Inventions in the Century Part 30

The high castellated bows and sterns and long prows of _The Great Harry_, of the seventeenth century, and its successors in the eighteenth, with some moderation of c.u.mbersome matter, gave way to lighter, speedier forms, first appearing in the quick-gliding Yankee clippers, during the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Eminent naval architects have regarded the proportions of Noah's ark, 300 cubits long, 50 cubits broad and 30 cubits high, in which the length was six times the breadth, and the depth three-fifths of the breadth, as the best combination of the elements of strength, capacity and stability.

Even that most modern mercantile vessel known as the "whale-back" with its nearly flat bottom, vertical sides, arched top or deck, skegged or spoon-shaped at bow and stern, straight deck lines, the upper deck cabins and steering gear raised on hollow turrets, with machinery and cargo in the main hull, has not departed much from the safe rule of proportions of its ancient prototype.

But in other respects the ideas of Noah and of the Ph[oe]nicians, the best of ancient s.h.i.+p-builders, as well as the Northmen, the Dutch, the French, and the English, the best s.h.i.+p-builders of later centuries, were decidedly improved upon by the Americans, who, as above intimated, were revolutionizing the art and building the finest vessels in the early part of the century, and these rivalled in speed the steam vessels for some years after steams.h.i.+ps were ploughing the rivers and the ocean.

Discarding the lofty decks fore and aft and ponderous topsides, the princ.i.p.al characteristics of the American "clippers" were their fine sharp lines, built long and low, broad of beam before the centre, sharp above the water, and deep aft. A typical vessel of this sort was the clipper s.h.i.+p _Great Republic_, built by Donald McKay of Boston during the first half of the century. She was 325 feet long, 53 feet wide, 37 feet deep, with a capacity of about 4000 tons. She had four masts, each provided with a lightning rod. A single suit of her sails consisted of 15,563 yards of canvas. Her keel rose for 60 feet forward, gradually curved into the arc of a circle as it blended with the stern. Vessels of her type ran seventeen and eighteen miles an hour at a time when steam vessels were making only twelve or fourteen miles an hour, the latter speed being one which it was predicted by naval engineers could not with safety be exceeded with ocean steams.h.i.+ps.

These vessels directed the attention of s.h.i.+p-builders to two prominent features, the shape of the bow and the length of the vessel. For the old convex form of bow and stern, the princ.i.p.al of an elongated wedge was subst.i.tuted, the wedge slightly hollowed on its face, by which the waters were more easily parted and thrown aside.

A departure was early made in the matter of strengthening the "ribs of oak" to better meet the strains from the rough seas. In 1810 Sir Robert Seppings, surveyor of the English navy, devised and introduced the system of diagonal bracing. This was an arrangement of timbers crossing the ribs on the inside of the s.h.i.+p at angles of about 45, and braced by diagonals and struts.

Of course the great and leading event of the nineteenth century in the matter of inventions relating to s.h.i.+ps was the introduction of steam as the motive power. Of this we have treated in the chapter on steam engineering. The giant, steam, demanded and received the obeisance of every art before devoting his inexhaustible strength to their service.

Systems of wood-working and metal manufacture must be revolutionised to give him room to work, and to withstand the strokes of his mighty arm.

Lord Dundas at the beginning of the century had an iron boat built for the Forth and Clyde Ca.n.a.l, which was propelled by steam.

But the departure from the adage that "s.h.i.+ps are but boards" did not take place, however, until about 1829-30, when the subst.i.tution of iron for wood in the construction of vessels had pa.s.sed beyond the experimental stage. In those years the firm of John Laird of Birkenhead began the building of practical iron vessels, and he was followed soon by Sir William Fairbairn at Manchester, and Randolph, Elder & Co., and the Fairfield Works on the Clyde.

The advantage of iron over wood in strength, and in power to withstand tremendous shocks, was early ill.u.s.trated in the _Great Britain_ built about 1844, the first large, successful, seagoing vessel constructed.

