232 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



never supersede or compete with steam. * He believed however 

 that the engine had a useful future in many minor applications 

 where economy was not the most important consideration. 



When sometime afterward, a friend urged him to secure patents 

 on his inventions, the "intensity" electro-magnet with its combi- 

 nations, and the magnetic engine with its automatic pole-changer, 

 earnestly assuring him that either one with proper management 

 would secure an ample fortune to its owner, he firmly resisted every 

 importunity; declaring that he would feel humilitated by any 

 attempt at monopolizing the fruits of science, which he thought 

 belonged to the world. And this aversion to self-aggrandizement 

 by researches undertaken for truth, was carried with him through 

 life.f 



While such disinterestedness cannot fail to excite our admiration, 

 it may perhaps be questioned whether in these cases it did not from 

 a practical point of view, amount to an over-fastidiousness: 

 whether such legal establishment of ownership, shielding the pos- 

 sessor from the occasional depreciations of the envious, and securing 

 by its more tangible remunerations the leisure and the means for 

 more extended researches, would not have been to science more 

 than a compensation for the supposed sacrifice of dignity by the 

 philosopher. J 



Nor did this repugnance to patenting arise (as it sometimes does) 

 from any theoretical disapproval of the system. On the contrary, 



* JAMES P. JOULE (himself an inventor of an electro-magnetic engine) in a 

 letter dated May 28, 1839, said : " I can scarcely doubt that electro-magnetism will 

 eventually be substituted for steam in propelling machinery." (Sturgeon's 

 Annals of Electricity, vol. iv. p. 135.) This was some years before he commenced his 

 investigations on the mechanical, equivalent of heat and other motors. He sub- 

 sequently estimated that the consumption of a grain of zinc though forty times 

 more costly than a grain of coal, produces only about one-eighth of the same 

 mechanical effect. 



f This trait calls to mind Faraday's avowal made nearly thirty years later, 

 when in a letter to Messrs. Smith & Bentley, dated January 3, 1859, (declining 

 their offer for the publication of his "Juvenile Lectures,") he said: "In fact I 

 have always loved science more than money; and because my occupation is 

 almost entirely personal, I cannot afford to get rich." (Bence Jones' Life of 

 Faraday, vol. ii. p. 423.) 



% Several hundred patents have since been granted in this country for ingen- 

 ious modifications of or improvements upon the electro-magnetic telegraph; and 

 probably a hundred for equally ingenious varieties of the electro-magnetic engine; 

 all of which would have been tributary to HENRY as an original patentee. 



