166 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



completed machine whose opportunity for use did not come until 

 twenty-five years later. Like lonely islands arising out of the reced- 

 ing waters of an ocean, such inventions, though they may after- 

 wards be the highest lands of great and fundamental enterprise, are 

 lost for want of use. Although pioneers their inventors are without 

 remuneration because they are too far in front of the needs of the 

 world. The world itself is ever unready; the lines of necessity are 

 conservative and strenuously refuse to make room for the new appli- 

 cant for favor, even though full of promise. 



Mr. Wm. H. Babcock said no one, on glancing over our patents, 

 can fail to observe how many of the inventions covered by them 

 are obviously outgrowths of those already in existence rather than 

 contrivances adapted to meet any real want. A man sees a partic- 

 ular machine, or a description of one, and forthwith proceeds to 

 devise a similar but slightly different construction. Thus there are, 

 for example, more than three thousand patents on car couplers, 

 most of them varying from others in a trivial degree, very few of 

 them being actually in use. A large class of our inventions are of 

 this incidental kind. 



But another large class of inventions have grown mainly out of a 

 distinct conception of a public demand, real, foreseen, or fancied, 

 or of the practical needs of manufacture. Exclusive of certain spo- 

 radic and eccentric instances, inventors are either manufacturers, 

 the men employed by them, or who expect to sell to them. All 

 these are on the alert to note the drift of public taste and practical 

 requirements. A manufacturer sees, or thinks he sees, that a new 

 article, or a change in an old one, would meet with or lead to a con- 

 siderable sale; or that a simplification of his machinery would ena- 

 ble him to reduce his force or his fuel ; a factory hand finds that 

 the machine with which he works has some persistent, annoying 

 defect which a slight alteration would avoid ; an outsider in a fac- 

 tory village forms his own theory as to what would give one com- 

 peting manufacturer an advantage over another and knows that it 

 Avould be well paid for; in all these influences the exertion of inge- 

 nuity is easily accounted for. 



The effect of the public demand is curiously illustrated in the 

 synchronism of invention. It frequently happens that men widely 

 separated territorially and having no discoverable communication 

 with one another make the same invention at the sdme time, or so 

 nearly at the same time that priority cannot easily be determined. 



