921 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. BY OTIS T. MASON. FROM THE SMITHSONIAN REPORT FOR 1892. WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 1893. 921 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. BY OTIS T. MASON. FROM THE SMITHSONIAN REPORT FOR 1892. WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 1893. THE BIRTH OF INVENTION.* Otis T. Mason. In this apotheosis of invention and inventors, to me has been assigned the pleasing task of leading you back for a few moments to the cradle of humanity. Those are happy hours to most of us when we recall the days of childhood. To trace the lives of celebrated men and women to the springs of their moral and intellectual power brings never-fading delight. To study the rise and progress of a nation or any social unit is worthy of exalted minds. But the most profitable inquiry of all is the search for the origin of epoch-making ideas in order to comprehend the history of civilization, to conjure up those race memories in which each people transmits to itself and to posterity its former experiences. Every invention of any importance is the nursery of future inven- tions, the cradle of a sleeping Hercules. But my task is to speak of primitive man and his efforts. It will aid us in prosecuting our journey backward to orient ourselves with reference to the present. For two days we have listened to the eloquent papers of my predecessors, written to glorify the nineteenth century. Through this faculty of invention the whole earth is man's. There is not a lone island fit for his abode whereon some Alexander Selkirk has not made a home. Every mineral, plant, and animal is so far known that a place has been found for it in his Sy stem a Naturae. Every creature is subject to man; the winds, the seas, the sunshine, the lightning do his bidding. Projecting his vision beyond his tiny planet, this inventing animal has catalogued and traced the motion of every star. But his crowning glory (which always fills me with admiration) is his ever increasing comprehensiveness. After centuries of cultivating acquaintance with the discrete phenomena around him, he has now striven to coordinate them, to make them organic, to read system into them. He has learned by degrees to comprehend all things as parts of a single mechanism. Sir Isaac Newton and Kepler conceived all objects and all worlds to be held by universal gravitation. And thus, in our century, von Baer and Humboldt taught that the world, in all its forces * An address on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the organization of the U. S. Patent Office; delivered in Washington. Proceedings and Addresses, 1891, pp. 403-412. 603 604 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. and materials, is an integrated cosmos. Anyone who is the least familiar with the progress of philosophy will recall that since the dawn of written history the thoughts of men were tending to this unifica- tion. Shortly after this first effort at comprehensive unity Mayer, Rumford, and Joule invented the methods of demonstrating the oneness of physical forces, the conservation of energy. Wollaston, Kirchoff, and Bunsen devised the delicate apparatus to prove the chemical identity of all worlds. Lamarck, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Darwin taught the consanguinity of all living beings. Helmholtz and Meyer coordinated nervous excitation with mental activity. Comte and Spencer grasped the unity of all sensible phenomena. Newton, Leibnitz, and Hamilton projected their minds beyond phenomena and invented mathematics of four or more dimensions, conceiving of worlds and sys- tems that under the present order of nature can have no objective reality. Over all this, into many great souls, have come the notions of infinite space and time and causation. The idea of limitation to thought or achievement no longer enters the imagination. The depth of the sea, the distances of the stars, the concealment of the earth's treasures, the minuteness of the springs of life and sense, the multiplicity and complicity of phenomena are only so many incitements to greater achievements. The daring souls of this decade are determined at any risk to answer the inquiry of Pontius Pilate, What is truth"? With sympathetic enthusiasm we wave them on, bidding them God speed. But, I ask you now to forget all this and go with me to that early day when the first being, worthy to be called man, stood upon this earth. How economical lias been his endowment. There is no hair on his body to keep him warm, his jaws are the feeblest in the world, his arm is not equal to that of a gorilla, he can not fly like the eagle, he can not see into the night like the owl, even the hare is fleeter than he. lie has* no clothing, no shelter. He had no tools or industries or experience, no society or language or arts of pleasure, he had yet no theory of life and poorer conceptions of the life beyond. The road from that condition to our own lies next to the infinite. The one endowment that this creature possessed having in it the promise and potency of all future achievements, was the creative spark called invention. The superabundant brain, over and above all the amount required for mere animal existence, held in trust the possi- bilities of the future, and stamped upon man the divine likeness. This naked ignoramus is the father of the clothed philosopher, looking out into infinite space and time and causation. It may give you pleasure to know something about the connections between these two and the witnesses to these connections. There are five guides whose services we have to engage on our inter- esting journey. The first is history, who does not know the way very far back-not over three thousand years-with much certainty. The second is philology, the study of which in our own century has ena- THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. 