Inventions in the Century

Tricycles having three wheels, propelled by the hands and steered with the feet, were also invented in the early part of the century.

The term Bicycle does not appear to have been used until about 1869.

Although such structures had been referred to in publications before, yet the modern bicycle appears to have been first practically constructed in Germany. In 1816 Baron von Drais of Manheim made a vehicle consisting of two wheels arranged one before the other, and connected by a bar, the forward wheel axled in a fork which was swiveled to the front end of the bar and had handles to guide the machine, with a seat on the bar midway between the two wheels, and arranged so that the driver should bestride the bar. But there was no support for the rider's feet, and the vehicle was propelled by thrusting his feet alternately against the ground. This machine was called the "Draisine" and undoubtedly was the progenitor of the modern bicycle. Denis Johnson patented in England in 1818 a similar vehicle which he named the "Pedestrian Curricle." Another style was called the "Dandy Horse." Another form was that of Gompertz in England in 1821, who contrived a segmental rack connected with a frame over the front wheel and engaging a pinion on the wheel axle. With some improvements added by others, the vehicle came into quite extensive and popular use in some of the cities in Europe and America. It was also named the "Dandy" and the "Hobby Horse." Treadles were subsequently applied, but after a time the machine fell into disuse and was apparently forgotten. In 1863, however, the idea was revived by a Frenchman, Michaux, who added the crank to the front wheel axle of the "Draisine" (also called the "célérifèré.") In 1866 Pierre Lallement of France, having adapted the idea of the crank and pedal movement and obtained a patent, went to America, where after two years of public indifference the machine suddenly sprung into favour. In 1869 a popular wave in its favour also spread over part of Europe, and all classes of people were riding it.

But the wheels had hard tires, the roads and many of the streets were not smooth, the vehicle got the name of the "bone-breaker" and its use ceased. During the few years following some new styles of frames were invented. Thus some very high wheels, with a small wheel in front, or one behind, wheels with levers in addition to the crank, etc., and then for a time the art rested again.

Some one then recalled the fact that McMillan, a Scotchman, about 1838-1841, had used two low wheels like the "Draisine" with a driving gear, and that Dalzell, also of Scotland, had in 1845 made a similar machine. Parts of these old machines were found and the wheel reconstructed. Then in the seventies the entire field was thrown open to women by the invention in England of the "drop frame," which removed completely the difficulty as to arrangement of the skirts and thus doubled the interest in and desire for a comfortable riding machine. But they were still, to a great degree, "bone-breakers."

Then J. B. Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon of Belfast, Ireland, in order to meet the complaints of his son that the wheel was too hard, thought of the pneumatic rubber tire, and applied it with great success. This was a very notable and original re-invention. A re-invention, because a man "born before his time" had invented and patented the pneumatic tire more than forty years before. It was not wanted then and everybody had forgotten it. This man was Robert William Thomson, a civil engineer of Adelphi, Middlesex county, England. In 1845 he obtained a patent in England, and shortly after in the United States. In both patents he describes how he proposed to make a tire for all kinds of vehicles consisting of a hollow rubber tube, with an inner mixed canvas and rubber lining, a tube and a screw cup by which to inflate it, and several ways for preventing punctures. To obviate the bad results of punctures he proposed also to make his tire in sectional compartments, so that if one compartment was punctured the others would still hold good. He also proposed to use vulcanised rubber, thus utilising the then very recent discovery of Goodyear of mixing sulphur with soft rubber, and to apply the same to the canvas lining.

