedition. Their number included
+carpenters, masons, iron-workers, bricklayers, caisson-men, sailors, and
+a host of common shovellers. The pay varied from twenty to fifty cents
+an hour for time actually worked, and the builders furnished meals of
+unlimited ham, bread, and coffee.
+
+On April 17th, the weather being calmer, the fleet ventured out
+stealthily. A buoy marked the spot where the lighthouse was to stand.
+When the cylinder was exactly over the chosen site, the valves of two of
+the compartments into which it was divided were quickly opened, and
+the water poured in. The moment the lower edge of the caisson, borne
+downward by the weight of water, touched the shoal, the men began
+working with feverish haste. Large stones were rolled from the barges
+around the outside of the caisson to prevent the water from eating away
+the sand and tipping the structure over.
+
+In the meantime a crew of twenty men had taken their places in the
+compartments of the cylinder still unfilled with water. A chute from the
+steamer vomited a steady stream of dusty concrete down upon their heads.
+A pump drenched them with an unceasing cataract of salt water. In this
+terrible hole they wallowed and struggled, shovelling the concrete
+mortar into place and ramming it down. Every man on the expedition, even
+the cooks and the stokers, was called upon at this supreme moment
+to take part in the work. Unless the structure could be sufficiently
+ballasted while the water was calm, the first wave would brush it over
+and pound it to pieces on the shoals.
+
+[Illustration: Saving the Cylinder of the Lighthouse at Smith Point,
+Chesapeake Bay, from being Swamped in a High Sea.
+
+_When the builders were towing the unwieldy cylinder out to set it in
+position, the water became suddenly rough and began to fill it. Workmen,
+at the risk of their lives, boarded the cylinder, and by desperate
+labours succeeded in spreading sail canvas over it, and so saved a
+structure that had cost months of labour and thousands of dollars._]
+
+After nearly two hours of this exhausting labour the captain of the
+steamer suddenly shouted the command to cast away.
+
+The sky had turned black and the waves ran high. All of the cranes were
+whipped in, and up from the cylinder poured the shovellers, looking as
+if they had been freshly rolled in a mortar bed. There was a confused
+babel of voices and a wild flight for the steamer. In the midst of the
+excitement one of the barges snapped a hawser, and, being lightened of
+its load, it all but turned over in a trough of the sea. The men aboard
+her went down on their faces, clung fast, and shouted for help, and it
+was only with difficulty that they were rescued. One of the life-boats,
+venturing too near the iron cylinder, was crushed like an egg-shell, but
+a tug was ready to pick up the men who manned it.
+
+So terrified were the workmen by the dangers and difficulties of the
+task that twelve of them ran away that night without asking for their
+pay.
+
+On the following morning the builder was appalled to see that the
+cylinder was inclined more than four feet from the perpendicular. In
+spite of the stone piled around the caisson, the water had washed the
+sand from under one edge of it, and it had tipped part way over. Now was
+the pivotal point of the whole enterprise. A little lack of courage or
+skill, and the work was doomed.
+
+The waves still ran high, and the freshet currents from the Potomac
+River poured past the shoals at the rate of six or seven miles an hour.
+And yet one of the tugs ran out daringly, dragging a barge-load of
+stone. It was made fast, and although it pitched up and down so that
+every wave threatened to swamp it and every man aboard was seasick,
+they managed to throw off 200 tons more of stone around the base of the
+caisson on the side toward which it was inclined. In this way further
+tipping in that direction was prevented, and the action of the water on
+the sand under the opposite side soon righted the structure.
+
+Beginning on the morning of April 21st the entire crew worked steadily
+for forty-eight hours without sleeping or stopping for meals more than
+fifteen minutes at a time. When at last they were relieved, they came up
+out of the cylinder shouting and cheering because the foundation was at
+last secure.
+
+The structure was now about thirty feet high, and filled nearly to the
+top with concrete. The next step was to force it down 15-1/2 feet
+into the hard sand at the bottom of the bay, thus securing it for ever
+against the power of the waves and the tide. An air-lock, which is a
+strongly built steel chamber about the size of a hogshead, was placed
+on top of the air-shaft, the water in the big box-like caisson at the
+bottom of the cylinder was forced out with compressed air, and the men
+prepared to enter the caisson.
