gradually wrought, that each one of them passed
unperceived, without leaving its author the credit for its discovery.
The immense majority of inventions are anonymous--some great names alone
survive. But, whether individual or collective, imagination remains
imagination. In order that the plow, at first a simple piece of wood
hardened by the fire and pushed along with the human hand, should become
what it is to-day, through a long series of modifications described in
the special works, who knows how many imaginations have labored! In the
same way, the uncertain flame of a resinous branch guiding vaguely in
the night leads us, through a long series of inventions, to gas and
electric lighting. All objects, even the most ordinary and most common
that now serve us in our everyday-life, are _condensed imagination_.

(III) More than any other form, mechanical imagination depends strictly
on physical conditions. It cannot rest content with combining images, it
postulates material factors that impose themselves unyieldingly.
Compared to it, the scientific imagination has much more freedom in the
building of its hypotheses. In general, every great invention has been
preceded by a period of abortive attempts. History shows that the
so-called "initial moment" of a mechanical discovery, followed by its
improvements, is the moment ending a series of unsuccessful trials: we
thus skip a phase of pure imagination, of imaginative construction that
has not been able to enter into the mold of an appropriate determinism.
There must have existed innumerable inventions that we might term
mechanical romances, which, however, we cannot refer to because they
have left us no trace, not being born viable. Others are known as
curiosities because they have blazed the path. We know that Otto de
Guericke made four fruitless attempts before discovering his air-pump.
The brothers Montgolfier were possessed with the desire to make
"imitation clouds," like those they saw moving over the Alps. "In order
to imitate nature," they at first enclosed water-vapor in a light, stout
case, which fell on cooling. Then they tried hydrogen; then the
production of a gas with electrical properties; and so on. Thus, after a
succession of hypotheses and failures, they finally succeeded. From the
end of the sixteenth century there was offered the possibility of
communicating at a distance by means of electricity. "In a work
published in 1624 the Jesuit, Father Leurechon, d