And, now, when the last decade of the century had been reached, and after a century's hard work by the inventors, the present wonderful vehicle, known as the "safety bicycle," had obtained a successful and permanent foothold among the vehicles of mankind. Proper proportions, low wheels, chain-gearing, treadles, pedals and cranks, cushion and pneumatic tires, drop frames, steel spokes like a spider's web, ball-bearings for the crank and axle parts, a spring-supported cushioned seat which could be raised or lowered, adjustable handles, and the clearest-brained scientific mechanics to construct all parts from the best materials and with mathematical exactness – all this has been done. To these accomplishments have been added a great variety of tires to prevent wear and puncturing, among which are self-healing tires, having a lining of viscous or plastic rubber to close up automatically the air holes. Many ways of clamping the tire to the rim have been contrived. So have brakes of various descriptions, some consisting of disks on the driving shaft, brought into frictional contact by a touch of the toe on the pedal, as a substitute for those applied to the surface of the tire, known as "spoon brakes"; saddles, speed-gearings, men's machines in which by the removal of the upper bar the machine is converted into one for the use of women; the substitution of the direct action, consisting of beveled gearing for the sprocket chain, etc., etc.

The ideas of William Thomson as to pneumatic and cushioned tires are now, after a lapse of fifty years, generally adopted. Even sportsmen were glad to seize upon them, and wheels of sulkies, provided with the pneumatic tires, have enabled them to lower the record of trotting horses. Their use on many other vehicles has accomplished his objects, "of lessening the power required to draw carriages, rendering the motion easier, and diminishing the noise."

It is impossible to overlook the fact in connection with this subject that the processes and machinery especially invented to make the various parts of a bicycle are as wonderful as the wheel itself. Counting the spokes there are, it is estimated, more than 300 different parts in such a wheel. The best and latest inventions and discoveries in the making of metals, wood, rubber and leather have been drawn upon in supplying these useful carriers. And what a revolution they have produced in the making of good roads, the saving of time, the dispatch of business, and more than all else, in the increase of the pleasure, the health and the amusement of mankind!

It was quite natural that when the rubber cushion and pneumatic tires rounded the pleasure of easy and noiseless riding in vehicles that Motor vehicles should be revived and improved. So we have the Automobiles in great variety. Invention has been and is still being greatly exercised as to the best motive power, in the adaption of electric motors, oil and gasoline or vapour engines, springs and air pumps, in attempts to reduce the number of complicated parts, and to render less strenuous the mental and muscular strain of the operator.

Traction Engines.– The old road engines that antedated the locomotives are being revived, and new ideas springing from other arts are being incorporated in these useful machines to render them more available than in former generations. Many of the principles and features of motor vehicles, but on a heavier scale, are being introduced to adapt them to the drawing of far heavier loads. Late devices comprise a spring link between the power and the traction wheel to prevent too sudden a start, and permit a yielding motion; steering devices by which the power of the engine is used to steer the machine; and application of convenient and easily-worked brakes.

An example of a modern traction engine may be found attached to one or more heavy cars adapted for street work, and on which may be found apparatus for making the mixed materials of which the roadbed is to be constructed, and all of which is moved along as the road or street surface is completed. When these fine roads become the possession of a country light traction engines for passenger traffic will be found largely supplanting the horse and the steam railroad engines.

Brakes, railway and electric, have already been referred to in the proper chapters. In the latest system of railroading greater attention has been paid to the lives and limbs of those employed as workmen on the trains, especially to those of brakemen. And if corporations have been slow to adopt such merciful devices, legislatures have stepped in to help the matter. One great source of accidents in this respect has been due to the necessity of the brakemen entering between the cars while they are in motion to couple them by hand. This is now being abolished by automatic couplers, by which, when the locking means have been withdrawn from connection or thrown up, they will be so held until the cars meet again, when the locking parts on the respective cars will be automatically thrown and locked, as easily and on the same principle as the hand of one man may clasp the hand of another.

The comfort of passengers and the safety of freight have also been greatly increased by the invention of Buffers on railroad cars and trains to prevent sudden and violent concussion. Fluid pressure car buffers, in which a constant supply of fluid under pressure is provided by a pump or train pipe connected to the engine is one of a great variety.

Another notable improvement in this line is the splendid vestibule trains, in which the cars are connected to one another by enclosed passages and which at their meeting ends are provided with yieldingly supported door-like frames engaging one another by frictional contact, usually, whereby the shock and rocking of cars are prevented in starting and stopping, and their oscillation reduced to a minimum.

