Inventors at Work, with Chapters on DiscoveryIles, George
History
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
Iles, George
Inventions -- History; Inventors
Only a few machines deal with writing or its duplication, most machines
perform quite other tasks at first wrought by the hands. Inventors have
always gone astray when they have sought to imitate a hand process with
anything like precision. On this point Sir John Fletcher Moulton, of
London, says:--“Doubtless you have often had to send a message by
telegraph to some distant country to which the rate charged per word is
high. You write your message as tersely as may be, but even thus its
length is formidable. You resort to your telegraphic code. It tells you
that if you will change the phraseology of your message you can by a
single code-word represent a whole phrase. You thereupon set to work to
recast your message so as to make it capable of being expressed in
code-words. When you have done so, you have not improved it as a
message. It is less terse and less naturally expressed. If you were
writing and not telegraphing, you would prefer to use it in its original
form. But as now expressed, each of the phrases of which it is composed
can be sent over the wires in the form and at the price of a single
word, and the cost of the whole is but a fraction of what would have
been the cost of the message as originally framed. It has been cast in a
form suitable for cheap telegraphing. Just so with the inventor. He has
to find a series of operations which, in their totality, are equivalent
to the series of the hand worker. But each of these operations in itself
need not be such as would in hand labor be suitable or even practicable.
“It is necessary and sufficient for him that they are suited to the new
conditions, so that they can be well and easily done by mechanism, and
that, taken as a whole, they produce the same result as the series which
he is paralleling. He is re-writing the series in terms suited to
mechanism just as the message was rewritten in terms suited for
telegraphing. The meaning of the message must remain the same, but the
terms used to express it are no longer those most naturally used in
writing or speaking, but are those which can be telegraphed at least
cost.
Sewing Coded in a Machine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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