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Show SOME OF THE WORLD'S GRAT INVENTORS. Patent Office Statistics Show That Not All the Thinkers Were From Connecticut Barnum a Shining Light, The Patent Office statisticians inform in-form us that Britons are the most inventive in-ventive of all foreigners; that for the year 1901 the patents issued to British inventors numbered 999, while the Germans, in spite of the advantages of cheaper aring and quieter surroundings, surround-ings, came forward with only 743. It is granted, we believe, that the Yankees are the leading inventors; They have nothing to say about those wonderful airships (our foremost theorist m air sailing is a Bostonian, Samuel Plerpont Langley) that always go to smash just before whirling whirl-ing around the vast empyrean, or about the still more wonderful perpetual per-petual motion machines, or aoout the yet unattempted desideratum (greatest (great-est of all, perhaps) a machine to rock and sing the baby to sleep. The world is yet at the mercy of infants and nurses. Nor do patents tell of the inventors of gods and goddesses in the East, or of the inventors of romances ro-mances that publishers will not take a chance with. As for Connecticut's reputation, however, it will endure forever and brilliantly, If for ti other reason than that the prince Ox Yankee Inventors, the Hon. Phineas T. Barnum, author of "The Humbugs of the World," hailed hail-ed from Bethel and lived to be mayor of Bridgeport and the head of the "Greatest Show on Earth." and naturally our cousins on the other side are next in line. But we remember remem-ber that the Connecticut people are supposed to be the most inventive Yankees, whereas Benjamin Franklin was a Bostonian, and Samuel F. B. Morse and Ellas Howe were New. Yorkers (as were the less well known but equally interesting inventors of the Cardiff Giant) ; George M. Pullman Pull-man lived In Cook county, 111., the Maxims are Maine men, Thomas A. Edison comes from Ohio, and the world-frighting Gatling opened his eyes in Dixie. Patents tell only a part of the story. |