As collisions and accidents cannot always be prevented, car frames are now built in which the frames are trussed, and made of rolled steel plates, angles, and channels, whereby a car body of great resistance to telescoping or crushing is obtained.

CHAPTER XXIX.

SHIPS AND SHIP-BUILDING

"Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,Survey our empire, and behold our home."

"Ships are but boards," soliloquised the crafty Shylock, and were this still true, yet this present period has seen wonderful changes in construction.

The high castellated bows and sterns and long prows of The Great Harry, of the seventeenth century, and its successors in the eighteenth, with some moderation of cumbersome matter, gave way to lighter, speedier forms, first appearing in the quick-gliding Yankee clippers, during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Eminent naval architects have regarded the proportions of Noah's ark, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits broad and 30 cubits high, in which the length was six times the breadth, and the depth three-fifths of the breadth, as the best combination of the elements of strength, capacity and stability.

Even that most modern mercantile vessel known as the "whale-back" with its nearly flat bottom, vertical sides, arched top or deck, skegged or spoon-shaped at bow and stern, straight deck lines, the upper deck cabins and steering gear raised on hollow turrets, with machinery and cargo in the main hull, has not departed much from the safe rule of proportions of its ancient prototype.

But in other respects the ideas of Noah and of the Phœnicians, the best of ancient ship-builders, as well as the Northmen, the Dutch, the French, and the English, the best ship-builders of later centuries, were decidedly improved upon by the Americans, who, as above intimated, were revolutionizing the art and building the finest vessels in the early part of the century, and these rivalled in speed the steam vessels for some years after steamships were ploughing the rivers and the ocean.

Discarding the lofty decks fore and aft and ponderous topsides, the principal characteristics of the American "clippers" were their fine sharp lines, built long and low, broad of beam before the centre, sharp above the water, and deep aft. A typical vessel of this sort was the clipper ship Great Republic, built by Donald McKay of Boston during the first half of the century. She was 325 feet long, 53 feet wide, 37 feet deep, with a capacity of about 4000 tons. She had four masts, each provided with a lightning rod. A single suit of her sails consisted of 15,563 yards of canvas. Her keel rose for 60 feet forward, gradually curved into the arc of a circle as it blended with the stern. Vessels of her type ran seventeen and eighteen miles an hour at a time when steam vessels were making only twelve or fourteen miles an hour, the latter speed being one which it was predicted by naval engineers could not with safety be exceeded with ocean steamships.

These vessels directed the attention of ship-builders to two prominent features, the shape of the bow and the length of the vessel. For the old convex form of bow and stern, the principal of an elongated wedge was substituted, the wedge slightly hollowed on its face, by which the waters were more easily parted and thrown aside.

A departure was early made in the matter of strengthening the "ribs of oak" to better meet the strains from the rough seas. In 1810 Sir Robert Seppings, surveyor of the English navy, devised and introduced the system of diagonal bracing. This was an arrangement of timbers crossing the ribs on the inside of the ship at angles of about 45°, and braced by diagonals and struts.

Of course the great and leading event of the nineteenth century in the matter of inventions relating to ships was the introduction of steam as the motive power. Of this we have treated in the chapter on steam engineering. The giant, steam, demanded and received the obeisance of every art before devoting his inexhaustible strength to their service. Systems of wood-working and metal manufacture must be revolutionised to give him room to work, and to withstand the strokes of his mighty arm. Lord Dundas at the beginning of the century had an iron boat built for the Forth and Clyde Canal, which was propelled by steam.

But the departure from the adage that "ships are but boards" did not take place, however, until about 1829-30, when the substitution of iron for wood in the construction of vessels had passed beyond the experimental stage. In those years the firm of John Laird of Birkenhead began the building of practical iron vessels, and he was followed soon by Sir William Fairbairn at Manchester, and Randolph, Elder & Co., and the Fairfield Works on the Clyde.

