10 GERMANY IN SCIENCE 



From cloth I pass in my thought to sewfnig. You all know 

 that the sewing machine is strictly an American invention. 



Machinery for the manufacture of shoes is almost all of 

 it the product of American ingenuity, and most of it is made 

 in the United States. 



The type- writer is an American invention. Adding ma- 

 chines, such as are used today in banks and counting-houses, 

 reflect the cunning skill and concentrated efforts of American 

 machinists. 



We cheerfully grant to Guttenberg, an Alsatian, the cred- 

 it for inventing the process of printing by movable types 

 some years before Columbus discovered America, but the great 

 power-presses of today, which with lightning rapidity roll off 

 of their cylinders the daily papers, and books by the millions, 

 are the result of the ingenuity of Americans and Englishmen 

 for the most part. In this connection the name of Robert Hoe 

 of New York stands forth pre-eminent. 



Harvesting machinery is American in its origin. Think 

 of Cyrus McCormick. 



But I might go on indefinitely along these lines, and only 

 desire to say before closing my remarks about the applica- 

 tion of physical laws in the field of industrial invention that 

 the manufacture of machinery capable of doing its work 

 with precision is one of the most important things in our mod- 

 ern life. Any one who has read the life of Watt and of Steph- 

 enson realizes the difficulties they had to contend with in get- 

 ting true surfaces, flat or curved, in the machinery they in- 

 vented. The standardizing of parts is also an important mat- 

 ter. To American mechanics is due much of the precision 

 attainable today with the help of machine-tools. Planers, 

 lathes, drills, punches, shapers, slotting machines, as used the 

 world over in the best practice, are largely the product of 

 English, but more particularly of American brains. At the 

 close of the Franco-Prussian War the German Government 

 gave orders amounting to millions of dollars to an American 

 firm to set up machinery for the manufacture of rifles with 

 standardized parts, and to send over men to instruct the Ger- 