605 bled us to find the cradle-land of many peoples. The third is folk lore, the survival of belief and custom among the uneducated. The fourth is archaeology, history written in things. The fifth is ethnology, which informs us that in describing this arc of civilization some races have only marked time, while others have moved with radii of varying lengths. The result of this is that we now have on the earth types of every sort of culture it has ever known. At the present moment, within hailing distance of yonder most beautiful dome in the world dwell all these wit- nesses-the relics of the stone age, the Indian village of Nacochtank or Anacostia, the folk-lore of both continents, and the literatures of the world. While you are listening to the encomiums of our decade, palae- olithic man sends in the testimony of his handicraft, the Smithsonian Institution treasures the inventions of the most primitive races, and the Bureau of Ethnology unravels the mysteries of savage tongues. As the fragment of a speech or song, a waking or a sleeping vision, the dream of a vanished hand, a draught of water from a familiar spring, the almost perished fragrance of a pressed flower, call back the singer, the loved and lost, the loved and won, the home of childhood, or the parting hour, so in the same manner there linger in this crowning decade of the crowning century bits of ancient ingenuity which recall to a whole people the fragrance and beauty of its past. From the testimony of these five witnesses we learn that there never was a time when man was not an inventor-never a time when he had not some sort of patent on his invention. They affirm that every art of living and all the arts of pleasure were born in the stone age; that graphic art, sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and the drama had their childish prototypes in that early day; that language is one of the very earliest of inventions, the vehicle of savage oratory, philos- ophy, and science. They affirm that society has been a series of inven- tions from the first; that legislation, justice, government, property, exchange, commerce, have not sprung out of the ground, but within our definition are inventions. And even the creeds and cults of mankind, whatever view you may take of the divine element underneath them, have been thought out and wrought out with infinite pains from time to time by earnest souls. But they had their origin in the cradle land and in the infancy of our race. What we enjoy is only the full-blown flower, the perfected fruit of which they possessed the germ. Let me enforce this idea, as we glorify the material prosperity of the nineteenth cen- tury, that many centuries ago men sat down and with great pains and sorrow invented the language, the art, the industries, the social order which made our machines feasible and desirable. There is no conflict between the testimony of these witnesses and the doctrine commonly taught that men do not invent customs and lan- guages, but fall into them. Befiect a moment upon your own daily life and you will recognize two sets of activity, those which you origi- nate and those in which you follow suit. Animals can learn to follow 606 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. suit, and to a very limited extent ean originate. But it is the spark of originality which underlies every thought or device in this world. As one man invents a machine and others by thousands fall into the use of it, as the musician composes a song and millions sing it, so was it in the cradle-land of humanity the inventor, touched with fire from the divine altar, set new examples to be followed. If we were to inter- rogate our five witnesses, particularly with reference to the ancestry, the family tree of the notable inventions of the nineteenth century, their answer would be somewhat as follows:* The ancestor of the steam plow is the digging stick of savagery, a branch of a tree sharpened at the end by fire; the progenitors of the steam harvester and thresher were the stone sickle, the roasting tray, or, later on, the tribuhim. The cotton gin and power loom are among the wonders of our age. Yet in that day of which we are speaking human fingers wrought the textile from first to last. They gathered the bark or wool, colored them to suit the primitive taste, spun and wove them with simple apparatus, and left upon the fabric patterns that are the despair of all modern machine-makers-patterns that are a pleasure to the eye by their infinite variety, replaced in modern fabrics by a dreary monotony that awakens pain instead of pleasure. The first sewing machine was a needle or