+
+No toil can compare in its severity and danger with that of a caisson
+worker. He is first sent into the air-lock, and the air-pressure is
+gradually increased around him until it equals that of the caisson
+below; then he may descend. New men often shout and beg pitifully to be
+liberated from the torture. Frequently the effect of the compressed air
+is such that they bleed at the ears and nose, and for a time their heads
+throb as if about to burst open.
+
+In a few minutes these pains pass away, the workers crawl down the
+long ladder of the air-shaft and begin to dig away the sand of the
+sea-bottom. It is heaped high around the bottom of a four-inch pipe
+which leads up the air-shaft and reaches out over the sea. A valve in
+the pipe is opened and the sand and stones are driven upward by
+the compressed air in the caisson and blown out into the water with
+tremendous force. As the sand is mined away, the great tower above it
+slowly sinks downward, while the subterranean toilers grow sallow-faced,
+yellow-eyed, become half deaf, and lose their appetites.
+
+When Smith's Point Light was within two feet of being deep enough the
+workmen had a strange and terrible adventure.
+
+Ten men were in the caisson at the time. They noticed that the candles
+stuck along the wall were burning a lambent green. Black streaks, that
+widened swiftly, formed along the white-painted walls. One man after
+another began staggering dizzily, with eyes blinded and a sharp burning
+in the throat. Orders were instantly given to ascend, and the crew, with
+the help of ropes, succeeded in escaping. All that night the men lay
+moaning and sleepless in their bunks. In the morning only a few of them
+could open their eyes, and all experienced the keenest torture in the
+presence of light. Bags were fitted over their heads, and they were led
+out to their meals.
+
+[Illustration: Great Waves Dashed Entirely Over Them, so that They had
+to Cling for Their Lives to the Air-Pipes.
+
+_In erecting the Smith Point lighthouse, after the cylinder was set
+up, it had to be forced down fifteen and a half feet into the sand. The
+lives of the men who did this, working in the caisson at the bottom of
+the sea, were absolutely in the hands of the men who managed the engine
+and the air-compressor at the surface; and twice these latter were
+entirely deluged by the sea, but still maintained steam and kept
+everything running as if no sea was playing over them._]
+
+That afternoon Major E. H. Ruffner, of Baltimore, the Government
+engineer for the district, appeared with two physicians. An examination
+of the caisson showed that the men had struck a vein of sulphuretted
+hydrogen gas.
+
+Here was a new difficulty--a difficulty never before encountered in
+lighthouse construction. For three days the force lay idle. There seemed
+no way of completing the foundation. On the fourth day, after another
+flooding of the caisson, Mr. Flaherty called for volunteers to go down
+the air-shaft, agreeing to accompany them himself--all this in the face
+of the spectacle of thirty-five men moaning in their bunks, with their
+eyes burning and blinded and their throats raw. And yet fourteen men
+stepped forward and offered to "see the work through."
+
+Upon reaching the bottom of the tower they found that the flow of gas
+was less rapid, and they worked with almost frantic energy, expecting
+every moment to feel the gas griping in their throats. In half an hour
+another shift came on, and before night the lighthouse was within an
+inch or two of its final resting-place.
+
+The last shift was headed by an old caisson-man named Griffin, who bore
+the record of having stood seventy-five pounds of air-pressure in the
+famous Long Island gas tunnel. Just as the men were ready to leave the
+caisson the gas suddenly burst up again with something of explosive
+violence. Instantly the workmen threw down their tools and made a dash
+for the air-shaft. Here a terrible struggle followed. Only one man could
+go up the ladder at a time, and they scrambled and fought, pulling down
+by main force every man who succeeded in reaching the rounds. Then one
+after another they dropped in the sand, unconscious.
