G.— ENGINEERING. 125 



frequently to change his plans on discovering that Dame Nature is not 

 quite so simple as he had believed and is seemingly getting the upper hand 

 and laughing at his efforts to control her. So the fight goes on from day 

 to day, from year to year, and there are very few great inventions which 

 are brought to a successful issue without departing in some respect or 

 another from the original scheme and without the expenditure of many 

 years of effort and large sums of money. The records of the various 

 attacks and their results in the series or chain of manoeuvres which are 

 finally crowned with success are rarely written, and in the much larger 

 proportion of long engagements which are finally abandoned as failures 

 no record of any kind is published and most valuable information is lost 

 for ever. 



Contrast this with military or naval wars in which records of every 

 little move are faithfully kept and are studied by the historian, who draws 

 from them lessons for future generations of soldiers. 



The history of the nineteenth century and the enormous economic and 

 political progress made in it might be summed up in the word ' Invention.' 

 As was pointed out so clearly in Sir John Snell's Presidential Address to 

 Section G of the British Association at the Oxford Meeting, economic pro- 

 gress can be best measured by the amount of horse-power used per head 

 of the population, and since every successful new invention increases this 

 amount both in the manufacture of the gear itself and by the power it may 

 control, it is very evident that economic progress is closely allied with 

 invention. The invention of the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the 

 power loom, the steam ship, the power printing press, the dynamo, the 

 electric lamp, the steam turbine, the electric telegraph and wireless 

 telegraphy, not forgetting the chemical industries, form the economic 

 history of last century, yet no one, so far as I am aware, has studied the 

 development of any of these inventions with the view of learning therefrom 

 and recording lessons which can be passed on to posterity. 



Of the hundreds of inventions which have been abandoned as failures, 

 or of possibly revolutionary inventions left incomplete simply from lack 

 of capital or lack of courage, no record is available to those who come after 

 and who might carry them on to success. Has every inventor for all time 

 to start from scratch ? The same difficulties crop up time after time in 

 the development of inventions, yet every new inventor has to tackle the 

 difficulties de novo, and fortunes are wasted in the process. Development 

 of an invention is always costly, even when guided by all the experience 

 obtainable from allied inventions ; how much more costly it is when not 

 so guided the history of the failures would most surely show. In most 

 inventions there comes a time when the inevitable question arises ' Shall 

 we cut our loss or risk further expenditure ? ' If the decision is to cut the 

 loss, the invention, which is possibly a sound one and of great value, is 

 pronounced to be a failure and the result may be the loss of an industry to 

 the country or a delay in its introduction for many years. Science will 

 prevail in the long run, but the cost of the trials both in time and money 

 could probably be greatly curtailed if records of similar ventures in the 

 past were available. Inventors would gain much if they could be trained 

 in, and benefit by, the experience of their predecessors in the same field, 

 while masters of industry, with records of that experience before them, 



