Invention: The Master-key to Progress. Fiske Bradley Allen

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      The suggestion may be hazarded that the invention was preceded by an accidental recognition of the fact that it was easier to drag something along the ground, if it rested on round logs, than if it did not so rest; and by noting also that the logs were passed over and left behind continually. From this point to the mental conception of a roller that would not be left behind, but would be secured to the thing dragged by a round shaft on which it revolved, there was probably a single mental jump. Someone saw such a contrivance with his mental eye. It looked dim and unreal – but he saw it. To make the picture clear, and then to develop the thing pictured, constructiveness was used. In other words, conception and development accomplished their successive but cooperating tasks. The invention was complete when a wheel was actually produced.

      To realize the importance of the wheel, we have but to ask ourselves (or our neighbors) how history could possibly have been even approximately what it has been if the wheel had not been invented.

      Another important invention probably made by the Assyrians was the catapult; another one, somewhat similar, was the balista. The catapult was used for hurling stones, balls, etc.; the balista for shooting arrows with greater force than an archer could exert. Another was the battering ram for making breaches in the walls of fortresses.

      The Assyrians used these inventions in their wars against the contiguous nations of the East, and with their aid achieved the mastery, and unified the Orient. That the Assyrian rule was harsh and cruel should not be denied; but, on the principle that any kind of government is better than no government, it cannot reasonably be supposed that the central and efficient administration of Assyria was not better than the condition of continual petty wars and quarrels that had existed among the numerous tribes and nations, with their enormous possibilities for suffering of all kinds.

      It may be pointed out here that the cruelties and injustices committed by any powerful government against great numbers of persons attract immeasurably more notice and condemnation by historians and others than do the numberless atrocities of all kinds that lie hidden in the darkness of anarchy, or the confusion of petty wars. In the endeavor to preserve order over widely separated and barbarous peoples, when means of transportation and communication were inadequate, stern measures seem always to have been required. That they have often been too stern, and that great cruelty has often been exercised, the wail of the ages testifies. But human nature is very imperfect; and no really good government, no government free from the faults of man, has ever been established. Yet every government has been better than anarchy.

      The Assyrians, despite their cruel treatment of their conquered peoples, did a direct service to mankind and gave a powerful stimulus to the march of progress. For the great empire which they established, and the great cities which grew up, and the system of provinces which they instituted, formed a pattern for similar work by later nations; while the civilization which they spread throughout the more backward countries under their rule, especially in Greece, started the later culture which Greece developed, and which is the basis of all that is most beautiful in the civilization of today.

      The influence of the weapons which the Assyrians invented was toward this end.

      Between Egypt on the west and Babylonia and Assyria on the east lay Syria; a territory not very large, of which the part that played the most prominent part in history bordered the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Two important peoples dwelt in Syria, the Hebrews and the Phœnicians. Both belonged to the Semitic race, and neither was distinctly warlike; though the Hebrews during a brief period achieved considerable military strength and skill, under their great king David.

      The main gift of the Hebrews to the world was the Jewish religion, a more spiritual religion than any that had preceded it, and based on a conception of one God, a holy God. The ideas held of immortality and of judgment after death for the deeds done in this life were not entirely new, but the conception of a holy and beneficent Deity was new; and it was so inspiring and stimulating a conception that it lifted the Jews at once to a moral and spiritual plane higher than any people had ever lived on before. It constituted a step also directly toward the Christian religion – which also was born in Syria; in Palestine.

      That the conception and establishment of the Jewish religion was an invention may not be admitted by some; but the author respectfully asks attention to the sense in which he uses the word invention in this book, and points out that they constituted an invention in that sense.

      That it was a beneficent invention, and that it helped the human race spiritually in a way analogous to that in which the invention of many mechanical devices helped it materially, does not seem hard to realize. For in both cases the race was transported away from savagery and toward high civilization; and in both cases there was first a conception of something desirable, then a constructive effort to develop it, and finally its production.

      The Phœnicians lived just north of the Jews, and possessed a territory smaller than that of any other people who ever exercised an equal influence on history; for it embraced merely a little strip of land hardly longer than a hundred and twenty miles from north to south, or wider on the average than twelve miles from east to west. It bordered on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, and was shut off by the mountains of Lebanon from Syria, that lay due east.

      The Phœnicians were a people of extraordinary enterprise and initiative. Inventors are men of extraordinary enterprise and initiative. How much the Phœnicians are to be credited with the invention of sailing vessels, we have no means of knowing; but we do know that (with the possible exception of the Egyptians) the Phœnicians were more identified with early navigation by sailing vessels and by vessels pulled by oars than any other people. It is even known that Phœnician vessels were navigating the Eastern Mediterranean, both under sails and under oars, as long ago as 1500 B. C. So, while we should not be justified in asserting positively that the Phœnicians were the inventors and developers of sailing vessels and of vessels pulled by banks of oars and steered by rudders, we may declare with ample reason that probably they were.

      For the purposes of this book, however, the identity of the inventors is not important. What is important is the fact that the invention of those vessels had immediate fruit in a commerce by which the products of eastern civilization were taken westward to Greece and other countries, while tin and other raw material were brought east from Spain and even Britain; and that it had later fruit in gradually building up a western civilization. It had other fruit as well, in demonstrating the possibilities and the value of ocean commerce, and forming the basis of the world-wide navigation of today.

      Few inventions have had a greater influence on history than that of the sailing ship. To some of us it may seem that no invention was involved; that to use sails was an obvious thing to think of and accomplish. But if any one of us will close his eyes a moment and imagine an absence of most of the great scientific and mechanical knowledge of today, and imagine also the absence of nearly all the present acquaintance with the laws of weather, flotation, resistance to propulsion, metacentric height, etc., he may realize what a feat was the invention of the sailing ship and even of the ship pulled with oars and steered with a rudder. It is true that we have no reason to assume that either vessel was conceived by one leap of the imagination and developed by one act, while we have many reasons to think that each was the result of a series of short steps; but this does not invalidate the invention of the ships, or depreciate its influence.

      By two other achievements, also, the Phœnicians showed the kinship between the inventor and the man of enterprise and initiative; the invention of the Tyrian dyes and of an alphabetical system of writing that forms the basis of the systems of today. Here again it is necessary to remind ourselves that possibly the Phœnicians were not the sole and original inventors of the alphabet, and that they may have merely improved upon a system invented by, say, the Cretans; and again it may be helpful to point out that the important fact is not the personality of the inventors but the birth of the invention, and the influence of the invention on history. Certain it is, СКАЧАТЬ