Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 July 1901 — AGE OF MECHANISM. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

AGE OF MECHANISM.

WMKT THE PAST CENTURY HAS BONE FOR MAN’S COMFORT. •' ' ■ '*l.AMwwOved Year* of Invention, WhereNrCbMlitiona of Life Have Been Rad- . MMv CkMSed-Waadarful Strides ■Mo- to •team and Klectrlclty. W» has been a moat materialistic juatury. an age of mechanism. We tore progressed wonderfully in our catoaffiy for luxury, extravagance, comfloat. A hundred years ago, our foredeaaa were content to live by hand, as a wsero; bow we live chiefly by compll-

•■M omchinery. A century of progress baa created demands which forced ■he dormant Inventive skill of the world to put forth Its beat efforts. The world has made more progress in material things in the last hundred ttan U did in all the centuries preceded- Civilized man's mode of existence has been totally altered by his invenfioat The world has gone patent mad. In the United States alone there were <28£35 patents granted In the sixty®wo years from 1887 to 1898. During Rs existence the patent office has reostvtfl more than >40,000,000 in fees, ©a carriages and wagons, more than 28uNd patents have been granted; on stoves and furnaces, 18,000; on lamps, <m bitings, harvesters, boots and siioes and receptacles for storing, 10,•00 each. The total of patents for the etvllised world is easily twice that of the United States. Thanks to these hundreds of thousands of contrivances, what were luxuries to our forebears of 1800 are commonplaces of existence to all classes, rich and poor, in 1900.

Distance Overcome. With the invention of the steam engine the world shunk at a bound to a twentieth of its former size. Its vast distances ceased to be formidable. Where the lumbering stage coach or the plodding caravan took weeks the •ying express covers the distance in a few boars. The trip across this continent used to be a matter of life and death. Now it is a matter of SIOO, and take your ease as you go. Without the ■allroad a close knit uatlon thousands of miles broad, such as this country, would have been an impossibility. In 1825 the first steam railroad was op ansi between Stockton and Darling ton. England. A year later a similar experiment was tril'd at Quincy, Mass., where the engine hauled stone for a distance of four miles. The first pas ■eager road In this country was the Baltimore and Ohio, ‘opened In 1830 with a mileage of fourteen miles. To-

■ay there are 210,006 miles of railroad to thia country; 103.210 In Europe; 20,■34 in South America; 31,102 In Asia; •,978 in Africa, and 14.384 In Austratoata. ■arty tn the history of railroading Wetve tulles an hour was considered yneUeaaly fast. In January, 1800, a ■rata on the Burlington route. In a run fhatß Hiding to Arion, 2.4 miles, did ■be distance in one minutes and twenty (■coeds, or at the rate of 108 miles aa hour. The Empire State esprees ■usde a record of 112 miles an hour in Wy. 18M Marine travel did not make so won ■nfal an advance In speed, through ?*a«MtDcy of steam, as did land travel, •at the progress la comfort and safety nraa greater, fn 1700 John Fitch conjstnsrted a steamboat - and was consld■oad a raving lunatic. This opinion ataaa confirmed when his experiment

proved a failure. Seventeen years later. Robert Fulton, another so-called visionary, backed by Joel Bartow and Robert T, Livingston, built the steamboat Clermont. She was soon dubbed “Fulton’s Folly,” and when she started for Albany on Augnst 11,1807, all New York was out to witness her failure. She went to Albany in the astonishing time of thirty-two hours, returning in two hours less. Now, when a gigantic ocean lines, with lifeboats as large as the Clermont, crosses the Atlantic in less than six days, we read the news in a bored sort of way, displeased that' steamers should be so slow. Fulton’s experiment fed, years later, to the building of the Savannah, which actually crossed the Atlantic to the great astonishment of the entire world.

