The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1878-09-26
The Inventive Genius Of America.

The London Times, speaking of the
mechanical display of the United States
at the Paris Exhibition, says:
cit may almost certainly be predi-
Gated of any modern mechanical con-
gress that the Americans will carry of
the palm for novel and ingenious ap-
plication of force to practical purposes,
the substitution of mechanism for hand
labor in new and curious c0ntrivances,
which to the amateur in such matters
surprise as much by the new ways in
which old problems are attacked as by
the fine way in which the work is done.
The mass of invention and practical
result from it produced by the Ameri-
cans within the century, and especially
the last twenty or thirty years, is so
great and SO important in results that
it presents an important problem in
political ecOnOmy-One especially IN
teresting to Englishmen, as American
mechanism is an offshoot from English,
but an offshoot so peculiar in its char
acter that mere heredity will not quite
explain it.
ga traveller in the New World once
said that the most interesting thing in
America was its Americanism, and so
we may say that the most curious feat
ure of American mechanics is its dis
tinctively American feature. As me-
cEanical science progresses, the great
er and more important inventions be-
come elaborated by and the property
of tho Nation who push that science
furthest in its experimental studies.
The result is foreseen, studied and de-
veloped with method and certainty,
and great industrial revolutions are ef-
fected with certain and almost cal
culable progress. In this process En-
gland has long led, and still leads, the
world, owing to favorable conditions of
capital and labor. fulton built the
first successful steamer on American
waters; but all the latest and most inn
portant advances in steamship build
ing are English. The first monitor
was American; but the puny craft of
that construction across the Atlantic
would all go down before one of the
last English build; and, though Rod
man and Dahlgren instituted the ex-
periments to which we owe most of the
present knowledge of the power of ar
tillery and gunpowder, English artil-
| lery has left the practical transatlantic
results out of the chance of competition.
| "Yet, in spite of this, the activity
and insight of the American inventive
genius develops more that is new and
combined. The New Highlander in
vents normally; his brain has a bias
that way. He mechanics as an old
Greek sculptured, as the Venetian
painted, or the modern Italian sang; a
school has grown up whose dominant
quality, curiously intense, widespread
and daring, is mechanical imagination.
1t is not the professed mechanic OF
ironmaster who invents, any more than
than the schoolmaster or the farmer.
As Tintoretto left his dyeing to become
a great painter, the American, be he
bank clerk, pedagoguc, backwoods.
man or plowman, turns in his busy
brain some problem of his own, sug.
gested by his experience of ill or too
slowly-done work, and, like Archim.
edes in his bath, he suddenly finds il
and rushes away with his Eureka to
some place where he can make his
model or get it made-more frequently
the former for want of funds to get il
made. There was want the man had
felt, an ideal to be worked out, and in
his meditation suddenly the thing
flashed on MIN, and is complete in all
its essential parts from that moment
The number of inventions, useful and
useless, thrown off in this way in the
course of year, of which only small
proportion attain the realization of the
Patent Office, can only be imagined by
those who have lived among New En-.
CHAMBERS at home"