2o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



oped to a great extent in Germany and France. We see the same 

 tendency to concentration of talent on the business end in the man- 

 agement of our railroads. Can any one doubt that these are now 

 managed with far less energy than twenty years ago? Our railroads 

 are now in the hands of financial magnates, and the attempt to do 

 more business takes precedence of everything else. The great increase 

 in the number of fearful accidents bids fair to open the eyes of our 

 good-natured public to this tendency. 



I believe I am justified in the generalization that the American 

 talent has made its success rather in business organization and in 

 invention that did not require great learning than in those lines 

 that require deep thinking and solid study. This is the line character- 

 istic of Germany. For instance, we build great steam engines, but it 

 remains a solemn fact that the finest engines are to-day built in the 

 Swiss town of Winterthur, by the firm of Sulzer Brothers. At the 

 Paris Exposition, in 1900, one did not need to be a great expert to per- 

 ceive that American engines played but a. small part there, and that 

 in originality of design and perfection of construction, those of Switzer- 

 land, Germany and Belgium were more worthy of consideration. The 

 notion that we are always ahead in mechanical matters receives several 

 rude shocks on careful examination. Some years ago when the power 

 of Niagara was to be developed on a grand scale, it was determined 

 to install turbines of five thousand horse-power each, larger than had 

 ever been built. For the development of this plant the best talent in 

 the world was obtained, and the dynamos were finally built after the 

 combined suggestions of several American and English engineers. 

 The turbines, on the contrary, were built after designs by a firm in 

 Geneva. And yet this is the country of great rivers and water-powers, 

 and at Holyoke turbines of all sorts have been built and tested for 

 years. The reason that the Swiss were appealed to was that they had 

 made such a study of the theory as well as the practise of turbines that 

 they were prepared to design a turbine of any magnitude. As another 

 example we may take the case of the most important subject now before 

 the engineer in the steam turbine. It is true that there is now on the 

 American market one successful American turbine, but it was brought 

 out years after the Parsons turbine in England, and the de Laval in 

 Sweden, and any treatise on the subject now bristles with the names 

 of German, French and Swiss turbines. As an example of the German 

 versus the English method, if we open one of the two or three English 

 books on the steam turbine we shall find a very little theory, some 

 specifications and a large number of examples of turbines built by 

 various makers. Opening the chief German treatise, a huge volume 

 by a professor in the Polytechnic in Zurich, we find at first a treatise 

 on the thermodynamics of steam, then applications to the flow of 



