[Illustration: MARCONI READING A MESSAGE] STORIES OF INVENTORS The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers. True Incidents And Personal Experiences By RUSSELL DOUBLEDAY 1904 ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author and publishers take pleasure in acknowledging the courtesy of _The Scientific American_ _The Booklovers Magazine_ _The Holiday Magazine_, and Messrs. Wood & Nathan Company for the use of a number of illustrations in this book. From _The Scientific American_, illustrations facing pages 16, 48, 78, 80, 88, 94, 118, 126, 142, and 162. From _The Booklovers Magazine_, illustrations facing pages 184, 190, 194, and 196. From _The Holiday Magazine_, illustrations facing pages 100 and 110. CONTENTS How Guglielmo Marconi Telegraphs Without Wires Santos-Dumont and His Air-Ship How a Fast Train Is Run How Automobiles Work The Fastest Steamboats The Life-Savers and Their Apparatus Moving Pictures--Some Strange Subjects and How They Were Taken Bridge Builders and Some of Their Achievements Submarines in War and Peace Long-Distance Telephony--What Happens When You Talk into a Telephone Receiver A Machine That Thinks--A Type-Setting Machine That Makes Mathematical Calculations How Heat Produces Cold--Artificial Ice-Making LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Marconi Reading a Message _Frontispiece_ Marconi Station at Wellfleet, Massachusetts The Wireless Telegraph Station at Glacé Bay Santos-Dumont Preparing for a Flight Rounding the Eiffel Tower The Motor and Basket of "Santos-Dumont No. 9" Firing a Fast Locomotive Track Tank Railroad Semaphore Signals Thirty Years' Advance in Locomotive Building The "Lighthouse" of the Rail A Giant Automobile Mower-Thrasher An Automobile Buckboard An Automobile Plow The _Velox_, of the British Navy The Engines of the _Arrow_ A Life-Saving Crew Drilling Life-Savers at Work Biograph Pictures of a Military Hazing Developing Moving-Picture Films Building an American Bridge in Burmah Viaduct Across Canyon Diablo Beginning an American Bridge in Mid-Africa Lake's Submarine Torpedo-Boat _Protector_ Speeding at the Rate of 102 Miles an Hour Singing Into the Telephone "Central" Telephone Operators at Work Central Making Connections The Back of a Telephone Switchboard A Few Telephone Trunk Wires The Lanston Type-Setter Keyboard Where the "Brains" are Located The Type Moulds and the Work They Produce INTRODUCTION There are many thrilling incidents--all the more attractive because of their truth--in the study, the trials, the disappointments, the obstacles overcome, and the final triumph of the successful inventor. Every great invention, afterward marvelled at, was first derided. Each great inventor, after solving problems in mechanics or chemistry, had to face the jeers of the incredulous.