Great Inventions and Discoveries

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[Illustration: THE FIRST SHEET FROM THE PRINTING PRESS]

Graded Supplementary Reading Series

GREAT INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES

by

WILLIS DUFF PIERCY

New York Charles E. Merrill Company

Copyright, 1911 By Charles E. Merrill Co.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introduction 7

II. The Printing Press 15

III. The Steam Engine 30

IV. Electricity: The Telegraph and the Telephone 56

V. Electricity: Lighting, Transportation, and Other Uses 78

VI. The Discovery of America 92

VII. Weapons and Gunpowder 108

VIII. Astronomical Discoveries and Inventions 127

IX. The Cotton-gin 138

X. Anæsthetics 147

XI. Steel and Rubber 154

XII. Stenography and the Typewriter 164

XIII. The Friction Match 169

XIV. Photography 177

XV. Clocks 182

XVI. Some Machines 188 The Sewing Machine 188 The Reaper 192 Spinning and Weaving Machines 197

XVII. Aeronautics 203

GREAT INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the world was even then old, primitive man came into existence. The first men lived in the branches of trees or in their hollow trunks, and sometimes in caves. For food they chased horses or caught fish from the streams along whose shores they lived. If they had clothing, it was the skins of wild beasts. Life was simple, slow, and crude. There were no cities, books, railroads, clocks, newspapers, schools, churches, judges, teachers, automobiles, or elections. Man lived with other animals and was little superior to them. These primitive men are called cave-dwellers.

A resident of modern New York sits down to a breakfast gathered from distant parts of the earth. He spreads out before him his daily newspaper, which tells him what has happened during the last twenty-four hours all over the world. Telegraph wires and ocean cables have flashed these events across thousands of miles into the newspaper offices and there great printing presses have recorded them upon paper. After breakfast he gets into an electric street car or automobile and is carried through miles of space in a very short time to a great steel building hundreds of feet high. He steps into an electric elevator and is whirled rapidly up to his office on the twentieth floor. The postman brings a package of letters which fast-flying mail trains have brought him during the night from far-away places. He reads them and then speaks rapidly to a young woman who makes some crooked marks on paper. After running her fingers rapidly over the keyboard of a little machine, she hands him type-written replies to the letters he has received. A boy brings him a little yellow envelope. In it he finds a message from Seattle or London or Hong Kong or Buenos Ayres sent only a few moments ago. He wishes to talk with a business associate in Boston or St. Louis. Still sitting at his desk, he applies a small tube to his ear and speaks to the man as distinctly and as instantaneously as if he were in the next room. He finds it important to be in Chicago. After luncheon, he boards a train equipped with the conveniences of his own home, sleeps there comfortably, and flies through the thousand miles of distance in time to have breakfast in Chicago the next morning.