[Footnote 1: An address delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the American Patent System, Washington, April, 1891.] By Dr. R.H. THURSTON, Director of Sibley College, Cornell University. Papin, Worcester, Savery, were the authors of the period of application of the power of steam to useful work in our later days. The world was, in their time, just waking into a new life under the stimulus of a new freedom that, from the time of Shakespeare, of Newton, and of Gilbert, the physicist, has steadily become wider, higher, and more fruitful year by year. All the modern sciences and all the modern arts had their reawakening with the seventeenth century. Every aspect of freedom for humanity came into view in those days of a new birth. Both the possibility of the introduction of new sciences and of new arts and the power of utilizing all new intellectual and physical forces came together. The steam engine could not earlier have taken form, and, taking form, it could not have promoted the advance of civilization in the earlier centuries. The invention becoming possible of development and application, the promotion of the arts and of all forms of human activity became a possible consequence of its final successful introduction into the rude arts that it was to so effectively promote and improve. But the work of these inventors was in itself but little more important than that of the Greek inventor of the steam ælopile, for each brought forward a machine which was, from a business point of view, utterly impracticable, and which, in each case, only served to show that a better device might prove useful and lead the way to its introduction. The merit of the inventors of the eighteenth century was that they were _able_ to lead the way, to point out the path to success, to furnish evidence of the value of the coming, crowning invention. The "fire engines," as they were then called, of these now famous men were merely contrivances by the use of which the pressure of confined steam of high tension could be brought to act on the surface of a mass of confined water, forcing it downward into pipes through which it was led off and upward to a higher level; and thus a mine could be drained, ineffectively and expensively to be sure, but vastly more satisfactorily than by the animal power of the time. The machine of Savery was the best of all; but that was only a somewhat improved and manageable rearrangement of the engines of Papin and Worcester. And, after all, Papin, the greatest man of science perhaps of his time, died in poverty; Worcester languished in prison his whole life, and the later efforts of his widow brought nothing by way of a return for his invention; nor did either they or their successor, Morland, make the introduction of the engine either general or remunerative.