Great Inventions and Discoveries

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 crud

men are called

ding 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

ot at one bound or at one thousand that we pass from the primitive cave to New York City. Civilization is the accumulation of centu

ibuted to civilization the results of their vision. Whoever has added to the safety, the happiness, the power, or the convenience of society; whoever discovers a star or a microbe; whoever paints a picture or plants a tre

blow between continents; but steam laughs at stormy seas. The moon's light is not sufficient for man's purposes and he makes a brighter one. When winter blows his icy breath, man warms himself with coal and fire. The South pours down upon him her scorching summer; but he has learned how to freeze water into ice. Time and space conspire together for human isolation; man conjures with electricity and with it destroys both. The

teenth century was the greatest in history in point of human progress, especially in the field of inventions. It alone gave to man far more of civilization than the whole ten centuries before the discovery of America or indeed any other period of a thousand years. One h

h, a stove, a piece of coal, a daily newspaper, a sewing machine, a reaper, a drill, a mowing machine, ether, chloroform, galvanized iron, In

ving, we a

nd and a

e on age

ving is

rs ago. From the beginning they have done about all they can ever do. Not so with man. He is a progre

o' the ages one incr

n are widen'd with the

who shall say that the fortieth century may not as far surpass the twentieth as the twentieth does the sleepy dawn of man's existence on the earth? We ar

ed tools. These tools are the best measure of his civilization. According to the materi

of bronze, an alloy composed of copper and tin. These bronze implements were more numerous and more efficient than the stone tools and gave man a higher degree of power and workmanship. With them he cut down trees or carved stone for his dwellings and acquired generally a higher order of life. This era is nam

already in existence but not known before. There was no electric telegraph until Samuel Morse made or inv

world great will always stand the names of Gutenberg or Coster, Watt, Stephenson, Morse, Edison, Fulton, Galileo, Newton, Columbus, Mort

ecting an entire change in the structure of government in Europe. As to the discovery of printing, it not only made religious revolutions possible, but was the basis on which modern democratic forms of government rested. The steam engine not only changed all forms of industry and the conditions under which industries were prosecuted, b

rest akin to the Creator of any faculty possessed by the human mind; for while it does not create

kind universally; while the good of political achievements can respect but some particular cantons of men; these latter do not endure above a few ages, the former f