Not long thereafter this same vessel lay helpless upon the coast of Ireland, driven there by a great storm, and beaten by the tremendous waves of the Atlantic with a force that would have in a few hours or days broken up and pulverised a "s.h.i.+p of boards," and yet the _Great Britain_ lay there several weeks, was finally brought off, and again restored to successful service.

Wood and iron both have their peculiar advantages and disadvantages.

Wood is not only lighter, but easily procured and worked, and cheaper, in many small and private s.h.i.+p-yards where an iron frame and parts would be difficult and expensive to produce. It is thought that as to the fouling of s.h.i.+ps' bottoms a wooden hull covered with copper fouls less, and consequently impedes the speed less; that the damage done by shocks or the penetration of shot is not so great or difficult to repair, and that the danger of variation of the compa.s.s by reason of local attraction of the metal is less.

But the advantages of iron and steel far outnumber those of wood. Its strength, its adaptability for all sizes and forms and lines, its increased cheapness, its resistance to shot penetration, its durability, and now its easy procurement, const.i.tute qualities which have established iron s.h.i.+p-building as a great new and modern art. In this modern revolution in iron-clad s.h.i.+ps, their adaptation to naval warfare was due to the genius of John Ericsson, and dates practically from the celebrated battle between the iron-clads the _Merrimac_ and the _Monitor_ in Hampton Roads on the Virginia coast in the Civil war in America in April, 1862.

Although the tendency at first in building iron and steel vessels, especially for the navy, was towards an entire metal structure, later experience resulted in a more composite style, using wood in some parts, where found best adapted by its capacity of lightness, non-absorption of heat and less electrical conductivity, etc., and at the same time protecting such interior portions by an iron sh.e.l.l or frame-work.

One great improvement in s.h.i.+p-building, whether in wood or metal, thought of and practised to some extent in former times, but after all a child of this century, is the building of the hull and hold in compartments, water-tight, and sometimes fire-proof, so that in case of a leakage or a fire in one or more compartments, the fire or water may be confined there and the extension of the danger to the entire s.h.i.+p prevented.

In the matter of _Marine Propulsion_, when the steam engine was made a practical and useful servant by Watt, and men began to think of driving boats and s.h.i.+ps with it, the problem was how to adapt it to use with propelling means already known. Paddle-wheels and other wheels to move boats in place of oars had been suggested, and to some extent used from time to time, since the days of the Romans; and they were among the first devices used in steam vessels. Their whirl may still be heard on many waters. Learned men saw no reason why the screw of Archimedes should not be used for the same purpose, and the idea was occasionally advocated by French and English philosophers from at least 1680, by Franklin and Watt less than a century later, and finally, in 1794, Lyttleton of England obtained a patent for his "aquatic propeller,"

consisting of threads formed on a cylinder and revolving in a frame at the head, stern, or side of a vessel.

Other means had been also suggested prior to 1800, and by the same set of philosophers, and experimentally used by practical builders, such as steam-pumps for receiving the water forward, or amids.h.i.+ps, and forcing it out astern, thus creating a propulsive movement. The latter part of the eighteenth century teemed with these suggestions and experiments, but it remained for the nineteenth to see their embodiment and adaptation to successful commercial use.

The earliest, most successful demonstrations of screw propellers and paddle wheels in steam vessels in the century were the construction and use of a boat with twin screws by Col. John Stevens of Hoboken, N. J., in 1804 and the paddle-wheel steamboat trial of Fulton on the Hudson in 1807.

But it was left to John Ericsson, that great Swedish inventor, going to England in 1826 with his brain full of ideas as to steam and solar engines, to first perfect the screw-propeller. He there patented in 1836 his celebrated propeller, consisting of several blades or segments of a screw, and based on such correct principles of twist that they were at once adopted and applied to steam vessels.

