DISCOVERY 



75 



pints ; a pint, a peck, and a pound are each divided 

 into " quarters." Again, a pound is divided into 

 sixteen parts (ounces) in avoirdupois. The fact of 

 having troy and avoirdupois is confusing ; merchants 

 recently have been discarding the former. Four 

 " quarters " go to a hundredweight, and eight stones to 

 a hundredweight. In measure, one mile divides into 

 eight furlongs, two half and four quarter miles ; and 

 four fingers make one palm, si.xteen fingers one foot. 



The decimal and duodecimal systems fit in with this 

 halving and quartering very neatly. One pound ' is 

 twenty shiUings ; " half a sovereign " is ten. A shilling 

 is twelve pence ; half a crown is thirty ; a crown (now 

 obsolete) is sixty. It is like tennis scoring, although 

 the coinage lacks pieces of fifteen and of forty-five pence. 

 In France, between 1310 and 1410, there was a pre- 

 dominance of coins value fifteen and sixty. When 

 you have quarters, halves and three-quarters need not 

 be separately struck. Further examples of the duo- 

 decimal and sexagenary systems — a " pound Scots " is 

 one shilling and eight pence, one-twelfth of a pound ; 

 one dram is sixt}- minims ; one " pennyweight " is 

 twenty-four grains ; the ell is two-thirds of sixty 

 inches ; twelve ounces (troy) are one pound. 



One sees something in the Roman single principle 

 that an uucia was the twelfth of an\-thing, and an as 

 twelve times anything, coin, weight, or measure. 



But the writer, though he has an antiquarian pre- 

 dilection for the duodecimal and sexagesimal systems, 

 is aware that their usefulness is in division only, and 

 of small amounts ; he would therefore welcome a 

 wholesale introduction of the decimal system. 



Arrested Inventions 



By Herbert W. HorwiU, ALA. 



VVh.\t is, perhaps, the most sensational of recent 

 triumphs of invention — the conquest of the air — was 

 long overdue. Ever since the day when Icarus pre- 

 sumed too greatly upon the skill of his father, Daedalus, 

 the world has been prepared to hear any morning that 

 man had at last acquired the powers of the bird. In- 

 deed, one might almost say that there has been more 

 disappointment at earlier failures than astonishment 

 at the successes recently achieved. It is not in this 

 section only of the wide field of invention that each 



1 The origin and the reason of the survival of the guinea do 

 not come within the scope of this article. It might be pointed 

 out, however, that one of the reasons why it is cherished by 

 lodging-house and hotel keepers is that it is divisible by seven, 

 the number of davs in the week. 



stage in the process has been curiously hampered by 

 a difficulty about the next step. " A little more and 

 how much it is." Again and again a promising ad- 

 vance has been brought to a halt by an obstacle that, 

 in the retrospect, seems almost trivial. It may be 

 that generations or even centuries pass before there 

 flashes into someone's mind the illuminating idea that 

 enables this hindrance to be surmounted. 



This arrest of invention has been abundantly illus- 

 trated in the history of transit by land as well as by air. 

 In view of the part that steam has played in modern 

 methods of transport, as well as in industry generally, 

 one is amazed to learn that its use was anticipated 

 early in the Christian Era. In a treatise written about 

 A.D. 130, Hero of Alexandria describes a hollow 

 spherical vessel turning on an axis, which vessel was 

 supplied with steam and driven by the reaction from 

 escaping jets. Yet the belief that there could be any 

 mechanical value in the expansive power of steam 

 seems to have slumbered through the ages, not to 

 awaken imtil the seventeenth century, when there 

 began the series of experiments culminating in Watt's 

 famous invention of 1769. A crude anticipation of the 

 modern railway existed near Newcastle-on-Tyne as 

 long ago as 1676, when coals were convej'ed from 

 the mines to the river along parallel rails of timber. 

 " Bulky carts were made," so we are told, " with four 

 rollers fitting those rails, whereby the carriage was 

 made so easy that one horse could draw four or five 

 chaldrons of coal." The story of the various con- 

 trivances that prepared the way for George Stephenson's 

 railway engine is familiar to all students of our in- 

 dustrial history. The motor-car of our own time cer- 

 tainly appears to be one of those inventions that should 

 have come earlier, when one remembers the road 

 locomotives of Oliver Evans in America and of Trevi- 

 thick in Wales more than a century ago. It is now 

 generally known that one of the latest adjuncts of the 

 public motor, namely the taximeter, was used by the 

 Chinese. Vitruvius, too, who flourished before the 

 Christian Era, describes a practical taximeter which 

 the Romans attached to their chariots. Perhaps even 

 the development of steam navigation might have been 

 expected sooner, inasmuch as the ship's paddle is only 

 an application of the familiar water-wheel, and the 

 screw propeller an extension of the vanes of the wind- 

 mill. 



Still more remarkable are the instances of long delay 

 in the discovery of improvements in the arts that have 

 to do with reading and writing. How strange it seems 

 to-day that so many centuries of literary activity 

 should have passed before anything corresponding to 

 our " running hand " was thought of ! One is surprised 

 that the painfully slow process of writing in capital 

 letters, or in that kind of half-capital which is known 



