76 



DISCOVERY 



to pal.TOgraphcrs as " uncial," shoukl have survived so 

 long after the jiriniitivc carving of literature upon stone 

 had been sujierseded by the introduction of papyrus 

 and parchment. A glance at any collection of ancient 

 manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. 

 makes one wonder also that no Greek or Roman writer 

 of that period should have seen what an advantage it 

 would be to separate successive words by blank spaces, 

 as had been regularly done on inscriptions both at 

 Athens and Rome in earlier times. 



Though the Kuropean world had to wait until the 

 fifteenth century for the invention of printing as we 

 know it, many of the most important elements of this 

 art were familiar long before. The existence of coins in 

 remote antiquity shows that the use of moulds was 

 early understood. In the time of Virgil, brands with 

 letters were used for marking the owner's name on 

 cattle, and articles of merchandise were stamped by 

 a similar process. Yet, while coming so near the 

 epoch-making invention of movable type and the 

 press, the Romans had to depend upon the labour of 

 scribes to reproduce their documents and books — and 

 newspapers — for they were " progressive " enough to 

 publish a daily gazette. In discussing this topic it is 

 inevitable to refer to the Chinese, who printed from 

 wooden blocks in the tenth century of our era. The 

 development of the art is often supposed to have been 

 arrested in their case bj' a failure to take the next step 

 of separating characters in the form of movable tvpes, 

 but it has lately become known that they were actually 

 doing this four hundred \^ears before Gutenberg set up 

 his press at Mainz. There seems to be no evidence, 

 however, that the Chinese anticipated Schoffer's plan 

 of casting these types from matrices, instead of cutting 

 them individually. It is worth noticing, by the wa}', 

 how one of the most important later developments of 

 printing has been, in a sense, a reversion to the earliest 

 methods of all, for, when you print from a stereo- 

 type plate whose component letters cannot be " dis- 

 tributed " and used another time, you are once more 

 printing from a solid block. A detailed examination 

 of the successive improvements in the mechanism of 

 the press itself and in the various devices for " com- 

 posing " by machinery would illustrate in like manner 

 how success has been reached by a series of stages, 

 with long halts between. The typewriter, again, is an 

 invention that has passed through a long apprentice- 

 ship, for as long ago as 1714 a patent was taken out in 

 this country by Henry Mill for a " machine for impress- 

 ing letters singly and progressively, as in writing, 

 whereby all writings may be engrossed in paper, so 

 exact as not to be distinguished from print." The 

 next step was not taken until more than a hundred 

 years later, when the " typographer " was patented by 

 an American. W. A. Burt. Before departing from the 



literary side of our subject, it may be as well to recall 

 that the card catalogue— that convenience of the 

 modern library — first suggested itself to the ingenious 

 mind of a French abbe of the Revolution period. He 

 wrote the titles of his books on plaj-ing-cards, and 

 arranged them endwise in alphabetical order on a tray. 

 But the first general application of the idea was made 

 by an American librarian in the middle of the last 

 century. 



Photography is an art that several times seemed on 

 the verge of being discovered. A camera obscura was 

 exhibited by Battista Porta in the sixteenth century, 

 and there are records of such cameras even before his 

 time. Thomas Wedgwood succeeded at the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century in making profiles by the 

 action of light upon silver, but it was many decades 

 later that the attempt to take portraits by similar 

 means became anything more than the curious hobby 

 of an experimenting chemist. There is a number of 

 other inv-entions — including the mariner's compass, 

 gunpowder, and the sewing-machine — whose history 

 it would be interesting to trace. But of all the 

 examples of arrested development in the application of 

 mechanical methods there is none more peculiar, in 

 some respects, than one revealed bj- an incident which 

 occurred in a British colon\'. About 1842 the area 

 under wheat cultivation in South Australia had in- 

 creased far beyond the capacit}' of the working popu- 

 lation to reap the harvest. So urgent was the need of 

 help that the Imperial troops then doing duty in the 

 colony were ordered into the fields to assist. There- 

 upon a local miller named Ridley -devised a labour- 

 saving machine called the " stripper," which, while it 

 was being drawn through the corn by a pair of horses, 

 pulled the heads off the straw and threshed them. 

 This immediately reduced the cost of harvesting from 

 2s. to 3irf. a bushel, and made the growth and export 

 of grain a flourishing industry. Now, the odd thing is 

 that Mr. Ridlej^ derived his " happy thought " from an 

 article in an old encyclopedia about a reaping-machine 

 worked by o.xen on the extensive plains of Ancient 

 Gaul, and described by the Latin wxiters on agricul- 

 ture. To use a metaphor appropriate to the subject, 

 could one imagine a more remarkable instance of an 

 idea becoming fruitful after Ij'ing fallow for many 

 centuries ? 



It is tempting to speculate on the causes which have 

 at one time and another prevented the rapid develop- 

 ment of the germs of invention. Sometimes the pecu- 

 liarities of national temperament seem in large measure 

 accountable. It cannot be by a mere accident that 

 China provides so many examples of arrested growth, 

 while her neighbour, Japan, with less power of origina- 

 tion, has borrowed so many Chinese contrivances, in the 

 fine arts as well as in mechanics, and has improved on 