+
+Griffin, remaining below, had signalled for a rope. When it came down,
+he groped for the nearest workman, fastened it around his body, and sent
+him aloft. Then he crawled around and pulled the unconscious workmen
+together under the air-shaft. One by one he sent them up. The last was a
+powerfully built Irishman named Howard. Griffin's eyes were blinded, and
+he was so dizzy that he reeled like a drunken man, but he managed to
+get the rope around Howard's body and start him up. At the eighteen-inch
+door of the lock the unconscious Irishman wedged fast, and those outside
+could not pull him through. Griffin climbed painfully up the thirty feet
+of ladder and pushed and pulled until Howard's limp body went through.
+Griffin tried to follow him, but his numbed fingers slipped on the steel
+rim, and he fell backward into the death-hole below. They dropped the
+rope again, but there was no response. One of the men called Griffin by
+name. The half-conscious caisson-man aroused himself and managed to tie
+the rope under his arms. Then he, too, was hoisted aloft, and when he
+was dragged from the caisson, more dead than alive, the half-blinded men
+on the steamer's deck set up a shout of applause--all the credit that he
+ever received.
+
+Two of the men prostrated by the gas were sent to a hospital in New
+York, where they were months in recovering. Another went insane. Griffin
+was blind for three weeks. Four other caisson-men came out of the work
+with the painful malady known as "bends," which attacks those who work
+long under high air-pressure. A victim of the "bends" cannot straighten
+his back, and often his legs and arms are cramped and contorted. These
+terrible results will give a good idea of the heroism required of the
+sea-builder.
+
+Having sunk the caisson deep enough the workmen filled it full of
+concrete and sealed the top of the air-shaft. Then they built the
+light-keeper's home, and the lantern was ready for lighting. Three
+days within the contract year the tower was formally turned over to the
+Government.
+
+And thus the builders, besides providing a warning to the hundreds of
+vessels that yearly pass up the bay, erected a lasting monument to their
+own skill, courage, and perseverance. As long as the shoal remains the
+light will stand. In the course of half a century, perhaps less, the
+sea-water will gnaw away the iron of the cylinder, but there will still
+remain the core of concrete, as hard and solid as the day on which it
+was planted.
+
+It is fitting that work which has drawn so largely upon the highest
+intellectual and moral endowments of the engineer and the builder
+should not serve the selfish interests of any one man, nor of any single
+corporation, nor even of the Government which provided the means, but
+that it should be a gift to the world at large. Other nations, even
+Great Britain, which has more at stake upon the seas than any other
+country, impose regular lighthouse taxes upon vessels entering their
+harbours; but the lights erected by the United States flash a free
+warning to any ship of any land.
+
+
+[Illustration: Peter Cooper Hewitt.
+
+_With his interrupter._]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE NEWEST ELECTRIC LIGHT
+
+_Peter Cooper Hewitt and His Three Great Inventions--The Mercury Arc
+Light--The New Electrical Converter--The Hewitt Interrupter_
+
+
+It is indeed a great moment when an inventor comes to the announcement
+of a new and epoch-making achievement. He has been working for years,
+perhaps, in his laboratory, struggling along unknown, unheard of, often
+poor, failing a hundred times for every achieved success, but finally,
+all in a moment, surprising the secret which nature has guarded so long
+and so faithfully. He has discovered a new principle that no one has
+known before, he has made a wonderful new machine--and it works! What
+he has done in his laboratory for himself now becomes of interest to all
+the world. He has a great message to give. His patience and perseverance
+through years of hard work have produced something that will make life
+easier and happier for millions of people, that will open great new
+avenues for human effort and human achievement, build up new fortunes;
+often, indeed, change the whole course of business affairs in the world,
+if not the very channels of human thought. Think what the steam-engine
+has done, and the telegraph, and the sewing-machine! All this wonder
+lies to-day in the brain of the inventor; to-morrow it is a part of the
+world's treasure.
+
+Such a moment came on an evening in January, 1902, when Peter Cooper
+Hewitt, of New York City--then wholly unknown to the greater world--made
+the announcement of an invention of such importance that Lord Kelvin,
+the greatest of living electricians, afterward said that of all the
+things he saw in America the work of Mr. Hewitt attracted him most.
