The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Masterpieces of Science:, by Various

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Title: Little Masterpieces of Science:
Invention and Discovery

Author: Various

Editor: George Iles

Release Date: June 25, 2009 [EBook #29241]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LITTLE MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE

[Illustration: George Stephenson.]

Little Masterpieces
of Science

Edited by George Iles

INVENTION AND DISCOVERY

_By_

Benjamin Franklin Alexander Graham Bell
Michael Faraday Count Rumford
Joseph Henry George Stephenson

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1902

Copyright, 1902, by Doubleday, Page & Co.

Copyright, 1877, by George B. Prescott

Copyright, 1896, by S. S. McClure Co.

Copyright, 1900, by Doubleday, McClure & Co.

PREFACE

To a good many of us the inventor is the true hero for he multiplies the
working value of life. He performs an old task with new economy, as when
he devises a mowing-machine to oust the scythe; or he creates a service
wholly new, as when he bids a landscape depict itself on a photographic
plate. He, and his twin brother, the discoverer, have eyes to read a
lesson that Nature has held for ages under the undiscerning gaze of
other men. Where an ordinary observer sees, or thinks he sees,
diversity, a Franklin detects identity, as in the famous experiment here
recounted which proves lightning to be one and the same with a charge of
the Leyden jar. Of a later day than Franklin, advantaged therefor by new
knowledge and better opportunities for experiment, stood Faraday, the
founder of modern electric art. His work gave the world the dynamo and
motor, the transmission of giant powers, almost without toll, for two
hundred miles at a bound. It is, however, in the carriage of but
trifling quantities of motion, just enough for signals, that electricity
thus far has done its most telling work. Among the men who have created
t