bodkin of bone, with dainty sinew thread from the leg of the antelope, and for thimble a little leather cap over the ends of the fingers. Coarse, indeed, the appara- tus, but the hand was deft, the eye was true, the sense of beauty was there, and so that needlewoman of long ago wrought in fur from the mammals, feathers from the birds, grasses from the fields, shells from the sea, wings from the beetle, and skins of snakes with tasteful geometric figures. You do err who think those ancient needle-women had no taste. It would be hard to invent a pattern now that was unfamiliar to them. The first engine was run by man power, then man subdued the horse, the ass, the came], and invented engines for those to propel. lie next domesticated the winds, the waters, the steam, the lightning, but the first common carriers and machine power were men and women. The first burden train was women's backs; the first passenger car was a papoose frame. The poetry of to-day is the fact of yesterday; the dream of yesterday is the fact of to-day. When the savage woman a century or two ago, upon this very spot, strapped her dusky offspring to a rude frame, hung it upon the nearest sapling for the winds to rock, or lifted the unfor- * We ought to remember, however, that an invention is not always a thing; but that it may be any series of actions conducing toward some new end. We should keep in mind, also, that all our activities involve materials and their qualities; human, animal, and physical forces; tools and machines; processes, and products; and that invention may take place in any or all of these. THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. 607 tunate suckling from the ground to which it had been huned by the bending of an unsafe bough, that was a fact, a stage in the history of invention. In our now a days couches of down, swung from gilded hinges, we have got far ahead of the papoose cradle, the memory of which we perpetuate in nursery rhymes sung to children, who wonder why babies should be hung in the tops of trees and think, doubtless, that the falling cradle was a just retribution on the silly parents. What is more beautiful than an ocean steamer, with skin of steel drawn over ribs of steel and closed above against the intrusion of the waves? Have you never seen the picture of the Eskimo, still in the stone age, who, over a framework of driftwood or whale's rib, stretches a covering of sealskin and learned therein to defy the waves hundreds of years ago ? Only now and then the angry sky was lighted for the primitive man by electricity, and even then it filled him with terror. But it was he that invented the apparatus for conjuring from dried wood, by a rude sort of dynamo, the Promethean spark. It was our Aryan ancestors that paid their devotions to the rising sun by kindling fresh fire every morning as the orb of day flashed his first beam across the earth. Who has not read, with almost breaking heart, the story of Palissy, the Huguenot potter? But what have our witnesses to say of that long line of humble creatures that conjured out of prophetic clay, with- out wheel or furnace, forms and decorations of imperishable beauty which are now being copied in glorified material in the best factories of the world? In ceramic as well as in textile art the first inventors were women. They quarried the clay, manipulated if, constructed and decorated the ware, burned it in a rude furnace, and wore it out in a hundred uses. He had no printing press, but he could tie knots in a marvellous fashion and write letters on bark or on bits of raw hide and leave memorials of himself in the book of stone. He made words and sen- tences, invented language, developed artistic forms of speech handed down to us in the eloquent harangues of his sages. He breathed his thoughts in poetry, a kind of childish rhythm. In the time of which we now are speaking the telegraph was a series of signal fires and a wonderful code of signs, which a distinguished scholar of our city has just unravelled. Primitive man developed the art of war, means of offense and defense; weapons of percussion, for cutting and thrusting; projectiles, armor, fortification, strategy. Nowhere has man pressed his hand so effectively upon nature as in the domestication of animals. It is almost incredible that ravening wolves and merciless felines should become faithful dogs and purring cats; that the wild sheej) and goat should descend from their inacces- sible fastnesses, and yield their fleece and flesh and milk; that horses, asses, camels, elephants, should be induced to lend their backs and 608 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. limbs to lighten the loads of the first common carrier. This process of impressing his own qualities on wild creatures began very early in his- tory, and has continued u interruptedly from first to last.