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James Watt and the Invention of the Steam Engine
UNTIL a little more than one hundred years ago, the chief power used in the production of food, clothing, and shelter was hand power. Cattle and horses were used to cultivate the fields. Windmills and water wheels were employed to grind corn and wheat. But most tools and machines were worked by hand. |
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Robert Fulton and the Invention of the Steamboat
George Stephenson & Invention of the Locomotive
Invention of the Electric Engine
ON August 17, 1807, a curious crowd of people in New York gathered at a boat landing. Tied to the dock was a strange-looking craft. A smokestack rose above the deck. From the sides of the boat, there stood out queer shaped paddle wheels. Of a sudden, the clouds of smoke from the smokestack grew larger, the paddle wheels turned, and the boat, to the astonishment of all, moved. It was "Fulton's Folly," the Clermont, on her first trip to Albany.
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Eli Whitney & the Invention of the Cotton Gin
An American, Eli Whitney, invented a machine to do this work. By reason of his invention, the United States is to-day the greatest cotton-producing country in the world. The cotton crop of 1916 amounted to more than [106] sixteen million bales and was worth several hundred million dollars.
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Whitney's cotton gin easily ranks in importance with the jenny of Hargreaves, the water frame of Arkwright, and the mule of Crompton. These four inventions are the foundation of the cotton industry of to-day. To spin and weave cotton, hamlets have grown into cities, such as Manchester in England, and Lowell in Massachusetts. Great territories, such as our Southern States, have been given over to the cultivation of cotton. Steamship and railroad lines have been built to carry cotton from the fields to the mills; and millions of people earn their daily bread from raising, or spinning, or weaving cotton, or from selling the finished goods. To have had a part in the growth of such a great industry is no slight honor. |
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Elias Howe & the Invention of the Sewing Machine
SEWING is older than spinning or weaving. Savages learned at an early time how to sew together pieces of fur. They used a pointed bone or a thorn to make a hole; through this they pushed a coarse thread or leather thong, making a knot at each hole.
The inventor was Elias Howe, who was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819.
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Howe's father was a farmer, who, in addition to his farm, had a gristmill, a sawmill, and a shingle machine. To the farm at Spencer, the neighbors brought their wheat and corn to be ground into flour and meal, and their logs to be sawed into lumber or split into shingles. Yet with all his labor, the income of the father was small, and supplied only a modest living to a family of eight children.
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Henry Bessemer and the Making of Steel
IRON is the most precious metal in the world. It is the most precious metal in the world, because it is the most useful. Without iron to make our stoves, kettles, knives, tools, engines, and railroads, we would be living to-day very much as the Indians lived when Columbus discovered America. Our cooking utensils, our tools, and our weapons would, to this very day, be of clay or wood or stone. Pound for pound, pure gold is, to be sure, worth more than pure iron.
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