+
+On that evening in January, 1902, a curious crowd was gathered about
+the entrance of the Engineers' Club in New York City. Over the doorway
+a narrow glass tube gleamed with a strange blue-green light of such
+intensity that print was easily readable across the street, and yet so
+softly radiant that one could look directly at it without the sensation
+of blinding discomfort which accompanies nearly all brilliant artificial
+lights. The hall within, where Mr. Hewitt was making the first public
+announcement of his discovery, was also illuminated by the wonderful new
+tubes. The light was different from anything ever seen before, grateful
+to the eyes, much like daylight, only giving the face a curious,
+pale-green, unearthly appearance. The cause of this phenomenon was
+soon evident; the tubes were seen to give forth all the rays except
+red--orange, yellow, green, blue, violet--so that under its illumination
+the room and the street without, the faces of the spectators, the
+clothing of the women lost all their shades of red; indeed, changing the
+very face of the world to a pale green-blue. It was a redless light. The
+extraordinary appearance of this lamp and its profound significance as a
+scientific discovery at once awakened a wide public interest, especially
+among electricians who best understood its importance. Here was an
+entirely new sort of electric light. The familiar incandescent lamp,
+the invention of Thomas A. Edison, though the best of all methods of
+illumination, is also the most expensive. Mr. Hewitt's lamp, though not
+yet adapted to all the purposes served by the Edison lamp, on account
+of its peculiar colour, produces eight times as much light with the same
+amount of power. It is also practically indestructible, there being no
+filament to burn out; and it requires no special wiring. By means of
+this invention electricity, instead of being the most costly means
+of illumination, becomes the cheapest--cheaper even than kerosene.
+No further explanation than this is necessary to show the enormous
+importance of this invention.
+
+Mr. Hewitt's announcement at once awakened the interest of the entire
+scientific world and made the inventor famous, and yet it was only the
+forerunner of two other inventions equally important. Once discover a
+master-key and it often unlocks many doors. Tracing out the principles
+involved in his new lamp, Mr. Hewitt invented:
+
+A new, cheap, and simple method of converting alternating electrical
+currents into direct currents.
+
+An electrical interrupter or valve, in many respects the most wonderful
+of the three inventions.
+
+Before entering upon an explanation of these discoveries, which,
+though seemingly difficult and technical, are really simple and easily
+understandable, it will be interesting to know something of Mr. Hewitt
+and his methods of work and the genesis of the inventions.
+
+Mr. Hewitt's achievements possess a peculiar interest for the people of
+this country. The inventor is an American of Americans. Born to wealth,
+the grandson of the famous philanthropist, Peter Cooper, the son of
+Abram S. Hewitt, one of the foremost citizens and statesmen of New
+York, Mr. Hewitt might have led a life of leisure and ease, but he
+has preferred to win his successes in the American way, by unflagging
+industry and perseverance, and has come to his new fortune also like
+the American, suddenly and brilliantly. As a people we like to see a man
+deserve his success! The same qualities which made Peter Cooper one
+of the first of American millionaires, and Abram S. Hewitt one of the
+foremost of the world's steel merchants, Mayor of New York, and one of
+its most trusted citizens, have placed Mr. Peter Cooper Hewitt among the
+greatest of American inventors and scientists. Indeed, Peter Cooper and
+Abram S. Hewitt were both inventors; that is, they had the imaginative
+inventive mind. Peter Cooper once said:
+
+"I was always planning and contriving, and was never satisfied unless
+I was doing something difficult--something that had never been done
+before, if possible."
+
+The grandfather built the first American locomotive; he was one of
+the most ardent supporters of Cyrus Field in the great project of an
+Atlantic cable, and he was for a score of years the president of a cable
+company. His was the curious, constructive mind. As a boy he built a
+washing machine to assist his overworked mother; later on he built the
+first lawnmower and invented a process for rolling iron, the first used
+in this country; he constructed a torpedo-boat to aid the Greeks in
+their revolt against Turkish tyranny in 1824. He dreamed of utilising
+the current of the East River for manufacturing power; he even
+experimented with flying machines, becoming so enthusiastic in this
+labour that he nearly lost the sight of an eye through an explosion
+which blew the apparatus to pieces.