The advantage of iron over wood in strength, and in power to withstand tremendous shocks, was early illustrated in the Great Britain built about 1844, the first large, successful, seagoing vessel constructed. Not long thereafter this same vessel lay helpless upon the coast of Ireland, driven there by a great storm, and beaten by the tremendous waves of the Atlantic with a force that would have in a few hours or days broken up and pulverised a "ship of boards," and yet the Great Britain lay there several weeks, was finally brought off, and again restored to successful service.

Wood and iron both have their peculiar advantages and disadvantages. Wood is not only lighter, but easily procured and worked, and cheaper, in many small and private ship-yards where an iron frame and parts would be difficult and expensive to produce. It is thought that as to the fouling of ships' bottoms a wooden hull covered with copper fouls less, and consequently impedes the speed less; that the damage done by shocks or the penetration of shot is not so great or difficult to repair, and that the danger of variation of the compass by reason of local attraction of the metal is less.

But the advantages of iron and steel far outnumber those of wood. Its strength, its adaptability for all sizes and forms and lines, its increased cheapness, its resistance to shot penetration, its durability, and now its easy procurement, constitute qualities which have established iron ship-building as a great new and modern art. In this modern revolution in iron-clad ships, their adaptation to naval warfare was due to the genius of John Ericsson, and dates practically from the celebrated battle between the iron-clads the Merrimac and the Monitor in Hampton Roads on the Virginia coast in the Civil war in America in April, 1862.

Although the tendency at first in building iron and steel vessels, especially for the navy, was towards an entire metal structure, later experience resulted in a more composite style, using wood in some parts, where found best adapted by its capacity of lightness, non-absorption of heat and less electrical conductivity, etc., and at the same time protecting such interior portions by an iron shell or frame-work.

One great improvement in ship-building, whether in wood or metal, thought of and practised to some extent in former times, but after all a child of this century, is the building of the hull and hold in compartments, water-tight, and sometimes fire-proof, so that in case of a leakage or a fire in one or more compartments, the fire or water may be confined there and the extension of the danger to the entire ship prevented.

In the matter of Marine Propulsion, when the steam engine was made a practical and useful servant by Watt, and men began to think of driving boats and ships with it, the problem was how to adapt it to use with propelling means already known. Paddle-wheels and other wheels to move boats in place of oars had been suggested, and to some extent used from time to time, since the days of the Romans; and they were among the first devices used in steam vessels. Their whirl may still be heard on many waters. Learned men saw no reason why the screw of Archimedes should not be used for the same purpose, and the idea was occasionally advocated by French and English philosophers from at least 1680, by Franklin and Watt less than a century later, and finally, in 1794, Lyttleton of England obtained a patent for his "aquatic propeller," consisting of threads formed on a cylinder and revolving in a frame at the head, stern, or side of a vessel.

Other means had been also suggested prior to 1800, and by the same set of philosophers, and experimentally used by practical builders, such as steam-pumps for receiving the water forward, or amidships, and forcing it out astern, thus creating a propulsive movement. The latter part of the eighteenth century teemed with these suggestions and experiments, but it remained for the nineteenth to see their embodiment and adaptation to successful commercial use.

The earliest, most successful demonstrations of screw propellers and paddle wheels in steam vessels in the century were the construction and use of a boat with twin screws by Col. John Stevens of Hoboken, N. J., in 1804 and the paddle-wheel steamboat trial of Fulton on the Hudson in 1807.

But it was left to John Ericsson, that great Swedish inventor, going to England in 1826 with his brain full of ideas as to steam and solar engines, to first perfect the screw-propeller. He there patented in 1836 his celebrated propeller, consisting of several blades or segments of a screw, and based on such correct principles of twist that they were at once adopted and applied to steam vessels.

