Inventors at Work, with Chapters on DiscoveryIles, George
History
Inventors at Work, with Chapters on Discovery
Iles, George
Inventions -- History; Inventors
Let the aeronaut continue his wistful and envious gaze at the birds in
the sky while we turn our attention to mother earth, there to note how
every day trade surrounds us with further illustrations of the law of
size, of the gains which may attend bigness. We enter a department
store, displaying a varied stock of foods, clothing, shoes, furniture,
and so on. As we cast our eyes about its counters, shelves, and floor we
see cans of vegetables, fruit, and fish; jars of olives and vinegar;
boxes of rice, soap and crackers; paper sacks of flour and meal. Outside
the door are piled kegs, barrels, and packing cases. Plainly the cost of
paper, glass, tin, and lumber for packages must levy a large tax on
retailing. Once more is recalled our old lesson with the inch-cubes;
the bigger a jar, box, or sack, the less material it needs in proportion
to its capacity. Wholesale packers of merchandise save money as they
form packages of the largest size. The contents of each box, crate, and
sack tell the familiar story once again. The coffee is ground from the
bean that it may be readily infused in the coffee-pot; wheat is reduced
to flour, oats to fine meal, that they may be quickly cooked; sugar is
crushed that it may rapidly dissolve in the tea cup. This very task
began long ago with the mastication of food by the teeth, diminishing
the size of morsels while moistening them for digestion before they
reached the stomach.
Summer Holiday Notes.
During a visit to the country one summer, we observed new examples of
our familiar rule. When we compared the dimensions of a small sectional
cabin with those of a large house, we saw the principal reason why the
cabin was hard to keep cool in July, and hard to keep warm in December.
We noticed tasks which depended upon giving wood, cloth or other
material as much surface as possible, whether new forms were like old
ones or not. A neighboring sawmill was busy cutting up logs into thin
boards; these were piled in open tiers, so that the drying winds might
speedily finish their work. In the same way we noted a laundress
spreading out by itself each table-cloth and apron fully to catch the
wind, instead of leaving the linen as a solid heap in her basket, where
only the edges would be dried. When the farm-hands went haymaking they
followed the same rule; they tedded out their gavels to give them the
utmost supply of sun and air; when all was as dry as a bone they reared
a haycock of compact form so as to expose the least possible surface to
rain and snow.
Dimensions Molecular.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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