In 1837-1839 the knowledge of his inventions had preceded him to America, where his propeller was at once introduced and used in the vessels _Frances B. Ogden_ and the _Robert E. Stockton_ (the latter built by the Lairds of Birkenhead and launched in 1837). In 1839 or 1840 Ericsson went to America, and in 1841 he was engaged in the construction of the U.S. s.h.i.+p of war _Princeton_, the first naval screw wars.h.i.+p built having propelling machinery under the water line and out of reach of shot.

The idea that steams.h.i.+ps could not be safely run at a greater speed than ten or twelve miles an hour was now abandoned.

Twice Ericsson revolutionised the naval construction of the world by his inventions in America: first by the introduction of his screw-propeller in the _Princeton_; and second, by building the iron-clad _Monitor_.

Since Ericsson's day other inventors have made themselves also famous by giving new twists to the tail of this famous fish and new forms to its iron-ribbed body.

_Pneumatic Propellers_ operated by the expulsion of air or gas against the surrounding body of water, and chain-propellers, consisting of a revolving chain provided with paddles or floats, have also been invented and tested, with more or less successful results.

A great wars.h.i.+p as she lies in some one of the vast modern s.h.i.+p-yards of the world, resting securely on her long steel backbone, from which great ribs of steel rise and curve on either side and far overhead, like a monstrous skeleton of some huge animal that the sea alone can produce, clothed with a skin, also of steel; her huge interior, lined at bottom with an armoured deck that stretches across the entire breadth of the vessel, and built upon this deck, capacious steel compartments enclosing the engines and boilers, the coal, the magazines, the electric plant for supplying power to various motors for lighting the s.h.i.+p and for furnis.h.i.+ng the current to powerful search-lights; having compartments for the sick, the apothecary shop, and the surgeon's hospital, the men's and the officers' quarters; above these the conning tower and the armoured pilot-house, then the great guns interspersed among these various parts, looking like the sunken eyes, or protruding like the bony prominences of some awful sea monster, is a structure that gives one an idea of the immense departure which has occurred during the last half century, not only from the wooden walls of the navies of all the past, but from all its mechanical arts.

What a great ocean liner contains and what the contributions are to modern s.h.i.+p-building from other modern arts is set forth in the following extract from _McClure's Magazine_ for September, 1900, in describing the _Deutschland_. "The _Deutschland_, for instance has a complete refrigerating plant, four hospitals, a safety deposit vault for the immense quant.i.ties of gold and silver which pa.s.s between the banks of Europe and America, eight kitchens, a complete post-office with German and American clerks, thirty electrical motors, thirty-six pumps, most of them of American and English make, no fewer than seventy-two steam engines, a complete drug store, a complete fire department, with pumps, hose and other fire-fighting machinery, a library, 2600 electric lights, two barber shops, room for an orchestra and bra.s.s band, a telegraph system, a telephone system, a complete printing establishment, a photographic dark room, a cigar store, an electric fire-alarm system, and a special refrigerator for flowers."

We have seen, in treating of safes and locks, how burglars keep pace with the latest inventions to protect property by the use of dynamite and nitro-glycerine explosions. The reverse of this practice prevails when those policemen of the seas, the _torpedo boats_, guard the treasures of the sh.o.r.e. It is there the defenders are armed with the irresistible explosives. These explosives are either planted in harbours and discharged by electricity from the sh.o.r.e, or carried by very swift armoured boats, or by boats capable of being submerged, directed, and propelled by mechanisms contained there and controlled from the sh.o.r.e, or from another vessel; or by boats containing all instrumentalities, crew, and commander, and capable of submerging and raising itself, and of attacking and exploding the torpedo when and where desired. The latter are now considered as the most formidable and efficient cla.s.s of destroyers.

No matter how staunch, sound and grand in dimensions man may build his s.h.i.+ps, old Neptune can still toss them. But Franklin, a century and a half ago, called attention to his experiments of oiling his locks when in a tempestuous mood, and thus rendering the temper of the Old Man of the Sea as placid as a summer pond. s.h.i.+ps that had become unmanageable were thus enabled, by spreading oil on the waves from the windward side, to be brought under control, and dangerous surfs subdued, so that boats could land. Franklin's idea of pouring oil on the troubled waters has been revived during the last quarter of the century and various means for doing it vigorously patented. The means have varied in many instances, but chiefly consist of bags and other receptacles to hold and distribute the oil upon the surrounding water with economy and uniformity.