In 1837-1839 the knowledge of his inventions had preceded him to America, where his propeller was at once introduced and used in the vessels Frances B. Ogden and the Robert E. Stockton (the latter built by the Lairds of Birkenhead and launched in 1837). In 1839 or 1840 Ericsson went to America, and in 1841 he was engaged in the construction of the U.S. ship of war Princeton, the first naval screw warship built having propelling machinery under the water line and out of reach of shot.

The idea that steamships could not be safely run at a greater speed than ten or twelve miles an hour was now abandoned.

Twice Ericsson revolutionised the naval construction of the world by his inventions in America: first by the introduction of his screw-propeller in the Princeton; and second, by building the iron-clad Monitor.

Since Ericsson's day other inventors have made themselves also famous by giving new twists to the tail of this famous fish and new forms to its iron-ribbed body.

Pneumatic Propellers operated by the expulsion of air or gas against the surrounding body of water, and chain-propellers, consisting of a revolving chain provided with paddles or floats, have also been invented and tested, with more or less successful results.

A great warship as she lies in some one of the vast modern ship-yards of the world, resting securely on her long steel backbone, from which great ribs of steel rise and curve on either side and far overhead, like a monstrous skeleton of some huge animal that the sea alone can produce, clothed with a skin, also of steel; her huge interior, lined at bottom with an armoured deck that stretches across the entire breadth of the vessel, and built upon this deck, capacious steel compartments enclosing the engines and boilers, the coal, the magazines, the electric plant for supplying power to various motors for lighting the ship and for furnishing the current to powerful search-lights; having compartments for the sick, the apothecary shop, and the surgeon's hospital, the men's and the officers' quarters; above these the conning tower and the armoured pilot-house, then the great guns interspersed among these various parts, looking like the sunken eyes, or protruding like the bony prominences of some awful sea monster, is a structure that gives one an idea of the immense departure which has occurred during the last half century, not only from the wooden walls of the navies of all the past, but from all its mechanical arts.

What a great ocean liner contains and what the contributions are to modern ship-building from other modern arts is set forth in the following extract from McClure's Magazine for September, 1900, in describing the Deutschland. "The Deutschland, for instance has a complete refrigerating plant, four hospitals, a safety deposit vault for the immense quantities of gold and silver which pass between the banks of Europe and America, eight kitchens, a complete post-office with German and American clerks, thirty electrical motors, thirty-six pumps, most of them of American and English make, no fewer than seventy-two steam engines, a complete drug store, a complete fire department, with pumps, hose and other fire-fighting machinery, a library, 2600 electric lights, two barber shops, room for an orchestra and brass band, a telegraph system, a telephone system, a complete printing establishment, a photographic dark room, a cigar store, an electric fire-alarm system, and a special refrigerator for flowers."

We have seen, in treating of safes and locks, how burglars keep pace with the latest inventions to protect property by the use of dynamite and nitro-glycerine explosions. The reverse of this practice prevails when those policemen of the seas, the torpedo boats, guard the treasures of the shore. It is there the defenders are armed with the irresistible explosives. These explosives are either planted in harbours and discharged by electricity from the shore, or carried by very swift armoured boats, or by boats capable of being submerged, directed, and propelled by mechanisms contained there and controlled from the shore, or from another vessel; or by boats containing all instrumentalities, crew, and commander, and capable of submerging and raising itself, and of attacking and exploding the torpedo when and where desired. The latter are now considered as the most formidable and efficient class of destroyers.

No matter how staunch, sound and grand in dimensions man may build his ships, old Neptune can still toss them. But Franklin, a century and a half ago, called attention to his experiments of oiling his locks when in a tempestuous mood, and thus rendering the temper of the Old Man of the Sea as placid as a summer pond. Ships that had become unmanageable were thus enabled, by spreading oil on the waves from the windward side, to be brought under control, and dangerous surfs subdued, so that boats could land. Franklin's idea of pouring oil on the troubled waters has been revived during the last quarter of the century and various means for doing it vigorously patented. The means have varied in many instances, but chiefly consist of bags and other receptacles to hold and distribute the oil upon the surrounding water with economy and uniformity.