Show INVJSMiORS LUCK I < t From the earliest times till today perhaps the most curious thing in the annals of inventions is the spontan eonsntss ot that happy idea or brilliant thought which crystallizes usefulness useful-ness as it comes from a master mind The good plodding genius seems to be nowhere m the game in which the great in science commerce and arts nave shone A heavensent idea indeed in-deed as often as not does not come as the fruit of long vigils and the midnight mid-night 0114 1 Jo guest of a scientific Galahad however faithful the cynical say ensures that coveted success which comes unsought and unasked where not looked for The alchemists to illustrate our meaning groped in their dim laboratories tor more than a century in hopes of discovering the philosophers stone yet what they all aimed at came to nothing and that which few of them sought a score of precious finds in physics and metallurgy bubbled to light unsum mooed in their crucibles or rose with the fumes of smelting pots and furnaces furn-aces lit for far other searches The same preponderances ef luck in the history of origination is to be traced back to the most ancient records There were inventors long before the alchemists and perhaps the very earliest earli-est hits they made are intrinsically the most wonderful though the exact data regarding them must be forever unknown Such for instance was a pone needle known to savants from cave earth of infinite antiquity eyed polished pol-ished as effective in its way as anything any-thing BJrmingham can turn out and epitomizing some brilliant conception some lucky fruit of sumptuary needs when man was only just begmirng to clothe himself There is again the wheel more wonderful in its simplicity than anything elsethe very centre pivot of civilized life without which existence today is in fact inconceivable inconceiv-able and yet there are nOwheels in nature na-ture and some obliterated hero vexed with tie uncertainties of logs or round pebbles as motive means must once have made the first of them and as likely as not looking at the usual fortune for-tune of inventors got but little good by it When men began to originate they were on the high road to civilization civ-ilization and the ages of the racethe stone period when they furnished their dwellings with flint or chalcedony rubbed and chipped into serviceableness thfe bronze and the iron periods are but epochs of invention inven-tion our museum shelves being stocked with patented happy thoughts in implements im-plements of war or peare There seems to have been some rude idea of the acknowledgment ac-knowledgment due to genius in the worship of Osiris the first of agricul alists and the pecans which echoed through the temples of Thebes and Memphis to Isis who originated wheat and pulse as food hungry humanity The Olympian gods are but inventors tor the most part from Vulcan the crafty son of Jupiter to Prometheus that admirable and painfully faithful type of a persecuted benefactor of his kind But what must have struck many a student of human progress is that though tie improvMiient of accomplished accom-plished facts may reward application ant diligence the great gifts of the gods come to hand in a 1 way that looks as if their arrival were little better than chance Infinite as are the engines and appliances of civilization today there is scarcely one which cannot be traced back to a fluke cf some kind The steam engine is but the monument of embodied surprises from the time when the lifting l lid of a homely teakettle suggested the irresistible irre-sistible power of steam to the latest achievement today of a Bessemer in compressed steel or the like The rod and piston was a happy thought and an idli apprentice tying two marbles to a string and hitching them on to a valve hit upon the principle of the 1 governor without which we should be lost in the present state of engineering engi-neering Then in other directions every schoolboy knows that Archimedes was bathing when a great theory dawned upo him and that he ran home in a couple of towels or something If w to commit it to his tablets Isaac Newton was rusticating no doubt when a falling fall-ing apple if any old story can be accepted ac-cepted suggested a philosophYto him Friar Bacon was perhaps concocting an1 antidote for rheumatism or pros peeting for the Elixir 6f Life when he chanced upon the first rude sample ef gunpowder In the same way the world called aloud for glass during a thousand years dr so but twenty generations gen-erations cf sages could not think it into life until those ragged shipwrecked ship-wrecked sailors of legend turned out the first specimen from below their beach flee where the heat had run the silica of the sand and the seaweed o a rough ingot of the sew material QpMos1 owe much to those urchins wh first held two lenses up in ra hoer and called r F the attervMon of an 1UW + old spectatife = makes to the curious phenomenon that distant objects were bought yisually nearer by this means and astronomy is indebted to Galileos elderwood spyglasses and meditative beterodoxy Where would our sportsmen sports-men be without their tiny yet perfect leaden hail Pet the art of making hot we arecredibly told was the con ceptic l jtifja dream And medicine has never suitably acknowledged the obligation obli-gation it is under to the dead frog whose spontaneous movements on Gal vanis supper table filled his mind with the first suspicion of galvanism A little eearch would swell such a list illimitably Yet there would be one danger attendant on its m kiug namely that we houla overlook the patient search and vigil long the tireless tire-less endurance of neglect and the htroic enthusiasm in a good cause i which has characterized the labors of many great benefactors of their kind The inventors cnaplet is at best a crown thorns he is born alas 1 for the most part to be misunderstood an1 > caviled at and he knows in his bitterness bitter-ness cf heart that there are trply latter day eagles to tear the liver of the modern Prometheus and angry conservative con-servative deities willing enough that he should suffer for helping dark humanity hum-anity to lighter and brighter existences |