The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century. — John Shaqi
The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century.Byrn, Edward W. (Edward Wright)
History
The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century.
Byrn, Edward W. (Edward Wright)
Inventions -- History; Inventions -- History -- 19th century
The telegraph disappears. The sewing machine, reaper, and
thresher have passed away, and so also have all india-rubber goods. We
no longer see any photographs, photo-engravings, photolithographs, or
snap-shot cameras. The wonderful octuple web perfecting printing press;
printing, pasting, cutting, folding, and counting newspapers at the rate
of 96,000 per hour, or 1,600 per minute, shrinks at the beginning of the
century into an insignificant prototype. We lose all planing and
wood-working machinery, and with it the endless variety of sashes,
doors, blinds, and furniture in unlimited variety. There are no
gas-engines, no passenger elevators, no asphalt pavement, no steam fire
engine, no triple-expansion steam engine, no Giffard injector, no
celluloid articles, no barbed wire fences, no time-locks for safes, no
self-binding harvesters, no oil nor gas wells, no ice machines nor cold
storage. We lose air engines, stem-winding watches, cash-registers and
cash-carriers, the great suspension bridges, and tunnels, the Suez
Canal, iron frame buildings, monitors and heavy ironclads, revolvers,
torpedoes, magazine guns and Gatling guns, linotype machines, all
practical typewriters, all pasteurizing, knowledge of microbes or
disease germs, and sanitary plumbing, water-gas, soda water fountains,
air brakes, coal-tar dyes and medicines, nitro-glycerine, dynamite and
guncotton, dynamo electric machines, aluminum ware, electric
locomotives, Bessemer steel with its wonderful developments, ocean
cables, enameled iron ware, Welsbach gas burners, electric storage
batteries, the cigarette machine, hydraulic dredges, the roller mills,
middlings purifiers and patent-process flour, tin can machines, car
couplings, compressed air drills, sleeping cars, the dynamite gun, the
McKay shoe machine, the circular knitting machine, the Jacquard loom,
wood pulp for paper, fire alarms, the use of anæsthetics in surgery,
oleomargarine, street sweepers, Artesian wells, friction matches, steam
hammers, electro-plating, nail machines, false teeth, artificial limbs
and eyes, the spectroscope, the Kinetoscope or moving pictures,
acetylene gas, X-ray apparatus, horseless carriages, and--but, enough!
the reader exclaims, and indeed it is not pleasant to contemplate the
loss. The negative conditions of that period extend into such an
appalling void that we stop short, shrinking from the thought of what it
would mean to modern civilization to eliminate from its life these
potent factors of its existence.
Returning to the richness and fullness of the present life, we shall
first note chronologically the milestones and finger boards which mark
this great tramway of progress, and afterward consider separately the
more important factors of progress.
CHAPTER II.
CHRONOLOGY OF LEADING INVENTIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
1800--Volta’s Chemical Battery for producing Electricity. Louis Robert’s
Machine for Making Continuous Webs of Paper.
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