326 INFATUATION OF MANY INVENTORS. 



begin of elaborating and completing the invention, and 

 then the struggle for its introduction into scientific 

 and mechanical life, in which most men are ultimately 

 ruined. Discovering and inventing brings therefore 

 hours of supreme delight, but also hours of the greatest 

 disappointment, and of hard fruitless work. The 

 public commonly notices only the few cases in which 

 successful inventors have hit, almost accidentally, upon 

 a useful idea, and by making the most of it, have 

 attained without much labour to fame and affluence, 

 or the class of acquisitive invention-hunters, who make 

 it their life -task to seek for technical applications of 

 well-known things and to secure the benefit of them 

 by patents. But these are not the inventors who 

 open for the development of mankind new paths, which 

 will presumably conduct it to more perfect and happier 

 conditions of life, but those who either in the 

 quiet of scholarly seclusion, or in the bustle of tech- 

 nical activity -- devote their whole being and thought 

 to this development for its own sake. Whether, by 

 correct judgment and use of the opportunities of 

 practical life, inventions lead to the accumulation of 

 wealth or not, frequently depends on chance. Unfor- 

 tunately however the instances of success possess great 

 attraction and have called forth a host of inventors, 

 who plunge into discovery and invention without the 

 necessary knowledge and without self-criticism and 

 thus are mostly ruined. I have ever regarded it as 

 a duty to turn such deluded inventors from the 

 dangerous path which they had entered upon, and this 