+
+[Illustration: Watching a Test of the Hewitt Converter.
+
+_Lord Kelvin in the centre._]
+
+It will be seen, therefore, that the grandson comes naturally by his
+inclinations. It was his grandfather who gave him his first chest of
+tools and taught him to work with his hands, and he has always had
+a fondness for contriving new machines and of working out difficult
+scientific problems. Until the last few years, however, he has never
+devoted his whole time to the work which best pleased him. For years he
+was connected with his father's extensive business enterprise, an active
+member, in fact, of the firm of Cooper, Hewitt & Co., and he has always
+been prominent in the social life of New York, a member of no fewer than
+eight prominent clubs. But never for a moment in his career--he is now
+forty-two years old, though he looks scarcely thirty-five--has he ceased
+to be interested in science and mechanics. As a student in Stevens
+Institute, and later in Columbia College, he gave particular attention
+to electricity, physics, chemistry, and mechanics. Later, when he went
+into business, his inventive mind turned naturally to the improvement
+of manufacturing methods, with the result that his name appears in the
+Patent Records as the inventor of many useful devices--a vacuum pan,
+a glue clarifier, a glue cutter and other glue machinery. He worked
+at many sorts of trades with his own hands--machine-shop practice,
+blacksmithing, steam-fitting, carpentry, jewelry work, and other
+work-a-day employments. He was employed in a jeweller's shop, learning
+how to make rings and to set stones; he managed a steam launch; he
+was for eight years in his grandfather's glue factory, where he had
+practical problems in mechanics constantly brought to his attention. And
+he was able to combine all this hard practical work with a fair amount
+of shooting, golfing, and automobiling.
+
+Most of Mr. Hewitt's scientific work of recent years has been done after
+business hours--the long, slow, plodding toil of the experimenter. There
+is surely no royal road to success in invention, no matter how well a
+man may be equipped, no matter how favourably his means are fitted
+to his hands. Mr. Hewitt worked for seven years on the electrical
+investigations which resulted in his three great inventions; thousands
+of experiments were performed; thousands of failures paved the way for
+the first glimmer of success.
+
+His laboratory during most of these years was hidden away in the tall
+tower of Madison Square Garden, overlooking Madison Square, with the
+roar of Broadway and Twenty-third Street coming up from the distance.
+Here he has worked, gradually expanding the scope of his experiments,
+increasing his force of assistants, until he now has an office and two
+workshops in Madison Square Garden and is building a more extensive
+laboratory elsewhere. Replying to the remark that he was fortunate in
+having the means to carry forward his experiments in his own way, he
+said:
+
+"The fact is quite the contrary. I have had to make my laboratory pay as
+I went along."
+
+Mr. Hewitt chose his problem deliberately, and he chose one of the most
+difficult in all the range of electrical science, but one which, if
+solved, promised the most flattering rewards.
+
+"The essence of modern invention," he said, "is the saving of waste, the
+increase of efficiency in the various mechanical appliances."
+
+This being so, he chose the most wasteful, the least efficient of all
+widely used electrical devices--the incandescent lamp. Of all the
+power used in producing the glowing filament in the Edison bulb, about
+ninety-seven per cent. is absolutely wasted, only three per cent.
+appearing in light. This three per cent. efficiency of the incandescent
+lamp compares very unfavourably, indeed, with the forty per cent.
+efficiency of the gasoline engine, the twenty-two per cent. efficiency
+of the marine engine, and the ninety per cent. efficiency of the dynamo.
+
+[Illustration: The Hewitt Mercury Vapour Light.