Communication between man and man was as expensive as it was slow in the old days. It cost a shilling to get a letter anywhere when the century began, and a shilling In. those days represented far more than it now does. Now two cents will carry a letter to the Philippines or around the corner. Then the mail matter handled was too insignificant for statistics; now there are seventy-five thousand post offices In this country, handling

postal matter of all kinds, per annum, of 6,570,310,000 pieces. Rapid Communication. As for “burry messages” or ,l rush” letters, they were unknown. Prior to the experiments of Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, signaling was done by means of fires on mountain tops, or by waving flags. Morse revolutionized this in 1837 when he announced the success of his experiments. The first telegraph line in this country was opened in 1844. In 1899

there were 904.633 miles of wire in use in tills country; 71.393,157 messages were sent that year. Now we are on the threshold of au era when even wires will be no longer necessary and when we will be able to talk or to telegraph to Boston or New Orleana, or perhaps even Ixmdon without any visible connection between the receiving and sending Instruments. The year 1800 knew no telephone. A hundred years later sees 772,989 miles of telephone wire In use. connected with 466,180 stations and answering 1,281,000,000 calls a year. When the century was new. It took six weeks to get Dews from Europe. To-day it takes six seconds. To-day there are 170,950 miles of submarine cablee—all laid since the first cable. Field's great achievement, was laid in 1867. Electricity has come to the aid of steam In traffic. Edison must be cred

ited wttb the construction Ot the first successful electric road, that which he operated in 1880 at his home at Menlc Park, N. J. Since then electric traction has developed to such an extent that now there are more than 1,000 such street car lines in operation in the United States, with a capitalisation of f 1,700,000,000. The same electric power, only dimly known before the wonderful century, now lights our cities. In the United States there are half a million arc lights and about 20,000,000 incandescent lights—the latter being equivalent in light-giving capacity to 820,000,000 candle tips such as they used in 1800. While the railroads have served to diffuse the population from one end of the land to the other, another invention has served to centralise it—the elevator. Because of it the huge sky-scrap-ers, the immense flat houses and the great factories have been made feasible. Formerly, when Shanks, his mare, was the fashion, people had to dimb stairs. This tended to low buildings and the consequent spread of population. The elevator has changed all that Huge caravansaries teeming with human beings accommodate as many as formerly could be crowded into respectable towns. The elevator makes practicable the centralization of commercial interests which is the basis of our great cities. The Age of Steel. The science of applied mechanics has reached a stage where further improvements seem Impossible, yet every day new inventions and improvements on old are recorded at the patent office. In other times they built bouses of wood and briek; now they construct them of steel and iron, and so carefully are the plans developed that the architect can say how many bolts will be required in the construction of a sky-scraper, how much each beam can support, where each piece of iron belongs. Wooden bridges hard been supplanted by huge steel structures. Even stone towers are being abandoned for the lighter steel. The age of steel is here. Our vast factory systems, employing thousands of workers and furnishing necessaries and luxuries alike at prices that would have made the citizen of 1800 gasp with amazement, have grown out of the substitution of ma-

chlnery for the hand; the sewing machine, the steam loom, the ring frame and hundreds of other Inventions. We do not yet grow crops by machinery, but no sooner has the fruit of the earth reached maturity than It is In the grasp of steel and steam, to be turned to human needs almost without the touch of human hands. Photography aud Printing. Photography is a product of the last hundred years. To have one's picture “took” In ye olden times required considerable money and more patience, for it took some time to paint the portrait. Daguerre’n daguerreotype, the foirrunner of the photograph, hewed the way for the developments in this line of the last ten years. Photography and color printing together have been among the mightiest educational influences the world has ever known. Appealing to the brain direct 1 through the eye. they have taught more swiftly and more widely than is possible to any other agency. To science their aid has been inestimable. No man can judge of the influence of the printing press, which did not reach any considerable development before 1800. In 1800 the principal dally papers were published in Boston aud New York City. They were marvels of staid conservatism. They permitted no news younger than a week to creep into their columns. As for the paper on which they were printed, respect for age prevents a description. The type, band made and band set, leaned either all one way or in any direction most comfortable. It may have been superlative work for those days, but nowadays new type Is east while being set; paper comes In rolls from two to four miles long; presses run off 80,000 complete newspaper an hour. The press, which is the most powerful agent of progress, is in Itself typical of the advance of the century.—Washington Star.

OLD STYLE OF SPINNING.

FIRST FULTON FERRY BOAT.

MODERN SPINNING WHEEL.