At the close of the century the world was still waiting for the successful _Air-s.h.i.+p_.

A few successful experiments in balloon navigation by the aid of small engines of different forms have been made since 1855. Some believe that Count Zeppelin, an officer of the German army has solved the great problem, especially since the ascent of his s.h.i.+p made on July 2, 1900, at Lake Constance.

It has been a.s.serted that no vessel has yet been made to successfully fly unless made on the balloon principle, and Count Zeppelin's boat is on that principle. According to the description of Eugen Wolf, an aeronaut who took part in the ascent referred to and who published an account of the same in the November number of _McClure's_, 1900, it is not composed of one balloon, but of a row of them, and these are not exposed when inflated to every breeze that blows, but enclosed and combined in an enormous cylindrical sh.e.l.l, 420 feet in length, about 38 feet in diameter, with a volume of 14,780 cubic yards and with ends pointed like a cigar. This sh.e.l.l is a framework made up of aluminium trellis work, and divided into seventeen compartments, each having its own gas bag. The frame is further strengthened and the balloons stayed by a network of aluminium wire, and the entire frame covered with a soft ramie fibre. Over this is placed a water-tight covering of pegamoid, and the lower part covered with light silk. An air s.p.a.ce of two feet is left between the cover and the balloons. Beneath the balloons extends a walking bridge 226 feet long, and from this bridge is suspended two aluminium cars, at front and rear of the centre, adapted to hold all the operative machinery and the operator and other pa.s.sengers.

The balloons, provided with proper valves, served to lift the structure; large four-winged screws, one on each side of the s.h.i.+p, their shafts mounted on a light framework extending from the body of the s.h.i.+p, and driven backward and forward by two light benzine engines, one on each car, const.i.tuted the propelling force. Dirigibility (steering) was provided for by an apparatus consisting of a double pair of rudders, one pair forward and one aft, reaching out like great fins, and controlled by light metal cords from the cars. A ballast of water was carried in a compartment under each car. To give the s.h.i.+p an upward or a downward movement the plane on which the s.h.i.+p rests was provided with a weight adapted to slip back and forth on a cable underneath the balloon sh.e.l.l.

When the weight was far aft the tip of the s.h.i.+p was upward and the movement was upward, when at the forward end the movement was downward, and when at the centre the s.h.i.+p was poised and travelled in a horizontal plane. The trip was made over the lake on a quiet evening. A distance of three and three-quarter miles, at a height of 1300 feet, was made in seventeen minutes. Evolutions from a straight course were accomplished.

The s.h.i.+p was lowered to the lake, on which it settled easily and rode smoothly.

The other great plan of air navigation receiving the attention of scientists and aeronauts is the aeroplane system. Although the cohesive force of the air is so exceedingly small that it cannot be relied upon as a sufficient resisting medium through which propulsion may be accomplished alone by a counter-resisting agent like propeller blades, yet it is known what weight the air has and it has been ascertained what expanse of a thin plane is necessary without other means to support the weight of a man in the air.

To this idea must be added the means of flight, of starting and maintaining a stable flight and of directing its course. Careful observation of the manner of the flight of large heavy birds, especially in starting, has led to some successful experiments. They do not rise at once, but require an initiative force for soaring which they obtain by running on the ground before spreading their wings. The action of the wings in folding and unfolding for maintaining the flight and controlling its direction, is then to be noted.

It is along these lines that inventions in this system are now working.