+
+_The circular piece just above the switch button is one form of
+"boosting coil" which operates for a fraction of a second when the
+current is first turned on. The tube shown here is about an inch in
+diameter and several feet long. Various shapes may be used. Unless
+broken, the tubes never need renewal._]
+
+Mr. Hewitt first stated his problem very accurately. The waste of power
+in the incandescent lamp is known to be due largely to the conversion
+of a considerable part of the electricity used into useless heat. An
+electric-lamp bulb feels hot to the hand. It was therefore necessary
+to produce a _cool light_; that is, a light in which the energy was
+converted wholly or largely into light rays and not into heat rays.
+This, indeed, has long been one of the chief goals of ambition among
+inventors. Mr. Hewitt turned his attention to the gases. Why could not
+some incandescent gas be made to yield the much desired light without
+heat?
+
+This was the germ of the idea. Comparatively little was known of the
+action of electricity in passing through the various gases, though the
+problem involved had long been the subject of experiment, and Mr. Hewitt
+found himself at once in a maze of unsolved problems and difficulties.
+
+"I tried many different gases," he said, "and found that some of them
+gave good results--nitrogen, for instance--but many of them produced too
+much heat and presented other difficulties."
+
+Finally, he took up experiments with mercury confined in a tube from
+which the air had been exhausted. The mercury arc, as it is called,
+had been experimented with years before, had even been used as a light,
+although at the time he began his investigations Mr. Hewitt knew nothing
+of these earlier investigations. He used ordinary glass vacuum tubes
+with a little mercury in the bottom which he had reduced to a gas
+or vapour under the influence of heat or by a strong current of
+electricity. He found it a rocky experimental road; he has called
+invention "systematic guessing."
+
+"I had an equation with a large number of unknown quantities," he said.
+"About the only thing known for a certainty was the amount of current
+passing into the receptacle containing the gas, and its pressure. I had
+to assume values for these unknown quantities in every experiment, and
+you can understand what a great number of trials were necessary, using
+different combinations, before obtaining results. I presume thousands of
+experiments were made."
+
+Many other investigators had been on the very edge of the discovery.
+They had tried sending strong currents through a vacuum tube containing
+mercury vapour, but had found it impossible to control the resistance.
+One day, however, in running a current into the tube Mr. Hewitt suddenly
+recognised certain flashes; a curious phenomenon. Always it is the
+unexpected thing, the thing unaccounted for, that the mind of the
+inventor leaps upon. For there, perhaps, is the key he is seeking. Mr.
+Hewitt continued his experiments and found that the mercury vapour was
+conducting. He next discovered that _when once the high resistance of
+the cold mercury was overcome, a very much less powerful current found
+ready passage and produced a very brilliant light: the glow of the
+mercury vapour_. This, Mr. Hewitt says, was the crucial point, the
+genesis of his three inventions, for all of them are applications of the
+mercury arc.
+
+Thus, in short, he invented the new lamp. By the use of what is known
+to electricians as a "boosting coil," supplying for an instant a very
+powerful current, the initial resistance of the cold mercury in the tube
+is overcome, and then, the booster being automatically shut off,
+the current ordinarily used in incandescent lighting produces an
+illumination eight times as intense as the Edison bulb of the same
+candle-power. The mechanism is exceedingly simple and cheap; a button
+turns the light on or off; the remaining apparatus is not more complex
+than that of the ordinary incandescent light. The Hewitt lamp is best
+used in the form of a long horizontal tube suspended overhead in a room,
+the illumination filling all the space below with a radiance much like
+daylight, not glaring and sharp as with the Edison bulb. Mr. Hewitt has
+a large room hung with green material and thus illuminated, giving
+the visitor a very strange impression of a redless world. After a few
+moments spent here a glance out of the window shows a curiously red
+landscape, and red buildings, a red Madison Square, the red coming out
+more prominently by contrast with the blue-green of the light.
+
+"For many purposes," said Mr. Hewitt, "the light in its present form is
+already easily adaptable. For shopwork, draughting, reading, and other
+work, where the eye is called on for continued strain, the absence of
+red is an advantage, for I have found light without the red much less
+tiring to the eye. I use it in my own laboratories, and my men prefer it
+to ordinary daylight."