* His affairs of state were managed through his patent system. The great inventors were made the rulers of the people, and his highest title to nobility was a most puissant and ingenious one. He had courts of justice, heard witnesses, executed his laws. It is true that the methods were summary, when a chancery suit was settled by execution on the same day as the death of the devisor. But out of his struggles came our methods, and the greatest drawback to secur- ing justice now is the survival o/ his antiquated customs into our new practices. lie invented philosophies and sciences, explained the universe and himself to himself. This seems puerile now, but it was the beginning of all our own speculations, necessary to us at present, but which will to-morrow become folk lore. Over and over again, those who preceded me on this platform have pointed to James Watt as the true deliverer of mankind. Far be it from me to take one leaf from his laurel crown; but the inventor of the alphabet, of the decimal system of notation, of representative government, of the golden rule in morality were greater than he. For the dream in stone and carving and decoration called a cathedral, "Where, through long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the notes of praise," that early day has only to offer wild shouts in unison under the starlit dome, touched by the first childish aspirations after the divine, or hopes of immortality. While you look with admiration upon these panoramas of progress you can not have failed to observe on the canvas that the art, the proc- ess and rewards of inventing itself, have undergone the very same development and improvement as the things invented. There is in this a marvellous similarity to the life processes of animals and plants. The homogeneous yolk of the egg during incubation becomes wonderfully complex and heterogeneous: but all of these diverse parts come together into a higher unity, in which each organ ministers to the good of all. *In a Saturday lecture delivered iu the National Museum, March 18, 1882, the author sought to combine the result of Morgan's culture stages, being seven, with the work of Klemm, Tylor, Lane Fox, and Spencer, who had treated separate arts from an evolutionary or, 1 should say, an inventional motive. This any one may repeat for himself by ruling a broad sheet of paper into eight columns. At the top of the several columns write the words of Morgan, or, better, the first.seven Roman numerals. In the. lines down the left-hand margin write any words you choose to examine, say music or weapons. The seven stages of music or of weapons would appear by reading across the sheet from left to right. Care should be taken not to confound the species of the same thought, for example, bruising, piercing, or slash- ing weapons; or string music, with reed music or horn music. A table made thus for all activities would be an index of all culture in all time. THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. 609 The earliest invention was a single homogeneous act, an original sugges- tion, a happy thought. The patenton this was an immediate and indi- vidual benefit. A sharper knife of flint, a better scraper, a longer spear, a stouter thread wrought better and the reward was more exe- cution. Now, the man who made the best weapons killed the most game, from that game he got better food, that food made him stronger, that strength made him chief, that chieftaincy gave him more wives, more children, more cohorts to support his throne. The best woman to cook or sew or carry loads got the best husband; that was her pat- ent. From these simple methods of inventing and rewarding invention we come on to the Olympic games, the monopolies, the patent system. And now, in the inventor's laboratory of Graham, Bell, or Edison the climax is reached, where one machine is the co-operative result of any number of trained minds, and the reward is meted out to each by the manufacturer; or, in this Patent Congress itself, we may have a still more highly organized unit, wherein the inventors of America become a body social, and together shake hands under the sea with the Emperor of Germany, who sends his congratulations to-day on the occasion of our meeting. The law of progress in the development of the thing invented, of the process of mind and hand in the act of inventing, of the reward paid to the inventor, of the changes in society itself through the invention, is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, as Herbert Spencer has well indicated. This applies to the uses of materials, the conquest of natural forces, the development of the qualities of things, the perfec- tion of the instruments and modes of applying them, and the wants which are gratified and to be gratified by the finished products. The great classes of industry that you are trying ever to serve are one and all your perpetual debtors. Producers, like farmers, fisher- men, lumbermen, miners, breeders, or hunters, have passed through the foregoing school of experience. No less indebted to you for lifting their burdens are the common carriers of the world, since you have trained the winds, the waters, the animal kingdom, to undertake for mankind journeys that would have utterly discouraged them. It is easy to show, in fact, that the common carrying organizations are as much an evolution or elaboration as the tools they use. But what shall I say of the manufacturer-his methods, his rewards, his guilds, his interest in politics? Pari passu with those efficient tools, that complicated machinery in his hands and about him, he him- self has been invented. He is no longer like the primitive artisan who struck the first