The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1915-07-22
PROGRESS DID NOT STOP.
Employee of Patent Office Thought
All Inventions We're In.

SOLle one pOliuS ONeI luS Olu AiSo
in the United States patent Office at
Washington the other day found a
letter written in 1888 that illus
trateS the limitations OF the human
imagination. 1t was from an en-
ployee OF the patent Office, offering
his resignation to the head of the
department. says the San Antonio
Light. His reason was that as every
thing inevitable had been invented,
the patent Office would soon be dis
continued and there would be no
further need for his services or the
services of any of his fellow-clerks.
He therefore decided to leave before
the blow fell.
Everything inevitable had been
invented. The writer of this letter
journeyed in a stage coach or ca
nal boat. He had never seen a limit
ed train or an ocean greyhound. He
read at night by candle light, if he
read at all in the evening; more like
ly he went to bed soon after dark
and did all his reading by daylight.
He had never seen a house lighted
by Illuminating gas. The arc and
incandescent electric lights were not
to be invented for nearly a half cen
tury. If he had ever heard of elec-
tricity, he thought of it as the mys-
terious and dangerous fluid that
strikes from the clouds during a
thunder storm. That it could be har-
messed to do mans will had never
occurred to him.
He had never heard the clicking
of a telegraph sounder. The tele-
phone would have seemed as won
derful to him as voyage to the
moon. Motion pictures would have
reminded him of black art, and the
idea that a machine could be invent
ed whereby a man would fly . above
the clouds like a bird, ascending and
descending at will, would have SEEM
ed to him merely absurd. The mod
ern printing press. the linotype ma
chine, which seems almost to think !;
the X-ray by means Of which sur
geons may diagnose disease and in
jury and lay out their work with
scientific certainty, these things were
yet to be invented long after he was
dead. He could not imagine the au-
tomobile, now so common that they
cover the streets and roads Of all the
world.
He could not dream that cannon
would be made to throw projectile
more than twenty miles, that repeat
ing rifles, revolvers and machine
guns would be invented, that steel
monsters of the deep would speed
invisible under the seas with the
power to send giant ocean liner to
the bottom within a matter of mo-
ments. He lacked the imagination
to see all the thousands and tens of
thousands of comparatively small in
ventions that have come into being
since his day, some of them for good
and some for evil, but all telling a
story of progress of one sort or an
other. Probably in this he did not
differ from most of his fellow7men
in his day. 1t is very likely most of
his friends agreed with him that the
limit of invention had been reached.
He seems, unfortunately, deficient in
imagination and in optimism, as we
read of his letter of resignation in
the musty files of the patent office.
But let US not take too much JUNCTION
to our souls. We are as ignorant OF
what the next eighty years may
bring forth as he was Of the future
Of American inventions.