+
+In other respects, however, its colour is objectionable, and Mr.
+Hewitt has experimented with a view to obtaining the red rays, thereby
+producing a pure white light.
+
+"Why not put a red globe around your lamp?" is a common question put
+to the inventor. This is an apparently easy solution of the difficulty
+until one is reminded that red glass does not change light waves, but
+simply suppresses all the rays that are not red. Since there are no red
+rays in the Hewitt lamp, the effect of the red globe would be to cut off
+all the light.
+
+But Mr. Hewitt showed me a beautiful piece of pink silk, coloured with
+rhodimin, which, when thrown over the lamp, changes some of the orange
+rays into red, giving a better balanced illumination, although at some
+loss of brilliancy. Further experiments along this line are now in
+progress, investigations both with mercury vapour and with other gases.
+
+[Illustration: Testing a Hewitt Converter.
+
+_The row of incandescent lights is used, together with a voltmeter and
+an ammeter, to measure strength of current, resistance, and loss in
+converting._]
+
+Mr. Hewitt has found that the rays of his new lamp have a peculiar and
+stimulating effect on plant growth. A series of experiments, in which
+seeds of various plants were sown under exactly the same conditions, one
+set being exposed to daylight and one to the mercury gaslight, showed
+that the latter grew much more rapidly and luxuriantly. Without doubt,
+also, these new rays will have value in the curing of certain kinds of
+disease.
+
+Further experimentation with the mercury arc led to the other two
+inventions, the converter and the interrupter. And first of the
+converter:
+
+_Hewitt's Electrical Converter._--The converter is simplicity itself.
+Here are two kinds of electrical currents--the alternating and the
+direct. Science has found it much cheaper and easier to produce and
+transmit the alternating current than the direct current. Unfortunately,
+however, only the direct currents are used for such practical purposes
+as driving an electric car or automobile, or running an elevator, or
+operating machine tools or the presses in a printing-office, and they
+are preferable for electric lighting. The power of Niagara Falls is
+changed into an alternating current which can be sent at high pressure
+(high voltage) over the wires for long distances, but before it can be
+used it must, for some purposes, be _converted_ into a direct current.
+The apparatus now in use is cumbersome, expensive, and wasteful.
+
+Mr. Hewitt's new converter is a mere bulb of glass or of steel, which a
+man can hold in his hand. The inventor found that the mercury bulb, when
+connected with wires carrying an alternating current, had the curious
+and wonderful property of permitting the passage of the positive half of
+the alternating wave when the current has started and maintained in
+that direction, and of suppressing the other half; in other words, of
+changing an alternating current into a direct current. In this process
+there was a loss, the same for currents of all potentials, of only
+14 volts. A three-pound Hewitt converter will do the work of a
+seven-hundred-pound apparatus of the old type; it will cost dollars
+where the other costs hundreds; and it will save a large proportion
+of the electricity wasted in the old process. By this simple device,
+therefore, Mr. Hewitt has in a moment extended the entire range of
+electrical development. As alternating currents can be carried longer
+distances by using high pressure, and the pressure or voltage can be
+changed by the use of a simple transformer and then changed into a
+direct current by the converter at any convenient point along the line,
+therefore more waterfalls can be utilised, more of the power of coal can
+be utilised, more electricity saved after it is generated, rendering
+the operating of all industries requiring power so much cheaper.
+Every electric railroad, every lighting plant, every factory using
+electricity, is intimately concerned in Mr. Hewitt's device, for it will
+cheapen their power and thereby cheapen their products to you and to me.
+
+_Hewitt's Electrical Interrupter._--The third invention is in some
+respects the most wonderful of the three. Technically, it is called an
+electric interrupter or valve. "If a long list of present-day desiderata
+were drawn up," says the _Electrical World and Engineer_, "it would
+perhaps contain no item of more immediate importance than an interrupter
+which shall be ... inexpensive and simple of application." This is the
+view of science; and therefore this device is one upon which a great
+many inventors, including Mr. Marconi, have recently been working; and
+Mr. Hewitt has been fortunate in producing the much-needed successful
+apparatus.
