Stories of Inventors eBook

Russell Doubleday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 143 pages of information about Stories of Inventors.

Stories of Inventors eBook

Russell Doubleday
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 143 pages of information about Stories of Inventors.

It is possible that in the future these modern “argonauts” will be seeking the golden fleeces of the sea in wrecks, in golden sands like the beaches of Nome, and that these amphibious boats will be ready along all the dangerous coasts to rush to the rescue of noble ships and wrest them from the clutches of the cruel sea.

Mr. Lake has also designed and built a submarine torpedo-boat that will travel on the surface, under the waves, or on the bottom; provided with both gasoline and electric power, and, fitted with torpedo discharge tubes, she will be able to throw a submarine torpedo; her diver could attach a charge of dynamite to the keel of an anchored warship, or she could do great damage by hooking up cables through her diver’s trap door and cutting them, and by setting adrift anchored torpedoes and submarine mines.

Thus have Jules Verne’s imaginings come true, and the dream Nautilus, whose adventures so many of us have breathlessly followed, has been succeeded by actual “Hollands” and practical “Argonauts” designed by American inventors and manned by American crews.

LONG-DISTANCE TELEPHONY

What Happens When You Talk into a Telephone Receiver

In Omaha, Nebraska, half-way across the continent and about forty hours from Boston by fast train, a man sits comfortably in his office chair and, with no more exertion than is required to lift a portable receiver off his desk, talks every day to his representative in the chief New England city.  The man in Boston hears his chief’s voice and can recognise the peculiarities in it just as if he stood in the same room with him.  The man in Nebraska, speaking in an ordinary conversational tone, can be heard perfectly well in Boston, 1,400 miles away.

This is the longest talk on record—­that is, it is the longest continuous telephone line in steady and constant use, though the human voice has been carried even greater distances with the aid of this wonderful instrument.

The telephone is so common that no one stops to consider the wonder of it, and not one person in a hundred can tell how it works.

At this time, when the telephone is as necessary as pen and ink, it is hard to realise a time when men could not speak to one another from a distance, yet a little more than a quarter of a century ago the genius who invented it first conceived the great idea.

Sometimes an inventor is a prophet:  he sees in advance how his idea, perfected and in universal use, will change things, establish new manners and customs, new laws and new methods.  Alexander Graham Bell was one of these prophetic inventors—­the telephone was his invention, not his discovery.  He first got the idea and then sought a way to make it practical.  If you put yourself in his place, forget what has been accomplished, and put out of mind how the voice is transmitted from place to place by the slender wire, it would be impossible even then to realise how much in the dark Professor Bell was in 1874.

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Project Gutenberg
Stories of Inventors from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.