The hydraulic press., 1860-06-16
PROGRESS IN THE 10th CENTURY.


have glided into the dead-and- gone Past, but
they have left behind them more enduring
mementoes, in the shape of scientific and
mechanical achievements, than all of the two
thousand years that preceded them Since
1901 the world of mind has taken forward
! leap, unprecedented in the annals of human
ity. Should the forty years, that intervene
between the present and 1901, be MS prolific,
in inventive brains and bold Investigations
of physical laws and elements, as the sixty
that have passed, the 10th century will sur
mount the column of time like a Corinthian
capital on Tuscan shaft. In great political
events, the future historian, who shall assign
to his pen the task of recording the exploits
OF the Caucasian race, will find this century
prolific field; but to the contemplative
philosopher, of fifty years hence, its intellect
ual march will appear with dazzling gran
deur. Within the first twenty years of this
same century, Napoleon Bonaparte rose to
be a mighty emperor, and sunk to the tomb,
poor captive But his life and his fate,
startling as they were, have left no bcnefi-
cent impress upon the world, comparable to
that which Fulton gave it, when he launched
his first steamboat. Napoleon conquered
nations, and left the memorials of his tri-
umphs stamped on the desolated hearts of
widows and orphans; but Fulton conquered
the currents of impetuous rivers and the
winds and tides Of angry oceans, and erected
the trophies of his genins in the marts of
commerce, exalted far above their former
state, and in subdued wildernesses- rescued
to civilization and The arts o6 psaca. No
hero, of any raee-no priest, Of any religion
ever effected a more momentous revolu-
tion in the affairs of men, than did the al
most forgotten Fulton, when he chained the
Hercules of steam to the oar and made him
a navigator. And this he did in the first
decade of the nineteenth century.
The printing press, which had toiIed .hro'
three centuries, almost the same slow, plod-
ding machine it was when it came fgom the
hands of its inventor, Guttembnrg, became
marvel of celerty early in the century,
and saddenly added twenty thousand gates
to the temple of knowledge, where but one
existed before. What an upward stride Of
Ramnage press of 1915, the ink beaten into
the faces Of the types by buekskin balls, and
whereat the sweating pressman could not
make more than one hundred and fifty i'm
pressions in an hour all at once disappeared
before the steam -impelied machines of Cly-
mer and Hoe, which astonished the world
with their hourly impressions of twenty and
thirty thousandp The old fas hioned woolen-
stuffed balls with which the fathers of the
topographic art, for more than three hun
dred weary years, had beaten a curious sort
of devils tattoo, were banished from the
press-room by the inventor Of the compost
ton roller. \ scientific mechanist saw the
composition roller at work. and, forthwith,
the idea Of p1ilatiaq 2.IE-the power press
seized upon his faculty Of constructive
sheets were hurled upon the public where
only meager hundred had been softly
dropped dbefore-thousands and tens of thou
ands of readers began. to read, where only
ffties ard hundreds had read before-pape-
mills burst into existence, as if by magic, to
supply the novel and unwonted demand for
+hair fro ilof f,i,r ~;
ledge were thrown at the feet of thousands
and millions of children, who had else grown
up in ignorance and its consequent vices
And for this great miracle ofphysical science,
which almost annihilates time, while It diff
fuses mental and moral light in ceaseless
radiations, the world is indebted to the 10th
century.
Another and less pretentious light-evol-
yer is the friction match, invented in the
third decade of this century, and st which,
some people, measuring their need of appro-
baton by its substantive diminutiveness,
may laugh; but the people, who toiled with
the flint, steel, and tinder, and the other
of forty years ago. would have hailed~it as
boon from Heaven /
| The railroad, that gave to man means Of
| locomoton, as swift as the eagle and as un-
firing as the wind, is another great child of
the 10th century. What the steamboat and
steamship of Fulton left uneompleted the
railroad has more than accomplished Time
was, when
Stands intersected by narrow firth.
Abhorred each other: mountains interppsod
Made enemie5-of lations-;'
but the Railroad has burst through the
boundaries Of nations and the prejudices of
communities, and bronght hereditary foes
into acquaintanceship and brotherhood. 1t
cleared, at one leap, five centuries in the