An initiative mechanism to start the s.h.i.+p along the earth or water, to raise it at an angle, to spread planes of sufficient extent to support the weight of the machine and its operators on the body of the air column, light engines to give the wing-planes an opening and closing action, rudders to steer by, means for maintaining equilibrium, and means when landing to float upon the water or roll upon the land, these are the princ.i.p.al problems that navigators of the great seas above us are now at work upon.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

ILLUMINATING GAS.

"How wonderful that sunbeams absorbed by vegetation in the primordial ages of the earth and buried in its depths as vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon system of slowly formed rocks have been piled above, should come forth at last, at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the light of civilised man into day."--_Prof. E. L. Youmans._

"The invention of artificial light has extended the available term of human life, by giving the night to man's use; it has, by the social intercourse it encourages, polished his manners and refined his tastes, and perhaps as much as anything else, has aided his intellectual progress."--_Draper._

If one desires to know what the condition of cities, towns and peoples was before the nineteenth century had lightened and enlightened them, let him step into some poor country town in some out-of-the-way region (and such may yet be found) at night, pick his way along rough pavements, and no pavements, by the light of a smoky lamp placed here and there at corners, and of weeping lamps and limp candles in the windows of shops and houses, and meet people armed with tin lanterns throwing a dubious light across the pathways. Let him be prepared to be a.s.sailed by the odours of undrained gutters, ditches, and roads called streets, and escape, if he can, stumbling and falling into them. Let him take care also that he avoid in the darkness the drippings from the overhanging eaves or windows, and falling upon the slippery steps of the dim doorway he may be about to enter. Within, let him overlook, if he can, in the hospitable reception, the dim and smoky atmosphere, and observe that the brightest and best as well as the most cheerful illuminant flashes from the wide open fireplace. Occasionally a glowing grate might be met. The eighteenth century did have its glowing grates, and its still more glowing furnaces of coal in which the ore was melted and by the light of which the castings were made.

It is very strange that year after year for successive generations men saw the hard black coal break under the influence of heat and burst into flames which lit up every corner, without learning, beyond sundry accidents and experiments, that this _gast_, or _geest_, or _spirit_, or _vapour_, or _gas_, as it was variously called, could be led away from its source, ignited at a distance, and made to give light and heat at other places than just where it was generated.

Thus Dr. Clayton, Dean of Kildare, Ireland, in 1688 distilled gas from coal and lit and burned it, and told his learned friend, the Hon. Robert Boyle, about it, who announced it with interest to the Royal Society, and again it finds mention in the _Philosophical Transactions_ fifty years later. Then, in 1726, Dr. Hales told how many cubic inches of gas a certain number of grains of coal would produce. Then Bishop Watson in 1750 pa.s.sed some gas through water and carried it in pipes from one place to another; and then Lord Dundonald in 1786 built some ovens, distilled coal and tar, burned the gas, and got a patent. In the same year, Dr. Rickel of Wurzburg lighted his laboratory with gas made by the dry distillation of bones; but all these were experiments. Finally, William Murdock, the owner of large workshops at Redruth, in Cornwall, a practical man and mechanic, and a keen observer, using soft coal to a large extent in his shops, tried with success in 1792 to collect the escaping gas and with it lit up the shops. Whether he continued steadily to so use the gas or only at intervals, at any rate it seems to have been experimental and failed to attract attention. It appears that he repeated the experiment at the celebrated steam engine works of Boulton and Watt at Soho, near Birmingham, in 1798, and again illuminated the works in 1802, on occasion of a peace jubilee.

In the meantime, in 1801, Le Bon, a Frenchman at Paris, had succeeded in making illuminating gas from wood, lit his house therewith, and proposed to light the whole city of Paris.

Thus it may be said that illuminating gas and the new century were born together--the former preceding the latter a little and lighting the way.

Then in 1803 the English periodicals began to take the matter up and discuss the whole subject. One magazine objected to its use in houses on the ground that the curtains and furniture would be ruined by the saturation produced by the oxygen and hydrogen, and that the curtains would have to be wrung out the next morning after the illumination.

There doubtless was good cause for objection to the smoky, unpleasant smelling light then produced.