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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. Anaesthetics                                                 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.

What is the difference between the life of the cave-dweller and the
life of the modern New Yorker? We call it _civilization_. It is not at
one bound or at one thousand that we pass from the primitive cave to
New York City. Civilization is the accumulation of centuries of
achievement. It is builded, in the language of Isaiah, "line upon
line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little."

Different nations have accomplished different things and have scattered
the seeds of these accomplishments among other nations. Certain
individuals have seen farther in certain directions than their