+
+The chief demand for an interrupter has come from the scores of
+experimenters who are working with wireless telegraphy. In 1894 Mr.
+Marconi began communicating through space without wires, and it may be
+said that wireless telegraphy has ever since been the world's imminent
+invention. Who has not read with profound interest the news of Mr.
+Marconi's success, the gradual increases of his distances? Who has not
+sympathised with his effort to perfect his devices, to produce a tuning
+apparatus by means of which messages flying through space could be
+kept secret? And here at last has come the invention which science most
+needed to complete and vitalise Marconi's work. By means of Mr.
+Hewitt's interrupter, the simplicity of which is as astonishing as its
+efficiency, the whole problem has been suddenly and easily solved.
+
+Mr. Hewitt's new interrupter may, indeed, be called the enacting clause
+of wireless telegraphy. By its use the transmission of powerful and
+persistent electrical waves is reduced to scientific accuracy. The
+apparatus is not only cheap, light, and simple, but it is also a great
+saver of electrical power.
+
+The interrupter, also, is a simple device. As I have already shown, the
+mercury vapour opposes a high resistance to the passage of electricity
+until the current reaches a certain high potential, when it gives way
+suddenly, allowing a current of low potential to pass through. This
+property can be applied in breaking a high potential current, such as
+is used in wireless telegraphy, so that the waves set up are exactly the
+proper lengths, always accurate, always the same, for sending messages
+through space. By the present method an ordinary arc or spark gap--that
+is, a spark passing between two brass balls--is employed in sending
+messages across the Atlantic. Marconi uses a spark as large as a man's
+wrist, and the noise of its passage is so deafening that the operators
+are compelled to wear cotton in their ears, and often they must shield
+their eyes from the blinding brilliancy of the discharges. Moreover,
+this open-air arc is subject to variations, to great losses of current,
+the brass balls become eroded, and the accuracy of the transmission is
+much impaired. All this is obviated by the cheap, simple, noiseless,
+sparkless mercury bulb.
+
+"What I have done," said Mr. Hewitt, "is to perfect a device by means
+of which messages can be sent rapidly and without the loss of current
+occasioned by the spark gap. In wireless telegraphy the trouble has been
+that it was difficult to keep the sending and the receiving instruments
+attuned. By the use of my interrupter this can be accomplished."
+
+And the possibilities of the mercury tube--indeed, of incandescent gas
+tubes in general--have by no means been exhausted. A new door has been
+opened to investigators, and no one knows what science will find in the
+treasure-house--perhaps new and more wonderful inventions, perhaps the
+very secret of electricity itself. Mr. Hewitt is still busily engaged in
+experimenting along these lines, both in the realm of abstract science
+and in that of practical invention. He is too careful a scientist,
+however, to speak much of the future, but those who are most familiar
+with his methods of work predict that the three inventions he has
+already announced are only forerunners of many other discoveries.
+
+The chief pursuit of science and invention in this day of wonders is
+the electrical conquest of the world, the introduction of the electrical
+age. The electric motor is driving out the steam locomotive, the
+electric light is superseding gas and kerosene, the waterfall must soon
+take the place of coal. But certain great problems stand like solid
+walls in the way of development, part of them problems of science, part
+of mechanical efficiency. The battle of science is, indeed, not unlike
+real war, charging its way over one battlement after another, until
+the very citadel of final secret is captured. Mr. Hewitt with his
+three inventions has led the way over some of the most serious present
+barriers in the progress of technical electricity, enabling the whole
+industry, in a hundred different phases of its progress, to go forward.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note:
+
+Obvious punctuation errors have been silently repaired. The oe-ligatures
+have been replaced by "oe". All words printed in small capitals have
+been converted to uppercase characters.
+
+Inconsistencies, for example in hyphenation and spelling, have been
+retained.
+
+Page 182: "Burnburg" is actually called "Bernburg".]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Boys' Second Book of Inventions, by
+Ray Stannard Baker
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