The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical ConquestThompson, Holland
History
The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest
Thompson, Holland
Inventions -- History; Inventors -- United States
With the locomotive definitely accepted, men began to turn their minds
towards its improvement and development, and locomotive building soon
became a leading industry in America. At first the British types and
patterns were followed, but it was not long before American designers
began to depart from the British models and to evolve a distinctively
American type. In the development of this type great names have been
written into the industrial history of America, among which the name of
Matthias Baldwin of Philadelphia probably ranks first. But there have
been hundreds of great workers in this field. From Stephenson's Rocket
and the little Tom Thumb of Peter Cooper, to the powerful "Mallets"
of today, is a long distance--not spanned in ninety years save by the
genius and restless toil of countless brains and hands.
If the locomotive could not remain as it was left by Stephenson and
Cooper, neither could the stationary steam engine remain as it was left
by James Watt and Oliver Evans. Demands increasing and again increasing,
year after year, forced the steam engine to grow in order to meet its
responsibilities. There were men living in Philadelphia in 1876, who had
known Oliver Evans personally; at least one old man at the Centennial
Exhibition had himself seen the Oruktor Amphibolos and recalled the
consternation it had caused on the streets of the city in 1804. It
seemed a far cry back to the Oruktor from the great and beautiful
engine, designed by George Henry Corliss, which was then moving all the
vast machinery of the Centennial Exhibition. But since then achievements
in steam have dwarfed even the great work of Corliss. And to do a kind
of herculean task that was hardly dreamed of in 1876 another type of
engine has made its entrance: the steam turbine, which sends its awful
energy, transformed into electric current, to light a million lamps or
to turn ten thousand wheels on distant streets and highways.
CHAPTER IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND
The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four: first to
harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin it into
threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and, finally to fashion
and sew the cloth into clothes. We have already seen the influence
of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the first process, and the series of
inventions for spinning and weaving, which so profoundly changed the
textile industry in Great Britain, has been mentioned. It will be the
business of this chapter to tell how spinning and weaving machinery was
introduced into the United States and how a Yankee inventor laid the
keystone of the arch of clothing machinery by his invention of the
sewing machine.
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