flakes from brittle stone. He is in touch with many others, who together with him constitute the higher unit of an organized factory or association of factories. It was once said that it takes nine tailors to make a man, but, surely, it takes nine hundred men and women to make a suit of clothes, or a house, or a locomotive. The H. Mis. 114 39 610 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. co-ordination and organization of these industrial cohorts, 1 affirm and repeat, is invention of the highest order. There are no letters patent on them. They enjoy natural patents, that is, by selection and the survival of the fittest; those who do the best and work together the best, get the reward. The commerce of the world is an excellent example of invention affecting men as well as their tools. Merchants and bankers, ex- changers of goods and exchangers of the prices of goods, have been also invented. It would hardly be affirmed that this world-encircling current of activity called trade had come about bj merely following suit or following the fashion. Were that so, Wall street bankers and New York merchants would now be standing naked on the shores of Manhattan Island bartering peltries for clams. Patent Congresses would never have been thought of, and this essay would not have been written. At first every man was his own exploiter, carrier, manufac- turer, merchant, banker, and customer. But now all men are servants of all men. By a system of credits only one one-thousandth part of the world's business is done for cash or barter. The human species, regardless of race or language or education, has become a universal com- bine for mutual helpfulness. And this combine has more parts playing into parts and wheels working into wheels than may be seen in a vast cotton factory. All this is the result of excogitation, of invention. The trader is the son of the trapper, the storekeeper is the son of the trader. In the direct line come the retailer, the wholesaler, the firm, the importer, the trust. The gatherer of cowries is the father of the wampum maker, and the son of the latter is maker of metallic slugs bearing the stamp of a domestic beast; his son issued the first coins, and the family tree brings you straight down to the Rothschilds, who have handled at least once all the money of the world. Now, what have I to say about the consumer, who, after all, is said by doctrinaires to pay all the bills? The consumer also has been invented, from my point of view. The first consumer wore out little clothing, dwelt in an inexpensive habitation, and his bill of fare was limited. His service, equipage, variety of enjoyments, were circum- scribed. Can you think of any one so bereft ? In our cities, if we found wandering about a person so poorly endowed, our hearts would be filled with commiseration. Now, from that man to any successful modern,or more correctly to our whole modern time combined, is the road along which consumers have been invented. The kinds of wants have been refined and increased in number. Each want has become more exacting and discriminating. Intellectual, social, aesthetic, moral, and political wants have been created. And these, not in single persons only, but there have been composite wants, world-embracing wants and ambi- tions thought out, whose gratification come to human beings in families, clubs, guilds, corporations, cities, congresses, nationalities, and interna- tionalities. And these, consuming what they have produced, find that the earth is inexhaustible. 611 THE BIRTH OF INVENTION. We are assembled to glorify the first century of American patents. A few months ago the disciples of Daguerre met in our city and set up in the National Museum a monument to the inventor of photography. I do not know that there is another memorial in America to an inventor. There is no better way to insure for posterity the recollec- tion of this day than by stimulating among the great industries the desire to continue this good work of memorializing their founders. Perhaps you may not build your monument of stone or bronze; you may set up a library, you may solicit a corner in the National Museum or Congressional Library, or you may secure a better Patent building. In our public places we set up statues of the destroyers of mankind and erect monuments in our national cemeteries to the anonymous dead. When we go to hang garlands upon the eulogium-bearing tombs we do not forget to scatter flowers upon the mausoleum of the unknown. We can not gather from the four corners of the world the bones of all the great inventors and honor them with a costly buriaL Even their names have perished from the records of mankind, but their works endure. What better can we do than to gather these and guard them in our great museums, mute witnesses of antiquated arts. I can imag- ine these anonymous inventors looking upon us to-day and glad of this tardy recognition of their vicarious sufferings. With loving reccollection of your labors I pluck a Hower from my heart and strew its petals over your neglected graves: In freta dum fluvii current, dum inontibus umbrae lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet, semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt, quae me cumque vocant terrae. JEneid, I, 607.